kitchens | on holiday [regina]

By the grace of Morgana, Regina had managed to slide her pan into the oven without dropping it onto the floor, and she used her sneaker to lift the door to close it. When that didn’t work, and the oven door stopped just before closing, she popped her hip into it, and it slammed shut loudly. All in a day’s work, or something like that. She lost herself in thought; not even the cacophony of the oven door shutting could break her from this magical daydream. A road trip to California, living life to the fullest, and surviving on snacks; could anything be better than that?

Smiling, the witch turned back around to Adam and realized she had two choices: clean up her workstation – or – she could go and pester him at his station. She looked at the aftermath of her flour-tornado cluttering up the counter she’d been working at as Adam mentioned making a list of places to go, and she moved toward him. Speaking of lists, Regina placed the task ‘clean up workstation’ at the bottom of her ‘future-to-do-list’ without hesitation.

Regina stopped halfway between Adam’s station and the oven she’d probably damaged with her hip-check to drag a chair toward him. The witch placed it off the side of his station, not in the way, but not precisely comfortably across the room either. Personal space was more of a guideline for Regina and one she forgot as often as she remembered. She turned the chair so that the back faced him and sat down with her legs on either side of the back. Her arms flopped on top of the backside of the chair, folded at the wrists and hands hanging. “Grand Canyon is a good one,” Regina paused, thinking about things she remembered from history class, but suddenly her mind went blank.

There were probably seven thousand much hipper things she could have brought up, but nothing remarkable happened when she opened her mouth to add-on to his list. “What about like that big ass bell in Pennsylvania?” she shrugged, and then another thought occurred. “Or that big ass arch in St. Louis,” Was that in Missouri or Illinois, and more importantly, would Adam call it Ill-en-oi or Ill-en-noise? Regina considered the two questions before a third and equally distracting one bubbled to the surface and escaped her no-filter lips. “Why is everything in the US so big? Like damn, we get it,” Maybe that was her insecurities about being short or the fact that she couldn't imagine why anyone would ever need a bell that big.

Regina was done, and Adam was waiting for his oven to ding; by rights Regina ought to have cleaned up the wasteland around her station, but instead she dragged a chair over to watch him, which – as he wasn’t doing anything – made him nervous. He slid his feet out further from the counter, slowly so that he wouldn’t slip on a stray spill (he thought it likely that most of the mess around his station had originated from Regina’s) and tilted his head, trying to think of anything else.

He really needed to read more, he thought – he was sure there were important monuments and landmarks and stuff all over the country, but he couldn’t name any of them, because he’d done kindergarten twice and so hadn’t learned any U.S. history in the fifth grade. “I heard of that bell,” he said. He hadn’t heard of that arch. He tilted his head to the other direction – “Probably ‘cause the US is so big,” he said. “I guess you get some small cities like San Francisco where everything is all crammed up together, but where I’m from, it’s all spread out just ‘cause there’s enough room.”

Now that the immediate fervour was dying down, a few concerns were starting to float to the forefront of his mind. They would need money. They would need gas. He would have to learn how to change a tire. He would have to figure out how to get his car to the East Coast. His parents wouldn’t be any help – they were probably gonna think that this was completely stupid. They would probably be right. He didn’t care.

The oven dinged; he stuck his brownies in and checked the time, and took a deep breath, glanced back at Regina, who was definitely not thinking about any of these concerns yet. “You know how to drive?” he said.

“Yeah, suppose your right about that,” Regina resigned as she leaned her front against the back of the chair and dangled her arms off the top. “New York is both, I guess,” Regina hadn’t spent a lot of time outside of New York City, but she’d been to Allegany and Buffalo, and everything was pretty spread out there. “NYC is like a mix of skyscrapers and bodegas, like giant towers built on top of tiny shops, not a whole lot of green space other than the park.”

Regina had always liked how New York City seemed to build up over time. There were layers of subway tunnels under the city, some forgotten about and abandoned, then the streets, the trains that went over the roads, and all the skyscrapers on top. It was like a layered cake or something. She wondered if L.A. was like that, and if it was, she imagined she’d feel right at home.

Unlike Adam, as the initial excitement of their trip starting to wane, Regina grew less focused on the details. She shrugged at his question, “Sure,” she lied and then shook her head, “I mean, I know the basics, but it’s not like legal or anything….” Regina had been behind the wheel of a vehicle all of three times in her life, and none of them had gone very well. While she’d learned a little bit at the community center in Shackamaxon, there weren’t any reasons for her to learn how to drive. For one, she was a witch, and for two, she lived in New York City. “Everyone just uses the subway where I’m from, or cabs, no reason to drive yourself around.” And she’d heard stories about how lousy gridlock and parking was in the city.

“Could you teach me?”

“San Jose is like ninety percent strip malls,” said Adam; now they weren’t really talking to each other so much as at each other, but he was in a mood to disparage San Jose, even in comparison to New York, which generally sounded frighteningly trendy and insane to him. “Like they wanted to make a city but they didn’t care enough. And all the big companies work in these ugly huge corporate parks.”

He was pretty sure his parents would consider him a massive success if he went to work for one of those places, but he could think of few things as unappealing as a lifetime spent in business casual dress, and he had no real idea what “engineer” actually meant, or what you could actually do with a degree in business. He’d spent a lot of time finding the magical economy weird, but the Muggle one was just as bad.

He had not expected Regina to know how to drive, and when he widened his eyes in ill-hidden shock that she did, she recounted immediately, and Adam snorted. Another of the many reasons he couldn’t have lived in New York – nobody could have a car there. He had spent enough time stuck in L.A. traffic to know that it wasn’t much better there, but at least they had the infrastructure for massive, soul-sucking congestion.

“I’ll teach you,” he promised – surely that would be easy peasy. He was a good driver. A good enough driver. His dad had taught him with like, zero permanent damage. He’d only failed the test once. He could do it. “It’s not that hard.”

“Sounds shitty,” Regina tacked on to the end of Adam’s scathing review of San Jose and rocked back in her seat some. The teenager didn’t pretend to be worldly, other than Shackamaxon, Ilvermorny, and that one time she visited a friend in Hawaii over break, Regina had never really been traveling. Some part of her imagined the world was this great big place full of originality and adventure, but deep down, she knew it was probably all the same stuff, just with a different mile marker -- Not that she even knew what a ‘mile marker’ was.

The timer clicked on for her bread, and she managed to peer over her shoulder to check it once or twice, but Regina certainly wasn’t the sort that paid too much attention to what she was baking. She didn’t check on it in the oven, and she likely wouldn’t even check it when she pulled it out. Merlin, she’d be lucky if she remembered an oven mitt first, but she’d had plenty of practice with spells to heal burns.

“Sweet, thanks. It looks pretty easy,” It looked like a nightmare, but Regina didn’t pay enough attention to be frightened of the steel death trap that ran on combustible liquid and could kill her more ways than she could count. “So, what do we need for this trip then,” Slapping her hands together in front of her, Regina got the classic burst of energy to start a project that she’d be terrible at following to the finish. Most of her class assignments began this way, remarkable and promising initially, and eventually, she lost interest and barely finished it.

“No-maj money, right, how much you think? I got some sickles saved up….”

“It’s disgusting,” Adam promised. He almost added that he’d show her, but it was probably quicker to go straight through the Southwest to L.A. and to skip the Bay Area altogether, and less of a colossal waste of time. Her timer dinged and reminded him to check the time – shit, he’d made himself have to do math to remember when to pull his brownies out; they still had nineteen minutes on them.

It was starting to smell like chocolate already, though, the scent mixing not wholly unpleasantly with that of Regina’s garlic bread; he’d been mostly full from the Thanksgiving feast but now he was hungry again. He slid his feet further out in front of him, and propped his elbows on the counter, wondering if there was some magical way to hurry this process along. Could brownies be insta-baked? Flash-baked? Did they make magical microwaves? There was still so much he didn’t know about the wizarding world.

“Super easy,” he reassured her. “Like, ninety percent of it is just paying attention.” And knowing road signs and knowing how to break into his own car when he locked the keys in.

What did they need for this trip? They’d need his car – that was the greatest logistical challenge he anticipated. Gas money – she hit on that before he could say it. “I have like, college money,” he said. His aunts and uncles were extremely hopeful on his behalf and his parents hadn’t known how to explain to them that Con Bảo wasn’t getting a high school diploma.

He slid his feet out further, his shoulders rising up accordingly. “Shit,” he said, “we gonna have to do so much planning.” But that – he’d already decided – was a problem for later; today was for the dream and tomorrow (and probably the next few months) was for the details. Tonight… he chucked an oven mitt over at Regina’s worktop. “Is that ready yet?” he said. “Think we have to toast this road trip shit before we can do anything else.” He hadn’t meant it as a joke but he noticed it a second later – “Ey, toast.”

Not known for her fantastic attention to detail, Regina laughed at herself. “Like, ninety percent of it is just paying attention.” Adam had explained, and Regina waved her hand at him as she made a joke. “Yeah, I’ve got that in the bag, then,”

The idea of college money chased the smile from her face, and she scratched her nose to hide it. She wasn’t about to whine about it or anything, but Regina had never really had the prospect of going to college. Not in the same way she was sure Adam was referring to. Maybe if she’d worked hard enough – and gone to a High School that would have a transcript – she could have gotten a scholarship. But neither of those things had happened. And maybe she could work through community college, but Regina didn’t see the point. She didn’t want to work in an office or save lives or anything, and it seemed like a waste of money.

His shit caught her off guard, and she smiled at him. Right now, the idea of planning all of this out seemed like fun, but that shine would wear off soon enough. “We got this,” she told him, still grinning. The timer dinged again, and Regina rolled her eyes as if the clock was her mother reminding her to do something for the seventh time and stood up. Adam added in the chorus of people reminding her to do things, and Regina’s nose scrunched up.

And then he made a stupid joke, and she was laughing again, “Shut up,” Regina told him before moving to the ovens. Pulling her bread pan out, she set it on top and considered using her wand to add the garlic butter spread to the knot. Regina reconsidered, remembering the last time she had tried, and pulled out a silicone brush from the drawer instead. “Still needs like twenty minutes,” She explained, having nearly forgotten the second half of the recipe in all the excitement.

“There is probably some soda or something, so we can still toast,”

Shut up. Adam laughed – at least she’d caught the joke, and the oven mitt. He didn’t know how much he ought to trust Regina Basciano when she said things like ‘we got this’ but decided not to question it yet. How hard could it be to drive across a country? They were wizards.

Twenty minutes left? Adam shook his head, and added, “Well – the brownies will be done, I guess,” although he supposed those would have to cool first too.

He sighed theatrically but got busy collecting his dishes (he didn’t touch hers, partly because he thought it would seem passive-aggressive and mostly because he just didn’t want to) and piling them by the sink. Regina said, as he was dumping his measuring equipment into his batter bowl, that they could find soda somewhere; Adam glanced around, trying to imagine a two-liter bottle of Diet Coke in a kitchen that hung pots  and dried herbs from the ceiling, and said doubtfully, “Do you think?”

There was a nifty trick he’d been told he could do – something like tapping a brush with his wand and getting it to wash his things for him – but he could never remember it off the top of his head and didn’t mind doing it himself, if nobody had asked him to do it first, so he flipped the sink on to get hot.

Hunter talked about his family’s magically tricked-out RV a lot; Adam would probably have to start caring about those stories. It had to be expensive as hell to do a road-trip, particularly out of a car he didn’t want to live in. (Certainly not with a girl.) As appealing as it was to do this the old-school No-Maj way (by now Adam almost always vouched for the old-school No-Maj way, just out of spite) he couldn’t deny that food-storage and undetectable-expansion and waste-disposal charms would come in handy. He said, over the running water, “Wonder if there’s books about this. ‘Cross-Country Magic Road Trips for Dummies’.”