Tandem

Raechel Harchey

Raechel awoke to the smell of freshly baked cookies wafting underneath the door to her room. A slither of light forced its way through a crack in the curtains. She let her eyes wander over the room, taking in everything around her. She hadn't paid too much attention to the room when Jack had first shown her to it. It was dark and she'd been so tired from the long journey that she's simply changed out of her clothes, got into the pyjamas Jack had leant her and fallen asleep.

The wallpaper in this bedroom was so detailed. Roses of every colour had been sketched upon a lilac background. They climbed up the wall until their petals had reached the ceiling. The carpet was a bright crimson colour and looked as though it had been recently laid. A large white mirror sat proudly on the wall opposite the bed where Raechel lay. She sat up, studied her reflection and thought to herself about how crazy all of this was.

"I hope you're hungry. I've made enough cookies and pancakes to feed a small army."

"Cookies and pancakes huh?" Raechel said, taking a seat on one of the bar stools at the breakfast bar. "They look delicious."

"Let's hope they taste delicious. They've never failed me before."

"Do you enjoy cooking?"

"A love for all things food is the one thing I inherited from my grandmother. I might look like my grandfather and dad but I definitely got her cooking ability. Thankfully she was an incredible chef. She used to make this combination for me on the weekends when I was little. Every Saturday morning, I'd wake up to warm cookies and pancakes on a big white plate. That plate seemed to get smaller as I grew up," he chuckled at the memory. "It started out as a novelty and then gradually became a bit of a tradition."

"It's a good tradition," Raechel placed two pancakes onto her plate and proceeded to cover them in syrup and strawberries. Jack sat opposite her and piled four pancakes and three cookies on top of one another.

"It's a good job I have a fast metabolism, that's all I'm going to say." "That's quite an impressive stack there."

Jack carefully cut the cookie-pancake stack into quarters and carefully dissected them into edible chunks.

"So, tell me more about yourself. Do you still live in your family home?"

Raechel shook her head. "I sold it after the accident because I couldn't bear to go back to an empty house every day. That place held too many memories for me."

Jack nodded. "That's understandable."

"I ended up moving to the Stack shortly afterwards using the money from the house sale. The Nook isn't anything special but it suits me just fine."

"Is that the building with all the ladders?"

Raechel nodded as she glanced around the kitchen. This one room was at least three times the size of her Nook. It seemed so long ago since she'd lived in her house. Her family home had been far smaller than Hollycrown but the rooms had still been large and filled with various decorative objects that her mother would find in antique shops. She'd spend hours in their outbuilding, repainting and reworking various pieces of furniture. Raechel's favorite had been a beautiful white dressing table that she'd been given as a present on her sixth birthday. It had previously been a mahogany desk but her mother had secured a beautiful, ornate mirror with spiral edging in the centre. She'd painted the wood in a white gloss and added tiny black paw prints to the corners in honour of Tripp. Raechel had loved that dressing table and it had been one of the hardest objects to part with when she'd sold her house. She wondered if the new owners had kept it, sold it or taken it to the rubbish dump. They were a middle-aged couple with two sons, so Raechel guessed that the two little boys wouldn't have much use for a dressing table. She hoped their mother had kept it because whilst the thought of someone else brushing their hair in the mirror upset her greatly, the thought of it being discarded in a skip somewhere was almost unbearable.