Worst Luck, Best Timing
Chapter Two: Paired With the Lucky One
The sign on the media room door said, in Ms. Alvarez's cheerful block letters, ONE GOOD DEED A WEEK, as if that were a small and reasonable request and not a life sentence.
"So here's the plan," she said, tapping a laminated calendar taped to the whiteboard, each square filled in with a different colored marker like she'd spent her entire weekend color-coding our doom. "Every Friday, you post something wholesome. Helping the community, doing something kind, whatever. Doesn't have to be complicated. First one's this week — the library's bake sale fundraiser. You two run the table, you film it, you post it before the day's out."
"A bake sale," I repeated, mostly to confirm that I had, in fact, heard correctly.
"A bake sale," Theo agreed, from the chair beside me, in the tone of a man already resigned to his fate.
"How hard can a bake sale be," I said, and if I had been a slightly more superstitious person, I would have taken that sentence back the moment it left my mouth.
Ms. Alvarez slid a folder across the table — sign-up sheets, a supply list, a laminated card with the library's fundraising goal circled twice in red. "Everything you need is in there. I already cleared the home ec kitchen for Thursday afternoon. Bake something simple, sell it at a table out front, film the whole thing looking like you're having the time of your lives. That's it."
"That's it," Theo repeated, like he didn't quite believe her either.
"That's it," she said, already halfway out the door to deal with whatever fresh emergency existed somewhere else in the building. "Good luck, you two."
The door clicked shut. Theo looked at me. I looked at the folder. Neither of us moved to open it for a solid five seconds, like it might bite.
• • •
In my defense, I prepared. I am, generally speaking, an extremely prepared person. I had a checklist. I had labeled containers for every ingredient, sorted by which recipe needed them first. I had a schedule broken into fifteen-minute increments, taped to the inside of a folder, because if there is one thing I have learned from a life defined by minor disasters, it is that the disasters happen faster when you don't have a plan.
I even color-coded my own checklist to match Ms. Alvarez's, which Juno said was either deeply responsible or a cry for help, and refused to specify which.
"You know it's just a bake sale, right?" she said, watching me lay out measuring cups in size order on the kitchen counter the way a surgeon lays out instruments. "Not, like, a NASA launch."
"A bake sale that four thousand people are going to watch," I said. "Slight difference in stakes."
"Sure. Slight." Juno leaned against the counter, arms crossed, clearly enjoying herself far more than the situation warranted. "And where's Lucky Park? Shouldn't your co-host be here supervising the chaos?"
"He's getting the folding table from the supply closet," I said. "Which he insisted on doing himself, because apparently letting me carry a table alone is, quote, 'tempting fate.'"
"Smart man," Juno said.
I threw a dish towel at her. She caught it, laughing, and went to go find her own seat in the corner where she'd installed herself as an unofficial camera operator, phone propped against a stack of textbooks, filming absolutely nothing yet because nothing had gone wrong yet.
What my checklist did not account for was the oven.
The home ec room's ancient industrial oven, the one the school had been "getting around to replacing" since before I was born, had a dial that stuck halfway between BAKE and BROIL and a door that didn't quite seal, both of which Ms. Alvarez had, in fairness, mentioned to us in passing and which I had, in the chaos of the moment, entirely forgotten. It chose the exact instant I slid in the second tray of cookies — the good tray, the one with the chocolate chips I'd bought with my own tip money — to make a low, ominous clicking sound and then die entirely, mid-preheat, with twelve dollars of butter and sugar trapped uselessly inside it.
"It's fine," Theo said, already crouched in front of the oven door, sleeves pushed up past his elbows, looking far too confident for someone whose entire relationship with kitchen appliances, as far as I knew, began and ended with reheating leftovers in a dorm-sized microwave. "I've fixed worse. There's probably just a loose wire somewhere."
"Please don't electrocute yourself in front of the whole school," I said, hovering behind him with the kind of nervous energy usually reserved for watching someone defuse a bomb. "I already ruined one broadcast this month. I don't need a body count."
"Have a little faith," he said, and reached for the panel at the back of the oven, popping it open with a screwdriver he had apparently just produced from somewhere, like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat that was on fire.
"Where did you even get a screwdriver," I said.
"I carry one," he said, without looking up. "You'd be surprised how often things break around me."
"Given the current situation," I said, "I am, in fact, not surprised at all."
I want to be very clear that I do not know what he did back there. I don't think he knew either. What I do know is that thirty seconds later, a thin curl of gray smoke rose from behind the oven, and four seconds after that, the fire alarm went off with a shriek loud enough to make every window in the room rattle and every fluorescent light flicker in sympathy.
"That's not what's supposed to happen," Theo said, staring at the smoke with the wide-eyed betrayal of a man who genuinely believed the universe owed him better.
"You don't say," I shouted, over the alarm, already grabbing the trays of half-baked cookies off the counter because some instinct in me refused to let them burn even in the middle of an actual emergency. "Move, move, we have to go—"
Juno, to her credit, did not move. Juno stood exactly where she was, phone raised, filming every single second of it with the calm of a nature documentarian watching a controlled burn.
We evacuated with the rest of the building, funneling out into the courtyard along with two hundred confused students, one visibly unimpressed janitor, and a substitute teacher who kept asking, to no one in particular, whether this happened often. We were still wearing the WESTBRIDGE BAKE SALE aprons Ms. Alvarez had ordered specially, flour dusted across both of us like a light snowfall. Theo was holding the tray of ruined cookies like a sacrificial offering he wasn't quite ready to put down. I was holding a fire extinguisher I had grabbed on pure instinct and never actually used, because apparently some part of my brain believed that carrying it around was a form of protection in itself.
"This is going in the campaign," Theo said, staring down at the tray of blackened cookies, sounding genuinely wounded. "This is exactly the opposite of what we were supposed to post."
"You think?" I said. "We set off a fire alarm during school hours. In front of a substitute teacher. While wearing matching aprons."
"They were free aprons," he said, as if that fact changed anything.
"That's not the point, Theo."
"I know it's not the point," he said, and for one brief second, under all the mock outrage, I heard something that sounded almost like real frustration — with himself, not with me — before he smoothed it back over with a small, rueful laugh. "Okay. Fine. It's a disaster. Noted."
That was, of course, the exact moment someone's phone caught the two of us mid-argument — me pointing furiously at the smoking tray, Theo holding it at arm's length like it had personally wronged him, both of us clearly, audibly, shouting over each other about whose fault the whole thing was, framed perfectly against a backdrop of two fire trucks that had, unnecessarily, been called by an overzealous hall monitor.
• • •
"Okay, but it's actually kind of good," Juno said the next morning, scrolling through her phone at lunch with the professional detachment of a talent scout. "Like, in a chaotic way. People like chaotic."
"We set off the fire alarm," I said. "During school hours. On camera. In front of actual fire trucks."
"You set off the fire alarm during school hours, on camera, in front of actual fire trucks, wearing a flour apron, next to Theo Park, also wearing a flour apron." Juno turned her phone around so I could see the view count, which had climbed past six thousand overnight, the little heart icon spinning upward even as I watched. "This is not the disaster you think it is. This is content."
"It's the opposite of the assignment," I said. "We were supposed to look wholesome. We looked like a kitchen fire in progress."
"Sure, but everyone's saying you two have chemistry," Juno said, entirely too casually, watching my face over the top of her phone screen the way she does when she's fishing for a reaction.
"We have a shared talent for property damage," I said. "That's not chemistry. That's a liability."
Juno smiled the particular smile she gets when she has decided not to argue with me because she already knows she's right and would rather let time prove it. I hated that smile. I hated it slightly less than I hated the comment section, which — I checked, once, briefly, against my own better judgment — had somehow shifted overnight from one person's opinion that I was a walking natural disaster into an entirely different discussion about whether Theo Park and the coffee-spilling disaster girl were, quote, "kind of cute together, ngl."
I closed the app. I did not open it again for the rest of lunch. I told myself this was a matter of principle. It was mostly a matter of not trusting my own face not to give something away.
• • •
Then, of course, there was the anonymous comment.
It showed up under the bake sale video sometime around dinner, from an account with no profile picture and a username that was just a string of numbers, the kind of account that exists for exactly one purpose. It said: everyone knows Theo's only doing this campaign because his image needs it. she's just convenient.
I read it four times. Then I read it a fifth time, mostly to confirm that reading it a fifth time would somehow make it hurt less, which it did not. I set my phone face-down on my desk and stared at the ceiling for a while, the way I do when I need my brain to stop doing the thing it's doing and it refuses to cooperate.
My mom knocked on my door around nine, poked her head in to ask if I'd eaten dinner, and I said yes, even though I hadn't, because it was easier than explaining why I currently had no appetite for anything except rereading one sentence written by a stranger with no face and no name.
I did not mention it to Theo the next day. I told myself this was because it wasn't worth bringing up, that anonymous comments were, by definition, not worth the energy of a response. This was mostly true. It was also mostly a lie, because the actual reason I didn't bring it up was that some small, unhelpful part of me was afraid it might be right.
• • •
"You're doing the thing," Theo said, on Thursday, when we met in the media room to plan the following week's segment.
"What thing."
"The thing where you go quiet and pretend you're just focused on the clipboard." He nodded at the clipboard, which I had, admittedly, been staring at with unusual intensity for the past several minutes without actually reading a single word on it. "You did it yesterday too. And the day before."
"I don't have a thing," I said, which was, generously, a stretch.
He studied me for a second, the way people do when they're deciding whether to push a conversation further or let it drop, tapping his pen once against the edge of the desk. Then — mercifully — he let it drop, which I appreciated more than I let on.
"For what it's worth," he said instead, flipping through his own notes, "the internet is going to say whatever it wants regardless of what we actually do. I stopped reading the comments a long time ago. Saves a lot of time. And a lot of headaches."
"How do you do that," I asked, before I could stop myself. "Just — not care?"
Something flickered across his face, there and gone so fast I almost missed it, like a light going out in a window across the street before you're sure you actually saw it. "I didn't say I don't care," he said, quieter now, not quite meeting my eyes, his pen going still against the desk. "I said I stopped reading. There's a difference."
"That's not really an answer."
"I know," he said, and left it there, and something about the way he said it — flat, a little tired, not defensive so much as worn down — made me decide not to push. I wanted to ask what he meant by that. I wanted to ask a lot of things — why someone with his life, his reputation, his apparently endless good luck, would need a rule for what he did and didn't let himself read. But the bell rang before I could get the question out, and by the time it stopped, he had already picked his bag up off the floor, already slipped that easy, camera-ready smile back over whatever had been underneath it a second earlier.
"Same time tomorrow," he said. "Try not to set anything on fire between now and then."
"No promises," I said, and, for the first time all week, meant it as a joke instead of a warning.
He laughed — a real laugh, short and surprised, like it had gotten out before he'd decided whether to let it — and for a second, standing there in the empty media room with flour still faintly visible on the hem of my sleeve, I forgot to feel embarrassed about any of it. The bake sale. The fire alarm. The anonymous comment still sitting somewhere in the back of my mind like a splinter I hadn't pulled out yet.
"See you tomorrow, Ellis," he said, at the door, and something about hearing my last name in his voice — casual, almost fond, the way you'd say it to someone you'd already decided you were going to keep around — stuck with me longer than I wanted to admit.
I didn't know it then, but that was the first time I actually looked forward to seeing him the next day. Not because the campaign needed us to. Just because.
It would take me a while longer to admit that to myself. It would take Theo even longer to admit what he was hiding underneath that laugh. But that Thursday afternoon, neither of us knew any of that yet. We just knew we had survived one more disaster together, and, somehow, we were both still standing — flour-dusted, slightly singed, and, against every one of my better instincts, not entirely dreading whatever came next.