Broken Hearts, Fences, and Other Things to Mend

Chapter 2

“And then what happened?” Sophie asked from her seat at the kitchen table, eyes wide.

It was two days later, and Sophie had shown up that afternoon, bearing tissues and chocolate and her “life coach”—otherwise known as Cosmo—clearly believing that I would be in a desperate, sobbing state. Which couldn’t have been further from the truth. I was fi ne. This was just a temporary situation, and as soon as Teddy realized he’d made a mistake, we’d get back together. It was as simple as that. In the meantime, I was baking.

I’d always liked to bake, but I’d gotten much more into it over the last two years, and had started providing the refreshments for Teddy’s various clubs and meetings and protest marches. Baking calmed me down, and I liked the order of it—the idea that when you mixed certain ingredients together, chemical change occurred, and you ended up with something else. And ever since I’d come back from Target, baking was the only thing that had appealed to me. If I wasn’t baking, I found that I kept reaching for my phone, either to check if Teddy had called or to start to call him and try to find out what he’d been thinking. And since I knew that neither of these were good options, I’d been keeping myself—and my hands—occupied. My mother and stepfather, clearly understanding that I was on a tear, had been staying out of my way in the kitchen. And so far, I’d made three kinds of muffins, four kinds of cookies, a coffee cake, and an iffy batch of snickerdoodles. I had just put my double-chocolate- chip cookies into the oven when Sophie had shown up at the door, despite me texting her repeatedly that I was fi ne and that she didn’t need to come over.

“Gemma?” Sophie prompted.

I looked up from the flour I’d been sifting for the next batch—white chocolate macadamia nut this time—and tried to focus on my best friend. Sophie and I had looked a lot alike when we were younger—it was uncanny, actually; people were always asking us if we were sisters, which we loved—but puberty had changed all that, and Sophie had gotten curvy while I’d gotten tall. We both still had brown hair and freckles, but Sophie tended to cover hers with makeup, and her hair was cut in a stylish, choppy bob while mine was kind of long and shapeless. We no longer looked like the doppelgängers we’d been when we were kids, especially after I broke my nose last year. When the doctor fixed it, he shaved off the bump that had always been in the middle. He just assumed I wanted it that way, but I actually missed it, especially when I saw the identical bump still on Sophie’s nose. It seemed to have more character than my perfectly straight nose now did.

Setting us apart even further at the moment were our outfits. I was wearing jeans and an oversized pink T-shirt that had once belonged to my stepfather but that I’d appropriated years ago as an apron. SALMON FESTIVAL! THE KICK-OFF OF SPAWNING SEASON! was emblazoned across the front.

Sophie, on the other hand, was decked out in her go to summer style—flip-flops and a sundress that hugged her curves, her sunglasses pushed up through her hair like a headband. The only things we currently had in common, looks-wise, were our necklaces. We’d splurged on them together last year. Sophie wore a gold G charm on a chain around her neck, and I wore a gold S on mine. We thought they were much better—and more unique—than traditional best friend necklaces. The two of us had promised never to take them off, and I knew it was a promise I’d keep.

“What?” I asked, trying to get myself to pay attention. “What did you say?”

“I just wanted to know what happened next,” Sophie said, leaning across the table. “After Teddy said he wanted to break up and you dropped the candle.”

“Oh,” I said, as I set the flour aside and started measuring out the white chocolate chips. I really didn’t see why I had to go through this whole recap; when Teddy called—which he would, of course, any minute now—it would all be moot. “Well, then this manager came up and handed me a broom and told me that the candle was going to come out of my pay.”