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Of the three mixing bowls set up on the counter, Miles stole from the one with sugar and butter mixed together. He made sure Niles’s back was turned, then scooped up a bit of the mixture with his finger and popped it into his mouth. Silent, like a ninja. The sweetness was bright on his tongue.
“I saw that,” said Niles, breaking the silence. “Stop eating raw ingredients.”
“It was only a little,” said Miles. “How did you even know? Did you install security cameras I’m not aware of?”
Niles turned and grinned at him. “No, just took a guess. You confirmed it.”
“You’re annoying.” Just to spite him, Miles ate a little more of the sugar-butter.
“Please tell me you washed your hands before that,” said Niles.
Miles rolled his eyes. “No, I just coughed all over them. And scratched behind the dog’s ears with them. And dug around in the dirt with them.”
“Ha, ha.” Niles actually said “ha, ha”. He handed Miles a clean wooden spoon and gestured at the bowl that held egg yolk and bananas. “Would you mix those together?”
“You’re ordering me around like it’s your family recipe,” said Miles. Nevertheless, he started mashing the bananas and eggs together. “Next you’re gonna remind me to mix the wet and dry ingredients separately.”
Out of the two of them, Niles was the least experienced in the kitchen. He’d grown up microwaving leftovers and TV dinners, and only knew how to make a few quick things. Which was great when they were teenagers and could eat take-out every day using Niles’s parents’ credit card, but now that wasn’t going to cut it. Miles hadn’t even known he could get sick of pizza until they’d moved in together and ate it every other meal. It was inevitable that they’d break and start doing some real cooking.
When it came to actual meals, they usually cycled through the same couple of recipes. Meatballs, for example, were a staple. But, owing to the fact they both had a sizable sweet tooth, they got more diverse when it came to making desserts. Thus why they were baking right now instead of addressing the fact that their air conditioner was still broken or that the bookshelf Niles had tried to put up had collapsed yesterday.
Look, neither of them were exactly home renovators. They were, however, suckers for a sweet treat, and banana bread sounded great right now.
“Why is that, anyway?” said Miles. “What would happen if we just dumped all the ingredients in a bowl and mixed them together?”
“I figure the world would explode,” said Niles.
“Maybe it’s something with the chemistry. Niles, what scientific principle explains why we can’t mix this banana bread all together in one big bowl?”
Niles shook his head. “It’s like you don’t even know Newton’s Fourth Law.”
“If it’s any consolation, I do know Murphy’s Law.”
“You know, when we hyphenate our last names, that joke won’t make sense anymore.”
“True.” A bit of egg yolk flew out of the bowl and onto Miles’s cheek. He wiped his face on Niles’s shoulder, who laughed and flicked him on the forehead in revenge. “Should we come up with a Sparks’s Law to make things even?”
“Nah,” said Niles. “I think I’ve about had it with law.”
It was one of the few things Miles knew for sure about his parents: they were lawyers who wanted Niles to be one too. Niles might have actually turned out to be one if Miles hadn’t shown back up in his life the day before he sent out an admission to law school. Miles didn’t frequently bring up the day they found each other again because it was liable to make Niles start rhapsodizing about soulmates and destiny and all that. Sometimes Miles still found it hard to believe he wasn’t a burden in Niles’s life, a partner instead of a tag-along. It had been years since he assumed he’d done something wrong every time Niles went quiet, but whenever they had tense conversations part of him went right back to the school year their little two-person club was at risk of falling apart.
They’d always bickered, though. Growing up meant realizing that the frequency of their arguments said less about the strength of their relationship than the way they resolved them. Now whenever they got in a tiff Miles knew he’d wake up the next morning and Niles would be reading or watching TV in the living room like always. A little row over the electric bill wasn’t going to rip them apart.
“What next?” said Niles.
Miles consulted the recipe card. “Uh oh.”
“What?”
“You’re not gonna like this.”
“What? Did we forget to pick something up? Oh, I knew I should have gone to the—”
Miles smiled. “We have to mix it all together now.”
Niles groaned. “Why do I ever take you seriously?”
“Because you know the one day I come to you in a time of need and you accuse me of pranking you, I’ll have, like, rabies. Probably from Josh’s squirrel. That you made me get up close and personal with. Remember that?”
“I don’t think rabies can set in over ten years later. And, more importantly, I didn’t make you do anything!”
Miles gave a haughty sniff. “That squirrel could have killed me, you know.”
“That wouldn't be my fault. You jumped at the opportunity to show you had better reflexes than me.”
“Um, because I do. Remember when we tried catching tadpoles last week?”
They’d headed out into the woods behind the house, treading on brittle branches and thick tree roots and procumbent little plants that sprouted in all directions. Niles was already breathing hard by the time they came to the stream that snaked through their woods. Someone before them had built a small bridge— really just two planks of wood— over the stream, though the water wasn’t even high enough to lick at their ankles. Maybe it had been built for a little kid. Miles and Niles had sat at the edge of the stream and lowered their cupped palms into the water. Neither of them had experienced much success, but at least Miles hadn’t fallen into the water twice.
“Just let me mix the ingredients,” said Niles, and Miles laughed.
Last month he’d gone through a box of old notebooks he’d filled out as a teenager. Most of them were pranking journals or sketchbooks, but one was the closest he’d ever come to keeping a diary. It was only eighty pages, but he wrote in it so infrequently that he’d made it last seven years. The first entry he’d written when he was nine and had nobody to tell that he was worried his friends didn’t really like him; the final entry he’d written in tears because he had nobody to tell that he was worried he’d feel hopeless forever. That there was something really wrong with him.
People always said that high school was the golden years, but Miles thought that growing out of being a teenager was the second best thing that had ever happened to him. The first was, obviously, the short egghead standing next him who still “forgot” to cut his hair and had terrible posture while reading.
While Niles finished mixing up the banana bread, Miles fished around the kitchen for the appropriate pans. Why were their cups arranged in reverse color order, but their pans were scattered across six different cupboards? When he finally located the two bread pans they owned, Niles was doing that thing where he tapped the wooden spoon against the rim of the bowl about a thousand times to get all of the food off before he put it in the sink. Touching wet food when he did the dishes made him nauseous. Still, Niles was banging the spoon against the bowl like it had personally offended him.
“What did that spoon ever do to you?” said Miles as he put the bread pans on the counter.
Niles rolled his eyes. He sprayed the pans with a little oil, then let Miles pour the big bowl of batter into each pan. That was always Miles’s job because his arms didn’t start shaking within five seconds of physical exertion like Niles’s did. Miles would make fun of Niles for it if he didn’t like being relied on; whenever Niles begged him to get rid of a spider or asked him for advice on how to talk to normal people (aka his co-workers), Miles felt all fuzzy.
“Next time,” said Niles, “we’ll use blueberries.”
“You think it’s gonna take three years for us to make banana bread again?” Miles said.
“What?”
“That’s how long it takes to get a good harvest from a blueberry bush. Which we only planted two days ago.” He preened at having known something Niles hadn’t. “I imagine it’s the same with raspberries and blackberries.”
“We’ll get them from the farmer’s market, then.”
“What happened to growing everything we need in our backyard?”
Niles blushed. “I don’t think I’m much of a green thumb. Maybe we need to accept that I'm a disaster when it comes to anything related to nature.”
“I accepted that a long time ago.”
That made Niles laugh. Filled with sudden affection, Miles picked him up and gave him a little spin, which made Niles laugh even harder.
“One of these days you’re gonna drop me,” Niles said when Miles put him down, his eyes still sparkling.
“Just reminding you who’s boss around here,” said Miles.
“Me.”
“Yeah, you.”
Niles kissed him, then started putting their mixing bowls in the sink. “You can put the bread in the oven now.”
Instead of reminding him that Miles knew that already, that the banana bread was a family recipe he’d made a hundred times, Miles just shook his head and put the pans in the oven. It was their household recipe now, after all, and a household without Niles bugging him about something or the other wasn’t really home.