Andre came through the swinging door from the kitchen then, holding a green binder. He stopped short when he saw me. “Shoot, Samaya, you okay?” he asked, handing me the dish towel that was draped over his shoulder. He turned to LostAxis. “Daniel, I see you met Samaya.”
So LostAxis wasDaniel. The guy I was supposed to be working with all semester. Ugh.
“I don’t know what just happened,” Daniel said. “I came in from the kitchen, and suddenly there was a cloud of sugar. And under it washer.”
I looked at him. There was no way he’d seen the picture on my phone. Of course he wouldn’t have looked—that would have been super rude. And he only had the phone in his hand for maybe a second. I wiped my face with my arm and checked my phone. The screen had turned off. I slipped the phone in my pocket.
I didn’t even know for sure that this was LostAxis. It was probably too big a coincidence. Yeah, LostAxis told me he lived in Canada, but this was literally the second largest country in the world. I needed to ask this guy if he frequentedDragon Arenamessage boards.
Andre raised one brow at me. “Bit of an incident with the powdered sugar?”
“You could say that.”
LostAxis rubbed his chin, looking at me with a smirk on his face. Why was he looking at me like that? It was ... sexy.
I suddenly remembered my black eyeliner—had it smudged again? With the white sugar on my face, did I now look like one of those sad white-faced clown figurines my grandmother had in her dining room? I wiped my face with the dry dish towel. My face felt hot. I was probably as red as a tomato, too. Or a raspberry. I was a big old half-rotted raspberry with smudged eyeliner. And this unsettlingly attractive guy who I’d been slaying orcs with all summer waslaughing at me. I looked down and pretended to brush more sugar from my jeans.
“Do you need clean clothes, Samaya?” Andre asked. “We have a whole donation bin.”
I found my voice. “No, it’s fine. I’m fine. Just fine.”
“All right then,” Andre said. He handed me the slim green binder. “Here are the recipes for the bake sales. The ones that sell well are marked. After you’ve taken stock of everything, go through the binder to figure out what we could make with this stuff.”
He headed out of the small room, calling out behind him without turning around. “I’ll leave the kitchen door open this time, so no one sneaks up on you again. Let’s try to prevent y’all wearing the ingredients before we can bake with them.”
I rubbed at my face again. “Not the way I expected to meet you. But thanks for helping me inventory.”
LostAxis grinned, then turned toward the shelves. “The restaurant donation was huge. Where are you with the counting?”
I nodded. “I’ve finished the first shelf.”
“You want me to count, or write?”
I handed him the clipboard and pen. “I’ll count, you record what I say, okay?”
My brain wasn’t working right. This wasLostAxis. Right here in front of me. I should be telling him who I was ... but I couldn’t. He may not have looked at the picture when he picked up my phone, but if I told him that I was his gaming friend, I would have to also tell him that my friend had manipulated a picture to make it look like him and I were dating. And that my whole school had seen the picture. I bit my lip. I couldnotadmit that.
He took the clipboard. “Got it.”
I turned back to the shelf. “Five bags of powdered sugar?”
He snorted, then looked at the now half-empty bag I’d dropped on the table. “Minus the one you’re wearing.”
I took a deep breath. This was mortifying. The guy in the picture was real, and he lived here in Scarborough, and he was going to discover what a loser I was. “Four and a half,” I said.
He seemed to pick up from the tone of my voice that I wasn’t looking for fun banter here. I kept counting—and thinking. It was clear that I couldn’t keep working here—I needed to spend another hour pretending I didn’t know that he was LostAxis, the best Dark Mage I’d ever seen, then never come back to the shelter or speak about this to him again.
“Four bags of raisins.” I made a face. “Yuck.” I hated raisins.
“What did raisins ever do to you?” Daniel asked.
I ignored him. “Eight tubs of ...” I lifted the big white plastic pail, not sure what it was. I wrinkled my nose after reading. “Beef suet? What the hell is that?”
“Beef fat,” he said.
“I thought these were baking supplies. Why is there cow?”
“Animal products are used in baking a lot. You do know that milk and butter are also from cows, right? Did you know it takes twenty-one pounds of milk to make one pound of butter? Good thing cows produce so much milk. Like seventy pounds a day.”
