Crush du Jour (8 page)

“Don’t let her get to you,” Seth said. “I’m sure she’s just jealous.”

I snorted. “Jealous of
me?
Doubtful.” I stepped back and regarded Seth again curiously. “But, I mean, if she
were
jealous of me … why would that be?”

Suddenly a flush erupted over Seth’s face, creeping up from his neck until the tips of his ears were blazing.

This
was an unexpected reaction.

“There could be a reason,” he mumbled, looking like he kind of wanted the floor to open up and whisk him away to an alternate reality where no one ever has to live through embarrassing situations.

I shook my head. More and more it was looking like we were having a real, live
Moment
, which was—well, let’s face it— pretty much the cherry on the ice cream sundae of my life. Like, maybe it was going to melt, so I should just eat it all up while I could.

I was rationalizing my crush. Was this one of the five stages of denial?

The tension in the air threatened to turn
me (and, I thought, Seth, too) inside out. I had to break it up.

“We should go see how Gretchens doing and what’s going on over there,” I suggested.

Seth nodded enthusiastically, and I could see relief flood his extra-adorable features.

I waved in the general direction of our booth.

And then I realized what, exactly, was going on over there.

And I froze.

Nine

Okay, so maybe I was being a little bit melodramatic—but only a
little
bit, I swear. The thing was, when I turned back to our stand, I saw not only Gretchen, Pete, and the rest of our precocious cooking disciples, but also the very last person I wanted to run into at the Fantastic Fourth celebration.

Yeah, it was my mother.

Now, under normal circumstances, I would have no problem running into my mother at an event like this. My mom, more than anyone except maybe Anna, is one of my very biggest supporters. So normally it would be great for her to see me here with the students—them looking studious (or as studious as one can look with chocolate
chips mashed into one’s hair) and me looking teacherly.

Under
normal
circumstances, that is.

Despite the fact that, between Hype and the cooking class, Seth and I were spending a bunch of days a week together, I had somehow managed to keep from telling him about what my mom does for a living. I knew, based on a few years of personal experience, that when a foodie finds out your mother is a big-time restaurant critic, well, everyone gets kind of antsy. And knowing what my mom thought about Hype—at least, for now—clearly the best course of action would be to try like holy heck to keep Seth and Mom from ever meeting up.

This was going to be a problem.

Snapping back from my internal panic attack, I saw Seth walk toward the bake sale and periodically glance backward to see if I was following.

These were desperate times, my friends.

“Wait!” I called in a tone of voice more suitable for a small grease fire or a set of diners skipping out on their four-figure restaurant check.

Seth halted in place, looking appropriately concerned.

He really was
so
sweet. Right, he wanted to know what had me so hyped up.

Think fast, Laine
.

“Um, I think that Pete is a mess from the food fight.”

It was a safe bet. I mean, Pete had been standing not three feet away from the fray. I pointed at my chest, just in case Seth didn’t remember from five seconds ago. “I’ll send him to you for a good hose-down.”

Seth looked appropriately bewildered, so I took the opportunity to jog over to our table.

I was concentrating so fiercely on keeping one eye on Seth that I stumbled directly into my own mother.

“Unnecessary roughness,” she called, grabbing at my shoulders and lightly wrestling me out of her personal space. Once she’d created a few inches of distance between us, she looked me over.

“Laine, did you know that the chocolate chocolate chip—”

“Undercooked. Yeah, we’ve been over that.” I
needed
to send Pete over to Seth before Seth came back to the table. This was dire. The process would be as delicate as baking a soufflé.

“Pete,” I hissed, sidling over to him and nudging him in the ribs, ”were you having a food fight with Cameron before?”

He looked at me with wide eyes. The expression on his face clearly showed a lack of any involvement in airborne cookie dough. But something about my desperation must have shown on
my
face.

Bless his little caramel-coated heart, he nodded

“Go get cleaned up,” I suggested. “Seth is looking for you.” This was not, strictly speaking, true. But it worked. Pete cast a last baleful glance at me and wandered warily toward the public bathrooms.

I was safe—for the next few minutes, at least.

I turned back to my mother.

“Some people like the cookies undercooked,” I said, crossing my arms over my chest defensively.

My mother laughed. “Fair enough,” she agreed. “Anyway, I didn’t come over here to pick on you. I just wanted to see what you and your class have been up to.”

I spread my arms wide. “Behold a bounty of baked goods. Try the cobbler. Loaded with preserved goodness.”

Sure, behold. But then please go away so you don’t out me
.

She started fiddling with the clasp on her bag. “Give me two of whatever you think I’ll like best.”

Seth was going to come back any minute. I could
not
be dealing with change right now. I’m just not good with numbers. It wouldn’t be a pretty—or speedy—process.

“You know what,” I stammered, shooing her away with my hands, “we’re all going to be taking the leftovers home, so, you know, your money’s no good here.”

She wrinkled her forehead. “I just wanted to support—”

“Yeah, of course, that’s totally sweet,” I said, speaking in a massive rush.

Ah!
There
was my flash of inspiration.

“It’s just that the
Sun
has a table over there”—I jerked my head due west—“and they’re selling ad space. A
lot
of it,” I added ominously.

The
Sun
is the
Tribunes
top competitor. They were sponsoring a writing program for teens this summer, and they’d gotten a lot of publicity for it. My mom was sick of hearing about it, so I could count on her to have a reaction to this new information.

Her eyebrows flew upward in perfect arches. “I see.” She drummed her fingers on the table thoughtfully, then shrugged. “All right. If you would rather bring home leftovers, it’s up to you. Maybe I’ll go check out the
Suns
table.”

Right, maybe.

I nodded, my face impassive. “Good plan.” I clapped her on the back and smiled broadly. “See you later!”

She looked at me strangely for a beat or two, but she took the bait.

I only hoped that there actually was a
Sun
booth at this street fair.

Oh, well. Dwelling on that wouldn’t help me now.

I was safe, at least for a little while.

Sweet.

Ten

It was almost too good to be true. My toohot-to-handle scenario had been temporarily tamped down by two tiny little white lies. Mom didn’t know about Seth, and Seth didn’t know about Mom. I had one juicy secret, that was for sure. And I was going to keep it all to myself for as long as I possibly could.

Unfortunately, I didn’t really know how long that would be. Ever since my Moment with Seth on the Fourth of July, I’d been fantasizing that “us,” as a couple, was possible. Suddenly it seemed not-insane to think that he could find me as yummy as I found him. I mean, he’d blushed and all. At
the Fantastic Fourth, he’d blushed. In boyspeak, blushing means something, right?

And what about the fact that I was now fully
obsessing
about his facial pigmentation? Did that mean that I had progressed from crush to full-blown, sizzling feelings? Feelings were new. Feelings were complicated. Feelings were
scary
.

So I decided to try not to have them.

All of my sweet-as-pie feelings about Seth were making it harder than ever to concentrate at Hype. And yet …

The situation was starting to feel as sticky as an all-day sucker.

My preoccupation was not a good thing. Really—just ask the irate elderly couple sitting over at table nineteen. The ones who asked for their water, like, a year ago.

“Hel-lo.”

It actually wasn’t Mr. and Mrs. Grumpy, but rather Callie, on her way to the computer to type in an order. She was kind enough to accidentally-on-purpose slam her hip into me on her way.

I shook my head, startled. Her hips were narrower than an eleven-year-old boy’s, and she still couldn’t see fit not to trample all over me? People who are genetically blessed
really ought to be kinder toward those of us less gifted.

“Sorry. I spaced.” It was half true; I
had
spaced. But I wasn’t all that sorry. Maybe I should have been, but Callie was a grade-A, prime beyotch. Not only that, but she was the worst kind of beyotch—one who was startlingly attractive. Grr.

“Really?” Her voice dripped with sarcasm.

I resisted the intense urge to throttle her. It was most definitely illegal and probably wouldn’t reflect well on me to Seth, or his dad, either. Even if, technically, I would only be force-feeding Callie her just deserts.

“Laine.”
She was crankier now. Much crankier. It was kind of weird; most human beings, like, max out at a certain level of crankiness, but not Callie. Callie had bitchery in reserves.

“Yeah?” I willed myself to go to my Zen place. I was in a land where chunky peanut butter and milk chocolate merged in a beautiful symphony of creamy, sugary goodness. …

Shoot. Now I was drifting off again.

I stood up straight and blew my bangs up and off my forehead. “Yeah.”

Callie grimaced at me. “Table nineteen.”

“Right, the water.” I moved to take care
of it. I couldn’t believe I’d gotten distracted
again
.

See? Love: not worth the trouble. It
always
gets in the way. And if, as I suspected, my feelings for Seth ran deeper than a simple crush, you could just triple that trouble. And then double it again.

“Not
the water,” Callie interjected. “Although they’d probably be into that, too.” She rolled her eyes so hard I wondered if she could see the inside of her perfectly shaped skull. “I
think
they’re ready to order.”

Whoops. My bad. Even I knew that “think” was code for “know for a fact,” with a hint of “you dingbat” thrown in.

“Right,” I assured her. “I’ll take care of it.”

As the night went on, I did my best to tend to table nineteen as well as the four others that were located in my station. It’s just, waiting tables was so overwhelming and difficult, and it was exactly the sort of task that my left-brain-oriented self wasn’t really suited for. Even if Callie hadn’t been launching a one-woman campaign against me, I still would have been in the weeds, big-time.

Why did I do this to myself? If I was such a lousy waitress, why didn’t I quit?

The simple truth? I needed the money.

The more difficult truth? The one I wasn’t sure I was ready to face yet? I
really
wanted Seth.

Since the Fourth of July, an electric force field had bubbled up between Seth and me. It had gotten to where I could barely stand to look directly at him without sunglasses or a hazmat suit or … I don’t know.
Something
.

But you know who else stuck to Seth like a half-melted Tootsie Roll? Callie. What this meant was that I was not only avoiding Callie, but I was doing my best to duck and cover whenever Seth was around too.

This obviously involved a lot of leaping through doorways and slinking down hallways when either of them swung by. If nothing else, I was getting a good workout.

I was so busy both stressing out and bussing table seventeen that at first I didn’t notice Anna walk into the restaurant. Once she caught my eye, though, I let out a squeal of glee, quickly stashed my tray at the sideboard in front of the kitchen, and dashed over to her. It was bliss to see a familiar face in the place I now thought of
as a heretofore undiscovered tenth circle of hell.

“What
are you doing here?” I asked, totally shocked.

“The kiddie has pinkeye and is deathly contagious. So I get a few days off.” She winked at me with a decidedly non-pink eye.

“Lucky,” I pouted.

“Uh, I’m not the one who’s working with Mr. Crest Whitestrips, Laine,” she pointed out.

There was that, yeah. She’d come by and seen Seth before, and, like anyone with eyes, realized that he was smokin’ hot.

I grinned. “Thank goodness for that. I would hate to have to kill you.”

“So …,” she hedged, “how
is
the competition these days?”

I bit my lip. Anna had decided over late-night café mochas with me that the source of Callie’s hatred was jealousy. I tried to convince her that Callie had not one single reason to be jealous of me, but Anna wasn’t buying. She thought that my notcrush on Seth was both not-nonexistent and not-nonobvious.

I held my right hand over my heart. “I plead the fifth, your honor.”

“You’re no fun,” Anna groaned.

“I’m
so
fun,” I corrected her. I glanced at my watch. “And you know what’s even more fun? You camping out at the bar with my good friend Damien”—I jerked my thumb in his direction—”while I finish up my shift.”

”Laine
, how long is that going to take? Be honest—I will totally kill you if you make me miss
The Daily Show”

I shrugged. “That’s why God invented TiVo,” I reminded her. There wasn’t time to snag her some of the “family dinner” that the staff was served before each shift, but I could poke my head into the kitchen and get her an order of steamed edamame to snack on.

“Now, get comfy,” I told her as I ran off. “I’ll be back with some food in a minute. Then I’ll finish out my shift. And, in the meantime, Damien will take good care of you.”