Frida grabbed the largest bowl and began measuring out the sugar. She knew exactly how much to use. A clafoutis was easy, especially if Anika had an understanding of the stove and its tendencies.
Anika stepped out the back door and returned with one of the glass pitchers of milk. “I asked Lupe to milk Jessa last night and leave some for us.”
“I know there aren’t any cherries,” Frida said, “but do you have any fruit at all?”
“Some apples, I think. Why?”
“I’d like to use them. Skip the chocolate. It doesn’t fit.” She met Anika’s eyes, and for once, the woman looked away.
After Anika had retrieved the leftover apples, she stepped back from the table and watched Frida with provocation in her eyes. She was daring her to mess up.
As Frida cracked the eggs, poured the milk, and sliced the apples thinly, she pushed Anika and her judgment out of her mind. Forget her. Frida could, and would, enjoy herself.
“Don’t you have to get the oven going?” she asked. She tried to hide the smugness spreading across her face when Anika was forced to turn away and fulfill her duties.
Frida poured the batter into the round pie tins. She had always loved baking for the time it took, for the patience it required, and dexterity, too, if you wanted your results to be beautiful. It was about risk as well as precision: you never knew if a dessert was good until your guests were taking their first bites.
But Frida didn’t care if these cakes turned out badly. She wasn’t vying for head pastry chef. If she failed at this ghetto clafoutis, Anika might let her try baking bread because she wanted another good laugh. And if Frida made something delicious, Anika would be too busy eating every last crumb to say something snarky. Frida felt her bravery rise. She felt emboldened.
She handed Anika the tins to place in the oven. “Did you know the Millers?”
Anika held her face perfectly still, as if she hadn’t heard.
“Anika?”
“Who?” She turned to the oven, a small fire going inside of it.
Frida couldn’t help but laugh. “You’re a terrible actress, you know that?” She waited for Anika to respond, and when she didn’t, Frida decided to take a risk. “Sandy didn’t like red, and neither do you. You gave yourself away when I cut myself.”
Anika spun around, and Frida thought she was smiling. But, no, she was grimacing, and her missing tooth made her look witchy or homeless, or both: a sorceress who slept beneath an overpass and shit in the Silver Lake Reservoir.
“I hoped you’d think I was just being squeamish,” she said. She had turned back to the stove again and was pushing the tins onto a metal grate that sat atop the small flame.
“The color makes you nervous. Sandy was the same way.” Frida paused, and she sensed her own brother in her voice, guiding its tone.
Anika straightened her posture and looked back at Frida.
“Tell me what it means,” Frida said.
“You mean you don’t already know?”
Frida wasn’t sure what else to say. She didn’t want Anika to know that she’d already talked to her brother about it, or had tried to. “I saw Sandy freak out about the color only twice. But I remember both times, because it seemed strange. She was frightened, like you were.”
Anika let out a tiny mewl, then stopped suddenly, as if embarrassed. “She was my friend.”
“Mine, too.”
For a moment they both watched the oven. Frida hoped they would be able to smell the cakes over the smoke of the fire. How would they cook in here without burning everything?
“I can’t believe they’re dead,” Anika said after a moment. “It’s easier, sometimes, to think of them as just a ways off, living separately.”
“I’d do the same, I think.”
“We were both here from the beginning,” Anika said, and Frida thought of the phrase Micah had used in the tree house: original settlers.
If Frida was silent, maybe Anika would say more. She practiced a trick Micah had taught her when they were in high school. She silently counted backward from ten.
At the number five (it was always five), Anika began talking. “It started because of the Pirates.”
“I still can’t believe they’re real. That they exist.”
Anika laughed meanly. “Of course they do. How lucky for you, to be able to think otherwise.”
“I would’ve thought you were protected, by the…Forms.”
“We didn’t always have so many surrounding us. Most were built later.”
Anika’s eyes were back on the oven.
10-9-8-7—
“Soon after we arrived on the Land, just a week or so, two of our men were killed. When we found them, they were naked, their bodies…they’d been mutilated, sliced up. They were covered in blood, just covered in it.”