Page 62 of The Getaway List
“I should hope so,” says Tom, seemingly indignant on the brownies’ behalf.
“No, I mean—wasn’t there a different bakery here?” Mariella peers up and down the walls with scrutinizing eyes. “One that didn’t do interactive stuff or anything, just a regular storefront.”
“It’s the same bakery,” says Luca, who is back in mumbling mode again. He’s been in and out of it since we all met up at Tom’s an hour ago to line our stomachs with lunch as a dessert pregame. “It got a renovation a few years ago, just before it went viral.”
Mariella opens her mouth as if to protest this when two tiny, enthusiastic humans who can only be Luca’s parents spill out from a side door, followed by even tinier enthusiastic humans who can only be Luca’s siblings. In all the commotion I hear snippets of “so nice to meet Luca’s friends” and “you must be Riley!” and one distinct, pip-squeaking voice aimed in my and Tom’s direction that says “they’re so tall.” Somehow in this commotion we are all hugged in turn by Luca’s parents, poked by at least one sibling, and ushered into one of the back rooms where parties can design and bake their own brownies.
The chaos does nothing to lessen the impact of what feels like falling directly into a room in Willy Wonka’s factory. The side walls are streaked with a glittery-gold-painted list of all the available brownie-batter flavors, fillings, frostings, and unexpected combination ideas. The back wall is lined with a big table full of vats of different chocolates, candies, and sprinkles you can stuff into your batter. Toward the middle are five workstations, each of which have a little name card with our names written in giant, childish lettering dusted in glitter that can only be the handiwork of one of Luca’s many mini-mes.
I glance over at Tom and decide even if we’d ended up bungling every other item on the Getaway List this summer, it still would have been worth it to see the Christmas morning–level bliss on his face right now.
The door closes and Mariella turns to Luca with wide eyes and slightly askew curls, looking as windswept as I feel. “Um, was that hurricane the entire Bales family?”
“Yep.” Luca takes a grounding breath, picking up the one purple apron on the counter laid next to the white ones. “And I’ll be your Brownie Bonanzer this afternoon.”
Mariella laughs, but when Luca continues to go through the motions of tying it around his waist, the Brownie Bonanza logo unmistakably embroidered on the chest, she says, “Wait a minute—you work here?”
Only then do I realize that we were so busy talking about what kind of brownies we wanted to make at lunch that neither Luca nor I bothered to explain how Luca was able to sneak us in, accidentally leaving Mariella and Jesse in the dark.
“Yeah,” says Luca to his feet, still in Mumble Town, population: him. “My whole family does.”
“Even when it was the old bakery?” Mariella asks.
“Yep,” he says again, and then so fast that Mariella can’t get another word in edgewise, he says, “Anyway, the basic gist of the whole thing is—”
“Wait, that’s wild,” says Mariella excitedly. “I used to come in here all the time after school. I can’t believe we never crossed paths before now.”
Luca mumbles something so indistinct that if his mouth weren’t moving I wouldn’t be entirely sure it came from him. Even Tom goes still in his brownie reverence.
“Sorry, what was that?” Mariella asks wryly.
The playful smirk slides off her face when Luca looks up with wary, almost apologetic eyes. “Well, our paths did cross? Like, crisscrossed and crossed and crossed again,” he says. “I worked at the register so I saw you, like, all the time.”
I feel my own jaw start to loosen from surprise as Mariella’s full-on drops. “That can’t be true.”
Luca is still fidgeting his apron strings as if he’s never tied a knot in his life.
“You always had a bunch of friends with you, so,” he says, as if this is a complete thought.
A rookie mistake with Mariella, who is the last person to let him get away with it. “We’ve been hanging out the whole summer and you never said anything?”
Jesse and Tom have enough wherewithal that they’re both pretending to be very, very interested in the list of fillings on the wall despite Tom having it memorized to the point of it being tattooed on his eyelids, but I’m just gaping like I accidentally fell into a reality show.
“I took your order every other day and you didn’t even recognize me,” Luca says, shifting uncomfortably.
Mariella’s cheeks flush. “Maybe not, but I definitely felt like something was familiar about you. Why on earth wouldn’t you say something? I’m sure I would have remembered then.”
“Because I had a big embarrassing crush on you,” Luca blurts.
“Oh shit,” says Jesse, who is doing a very bad job of looking distracted now.
Between Luca’s bright red face and Mariella’s gobsmacked eyes I’m expecting the room to come to an excruciating halt, only it doesn’t, because Mariella fires back without a moment’s hesitation, “Well, that’s ridiculous, because I’ve spent the whole summer with a big embarrassing crush on you.”
Luca blinks. “What?”
“What?” Mariella shoots back.
And there’s the beat of excruciating silence I was expecting, one that Tom scoops up as easily as brownie batter. “Oh. Well. That was an easy fix.”
