Now came the fun part: I pushed the tip into the center of the top of the cupcake and slowly squeezed the bag, emptying cream into the cake until the top began to rise. Then I lifted the tip out and spiraled frosting out from the hole until I’d covered the top, then I spiraled back in again.

I felt my mouth spreading into a bigger and bigger smile.

Suddenly, I got that feeling you get when you know you’re supposed to be doing something but aren’t and can’t even remember what that thing was.

I looked around.

20:02…20:01…

Time! I’d completely forgotten about the clock. And the competition.

And I didn’t care.

For the first time in so long, everything felt right. Like I knew who I was and what I was supposed to be doing, and as long as I kept doing it, everything else would be okay.

I made the last circle of icing over the spiral tower, set the cupcake down on a clean white plate, and sprinkled it with the toasted coconut.

Perfect.

Eighteen minutes left, and all I had to do was fill and ice one other cupcake.

For the first time since the challenge began, I checked what Keya was doing.

She must have just taken her cupcakes out of the oven because she was still wearing oven mitts, but she wasn’t taking the cakes out to cool, and I could see why. They were shriveled down in their little cups and though their edges were brown, their centers looked wet and foamy.

She had time to make another batch if she hustled. But she wasn’t hustling. She was chewing on her bottom lip, staring down at her shrunken cupcakes. Maybe she was trying to figure out what had gone wrong—it didn’t made sense to start again until she knew what had happened.

Come on, Keya. Come on. Go through the steps in your head. Find the mistake and get moving.

I don’t know if she couldn’t figure out what went wrong, or if she wasn’t even trying but two whole minutes later, she was still just standing there.

Before I knew it, I’d put down the pastry bag and was headed over to Keya’s station.

“Hey, you can’t do that,” Marco said behind me. His voice sounded different, like for once he was saying something he hadn’t practiced in front of a mirror.

At the front of the set, Chef JJ and Dieter were offering tips on making buttercream frosting and didn’t seem to notice that the Transformer usually trained on my station was swinging sharply to the left.

April the medic saw me though, and beat me to Keya. “Go back to your station,” she said, blocking me. They were definitely going to have to edit this out.

“Keya?” I said over April’s shoulder.

She didn’t say anything. She was still staring at her sad cupcakes.

“Look—”

April poked me in the chest. “I said, ‘Back to your station.’”

I backed up as if I’d given in, but then circled around the front of the counter to Keya’s other side. “You have time to make another batch.”