“About the deadly glitter,” they whispered.

“Oh. No. Um, what’s king cake?”

“So,” Helen began, leaning in and fixing her with an intent gaze.

But Carys slung an arm over their shoulder and said, “Can we, like, sit down first?”

They made their way to the living room through the kitchen, and Veronica and Helen stripped off their aprons and sat down.

“You know Mardi Gras?” Helen asked.

Greta nodded.

“King cake is sold for Carnival. You bake a little baby inside, and whoever gets the baby in their slice gets luck and good fortune for the year. Or whatever. But the point is that me and Veronica made bank to last, like, six months selling king cakes just for Mardi Gras last year. So we’re just making sure our recipe is still bomb and experimenting with…”

They frowned and looked over at Veronica.

“Pizzazz,” Veronica finished. “That little something that will set Eleventh House King Cakes apart from the rest.”

“Last year, our babies were gators,” Helen said.

“The year before that, we painted our boxes with chalkboard paint so we could write people’s names and addresses on them. It was cute, but, damn.”

“We loaded that first batch in the van, and by the time we got to the first address, the chalk had all rubbed off and we had no fucking idea whose was whose,” Helen finished. “Bad call.”

“This year,” Veronica said, “we’re experimenting with tying a glitter-balloon to each box so when someone opens the door, they see it floating there all pretty-like.”

“Veronica’s afraid they’ll pop and blind people, but really I think it’ll just add a little sparkle to people’s houses.”

Carys just shook her head at her roommates. “If you get glitter all over people’s houses, they will never order from you again. That shit lasts for decades. Seriously, it’s, like, archaeological. PS, please tell me that you didn’t have one explode and that’s what made you worried, Ronnie.”

Veronica and Helen exchanged sidelong looks.

“It’s totally fine. We cleaned it up,” Veronica said finally.

“Just tell me it wasn’t in the kitchen,” Carys said hopefully. After a beat of silence, she tried, “Tell me the cabinets were closed?”

“They were!” Helen said triumphantly.

Carys turned to Greta. “Two years ago, we needed purple glitter for our Mardi Gras costumes. We thought we were brilliant because we got these huge bags of glitter wholesale online. When we slit open the box, we must’ve cut through the bag somehow, so when we opened the box, this mushroom cloud of glitter poofs out onto the floor. It was there for, like, eight months. It got in and on everything, and we were cursing the existence of glitter. Until recently, apparently.”

She raised a stern eyebrow at Veronica and Helen, but there didn’t seem to be ire behind it.