Most people think you can’t have a bad hair day with a shaved head, but my porcupine of frizz and I are here to tell you they are wrong. Fortunately, there’s no one around to see me when I slump into the back door of the Proud Muffin. I flip on the kitchen lights, one row of switches at a time. Oil shines on the wooden worktops. The steel of the great big mixing bowls glows, pristine. Rows of darker cake pans wait to be filled.

The bakery counter is beautiful, the porch is bright, the garden welcomes everyone, and the community room upstairs gives them a big queer hug, but this is the heart of the Proud Muffin. A kitchen that gets wrecked every day, and by morning looks perfect and untouched.

Why doesn’t my heart feel like that?

I knot my apron with thick, stupid fingers. I thought I would be better today. I thought this would get easier, not harder.

I check the tags for special orders. Not that many, which is normal for Sundays, just a few basic birthday cakes. I line up everything I need to whip through these and get back on Marisol’s good side — whichever of her sharply shaved sides that happens to be today — and show Vin and Alec that I’m not the kind of teenager who can be taken down by something as obvious as a broken heart.

But before I start baking, I check on my brownies.

The counter staff hasn’t arrived yet, and I keep the front lights dim. The baked goods that keep for more than a day — the cakes and pies and cobblers — are lined up and mummified in plastic wrap. The plate of brownies is exactly where I left it, barely dented by the customers yesterday afternoon. There were twelve of them. There are ten left. As I unwrap the brownies, the scent of midnight-dark chocolate nudges me to the past, a place where I really don’t want to go.

But I’m already back at the first time I made her brownies. We made it through three whole months of dating before I asked if I could bake for her. Somehow that felt more official than saying the word girlfriend. Somehow that was a bigger deal than telling my parents I was going on a date and letting them take a thousand pictures like it was prom, even though I was wearing chewed-up jeans and W was trying to hide a tiny halter top under her jacket.

A dozen dates after that first one, I sat her down in my living room and put on a movie — Jane Eyre, the good version with Ruth Wilson — before I went to the kitchen and got to work. W shouted the plot at me.

“Jane’s got a little friend who is definitely into her!”

“Oh no, Jane’s friend is dead!”

“Jane got older and now her eyebrow game is amazing!”

In between those shouts, she asked for regular baking updates.

“That ruins the magic,” I said. Secretly, I was worried that nothing would get baked with W looking at me. Her stare had the power to unbalance everything. It could have distracted me into scorching an entire pan of brownies.

“Is the magic happening now?” she called in a sharp, teasing voice.

I didn’t answer. I just kept stirring, my wooden spoon tireless until the melted chocolate was one glossy puddle.

“Now?” she asked.

When I finally brought out a single brownie on a plate, W smiled at me in a way that could have lit up the countryside in a blackout storm. She accepted the plate as if I’d offered her something precious. The brownie had that perfect just-slightly-underbaked ooze in the center, with a crackle on top. It smelled like the best chocolate I could afford, like tart cherries and good life choices.

These brownies smell like that, too, but they’re not the same.

The lights snap on — someone’s here. Probably Gemma.

I leave a note for the counter staff.

Push the brownies!

These aren’t I’m-falling-in-love-with-you brownies. These are it’s-over-and-I-don’t-know-what-comes-next brownies. It helped to pour that feeling into a container that could hold it. Now I want them gone.

I go back to the kitchen, and I bake and I bake and I bake.

I bake her out of my body, I bake her out of my hands.

I bake until my heart is an empty kitchen, ready to be filled with sugar and heat. Ready to get messed up all over again.

When I finally look up from my work, Vin and Alec are both in the kitchen — a rare sight. Vin runs the front in the morning and otherwise lives in the office. Alec takes the afternoon and evening shifts and hosts the events in the community space, talking to everyone who comes through the door, making them feel seen — or safely ignored. For a moment I think my bosses are grabbing late breakfast and coffee together, being cute in a way that might hurt my stomach post-breakup but, ultimately, is good for my health. Whenever I see a queer couple doing even the simplest things, like kissing or holding hands or existing, I swear I get stronger.

But Alec and Vin aren’t sharing a café breve, their fingers curled around the same cup. Vin is leaning forward against a worktable, his hearty forearms showing all the way to the elbow, tattooed poetry spilling. Alec, who is tall and trim and has a Professor of Baking look, leans back with his arms crossed. His apron always seems like he unfolded it fresh from the laundry, and under it his slacks and dress shoes are just as sharp. He keeps pinching his nose just below his perfectly round tortoiseshell glasses. Their voices are low but undeniably clipped.

This is not impromptu-breakfast-date body language.

Marisol hits my shoulder with hers on her way across the kitchen. “Grab some eggs for me?”

“What?” I ask. “You have, like, a gross of eggs right —”

Marisol stares at me with the force of a thousand managers.

“Right.”

“I’ll get the butter,” she adds, like this is the continuation of a talk we’ve been having and not some weird improv we’re doing to get away from Vin and Alec, and starts toward the walk-in. Are we giving them space? Are we running away?

I trail behind her, my body flooding with memories of my fight with W. When I pull the latch and close the door, they all crash down. It’s bitterly cold in here. As cold as the aftermath of a bad shower.

“Marisol, I can’t hang out in a big freezer,” I say, shivering.

“Do you have a medical condition?” she asks, bracing one foot against an upturned, empty crate.

“No,” I admit.

“Then sit down and pretend you’re in Canada.”

I pull up another crate and sit with my knees spread wide. I have a good view of my legs mottling with the sudden cold. Marisol goes to work, making sure the cartons of cream are sorted by their expiration dates, acting like that’s what she actually came in here to do.

Knowing that Vin and Alec are fighting makes it impossible for me to focus on anything else. It’s like seeing your parents fight, but more upsetting because they’re everybody’s parents.

Maybe if we went back out there, they’d stop. “Are we just supposed to stay here until they’re done talking?” I ask. “I don’t have a timer on the lemon bars, and they have to come out soon.”

“Your lemon bars don’t exist without Vin and Alec,” Marisol says.

She’s not wrong. Vin and Alec are the Proud Muffin. Alec likes to say that they opened a bakery because gay marriage wasn’t legal in Texas ten years ago and they needed a couples’ activity — but that joke is just the shiny finish he puts on the truth. Toxically masculine and homophobic kitchens had already exhausted Alec by the time he met Vin, whose early jobs were in advocacy and activism. Plus, he really likes muffins. They put absolutely every dollar and dream they had into opening this place; now dozens of groups meet in the community space. Regular free drop-offs are made to queer-friendly homeless shelters in the area. And the bakery hosts at least one transiversary a week, cake on the house. Marisol had her first when she still worked the front counter — she made her own cake, of course. And when the Defense of Marriage Act was overturned by the Supreme Court, the very next day Vin and Alec had their wedding in the bakery. Sometimes I think I’m the only person in South Austin who wasn’t there, because I was still in Illinois. Vin told me about it the first time I came to the Proud Muffin, when he caught me running my fingers along a particularly wobbly stripe on the rainbow porch and explained that some of the wedding guests painted under the influence of too much sugar and champagne. The afterparty lasted all week, because people kept showing up to celebrate. Queer folks and trans folks and allies, neighbors and family and friends. If the Proud Muffin is an institution, so are Vin and Alec.

Outside of the walk-in, their voices heat like a suddenly jacked-up oven.

Cracking the door, I give myself a stripe to watch. Vin walks into it, scrubbing his hands over his face like he’s trying to wash off a layer of frustration. “You’re acting like I’m serious about this.”

Alec’s sigh could lift a boulder — and set it back down on Vin’s big toe. “If you weren’t, you would have brought it up weeks ago. Instead, you chose to hoard this information. Turn it from a harmless oh-a-funny-thing-happened-today into a big old secret.”

“Oh, shit,” I mutter.

Suddenly, Marisol is behind me, her hand on my back, her head stacked over mine. All these months of trying to act mature enough to impress her, and I’ve dragged her down to my level.

“When were you going to bring up the fact that you’re being wooed?” Alec asks, marching into view. He takes a bite of something that he’s holding in one hand, half-wrapped in a napkin.

“It didn’t seem important,” Vin growls out. “I’m not interested, and I already told you . . .”

Shit.

Shit, shit, shit.

Vin is being wooed by somebody? Who isn’t Alec? People were always trying to flirt with W, but she never really flirted back. “Just because I’m queer and open to dating all sorts of people doesn’t mean I’m going to bat my eyelashes at everyone who walks by,” she said on several occasions.

I can be more susceptible. I’ll drop my voice a full octave if someone gives me a compliment, and fairly regularly I would stare at a cute waitperson or actor or stranger walking their dog in a way that made W lace her arm through mine and say, “Oh, so you noticed Cutie McCutePants.”

“Their pants are cute,” I would admit.

“You can dream about getting into them, but you’re coming home to these,” she would say, and slap my hands onto her hips. Then we would laugh and kiss until the stranger was forgotten.

No one here is laughing.

But they are eating. Vin picks up something dark, fudgy brown and scarfs half of it in a single stressed-out bite. It matches the brown stripe at the top of Alec’s neatly napkin-wrapped treat.

“You okay?” Marisol asks.

“Fine,” I grate out.

“Really, Syd? Your skin is about seven different colors and your hair . . . it’s like dryer lint. Wow.” She flicks a bit of activated fuzz.

I don’t care about my hair anymore. Easing the walk-in door open a little bit, I try to confirm something.

Vin and Alec are sharing a late-morning treat.

They’re both eating my brownies.

When the silence has lasted long enough that Marisol lets me out of the walk-in, my lemon bars aren’t just overbaked. They’re gummy, charred, fused to the pan. They reek of rotting citrus and sugar that went to the dark side.

She squats to peer into her own ovens, to see how much damage Vin and Alec’s fight did. “How do yours look?”

“They’re not winning the Big Gay Texas Bakeout,” I mutter.

I scrape them out, but before I have time to properly mourn them, I hear a voice from behind me.

“What’s the Big Gay Texas Bakeout?”

I spin to find Harley lingering in the doorway of the staff room. I give the pin on Harley’s bag a quick check — they — and remind myself that they are, technically, staff. I’ve just never seen them over there before.

I’ve also never hung out with Harley outside of work, and I’m not sure what direction it’s going to tip us now that we’re back in the bakery. Do we act like friends? Do we flirt harder? Do we stay exactly the same?

Can we stay exactly the same?

“The Big Gay Texas Bakeout is a thing I made up,” I say, dumping my lemon bar pan in the enormous sink. Actually, W and I invented it together, out of sheer love of Mary Berry and an epic week of binge-watching. “Like The Great British Bake Off crossed with a Texas cookout.”

“Sounds like fun,” Harley says, hooking their thumbs through their belt loops. “When is it happening?”

“Never,” I say. “It’s not real. When did you get here?”

“About three minutes ago,” Harley shrugs. “I knocked, nobody answered.”

Did they catch the tail end of Vin and Alec’s fight? Did it leave them feeling just as wobbly as I do? Did they flee to the staff room, hiding out the same way Marisol and I did?

“I need to ask Syd something,” Harley says, looking at Marisol like we need her permission.

The empress of the kitchen nods.

I walk over and join Harley in the staff room. It’s empty besides us, though there are condoms and dental dams and lube samples strewn across the table, leftovers from the safer sex workshop in the community space last night. Harley picks up a dental dam package and starts fiddling with it mindlessly, without seeming to notice what it is.

Which is not awkward. Not at all.

“What’s up?” I ask.

“Oh, you know. I just had a request from one of my delivery customers. For a special order. One of yours.”

“Really?” I ask.

This is mildly amazing. When people go off the standard cake-and-muffin menu for special orders, they always request one of Marisol’s bakes. It’s the first time someone’s asked specifically for one of mine.

Right when I’m starting to feel more confident about this conversation, I realize that there’s no reason that Harley and I are having it alone. They could have easily talked to me about this in front of Marisol. Suddenly I’m looking at the floor. And I’m aware of every inch between Harley’s shoes and mine.

I have a recipe for being in a relationship. I spent four years perfecting it. But I don’t know how to do this part — where I’m watching Harley like a pot of almost-boiling water, but I’m still thinking about W every five minutes.

“So . . . the request?” I ask.

“It was from the people I brought those brownies to yesterday.” So that accounts for the two that were missing this morning. At least somebody wanted them. “They really love your olive oil cake.” Harley says the words carefully, like they had to commit them to memory. Do they not know what olive oil cake is? How? They’ve been working here for over a year. “They were hoping you’d make it for a party they’re hosting tomorrow. I was going to fill out a special order form, but . . .”

But Vin and Alec were stomping around the kitchen, strewing their personal business everywhere.

“Do they want mascarpone frosting or fruit?” I ask.

Harley tries double finger guns, then seems to think better of it, quickly uncocking them. “Fruit.”

“Did they like the brownies?” Now I’m just fishing for compliments. Or trying to keep Harley here for another few minutes. They’re bouncing on the balls of their feet like this is already over.

I’m so sick of good things being over.

“Oh, yeah,” Harley says. “Big hit. I mean, they both said they loved them before they started —”

“Started what?” I ask, sharp as a sudden tester speared right through the center of a cake.

“Fighting?” Harley says. “Like, a couple fight? It was really awkward. I’ve never had that happen on a delivery before. Sometimes people are clearly hitting the pause button on a fight and pretending they’re okay. Lots of wincing smiles and sour body language. But Rae and Jay seemed fine when I got there, they dug into the brownies like they just couldn’t wait, and then an argument fired up, big and dramatic, and I was standing right there waiting for them to sign their receipt.” They wrap their arms around themself, still bouncing.

“You okay?” I ask.

“Sure,” Harley says. “I should just . . . you know . . . deliveries.”

They care about their job nearly as much as I do. They’ve told me about it while strapping a dozen cake boxes onto their bike. I should let Harley go. But I can’t stop thinking about those brownies.

The ones that have landed in the hands of fighting couples. Twice.

“Come with me for a minute,” I say, tugging at the shoulder of Harley’s muscle tee. “And leave the dental dam.”

They drop it and leap backward. “Why are those in the break room?”

We weave around the worktables in the kitchen, ignoring the cake boxes for now. A few more shirt tugs and we make it to the front counter. The barista, D.C., looks up from some kind of elaborate iced mocha.

“Hey, Syd!” D.C. gives me a glowing smile. He’s a white guy, about thirty, with overeager slices of silver in his shoulder-length black hair. A few years ago, he left the military and came home to some realizations about himself, starting with pansexuality and ending with great big drag-queen tendencies. He might be a dozen years older than me, but he’s the cutest kind of baby queer. And he treats me like a wise and ancient bisexual, which, to be honest, I love.

“Where are the brownies?” I ask, pinpointing the place where they used to be with a stare.

“Oh, we really pushed them,” D.C. says with an extra helping of helpfulness. “Like you asked.”

He points to the spot right near the counter, where a single brownie sits on a small plate. All of my feelings about W’s abrupt ending have been condensed down to this one square. I pick it up, inspecting it like it might cough up secrets.

It stays fudgy and silent and unhelpful.

“What are you doing?” Harley whispers, so close to my ear that the feeling flicks down my spine.

“Nothing,” I say with a low laugh. I’m tired. I barely slept last night. There’s nothing to see here.

My brownies are definitely not breaking people up.

I turn to head back to the kitchen, to fill Harley’s arms with cake boxes, to scrub away the memories of Vin and Alec arguing all over the kitchen.

“Um, Syd,” Harley says. “I see more of your brownies.”

They spin me gently and point to the window.

Two teenagers a little younger than I am are sitting at a table in the garden, their hands flying. In front of them, a shared plate of brownies is busted down to crumbs. I recognize these two from the morning coffee rush — they’re students from the Texas School for the Deaf. They love iced green tea and making out while they wait for the counter staff to pour them enormous cups of it. Right now, they’re nowhere close to making out. Judging by their clipped hand motions, they are not very happy with each other.

“Do you know those two?” I whisper to D.C. “From the endless drink orders?”

“Sure,” he whispers back, playing along though he’s not entirely sure why. “Kit is the short one and Aadi is the . . . not short one.”

He’s right, I notice, as Aadi stands up and unfolds to gawkish baby giraffe height. They continue to argue.

“What’s going on?” I ask D.C. I don’t know if this is part of his military background, but he knows about ten languages, one of which is ASL.

D.C. watches, waits. “I don’t think it’s right for me to translate some of the more personal teenage relationship details they’re flinging around right now, but let’s just say they might be done with the public mouth aerobics.”

Kit stands up so abruptly that the little table shudders and two iced green teas erupt. Ice chips fly as Aadi stalks away, frustrated, and Kit is left behind to crouch awkwardly and try to sop up the mess with several napkins.

“Hey,” Harley says, touching my shoulder with one fingertip. “What just happened?”

When I look over, the light that floods the bakery seems to melt the chocolate in their brown eyes. I’m stirring up the courage to say it. Harley might laugh, or slowly back away. I’m not sure I would blame them. But I have to let the words out, the ones that have been trapped on the end of my tongue since the moment I saw Vin scarfing down a bite of my bittersweet catharsis.

“I think my brownies are breaking people up.”

Sunday night, as the sky burns orange and the bats fly down the Colorado River, Harley and I step out of my beat-up car.

We’re not on a date.

We’re on the weirdest not-date I can imagine.

Harley is still in the same clothes they wore to bike all over Austin: stretchy shorts, an extra-long Proud Muffin muscle tee, short yellow vest, and those fingerless bike gloves that leave their knuckles exposed. I’m covered in muffin batter. I couldn’t wait. Not after what I saw at the bakery this morning.

Harley gave me directions to this place, which seems to be a pocket-size theater. It’s tucked between two houses on a side street off South Congress. I’ve probably been within a block of this building a hundred times and never even imagined it could be here. That’s one of Austin’s glories. It feels organic and surprising in a way that other cities don’t. According to Tess, who watches a lot of History Channel and cares about weird things like city planning, it’s due to a complete lack of zoning laws. I told her not to take the mystery out of it, and she told me that I’m a terminal romantic. “In case you’re wondering, that’s four steps past hopeless romantic,” she added.

I scoffed and didn’t let her pinch a spoonful of the dough I was working on — lavender and lemon shortbread — a true punishment for Tess, who believes that all baked goods are best before they’re actually baked.

Harley strolls up the walkway, hands in their back pockets, like this is just a normal day. Like we do this kind of thing all the time. But this is only our second time hanging out in a nonbakery setting.

And it’s definitely our first time trying to break up a couple with my baked goods.

The theater is called the Comeback, according to a sign above the door. The windows are papered with signs for shows, mostly local comics and experimental theater groups. Harley waits by the door, but I feel a little stuck. “I still can’t believe you’re willing to believe me.”

“Three couples sounds like more than a coincidence,” Harley says. “And Syd . . . you’re a force.”

I try not to worry too much about whether that’s a compliment, focusing instead on the fact that Harley is telling me they really think I might have infused my feelings into my baked goods, which then stirred up the same emotions in other people. W always teased me about the whole magical baking thing, treating it like a cute little play I was putting on for her.

It was never that.

“Do you have the last brownie?” I ask, nodding at Harley’s messenger bag. They pull it out and hand it over to me, careful not to disturb the layers of napkin I wrapped it in.

“Time to put your theory into practice,” Harley says. “But first we need to find our test subject.”

“Wait,” I say. “We’re going to feed it to someone?”

Harley cocks their head, curls flopping slightly. “What did you think I meant when I said we should test it?”

“Eat it ourselves, maybe? Or study it on the molecular level?”

“Neither of us is dating anyone at the moment,” Harley says, and I can’t help but notice how they folded their single status into that moment before ducking their head shyly. “We need a relationship here, right?”

“But we’d have to break someone up on purpose,” I say, as horrified as if Harley told me they love white chocolate — which is not chocolate. It’s an abomination of sugar and manufacturing leftovers. Fight me.

Harley is almost at the end of the short walkway to the theater before they twist back and say, “Oh, I’ve got a couple to nominate.”

I rush to catch up, following Harley into this tiny dim theater where they apparently know a relationship in need of crumbling. I hold the brownie loosely in my grip — I don’t want to squash it, but I don’t want to drop it on this grubby lobby carpet, either. I wince at the sour atmosphere, the ghost of crappy beers past. A black velvet curtain with a few bald spots and a weird stain separates us from the theater — classy — and Harley approaches it, peeling it back to watch whatever’s happening on the other side.

I take the other end of the curtain, pulling it aside with my non-brownie hand. There’s no audience out there, but the stage is occupied by a group of college-ish people wearing jeans and dark T-shirts who are pretending to be drunk dinosaurs.

“We’re going to break up an improv troupe?” I ask.

“As much as I’d like that to be our objective, no.” Harley nods at the very back of the theater, where a person is folded up in one of the seats, legs dangling out of the sandwiched halves.

“I’m going to need more information,” I say. Harley wouldn’t bring me here to break someone they like out of a relationship — right? They wouldn’t use my breakup brownies for their own personal gain, would they?

Harley doesn’t seem like that kind of person.

Of course, now is the exact moment when I realize that as much as Harley knows about my love life, I know next to nothing about theirs.

“Eve hasn’t taken a night off from practice since they started dating two months ago,” Harley says. “Her boyfriend insists he needs her here for moral support. He says that it’s a relationship builder.”

“Sounds like a top-notch significant other,” I say, sticky with sarcasm. “Which one is he?”

“The velociraptor in the middle,” Harley says, pointing out a screeching white man-boy whose hands are curled into claws. “Eve is really great. She helped me get my bearings when we first met.”

“What kind of bearings?” I ask, realizing belatedly that these people are all much too old to be high school students. “Wait, are you in college?”

Harley quirks one red-brown eyebrow, letting me wait in a dramatic silence that feels distinctly high school. “Yes and no. I’ve been taking college courses since sophomore year. Anyway, when I started, Eve was dating Robbie, who’s amazing, but he transferred. Then Eve went out with Nia, and Nia is also incredible, but that didn’t work out. And then Eve got lonely right around finals and hooked up with him.”

I’ve never really faced the idea of dating so many people. Thanks to W, I’ve been locked in all through high school. Now I’m single for the first time in my entire dateable existence. I honestly can’t seem to untwine that strange feeling from the dumping itself.

Harley and I walk up to Eve, who unscrunches herself from the seat. She’s tall and Asian and scowlingly pretty — at least until she sees Harley and lights up. Then she’s glowingly pretty. “Hey,” she says, with the wilted voice of someone who hasn’t seen the sun in months. She really has been holed up in here.

“Eve,” Harley says. “This is Syd.”

“We both work at the Proud Muffin,” I add quickly. Which saves Harley from having to say if we’re coworkers, or friends, or some mysterious third thing.

“That place is so great,” she says. “My boyfriend won’t eat baked goods. He says the stage lights add ten pounds. And then he laughs like it’s a joke, but I know he means it because I made him pancakes once and he just side-eyed them like they were attacking him with calories and then took a single bite to ‘make me happy.’” She rolls her eyes.

“Ew,” I say under my breath.

A lot of people look shocked when I tell them I work at a bakery and insist that they could never, because they would eat everything and get so fat. As if, because I’m solidly built, I’m supposed to share their fatphobic fear.

This is horrible, and I tell people so.

Onstage, the velociraptor screeches.

Harley shudders and whispers to me, “Do you think he makes that sound when they . . . you know . . . ?”

“We brought some Proud Muffin straight to you,” I say, holding out the brownie like it might save Eve’s life. This whole plan started out feeling more than a little morally questionable, but at this point I’m happy to lend her a piece of my heartbreak.

Her dark brown eyes crackle with interest. Her fingers reach out, wiggling.

Eve tucks into the brownie right in front of us, in the breathless way that I’ve noticed only small kids and college students eat, like they’ve forgotten food exists until it’s right in front of them again. “Uhhhh. Mmmmmm. Oh my fucking god.” Eve is having an intense, private moment with this brownie. She stares at it like she’s falling in love. She makes sounds that under any other circumstance would make me blush.

“Wow,” she says, as she finishes with a sigh.

Harley and I are both staring now, waiting for the aftermath. For the moment when the brownie unleashes its power and her relationship with this terror of a pretty boy ends.

“How are you feeling?” Harley asks, leaning forward slightly.

“Are you starting a rival troupe back there?” improv boy asks in a pushy stage whisper, and several of his teammates give a stale laugh.

“Just visiting a friend,” Harley shouts.

“Bikes!” he shouts back, and it takes me a second to realize that this is a nickname for Harley. “Do you want to come up here? Show us what you’ve got? What about your friend?”

“Let’s absolutely leave,” I say.

“I’m sorry about him,” Eve says, with a sudden hand on my wrist. “He can be such a dick.”

“What did you say, baby?” her boyfriend asks, squinting against the stage lights.

“Dick!” she says. Then she blows him a kiss.

I think about people who get stuck in relationships that should be over, who let things burn long after they should be tossed in the bin. Did W think I was doing the same thing? Was it obvious to the people around us, to everybody but me?

Suddenly I’m not thinking about our fight but the date before that. And the ten dates before that one. The late-night gingerbread pancakes at Kerbey Lane, the sunrise runs by the lake before we had to split up for days at our respective schools. Those dates look fine from a distance, but up close they were strangely quiet. Our skin would brush and W would look at me like she’d forgotten I was there.

Suddenly I feel a very special kind of dumb, and I’m pushing my way out of the theater, dashing the curtain aside. Harley pounds along behind me. “Wait. We need to see if it works, right?”

“It doesn’t matter.” Thinking that baking might be some form of magic is as stupid and childish as thinking that W and I would last through high school, that her feelings would never go stale.

“Syd,” Harley says, dragging me back to the curtain. “Look.”

Eve is standing up in a smooth, determined way that makes it look almost like she’s levitating. There’s a gleam in her eyes that even the dim house lights can’t hide. She starts throwing things at the stage. Everything she can get a hold of. Pens and paperbacks and the napkin from the Proud Muffin, which flutters and falls short.

“What are you doing?”

“Interrupting your precious rehearsal!” she shouts.

“What? Why?”

“Because I’m funnier in my sleep than you are onstage!” Eve shouts. “The only thing funny about you is when you try to . . .” and then she lists a few activities that he’s apparently hilarious at.

The rest of the troupe applauds Eve.

“This isn’t a scene, assholes!” he shrieks, back to his velociraptor voice, not on purpose.

Harley and I turn to each other. I’m waiting for them to say that it’s not real, to come up with some explanation. Instead, Harley bum-rushes me, and even though they’re only a tiny bit taller, they’re strong enough to heave me off the floor and spin me once, twice, to pick up speed and make me dizzy.

“You did that,” they whisper. “That was you.”

“It really was.”

“There are so many jokes about magic brownies I’m not making right now,” Harley says into my shoulder.

I start laughing, but the sound dissolves when I think about Vin and Alec. And Kit and Aadi. And the strangers Harley delivered my brownies to. Maybe W and I deserve to be over, but I’m not going to spread that misery to anyone else. I refuse to be the cause of more heartbreak.

“I’m going to get them back together,” I say, right as Harley sets me down.

“Them?” Harley asks, pointing at the stage, where Eve and her now-ex-boyfriend are standing on chairs, shouting each other’s inadequacies.

“Okay, not them. But everyone else who ate my brownies. I’m going to find them and fix it.”

Harley’s practicality snaps in place so fast that I don’t see it coming.

“How?”

 

FOR THE CAKE

2 cups all-purpose flour

1½ cups sugar

1½ tsp big grain salt (Kosher salt, sea salt, etc.)

½ tsp baking soda

½ tsp baking powder

1⅓ cups extra virgin olive oil

1¼ cups milk (Not skim! Skim is blue water! Don’t apologize to people with runny blue water cake!)

3 eggs

1½ tbsp orange zest (That is a lot of zest, but you’re very sorry, so it’s worth it.)

½ cup fresh juice from actual oranges (Not a carton. Get in there and start crushing pulp and chasing down seeds. Every time you think about cutting a corner, don’t. That’s not how apologies work. Do the thing, and do it right.)

FOR THE FRUIT SAUCE

2 cups berries (I used blueberries, but this would be just as good a fuck-up sauce if you used strawberries or raspberries or blackberries.)

1 to 2 tbsp sugar, depending on how sweet your fruit is

A squeeze or two of fresh lemon

Ready to fix whatever you’ve done horribly wrong?

Let’s go.

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

In a medium bowl, mix the flour, sugar, salt, baking soda, and baking powder. In a large bowl, whisk the olive oil, milk, eggs, orange zest, and juice.

See how easy that was? Shouldn’t we all say we’re sorry with cake?

Fold the dry ingredients into the wet ones, until just barely mixed. Pour the batter into your greased pans — I use two 9-inch round cake pans and sauce them separately, OR you can get truly penitent and stack them for a double layer cake, adding whipped mascarpone in the middle (quick and dirty recipe: one 8-oz tub mascarpone, 2 to 3 squeezes of lemon, 2 tbsp of your favorite fine sugar; dump in a bowl and whip together).

Bake according to your pans — start checking at 30 minutes for rounds. The trick here is to wait until you’ve got a consistently golden-brown top. And of course, your toothpick should come out clean. If it doesn’t, you’re still working through your shit and you’re not actually ready to center anyone else’s feelings.

When the cake is truly golden, shining with sincerity — and oil — you’re ready to take it out of the oven to cool and make the fruit sauce. On the stovetop, in a small saucepan, cook down 1 cup of fruit. When it reaches half of its original volume, add the second cup of fruit and a little sugar. Right at the end, when it’s getting thick and almost TOO sweet, hit it with the lemon, to taste. Test with a spoon: it should leave a thin coating of sauce behind, and the flavor should burst in your mouth, like the words that are ready to come out.

Say them with me as you spoon the fruit over the cake: I’m very very very very very very very sorry.