And then I burst out laughing again.
I couldn’t help it. He looked so ridiculous sitting there, covered in batter and every ingredient we had, his hair and eyes wild. I laughed even harder than before, so hard that I felt like I couldn’t breathe, and every time that I stopped laughing, I saw his face again and the cycle would repeat. I barely noticed him get up and didn’t register him saying, “Oh, that’s war!” until the bag of flour was being tipped over me.
That sobered me up real quick. I wiped the powder out of my eyes and stared at Tino in shock. “You did not just?—”
He was already laughing so hard he couldn’t breathe. “You look like a ghost!”
“Tino!”
“Like, a really angry ghost.”
I took a slow step toward him. “You have three seconds to run.”
“Oh come on, you wouldn’t?—”
I lunged for the bag.
Flour exploded everywhere—the counter, the floor, both of us—like a blizzard. It stuck to every surface of the room, which had already been covered by the batter and some failed cracked eggs. I continued to chase Tino, wanting to get revenge for all the flour that I was going to have to wash out of my hair later, and we were coughing and laughing, slipping on the drenched tile, trying and failing to regain balance.
And then, the cherry on top of the cake, the smoke alarm went off.
The shrill, ear-splitting BEEP-BEEP-BEEP echoed through the kitchen as we blinked at each other then both turned our gazes to the second crepe. In all the disasters, we’d completely forgotten about it, left there to burn and send smoke up in the air.
“Fan the alarm!” Tino yelled over the beeping as he went to turn off the burner. I spun around in a circle, looking for anything I could use to fan it but coming up short. Everything in the room was covered in batter or flour or was hard to see in the smoke, and the constant beeping was not making it easy to think. “Lilah! Quickly!”
“What am I supposed to fan it with, my hands?” I snapped.
“Yes!”
I groaned, but stomped over to the smoke alarm and did what I could to wave my hands under it. The ceilings were high in here and I couldn’t even hope to reach it, so it was more like I was hopping in place, flailing my arms around like an idiot.
“I just want it on the record that I hate you.”
“No, you don’t.” Tino dumped the crepe onto the plate with the other one then dropped the pan into the sink and turned on the cold water. I cringed as I watched the steam rise from it.
“Currently? I really might.”
He grinned through the chaos, hair dusted white, eyes bright with the kind of joy that came from absolute disaster. “You can’t hate me when I look this good.”
I scowled. “You look like a powdered donut.”
He just laughed and grabbed the magazine I’d been using earlier. It was completely covered in powder and unrecognizable but it was good enough to fan under the smoke alarm, which Tino did without even needing to stand on his tiptoes.Show-off.
“If we get written up for this, you’re explaining it,” I told him.
“Obviously not. You were the one in charge of the pan.”
“I was not in charge?—”
“Lilah Turner, head chef?—”
“Michael Valentine, alarm activator?—”
Tino snorted and then started coughing like he’d breathed in too much floor. “I can’t breathe.”
“Good. You deserve to suffocate.”
“You’re so mean to me.”
