Page 76 of A Perfect Disaster

“No, the other one.”

“Helen, there are seven identical bowls.”

“The medium one, Maika,” she specifies.

“They all look medium-sized from where I’m standing.”

She sighs, comes up behind me, and picks it up herself. And as soon as she invades my personal space, I feel the air catch in my lungs.

“Are you okay?” she asks, noticing my sudden paralysis.

“Perfectly fine. It’s the summer heat, you know,” I lie shamelessly.

“You just put coarse salt in instead of refined sugar.”

I look at the container in horror.

“Oh. Oops.”

Helen takes the jar out of my hands.

“Focus a little more, come on.”

“It’s your fault for existing, for being this close, for wearing those stripes, and for smelling so good,” I blurt out without any filter.

The words come out of my mouth before my brain can stop them. Helen freezes for just a second, the tips of her ears turning an adorable shade of red. Then she clears her throat, adjusts her uniform shirt, and goes back to the recipe.

“Interesting. Very interesting. The officer of my heart gets nervous, too.”

I try not to smile too much as the pool DJ switches to a more upbeat song.

We keep working with the tension breathing down our necks, shooting each other dangerously long, double-meaning glances, until the fateful moment arrives to use the industrial blender to churn the ice. And that’s when our free fall into utter chaos officially begins.

“Let me do it,” Helen says authoritatively, grabbing the machine.

“Why? Trust my hands a little.”

“Because I’m sure that’s the first step toward disaster.”

“That sounded like a very personal and painful criticism, Helen.”

“It sounded like an empirical observation based on your track record,” she replies, flashing an extremely attractive smile.

I stick my tongue out at her discreetly as she turns away. Helen plugs the mixer into the outlet on the table. At first, everything goes smoothly. For exactly seven seconds. Then the machine emits a strange whine, followed by a rattling sound worthy of an engine, and finally decides to rebel against us. It vibrates with the force of an earthquake—you have to add some drama to the story, right?—and the semi-liquid lemon mixture shoots out in all directions like an out-of-control geyser.

“Shit!” Helen yells in surprise.

A thick stream of sorbet hits her uniform squarely, right on the epaulets. Another one hits me right in the face, blinding one of my eyes. The audience in the lounge chairs bursts into unanimous laughter. Far from getting angry, I laugh hysterically, holding my stomach. Meanwhile, Helen stares at her clothes as if she’d just witnessed a pastry-making war crime.

“Don’t laugh—this isn’t funny at all,” she protests, though her eyes sparkle with amusement.

“I can’t… I can’t breathe,” I manage to say between fits of laughter, wiping my eye with my apron.

Helen tries to turn off the damn thing while another splash hits us on the bounce. Now I have lemon sorbet in my hair, and Helen has a trickle sliding down her neck toward the neckline of her shirt. The scene is so utterly ridiculous that several tables of passengers start clapping and cheering us on.

“This is humiliating,” she protests, trying in vain to wipe herself clean.

“I think you look especially sexy with that piece of lemon on your right eyebrow.”