Page 241 of What We Bury

I nod once, satisfied I’ve solved today’s thought of the day.

She’s gonna need a big breakfast.

I extract myself from the pile of limbs, which requires the flexibility of a Cirque du Soleil acrobat. We’re six people in a queen bed. Sage is in the middle. Eli is curled around her back. Holden has her left hand in his, both hands resting on his chest. Micah is face-down with one leg thrown across Eli’s andis drooling into the pillow, which I file for future weaponization. Knox is at the foot of the bed, sleeping on his back like a corpse at a wake, fully dressed in sweats he got from somewhere overnight, one enormous hand draped over Sage’s right ankle. He fell asleep holding it and didn’t let go.

I love every one of these idiots.

I climb out over Knox because Knox is the structurally simplest exit—the man sleeps so still you could do a yoga flow on top of him and not wake him up—and I land in the hallway in my boxers feeling like I just completed a heist.

Cowabunga!

Amy’s door is closed at the other end of the hallway. Which is normal, since she’s hardly ever here. Or it’s purposeful because shedidcome home and locked herself in.

“Hm.”

I stare at the door.

We’ve got ourselves a case of Schrodinger’s Roommate now. Where both things can be true until I open that door to find out.

I decide I don’t really care and pad quietly past her door and head for my domain.

The kitchen.

I survey what we have to work with, rubbing my hands together. There are six eggs, half a pound of bacon, a block of cheddar, some sad mushrooms in a paper bag, one tragic onion, butter, a loaf of something I refuse to call bread, and a bag of flour that I think has been in this kitchen long enough to have rights.

I need more eggs. I need more bacon. I needrealbread, not the white sliced offense Sage buys. I need cream and sugar, and fruit because Holden secretly likes fruit at breakfast and will pretend he doesn’t. I need maple syrup because I have an idea, and the idea requires syrup.

The idea is dawning on me slowly and beautifully, the way the best ideas do, which is to say at five-fifty in the morning before any coffee, while I’m standing in Sage’s kitchen in my boxers contemplating the bag of flour.

Pancakes.

But not just any pancakes.Commemorativepancakes. Pancakes that honor the events of the previous evening. Pancakes that recognize what was accomplished. Pancakes thatsay we’re all in this together.

I steal Knox’s truck keys off the hook by the door and I head to the twenty-four-hour grocery on the corner in my jocks.

Won’t be the first time he’s gotten a glimpse of my six-pack.

I’m back in a half hour with three bags of groceries, a piping bag, two different food colorings, and a fine for public indecency.

The kitchen is still empty. The apartment is still quiet. I have time.

I make the batter from scratch because anything else would be an insult to the artistry I’m about to attempt. Flour, baking powder, salt, sugar, eggs, milk, melted butter. I whisk then rest. While the batter rests, I divide it into three bowls. One stays neutral. One gets a dot of red food coloring, worked through until it goes a pale, ambitious pink. One gets a more generous dose of red until it lands somewhere in theplausibly-tan-with-a-suggestion-of-sunburnrange.

What can I say? I’ve done this before.

I scoop the neutral batter into a piping bag. The pale pink into a second. The shaft-toned into a third. I heat the pan as music plays in my head. Chopin, I think. Or Elvis, I’m not sure.

The first pancake is always the warm-up. I pipe a generous blimp shape—generousbeing the operative word here, because this is not the time for false modesty. I add two perfectly round companion circles at the base and let it set. I flip it. The reverse side comes out golden. I plate it. I step back. I admire.

“I shall call you, Pan-cock.”

The next pancake is a boob. I pipe a circle, add a smaller filled circle in the center with the pink batter, let it set so the color catches, and flip. The result is—let me be honest—slightly more abstract than I was aiming for. Pancake batter doesn’t respect anatomical detail the way I’d hoped. But theintentionis clear. Anyone who sees this pancake knows exactly what I was going for.

I make a matching boob, because boobs come in pairs, mostly, and I’m not a barbarian.

By the time I’m on my fourth dick pancake—varying sizes, because the men have made their preferences known regarding representation, and also because I’m an artist and I refuse to be confined to a single dimension—I hear footsteps.

The front door clicks open.