The day after Sam professes his undying love and affection for her, Emily bakes cookies. Baking is something she is good at, something she understands. The rules will never change. Two cups of flour, two eggs, one cup of chocolate chips, one hot oven, fifteen minutes. Simple, really.
Well, Emily thinks as she wipes the sweat off of her forehead, it was simple. She is in the process of mixing her fourth batch when she smells the smoke. She nearly drops the bowl of cookie dough in her haste to get the cookies out of the oven.
When she finally does, the cookies are blackened and hard, far beyond salvation.
It upsets Emily beyond words that the only thing she thought she knew would escape from her today. She's always been polite, she's always said "please" and "thank you", she hasn't eaten with her elbows on the table for over ten years now. She doesn't understand why a kind-hearted girl like herself deserves to have three batches of cookies burn on her.
She doesn't understand why, when she came down to visit her Aunt Sue for her 47th birthday, her cousin's boyfriend fell in love with her and won't leave her alone.
She definitely doesn't understand why Leah, her favorite person in the whole entire world (beside her grandmother), blames her for any of this. But, being the kind-hearted girl that she is, she does understand that cookies can make anything better, and that Leah can't possibly stay in her room forever.
Emily sighs and scrapes the ruined cookies off of the pan. She returns to her mixing bowl and continues to mash the butter into the flour. She reaches for the bag of chocolate chips, and pours the remainders into a measuring cup.
It comes up short.
Emily is left with her mouth wide open, her body sinking to the floor.
Of all the things to ever go wrong in her whole entire life, she has never thought that chocolate chip cookies would make her cry the most.
Nothing that Emily thought she knew is right anymore.
