“Where’s the fun in that?” I asked.
Never Have I Ever had died once we realized how easy it was to make the others drink. Micah had been right, we knew too much about one another for it to be fun. We would have been flat on the floor before we even made it around the group twice. We all enjoyed getting a good buzz, but none of us wanted to be sick the next morning. Grace had enjoyed herself though, since she got to hear some of our funny stories.
We had switched from straight tequila shots to Sprite-and-tequila mixes. Kaylee and Finn had taken over the karaoke machine to do a series of duets while the rest of the gang lounged around and continued the endless Nirvana versus Pearl Jam debate.
“Finn!” Chris said. “Come help me out here. Pearl Jam, right?”
“Not this again,” Finn replied. “I’m sick of taking sides. Who’s up for playing a game of Quarters instead?”
The gang all cheered.
“Let’s sit this one out,” I suggested to Grace. I knew things were going to get heated over there. “Want to try out some of these arcade games?”
“How does this one work?” she asked.
I started up Street Fighter and showed Grace which buttons to mash. I figured I’d go easy on her, but to my surprise she was a quick learner.
“Is it true what Kaylee said during the drinking game, that you and Finn sometimes spend hours playing on these arcade machines?” she asked as she beat my ass up.
“Sure is, love.” I winced as her Chun-Li character bashed my Ryu character’s face in. “Kicking the virtual crap out of each other is a good stress relief. I think we even did a twelve-hour marathon once.”
“I don’t know whether to be impressed or repulsed,” she said, keeping her eyes trained on the screen.
“From the tone of your voice, I’m going to go with impressed,” I said. “If you were really repulsed you’d be making that weird face you make.”
“What weird face?” She kicked me one last time, ending the fight with a firm KO on my end. “I don’t make a weird face. Do I?”
“It’s that face you make when you think something is disgusting.” I leaned against the arcade machine and tried to hide my wounded pride. “You made it the first time we tasted that lemon tart in class.”
“That was a truly horrifying experience,” she agreed.
We started up another game and I vowed to take it more seriously this time.
“You must have played video games before, right?” I asked her. “Otherwise you wouldn’t be this good.”
“I guess I have spent a lot of time playing Candy Crush,” she said.
“I don’t think you can compare Candy Crush to Street Fighter.”
“Are you seriously being a gaming elitist right now?” She scrunched up her nose.
“See, that right there,” I pointed out. “That’s the face. That’s the face you made when we ate that tart.”
“I still don’t know how we managed to mess that up as bad as we did,” she sighed. “It makes me wonder what we’re going to do about our bake-off.”
“Bake-off?” Finn appeared behind us, sticking his head between ours and throwing his arms around both our shoulders. “What’s this about a bake-off?”
The game of Quarters was still going strong, but by the crooked grin on Finn’s face I knew he’d probably won enough times to satisfy his own ego, and get a good buzz on, too.
“There’s a bake-off as part of our baking class,” Grace explained patiently. “At the end of the course, we each pair up to make something on our own and then show it off.”
“Sounds fun,” he replied, and, surprisingly, he wasn’t being sarcastic. Maybe because he was too hammered to be a dick about things, or because he was trying to get along with Grace.
“Nothing we’ve made has turned out so far, though,” I said. “Baking is a lot harder than it looks.”
“How hard can it be to make a cake?” He spread his arms wide. “Eggs, flour, sugar, andboom, you’re done.” He smacked his hands together like a firecracker going off.
“It’s a bit more complicated than that.” I paused. “At least, I think it is. I’ve never made a cake before.”
