Page 66 of Caelum

“Oh!” She beamed at me, and I beamed back.

“Now, we try it warm. We have to, otherwise it isn’t a fair taste test.” Iheaded over to the microwave and stacked the pizza inside. “You only have to press this button for however long you want it to cook.”

“I know,” she said worriedly. “But how do you know how long to cook something for?”

I blinked at her. “You don’t. You just guess.”

“That doesn’t seem very accurate.”

“Because it isn’t,” I said with another laugh—I swear, I didn’t laugh this much in an entire day, but something about her just made me smile. She said the most random shit. ‘Accurate’ and ‘microwaves’ weren’t where I’d seen this conversation going. “You just blast it and keep on trying to see if the temperature is where you want it.” I let it run for thirty seconds, took out the pizza, and said, “Feel it. Warm enough?”

Gingerly, she patted the top of the pizza with her fingers. “No. It’s still cold.”

“So we put it in again.” We went through this four more times until she was happy and the cheese was bubbling and starting to spit. “Didn’t Eren show you that?” I questioned.

She shook her head. “No. He shows me how to do stuff but says I have to learn on my own.”

I didn’t have to like the method to understand. She did have to gain some autonomy. “That makes sense. But, in the future, maybe tell him if you don’t understand something, yeah?”

She winced. “I do, but Dre…”

My mood darkened when she mentioned that prick. “What about him?” I intoned, aware my voice had deepened with annoyance.

A shake of her head was all the answer she gave me.

“Eve?”

“He just makes me feel stupid.” She blew out a breath. “Eren told me to put milk in the microwave if I couldn’t sleep. He said it works for him.”

Everyone knew that Eren didn’t sleep well. And if he did, it was never in his room. He was probably the only kid in school who could wake up on the sofa without having a dick drawn on his forehead.

Everyone knew about his past, his nightmares. Any Zs the dude caught were hard-earned.

“Okay, so what happened with the milk?”

“It went everywhere.”

“How long did you cook it for?”

“Ten minutes.”

My lips twitched. “Well, that was too long. Now you know to set it every thirty seconds and to test as you go.”

“Eren showed me a different way,” she explained and showed me that method. It wasn’t wrong. Just meant she set her time beforehand.

“Well, that works if there are cooking instructions and they give you a guide. But when you don’t know, you can’t just guess.” A thought occurred to me. “You know not to put metal in there, don’t you?”

“Eren said it would explode if I did that.”

“He was right.” It was weird having to explain something to her that everyone just knew, but I kind of liked it. I liked her, though. She was sweet and I hadn’t experienced a lot of that in my life.

Her inexperience was probably why Dre didn’t like her. He was the kind of dick who saw idiocy as weakness, but Eve wasn’t an idiot. She just did things how she was taught, and if you taught her wrong, then how could that be her fault?

She was a baby in our world, I realized. But she certainly didn’t look like one.

“Time to try the pizza,” I told her, grabbing the plate and passing it to her.

She blew on it a little then took a cautious bite. As she chewed, her eyes lit up. “Hot is better.”

---