I pulled the cookie dough out of my mini-refrigerator, tube by tube, and stacked them in a pyramid on the baking sheets I fished from behind the dresser. Ruby noticed the cookies and asked for one when I was done. Or two. I told her she’d have the chance at the barbeque the next day. I could tell she wasn’t very happy but she made a probably-for-the-best-shouldn’t-be-eating-so-much-junk comment and went back to her homework.

I walk-skipped down the stairs to the first floor, where the kitchen was located. No one was in the kitchen at the moment and I dumped the used pots and plates that were lying crusty on the counter in the sink. My RA told me that the kitchen was usually a place of nuclear disaster and I should expect nothing more. It was a pretty big change from the kitchen my mother kept, where the counter was always wiped clean and ready to be featured in Home and Garden. My brother was always getting in trouble for leaving things behind.

Flint walked through the revolving door and plopped himself down on a chair at the inconveniently placed table in the center of the tiniest kitchen on earth. He preheated the oven using a free toe.

“I think that’s a sanitation issue,” I said.

“My feet are clean, motherfucker.”

I laughed. It felt good after a day of worry.

We began the process of making cookies. I cut the dough and placed it on the greased pan, and Flint took a piece off and ate it, creating a pile of dough for me to eat as well. After a while, he gave up on waiting for me to take a bite of my own volition and fed it to me. His fingers brushed my tongue and I wondered what I should do next. I had been told that raw cookie dough could give me salmonella. But Flint was feeding me cookie dough. I tried to keep it together.

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“You’re going to forgo all of the times when you can eat delicious raw cookie dough, just in case, that one time, you might get sick?” Flint said.

“Yes. Exactly,” I said.

It was his turn to laugh at me. “I don’t get you.”

I swatted at his head. “You think you’re so easy to understand?” I wondered what his playfulness hid. I could never think straight when he was around. His witty banter kept me a few lines behind, racing to catch up. I wanted his ease, his confidence, his appetite.

We put the cookies in the oven to bake. I turned the oven light on and watched them begin to sizzle and brown, transforming into a substance that far surpassed the cookie dough that it was made up of.

“We’re the cookies,” Flint said, reading my mind.

I hip bumped him. “Maybe someday we’ll be that good.”

After gobbling up some of the cookies, I left one to the side for Ruby and packaged the rest up for transportation the next day. Flint carried half of them while I carried the rest, up the stairs, careful, careful, don’t fall.

I put Ruby’s on her desk. She smiled, a genuine thank you, and began to break pieces off and lick her fingers. Flint bade me goodnight and returned to his room, probably to finish the readings that took him so long to get through thanks to his dyslexia.

“So, hanging out with Flint?” Ruby said.

“I think he’s nice. He offered to help me make cookies.”

Ruby shrugged. “Seems like a total pothead.”

He has way too much life and energy in him to be a pothead, I thought. But I kept my mouth shut. No point in causing trouble. Ruby probably didn’t even really care about the issue. She was just bored. Bored as a bat, or something along those lines. That was always one of my flaws. I could never quite remember the phrases people seemed to spout with ease. They never quite fit for me. All the phrases seemed to blend together into something that felt right to me, but obviously wasn’t something everyone else recognized; “all’s well that ends” and “like taking money from a baby” were my personal favorites.