Sixty-eight

Racing out of my office, I entered our second-floor lounge at the same moment Howie, Esther, and Captain Siebold reached the top of the spiral staircase. Nancy followed, her yellow braids flying.

The cause of the commotion wasn’t hard to find. In the center of the room, the customer who’d screamed jumped to her feet.

“Turn it off!” she shouted.

Dark hair tumbling loose, the young woman’s demand was directed at a tattooed guy with an overgrown beard and dirty blond hair. Lazily sprawled in one of our overstuffed lounge chairs, the dude rolled his eyes at the woman, which made her even angrier.

“I had the perfect words to end my essay. Perfect!” She swiped back her dark bangs. “And your obnoxious ringtone blasted them right out of my head. What kind of a selfish jerk puts an air raid siren ringtone on his phone and lets it scream away while others are trying to work?!”

The bearded, tattooed dude held up his mobile phone, which suddenly began re-blasting the siren at top volume. “My calls are important and your brain dysfunction is not,” he shouted over the obnoxious siren. “So take your lousy essay and shove it right up your—”

His reply was cut off by shouted complaints from the other writers. Then something was thrown—a hurtling ball of golden cake and marshmallow frosting (a tragic waste of our new Twinkie Tribute Cupcake).

The perfectly pitched pastry smacked the sneering dude right in his nose. The move was pure elementary school cafeteria. Half the room stared in shock. The other half dived for cover when the splattered dude, scowling under a mask of gooey marshmallow deliciousness, scooped the mashed cupcake off his bearded face and shot it back at his attacker. The scrumptious cake snowball disintegrated mid-flight and the pieces went wide!

Dante’s friend Tony Tanaka ducked just in time, and a woman behind him took the brunt of the cake-plosion. Sputtering with outrage, she sent her container of mixed-berry yogurt flying.

Dina Nardini, the singing waitress, shrieked a high C note and took cover behind her laptop screen while Mason Dunn—with a calculating filmmaker’s gaze—aimed the business end of her phone’s camera at the action.

Refusing to be distracted, Lachelle LaLande glanced up once from her keyboard, rolled her expressive brown eyes, and resumed typing.

In the meantime, Dante—who’d replaced Tucker as proctor—tried to force a cease-fire by jumping between the main combatants. His reward was a face full of Ethiopian with double almond milk, fortunately tepid (as he told me later). When the cup bounced off his razored scalp, Nancy yelped and ran protectively to his side.

At that point, all the customers began to shout at one another with some joining in the food fight as they threw pastry and coffee cups!

I leaped into the fray, trying to help restore order. Esther gamely joined in. But it was the deep, loud command from six-foot-something Captain Siebold to “CEASE AND DESIST OR I’LL HAVE YOU ALL KEELHAULED!” that finally did the trick.

The authoritative voice from the giant man in a federal agent–sharp suit snapped everyone back to their adult senses.

Since the three-hour writing session was minutes away from ending anyway, Esther announced: “Take a break, everyone! Clean yourselves up! We’ll start a new session in thirty minutes.”

Tony Tanaka was the first to hit the spiral stairs, and many others followed. As food-splattered customers either headed for the restroom or packed up and left in disgust, Howie grabbed a mop and Dante and Nancy helped him clean up the lounge.

To say I was mortified would be an understatement. I had wanted us to make a good impression on Madame’s new beau. Having the captain witness this Titanic of a shop-wreck felt like a disaster in itself.

Even worse, if we couldn’t control this kind of acrimonious anarchy inside our Writer’s Block Lounge, it was destined for failure—which would give Cody Wood the edge he needed to push us over a cliff.

Esther looked even more upset than I was. As she watched a parade of writers move downstairs and out the door, she placed her hands on her ample hips and groaned.

“How did this happen?”

“I think I know,” Captain Siebold said. “If you’d like some advice to avoid scenes like this in the future, I’d be happy to give it.”

“Please do!” Esther said, and we all gathered around.