Page 28 of Grump Hard
The mayor’s husband, Mattie, is in charge of the music and very invested in keeping his wife, Hattie, in the winner’s circle for another year.
But if I have anything to say about it, Hattie’s reign ends tonight.
She’s had a strong five years, but this year is mine, dammit!
I take a deep breath, centering myself while fanning my face with my gingerbread house plans. They turned the heat off half an hour ago, but it’s still boiling in here, despite the cracked windows. Turns out, I shouldn’t have worn my blue sweater, after all, but it’s too late now.
I’ll just have to think chill thoughts and trust my deodorant to hold up under the strain. I’m sure my nerves will calm down once we actually get started.
I mean, I’ve assembled a powerhouse team. I’m the project manager and creative director, armed with a detailed architectural sketch of our project: a charmingly rustic replica of the Silver Bell Falls town hall. My crew consists of Marge, the head librarian, a woman known for her meticulous attention to detail, her ten-year-old grandson, Timmy, who has won several school art competitions and demonstrated impressive hand-eye coordination for a human of any age, and Paulie, a local baker who once made it to the semi-finals on Cupcake Battle Royale.
On paper, we’re unstoppable.
We’ll just have to see if we live up to the hype in real life.
“I brought extra frosting!” Marge announces cheerfully as she and Timmy arrive ten minutes before showtime. She plunks two massive tubs of store-bought vanilla onto our already crowded table. “You can never have too much icing, right?”
“Right. This will be great for the snow around city hall,” I say, beaming as I tuck the icing under the table, making more room for our premade cookie pieces and all the equipment needed to make Candy’s top secret Hard as Glue and Tasty Too icing.
My bestie kindly shared her recipe for her magical icing, the kind that stays soft just long enough to pull a gingerbread house together before drying as hard as concrete. She’s used it to create masterpieces at the Reindeer Corner’s Inn over the past few years and assured me it’s the only icing capable of holding our ambitious design together.
Store-bought frosting does not have the chops for this job.
But hopefully, I do. I’ve practiced whipping egg whites so many times between last year’s competition and this one, I’m pretty sure I could crank out a perfect batch of Hard as Glue in my sleep. And Paulie has the kind of deft, professional baker’s touch certain to slice our gingerbread into the perfect shapes with minimal breakage.
Each team only gets a set amount of gingerbread. With a design as large and ambitious as ours, we can’t afford mistakes.
“All right, Ginger Jubileers, on your marks,” Mattie calls out through his megaphone as the clock counts down to go time. “In five, four, three, two, and one!”
The starting bell rings, and a cheer fills the room.
Followed quickly by frantic attempts to communicate over the music Mattie has once again cranked up to an unreasonable decibel…
Shooting a glare his way, I raise my voice, reading our first step in the directions aloud as I get started on the icing.
For the first ten minutes, things progress perfectly! I whip out icing and delegate while Paulie assembles the gingerbread walls according to my sketch. Timmy sorts the candy decorations into piles, preparing to slap the flourishes into place the moment we’re ready to move on to step two. Marge follows behind Paulie, adding extra icing glue to the weaker-looking junctions.
I am a fun, festive, highly capable leader in her holiday element!
I am executing on the plan!
I am not going to lose again to Hattie, who has more than her fair share of first-place medals already, and is honestly kind of crossing a line, what with the Mattie musical sabotage and installing her sister-in-law on the judging committee.
I am flying high on the wings of anticipated victory when the first crack appears.
Literally…
“Uh, Holly?” Paulie calls from the end of the table. “These cookies are way too dry. We’ve already got breakage.”
“What?” Pausing the blender, I hurry over, heart lurching into my throat at the sight of the fissure snaking up the center of one of our main walls. It’s right in the front of the structure, no less! “Crap,” I mutter. “Are all of them like that?”
He nods, motioning to several already-fractured pieces on the table. “They are.” He glances around before adding in a voice for my ears only, “All of our cookies are, anyway. Other tables seem to have perfectly baked gingerbread that’s taking to the construction process just fine.”
Jaw dropping, I gasp, “No! You don’t think?—”
“That we’ve been the victims of sabotage?” he cuts in, lips pressing into a tight line as he glares toward Hattie’s table in the corner. “I mean, I don’t have any proof. But the fact that the woman whose team got three points away from taking Hattie’s title last year is the only one with cracky cookies smells fishy to me.”
“What smells fishy?” Marge asks, bending her nose to the icing bowl in her arms. “It’s not the icing, is it? I think it smells good. Maybe not as good as store-bought, but…”
