His grunts are so loud that I have to pause my video. And just as Julie Graham, the great pastry master, is doing the part I always screw up. Making sure the meringue on the Baked Alaska stays firm. I don't know why I can't get it right. I've been practicing for weeks. Ever since I got the email about my upcoming audition for the spot in the acclaimed pastry school. Cupcakes are usually where I shine the most, but I read that a Baked Alaska is one of the most technically difficult pastries. So I'm trying to master it for the audition tomorrow, hoping my skills will impress the judges.

Vale's grunts get louder, and I turn around, annoyed, to see him carrying a couple huge boxes up the stairs and into the living room. He drops them on the couch, and I see clouds of dust rise into the air. Then he wipes his dirty hands on his pants, looks up at me with a goofy grin, and says, "Guess what I found cleaning out the garage?"

I give him a tight grin back. "My sanity?" I ask, my fingers covered in sticky meringue and my face itching suddenly from the smattered flour all across my face.

He shakes his head, still smiling. "No, I've been looking though. I'll let you know if I find it." He drops down to his knees and opens one of the boxes, pulling out what looks like an old DVD player and several tangled cables. More dust rises into the air. "I found some old home videos. With our names on them."

Now I'm intrigued. I rinse my fingers off in the sink to get the stickiness off before drying them on my cat chef apron and walking over to him. Behind me, Julie Graham, my idol, is paused mid-sentence, and even though I'm mildly annoyed at the interruption, I'm silently thankful for a break. It's been hours and hours of watching the same video and making the same mistake every single time. The rage was about to boil over like an unwatched pot. I lean against his brown couch where he's put the old dusty DVD player, and sure enough I see a handful of old disc cases with the words GEN AND VALE scribbled on them in messy black sharpie.

"Aww," I coo, smiling down into the box. "How sweet. Why did you bring this up here again? Aren't you supposed to be cleaning the garage, not making more of a mess in the house?"

He rolls his eyes. "You sound like my dad. Live a little, Genny. Besides, I couldn't not bring these up here when I saw what they were." He gives me another smile, his light brown eyes wide. "So, what do you think? You want to watch them with me?"

The absolute last thing I want to do is go back over to my phone and watch Julie Graham make another Baked Alaska. I think I've had enough for the day. Or one month, really. So I sit beside him on the floor and say, "Only if you can figure out how to work these cables."

He laughs a hearty, joking laugh. "Please, Genny, I had one of these bad boys in my room until I was ten. I know exactly how to work a DVD player. Now," he says, going back to digging around in the box, "I wonder if the remote is in here."

It's not in the box, which isn't surprising. That remote was probably lost years ago, long before it was packed away and set in the garage to collect dust. But Vale has a solution. He sets the old DVD player up and sits close to the buttons, so he can control it manually. Once everything is set up right, he plugs in the first DVD and hits play. Moments later, a tiny little blonde-haired girl who can't be more than three is playing in a pretend kitchen, her hair in pigtail braids. She's wearing a ballerina tutu and bright purple cowgirl boots, and she's flipping a plastic egg with a plastic spatula.

"Look at you!" Vale shouts, pointing at the TV and laughing. "God, you were so cute, Genny! What happened?" I roll my eyes and kick him in the back, making him laugh harder. Part of me knows I should go back into the kitchen and work on my baking, but I'm so enraptured by this DVD. The cake can wait until later.

"Genny," a woman's voice says off camera, and the tiny version of me looks up at the camera, showing off a big baby-toothed smile. It's not a voice I recognize, which means it probably belongs to Vale's mom. She left them right after Vale's sixth birthday, and her only contact with him since then are the birthday cards she sends once a year with a twenty-dollar bill in the fold and always accompanied by a note that says she wants to get together with him soon. She never does.

Vale doesn't point out his mother's voice. He's too busy smiling watching little me play with the kitchen set I vaguely remember being his. A few moments go by when the camera makes a hard shift. A little boy about the same age as the girl has grabbed the camera and is now making silly faces into the lens. He's so close to it that he's fogging it up. The voice giggles a little bit as she pulls back. Tiny Vale is sporting the same thick, messy dark brown curls he still has today, and flashes the same toothy smile he's giving right now at the TV screen.

"Mommy, lookit!" He says, and he does a jump spin in the air, only wobbling a little as his feet hit the ground. His mom laughs again, and just as Vale is about to do the jump spin again, the tiny version of me grabs his attention. I hand him a plate with a plastic fried egg and a plastic piece of chicken. Tiny Vale bites into the egg, and his mom tells him not to really eat it because it's not real food. He ignores her and takes a bite of the piece of chicken. Little me laughs and claps, clearly pleased that he seems to be liking the pretend meal I just spent who knows how long slaving away over a plastic stove.

There's another scene of the two of us opening presents together on Christmas. I'm wearing a long Disney nightgown and Vale is rocking his Spiderman onesie he wore all the time in pictures taken from back then. We look a few years older now, and this time it's Victor, Vale's dad, who's holding the camera as we tear through the wrapping paper covering our presents. Vale gets a bunch of Hot Wheels, and I get more cooking things for Vale's fake kitchen. My mom never bought me one, so any time I played with it I had to go to Vale's house. Which was fine, because I enjoyed being with Vale and his dad. I still do.

We're still watching the videos an hour later when his dad walks through the door, his clothes caked in old sauce stains and flour. "Hey, you two," he says warmly as he walks up the stairs and into the living room. We wave up at him but keep our eyes on the screen. He stops in the living room and says, "What are you guys up to?"

Vale hits the pause button and looks up at his dad. "I was cleaning out the garage like you told me to, and I found these boxes with DVDs. They had our names on them, so we thought we'd watch them and see what they were about."

"Cute," Victor says as he looks up at the frozen screen, where Vale is blowing bubbles and I'm jumping in the air trying to catch them with my mouth. Then he looks up into the kitchen, sees the mess, and starts laughing. "I see you've been busy making quite the mess today, Gen."

I make a face and look back up at the kitchen. I completely forgot about my Baked Alaska. "Yeah, I'm sorry. I can clean it up."

"What were you trying to make tonight?" He asks as I get to my feet and go back into the kitchen, which is covered in flour, bowls coated in failed meringue attempts, and globs of melted ice cream. My phone screen has long since gone black but is still sitting forgotten on the counter amid the mess.

I reach for the eggs first, closing the carton lid and putting it back into the refrigerator. "I was watching Julie Graham teach how to make a Baked Alaska. But I can't figure out how to get the meringue right. Every time I try, it just ends up melting all over the place. Don't really know what I'm doing wrong."

"Baked Alaska, huh?" he says, sitting down at the bar stool and watching me clean up the kitchen. "Tell you what. You staying the night?" I nod my head yes. "Okay. Leave all this stuff out. Order a couple pizzas for dinner. Let me take a quick shower and get cleaned up, and when I'm done, I'll come out and give you a hand. Maybe we can figure it out together. Sound good?"

"Sounds good," I reply, grabbing my phone off the counter and preparing to order a combination pizza with no mushrooms and a Hawaiian with extra pineapple for Vale. Victor gets up off the stool with a grunt that reminds me of when Vale brought in the boxes earlier and makes his way to the back of the house toward his shower.

But he stops when he reaches the living room. "Hey, son," he begins, taking in the mess Vale made when he was setting up the DVD player. Vale raises his eyebrows questioningly. "I don't mind if you guys watch these old videos. But think you can clean up this mess? Maybe watch them in your room tonight?" He pauses, then looks at the couch, where there's a bunch of dust from where Vale set the old DVD player down earlier. "Is that dust on my couch?"

Vale cringes. "Yeah, I'm sorry, dad. I'll get the vacuum and clean it up." Victor is a bit of a clean freak, liking his house to be as clean as the kitchen of his restaurant. "And yeah, Gen and I can move it all to my room."

"Thank you," Victor says with a sigh, and without another word he stalks off to his bedroom and closes the door behind him. While he's in the shower, Vale and I disconnect the cables from the TV in the living room and move everything to his bedroom. The walls of his room are lined with posters of old cars, and in the corner of his room are parts that he's going to use for his next big project. He loves to fix cars and sell them for profit. He's been doing it for years. Unfortunately, because of this his room is always littered with greasy car parts sitting on torn blue tarps. There are some black smudges on his brown carpet that I know are grease stains from his shoes. He's not nearly as neat as his dad, but since I stay over all the time, he tries his best to keep things somewhat tidy.

I help him set up the DVD player again, handing him cables as he tries to find a place to plug them in on his newer TV. We get everything set up just as his dad walks back out of his bedroom to meet the pizza delivery driver at the door. He looks refreshed now that he's had a chance to get cleaned up. Seeing as I work at his restaurant part time, I definitely know the feeling of watching the pasta sauce leave your hair and slide down the shower drain.

I spend the rest of the evening with Victor as we go over Julie Graham's video. It's the first time he's seen it, so I start it over for him, even though I've seen it dozens of times at this point. We spend a good amount of time, in between bites of pizza, trying to figure out how to make a proper meringue that doesn't melt, and by the end of the night I think I might have it. While we're working on the cake, Vale goes back to cleaning the garage. He comes in a few times to show us something cool that he's found, and it's like he's a pirate discovering lost treasure.

By the end of the night the garage is mostly cleaned up and we're sitting together at the table eating my pathetic attempt at a Baked Alaska that doesn't taste or look nearly as good as the one from the video. I take notes as I eat, telling myself to use less of this and more of that. Meanwhile, Vale and Victor are talking about their days and what the two of them have planned for tomorrow.

"Gen and I are going to head to the mall tomorrow afternoon after her audition and meet up with everyone," Vale says as he takes a bite of his cake. I watch him for any sort of indication that he likes what he's eating. But Vale is a bottomless pit. He doesn't care what he's eating, just as long as there's food on his fork. The boy can put down a whole Hawaiian pizza on his own, and yet he never gains a single pound. He looks just like his dad. Rail thin with curly hair, but he's a bit more muscular from lifting heavy parts all the time. His dad has a little bit more meat on his bones, but not much. Just the consequences of getting older, I guess.

We finish dessert, and Vale does the dishes while I get changed into my pajamas. It's only mid-June, but it's already in the 90s during the day and the 60s at night. I slide on a pair of pink checkered shorts and one of Vale's old t-shirts that I probably borrowed years ago and never returned. It wouldn't fit him now anyway. He's grown like a weed since he got it, and now looking at him it's hard to believe he was ever able to wear it to begin with. But it fits me perfectly.

"All right," Victor says as I re-enter the kitchen. He slaps the counter and says, "I think I'm going to hit the sack. I'm dead tired. I'll talk to you two tomorrow. Don't do anything I wouldn't do," he says, giving us a teasing look as he leaves the room. Vale and I both roll our eyes. He makes this joke all the time, but it's not like that. Vale is my best friend. We've been best friends since we were two. I've seen him do the floss, for crying out loud. And there's no coming back from that.

Author's Note:

Hello, beautiful people! Hope you're all doing well. It's Monday night (almost Tuesday), and I'm working hard on the early chapters of A Touch of Cinnamon. No promises when chapter three will come out. Could be next week. Could be next month. But chapter two felt pretty solid, and I thought it would be safe to post it. Plus, I love the idea of you all getting to know Vale a bit more. He's so fun!

I'm about 43,000 words into this story right now. Doesn't seem like much, but I got a huge plothole fixed tonight, so I'm hoping the rest will go more smoothly. Please let me know what you think of this chapter. And know that I'm working on it almost every day. Take care and be safe, my dears!
XOXO,
~Aly