"Heard you gave 'em quite a show tonight," Hannah's dad says.

"Yes, sir," Clay says, his deep voice vibrating with pride.

"That's great," Hannah's dad says, and then he says nothing else. Hannah strains her ears past Baker and her mom's conversation to listen to the pocket of silence in the family room. She pictures her dad shifting his eyes from boy to boy, wondering what to say, his mouth half-open around another pleasantry. Joanie gives her a look.

"We'd better get back in there for cake," Wally says, his voice more robust than normal. "Good to see you, Mr. Eaden."

"See you later, Mr. Eaden," Luke and Clay say.

The boys come back into the kitchen and there's a spike in volume from the TV in the family room. Hannah looks automatically at Wally. His mouth curves in a simple smile to let her know everything is okay.

There are remnants of Christmas littered all throughout the kitchen: a plate of stale gingerbread cookies that Joanie never finished decorating; a collage of holiday greeting cards tacked up with magnets on the fridge; a dying poinsettia in the middle of the table, its blood red petals withering right in front of them, though none of them notice. Hannah gathers silverware from the drawer in the counter and her mom's mint green dessert plates from the cabinet above the coffee maker, and all the while she feels a beating thrill in her stomach, that same thrill she feels every year at the start of Carnival season, when the King Cakes first appear on store shelves and the neighbors on the corner hang their purple, green, and yellow flag off the side of their house, and her cla.s.smates at school talk about which Mardi Gras b.a.l.l.s their older siblings are going to or where their family plans to go skiing during the long weekend. "It's the best d.a.m.n time to be a Louisianan," Clay always says, and Hannah, glancing at her friends, agrees.

"How can I help?" Baker asks, appearing at Hannah's side.

"You can go enjoy your unofficial birthday party."

"I am enjoying it," Baker says, "but let me help you."

"I'm pretending to be a domestic G.o.ddess right now," Hannah says. "Just let me have my moment."

"What kind of cake did you get?"

Hannah slides the cake box toward her. When Baker glances down at it, Hannah says, "Open it."

"You got a King Cake?" Baker exclaims, looking down at the icing-coated cake ring.

"Are you surprised?" Luke calls from the table. "We're obviously going to use your Epiphany birthday to kill two birds with one stone. What kinds of friends would we be otherwise?"

"I can't wait to eat it," Clay says, reaching his hand out.

Hannah slaps his hand away. "I will punch you if you try to eat this before we sing."

"Sorry, Mom," he says, licking his finger and sticking it in her ear.

"Stop! Stop! Oh my G.o.d, just go make sure everyone has their drinks!"

"Did we get candles?" Luke asks. "Or are we gonna sing without them, hard-a.s.s style?"

"We got some," Wally says, fishing them out of the grocery bag. He places them carefully into the King Cake, s.p.a.cing them equidistant from each other and taking pains not to mess up the icing more than he has to, and Hannah imagines him doing this for his mom or his little brothers with the same deliberate care.

"You really didn't have to do this for me," Baker says, resting her eyes on the cake, then glancing up at Hannah.

"Of course we did, goober," Hannah says, taking Baker's gla.s.s from the table and refilling it with sweet tea for her. "This is actually probably the lamest birthday party we've ever had for you."

"Well, nothing tops the one at California Pizza Kitchen," Luke says.

"When you and Clay got her that Hannah Montana card and walked around the restaurant asking everyone to sign it?" Joanie asks.

"And then we went over to Urban Outfitters and Wally and I got her that book about hamsters dressed as Renaissance painters?" Hannah says.

"I still have that book," Baker says. "And that card. My mom keeps trying to steal it off my dresser and throw it away, but I always catch her."

"How could she ever want to throw away something like that?" Joanie says.

They light the candles and gather around the cake, each of them leaning in on their elbows and yelling at each other not to breathe too hard over the 18 tiny flames. "Ready?" Hannah says in a hushed, excited voice, and then five of them start to sing, with Clay and Luke affecting bullfrog voices and Wally pretending to conduct them, and Joanie laughing at Luke across the top of the cake, and Hannah watching Baker the whole time, watching how her eyes get even softer and her face looks disbelievingly happy, and how she tucks her hair self-consciously behind her ear when they all sing her name.

"Make a wish!" Hannah reminds her, and Baker glances at her for a lightning-quick second, happiness evident in her eyes, before she blows out the candles on her cake.

"How has n.o.body found the baby yet?" Joanie says, stabbing her fork back into her cake. "Someone always finds the baby during the first cut."

"This Baby Jesus is holding out on us," Hannah answers around a cream cheese-filled bite. "Playing hard to get."

"I'm cutting seconds," Clay says with his mouth full. "I want that baby."

"I want that baby," Hannah says.

"Careful, Clay," Joanie says. "Hannah gets really compet.i.tive about finding the Baby Jesus. She once pushed our cousin Warren into the refrigerator just to beat him to seconds. He had a bruise on his chest for a month."

"That's an exaggeration," Hannah says.

"Not so much. And I bet everyone here can believe it."

"I can absolutely believe that," Baker says, catching Hannah's eye.

Wally ends up cutting seconds for everyone-"We need a fair judge," he says, elbowing Clay out of the way-and they all eat eagerly, watching each other's plates to see who unearths the plastic pink Christ child hidden within the cake.

"Bam!" Hannah says, digging the Baby Jesus out from beneath layers of bread and cream cheese. She holds the inch-long plastic figurine up for the others to see. "I got him!"

"G.o.dd.a.m.n it," Clay says.

"Well, how does he look?" Luke asks. "Do we have ourselves a bouncing baby boy?"

"Does he look like the Messiah?" Wally adds. "Think he's got the potential to save us all from our sins?"

"Doubtful," Hannah says. "But you know, this is probably the best Baby Jesus I've ever found in a King Cake."

"Better than that one we found last year?" Baker asks.

"Are you referring to the one you 'accidentally' threw away?"

"Don't bring that up," Baker laughs, lowering her eyes back to her cake. "I still feel bad about that."

"You know who else feels bad about that? Jesus. Because you denied him."

"Hey now," Clay says. "Let's get this mocking under control."

They finish their cake slices-Clay finishes Hannah's and Baker's second pieces for them-and sit around the table for another hour, long after Hannah and Joanie's parents have gone up to bed, just talking and making fun of each other, and asking Luke to do impressions of their teachers, and asking Baker to tell the story about the time she walked into Mrs. Shackleford's office to find her talking aloud to the curtains, and indulging Clay with his questions about how the St. Mary's crowd reacted to the game tonight ("A couple of old women started speaking in tongues every time you got the ball," Luke says; "It's true," Joanie says, "I sold them a nacho with your face imprinted on it"). Wally pushes discarded sprinkles around his plate while he listens to the conversation, and Joanie leans her head against Luke's shoulder and starts to doze off, and Hannah stands the plastic Baby Jesus on the table and dances him over to Baker's plate until Baker, her eyes swinging sideways to meet Hannah's, tugs him out of Hannah's hand.

"We should probably go," Luke says, his voice uncharacteristically hushed as he watches Joanie doze against his side.

"Yeah," Wally says, rising gently from the table. "Here, everyone give me your plates."

The boys leave just after midnight. Hannah stands at the sink and rinses the plates and forks, watching Baker hug the boys goodnight. Clay's hand lingers at the small of Baker's back and Hannah concentrates on sc.r.a.ping a stubborn piece of icing off one of the plates.

Then the boys have gone, and Joanie has lumbered upstairs in a half-sleep, and now the only thing in the room seems to be the water pouring forth from the sink. Baker turns where she stands and casts Hannah a gentle, sleepy smile before she wordlessly walks to the sink, takes the other sponge, and starts to wipe down the table.

"You don't have to," Hannah says, more out of polite habit than anything else, but Baker just sends her a look-Don't be ridiculous-and continues to clean.

They walk up the wooden stairs in silence, their feet tracing the familiar path to Hannah's room, and Hannah feels content just to be together, just to have another Friday night sleepover in which Baker will borrow one of Hannah's t-shirts to sleep in, and Hannah will turn the ceiling fan on high because Baker likes it that way, and they'll fall asleep with some sitcom episode playing through Hulu on Hannah's laptop.

"Do you want your birthday present?" Hannah asks when Baker pulls the sheets back on the bed.

Baker stills. "I thought this impromptu party was my present?"

Hannah smiles. She walks to her desk and retrieves the carefully wrapped gift from her second desk drawer, and in some part of her mind she thinks about how she's opened this drawer to check on this present every day for the last two weeks.

Baker removes the daffodil-yellow wrapping paper very gingerly, her slender piano player's fingers working under the tape with an easy grace. When she finds the book, her face alights with an expression Hannah cannot name.

"Han," she says as she trails her fingers across the cover.

"I know you lost your copy," Hannah says, stepping nearer to her. "And I thought you might want a hardcover edition."

"I love it," Baker breathes. She opens the book and flips to a random page, sliding her fingertips down the hard paper, the black ink words-Scout. Atticus. Boo.-breathing off the page with the mysterious power of gospel. And in the dim light of the room, with the fan guiding currents of air across the leaves of the book and the phantom taste of King Cake on her tongue, Hannah is wrapped in magic.

"Think it'll make it onto the sacred shelf?" Hannah asks.

"Front and center," Baker says, drawing her fingertips across the cover. She shifts her footing to face Hannah. "Thank you."

They crawl into bed and prop up Hannah's laptop between them. They choose an episode of Parks and Recreation and play it with the volume on low. Baker rolls onto her side and nestles her head into Hannah's shoulder, and Hannah falls asleep to the rhythm of Baker's breathing and the smell of her hair.

Chapter Two: Ordinary Time.

The following week at school, during Hannah and Wally's una.s.signed period, Wally asks her if she wants to go somewhere off campus. "Off campus?" she asks. "What, like, just to experience the thrill of maybe getting caught?"

"To get some food," Wally says, his sinewy arms moving over his Calculus textbook as he packs it into his booksack. "I'm bored and hungry."

"You sound like Luke."

"I feel like Luke."

Hannah taps her pen against her Calculus binder. "We could bring food back for our friends."

"We could."

Hannah pictures her friends' faces lighting up when she and Wally surprise them with food. She sees Baker's eyes growing large with her smile.

"You're driving," Hannah says.

They sneak out the back entrance and drive down South Acadian in Wally's old Toyota Camry. Wally plays one of his standard mixed CDs-the one with a lot of tracks by Eli Young Band-and lowers the windows so the fresh, wintry air rushes into the car.

"Where do you want to go?" Wally asks, looking over at Hannah.

"You wanna do Coffee Call?"

"For beignets?" he asks, with a spring in his voice.

Hannah smiles and changes the CD track. "For beignets," she says.

Wally opts for the drive-through so their school uniforms will be less conspicuous. He orders six beignets and a cup of coffee and they pull up to the window to wait. The smell of rich processed sugar wafts out from the kitchen, making Hannah lightheaded. An older woman opens the window and smirks knowingly at Wally's red tie and Hannah's plaid skirt.

"Thank you, ma'am," Wally says, accepting the white paper bag from her.

The woman looks at them from under raised eyebrows. "You'd better get back to school."

"We're home-schooled," Hannah says. "Our mom just makes us dress up so it feels more authentic."

The woman raises her eyebrows even higher, and Wally moves the car into gear, bursting with laughter as soon they've pulled away.

They take the long route back to campus, driving down Perkins until they can turn right into the Garden District. The mid-morning sun colors the trees and houses in wintry light, illuminating the purple and yellow LSU flags that hang from the porches. Wally lowers his window all the way to swim his hand through the air, and Hannah looks at him, carefree behind the wheel, his russet brown hair lifting with the oncoming rush of air.

"I don't think I've ever seen you look so happy," Hannah says.

Wally stares ahead through the windshield. After a moment, he says, "Yes you have."

Hannah clutches the warm paper bag in her lap and turns to look out the window.

To: Baker Hadley & 4 more...

Jan 12, 2012 9:54 AM Wally and I request your presence in the senior lounge. We have beignets from coffee call. Hurry b.i.t.c.hes!

Joanie: How did you go to coffee call??

The way most people go...in a car Wally Sumner: We snuck out like secret agents. Come eat!

Clay Landry: This is awesome, coming in a min, waiting for Akers to shut up so I can ask to leave, save me at least 4 beignets Baker Hadley: Beignets?! But I'm in computer systems. I'm learning how to use the s.p.a.ce bar As stimulating as that must be...we have SUGAR Baker Hadley: s.p.a.ce...bar...s.p.a.ce...bar...

Joanie: Coming now. Luke where are you Wally Sumner: He probably fell asleep in cla.s.s again Luke Broussard: O ye of little tiny baby faith. I'm walking down the hall now! You know if you bring me food then I'm there. Joanie hurry up or I'm going to steal yours and I won't regret it Joanie: And I will break up with you. Beignet > boyfriend Luke Broussard: How long did it take you to find that symbol on the keypad Joanie: ...a while Luke whoops with laughter when he bursts into the lounge. Clay and Joanie follow close behind him, Clay clapping his hands together and Joanie whispering "b.i.t.c.hes and hos" with giddy reverence. Baker comes last, her long hair swinging behind her as she closes the door and turns to face the table. She meets Hannah's eyes and her smile grows even larger than Hannah pictured.

"You really weren't kidding," Baker says.