“Oui!” Jahna said. “J’adore les moneymakers.” Lily really needed to get home, but Jahna was extremely curious to know what was back there. Maybe Jahna should minor in French. It would open her up to so many diverse career opportunities after she graduated Pratt. She could study at Le Cordon Bleu. Oui, oui, oui!
Miss said, “You did such a beautiful job on the churches. You’re not religious or anything, are you? Because I don’t want you to be offended by what’s in the back. The gingerbread cookies back there are, you know, rated X. Full-frontal men, if you know what I’m saying.”
“No problem,” I said. “It’s not like I’m a virgin, ha-ha!” Lily was the virgin. Jahna had had a mad love affair with her eighteenth-century French lit professor during her junior year abroad. It was all very secret, and Jahna regretted it now because he was two decades older than her, but, wow, the sex had been le amazing. And the champagne and chocolate-dipped strawberries après l’amour.
Jahna may have been le whatever about what she saw in the back room, but Lily was wide-eyed shocked. “Rated X” was no exaggeration. My eyes had never, ever wanted to see gingerbread men and women in such various acts of…
“They’re Kama Sutra cookies,” said Miss. “All the major positions.”
“I knew that,” Jahna said, too quickly.
“They even have their own orgy den!” said Miss, laughing. She pointed to a completed gingerbread house decorated to look like a naughty gentlemen’s club, with the words LIVE NUDES spelled out in white frosting on the roof, and Red Hots candies lining the sides to look like red lights.
Lily gulped, but Jahna said, “Awesome. Great work on the cutouts.” I’m not going to lie. The gingerbread couples seemed very much in love, and they made me wish to experience the kind of passionate pleasure that was on their faces. Someday.
I couldn’t wait to go home and find my phone, call Dash, and forget all the awkwardness lately. See him. Touch him. Sprinkle him in ginger and cinnamon and sugar, then smell him, and kiss him.
“Right?” said Miss. “It took me weeks to weld the cookie cutouts to just the right degrees of positions.”
“You make it look so easy,” said Jahna.
“Thank you! You’ve worked so hard all day. You deserve the truly fun task now.” She handed me a bag of blue frosting, and then pointed to several trays of undecorated gingerbread females. “Are these the girls who work in the gentlemen’s club?” Jahna asked Miss knowingly.
“Hardly!” said Miss. “These girls are royalty.” She lifted a piece of paper covering a drawing tacked to the wall behind the trays, showing voluptuous girls with long, braided hair doing unspeakable things. “Make ’em look like this. Princesses.”
“Not Elsa and Anna!” Lily cried out. Lily wanted to go home so badly right now and never, ever watch Frozen again until these drawings had been obliterated from her memory.
“Right?” said Miss again. “I know, bestsellers!”
This was the time for Lily to bail, oh-bee-vee-ess. Obvs, I really missed my phone. And home. And Mommy. But then Miss said, “Want to taste Magic Mike?”
“Um, yes,” said Jahna.
Miss winked at me. “This one’s the special batch.”
I took a bite of Magic Mike, and, man, was that boy delicious. He tasted a little different than I expected.
“What’s the special ingredient?” I asked.
“Right?” Miss said again.
Jahna probably knew what the special ingredient was, but Lily didn’t. Jahna nodded knowingly again and said “Awesome” again.
I ate the cookie, and it was so good I had to have another, and then one more.
And then I was so relaxed and happy, I forgot the desire to leave. Suddenly I was really hungry for more pizza, and maybe some brownies, and it seemed to me that Elsa and Anna were really reaching their full artistic potential in Miss’s gingerbread cookie drawings, and who was Jahna to deny them because Lily was such a Disney-loving virgin prude?
Jahna went to work.
Wednesday, December 17th
Jahna woke up on the futon when the sun burst through a hole in the papered windows of the store work space, but it was Lily who saw the clock on the wall and panicked. 11:15 a.m. FUDGE, FUDGE, FUDGE!
Miss was asleep on the floor.
I had no memory of falling asleep last night and no time to find out why I never made it home.
I bolted out the door and ran all the way to the ferry terminal. Knowing the level of crisis, I didn’t even stop for a bagel. I didn’t know what I feared more—how much trouble I was going to be in or that my family had gone totally Home Alone and hadn’t even noticed I was gone.
The answer to both questions was on a TV monitor in the ferry waiting area. The TV was tuned to the NY1 channel. The sound was off, but on the screen I saw my picture, in which I was wearing my red pom-pom hat, followed by a cell phone video of a certain incident from last year. The headline running across the screen announced, “Teen Baby-Catcher Is Missing.”
Wednesday, December 17th
It was about eight o’clock in the evening on Tuesday night when I received a text from Langston.
Is Lily with you?
I texted back: No.
Then he asked, Do you know where she is?
And I texted back: No.