I raised a brow. “What do your teammates think of you?”
He laughed as he headed to turn on the ovens. “They think I’m weird. But I think everyone is weird. Sometimes it just takes longer to find the weird deep inside some people.” Daniel took a bowl into the pantry and returned with it filled with lemons. “Shall we square, Ms.Count?”
I nodded. This dude’s ...weirdness... made me forget about all the weirdness about this situation with him. “I don’t know a thing about baking.”
“That’s okay. I do.”
Together, we followed the steps of white-lady Rose’s recipe. “The base is pretty much shortbread,” Daniel said as he measured all theingredients into a big bowl. We weren’t alone in the kitchen anymore. Andre and two others were cooking on the other side of the room. It smelled strongly of beef stew or something. I hoped the lemon squares wouldn’t smell like beef.
“The filling is really where it’s at,” Daniel continued, pressing the crumbly base into a large pan. “And it’s covered with powdered sugar, a sensation you’re familiar with. I guess that’s something that makes bars more like cakes than cookies. Cookies don’t have toppings, but bars usually do. Like date squares, and Nanaimo bars and ...” He paused and looked at me, a rare serious expression on his face. “Am I taking this too far?”
I blinked.
He tilted his head. “It’s hard to know what to talk to you about, so I figured bars and squares would work since we’re making squares. You want me to ease up?”
“Why is it hard to know what to say to me?”
“Because you’re, you know.You.Cool. Smart. I’m not used to having genius friends.”
I shook my head. “I’m not a genius.” And I wasn’t really that cool, either. I was a gamer, and a math nerd. Those were hardly cool-people hobbies.
He shrugged. “Okay, but you are a little intimidating.” He took the pans to the oven and put them in. “Okay, let’s make the filling. Can you zest those lemons?”
I wasn’t sure what that meant, so Daniel showed me how to use this big, long grater thing to get the top yellow layer off the lemons. The bright, fresh citrus scent exploded as a little pile of yellow flecks collected on the wooden cutting board.
He put the bag of lemons next to me so I could zest them all. “Best thing about baking is that it makes me think about baking, instead of all the things that are bothering me. Like, I told you yesterday how stressful my first calculus class was?” He took a citrus juicer and put iton the counter. “Anyway, I went home and made peanut butter cookies. Now that’s a cookie with a smell that eases all worries. We should make those for the market. Not this week; there was no peanut butter in that donation. Unless”—he cringed—“I should have asked you ... you aren’t allergic to peanuts, are you?”
“No. Was calculus upsetting you that much?” Poor guy. I turned to math for comfort, and he needed comfort from math.
“Yeah ... the teacher gave this review quiz to make sure we had the skills to do the class, and I failed miserably. I am not numerically minded. Unlike you, Ms.Count. That sounds weird. What’s the Count’s first name? I don’t think it’s actuallyThe, is it?”
I looked up from my lemon zesting. After I was finished with a lemon, Daniel cut it in half and pressed it into the sharp conical top of the juicer, his impressive biceps flexing under his thin Toronto Maple Leafs T-shirt. I think I abstractly knew that hockey players were built, but seeing one squeeze lemons like this was ... well, it was something. What would it be like to have arms like that around me?
“You don’t know either?” he asked.
“Huh?” What was he even talking about?
“The Count. What’s his first name? Does he even have one?”
I shook my head. “I have no idea. Why are you taking calculus if you’re not good at math? It’s the hardest of the grade-twelve math courses.” It was my favorite for that reason, but yeah. It was tough for most people.
“My uncle insisted. He’s an engineer, and he wants me to be an architect or an engineer. I mean, there’s no way that’s going to happen, but Mom said I should at least take calculus since we live with him.”
He lived with his uncle? It sounded like there was a bit of a personal story there. I didn’t want to pry into his family situation, though.
“What do you want to study after high school?”
“Pastry arts.” He smiled. “That probably doesn’t surprise you.”
I laughed. “Not one bit.”
Daniel grabbed another naked lemon to juice while I kept zesting.
“It was my ex texting me,” I said suddenly. I didn’t know why I said it. Daniel’s talkativeness was contagious, or something. “That’s who was pissing me off when you got here.”
He raised one eyebrow as he squeezed the lemon. “Bad breakup?”
“You could say that.Unexpectedbreakup, at least for me.”
