“He wouldn’t approve?”
Daniel shrugged. “I have no idea. But he’s a little judgy, so Mom and I don’t tell him a lot.”
I looked at him. He was quite focused on weighing all-purpose flour with a large kitchen scale. This was the most he’d ever told me about his family.
“I’m not the first girlfriend you’ve hidden from him, am I?” I asked, making sure the playfulness was there in my voice.
He laughed, shaking his head. “Perceptive. But you’re the first bloodsucking vampire I’ve hidden. Now, are you ready for your first pie lesson, Count?”
I shook my head, laughing. He hadn’t called me Count for a while. I’d kind of missed it. “I’ll have you know I had pi memorized to a hundred digits before I was ten.”
He rolled his eyes. “Math nerds.Pie. P-I-E. Here, take this. It’s a pastry blender.” He handed me a kitchen implement that I’d never seen before.
“Pie being a circular food, my pi knowledge is useful.”
With Daniel’s help, I made my first all-butter pastry. Basically, that meant I used the blades on the pastry blender to cut the cold butter into tiny pieces inside the bowl of flour, then added enough ice water to make a dough.
“So, all it took was a friend with a crush on a hockey player to get you to accept me as I am?” he asked as he was stashing the finished discs of pie dough in the fridge. He grabbed a bag of apples and handed me a peeler to start peeling them.
I cringed. I had already accepted him as he was, hadn’t I? “If you’re not comfortable with this, I won’t come to the game. I know it’s weird.” I turned away to take an apple out of the bag.
Everyone he knew there, including his teammates and even his own mother, thought we were a couple. Which meant we’d have to respect our parameters, instead of just being us. Maybe he wouldn’t want that when he was supposed to be focused on his game.
He took the apple I’d peeled and started slicing it. “I was kidding. I want you to come. I’ve always wanted a puck bunny.”
I’d done enough googling last night to know exactly what a puck bunny was. I pretended to slap him but didn’t actually touch him this time. “I am not showing up in your hockey jersey and booty shorts.”
“Damn,” he laughed. “Should have added that to the parameters.”
21
My First Hockey Game
Istood in front of my sister’s closet, more confused than I had ever been in my life about clothes. “What does one wear to a hockey game?” I held up Tahira’s redSuper Mario Kartsweatshirt in one hand and a black “ironic” wolf howling at the moon T-shirt in the other.
Tahira looked up at me from her sewing machine and made an expression that was exactly like the one she made on the weekend when she poured soy milk into her chai by mistake. “Ew, neither of those.”
I frowned. I’d assumed a hockey game was a casual thing. When I googled this question, the standard advice was to wear a team jersey, and if you didn’t have a jersey that matched one of the teams playing, then a pro jersey was appropriate. But that wasn’t something that existed in this house. “What’s wrong with these?”
“You’re going to your boyfriend’s hockey game for the first time,” Tahira said. “You don’t wear graphic sweatshirts for a date.”
“It’s not a date. We’ve agreed on three dates, and this doesn’t count as one because no one from school will be there.”
Tahira got up and went to her closet. “Yes, yes, so you said. All the same, even if you or he don’t think it’s a date, everyone else will.” Shestarted flipping through the clothes in her closet, which, since this was Tahira’s closet, took a while.
“I don’t think you should wear black,” she said. “I mean, I like this nerdy-emo look of yours ... but to meet his friends? And his mother? The point here is to makehimlook good.”
“I don’t look good?”
She pulled something out of her closet and handed it to me. “You look awesome. But there’s always room for improvement.”
The top she’d given me was a dark green, loose, boxy long sleeve. The bottom six inches or so had a busy floral print in shades of green and purple. The whole shirt was made of a silky, flowy fabric. It was exactly Tahira’s aesthetic—modern and slightly unexpected.
“You made this?”
She nodded. “Custom fabric.”
“Seems a little dressy for a hockey game, no?”
