Page 63 of Make You Mine This Christmas

Ambrose:she’s a dork??

Ambrose:a hot dork?

Ambrose:oh no no no.

Ambrose:ABORT ABORT

Ambrose:that’s your kryptonite

Ambrose:I KNOW YOUR TYPE

Ambrose:goblin men and mean dorky women

Ambrose:get out of there!

Haf:I’M FINE

Haf:Go shoot something on Fortnite you menace

Ambrose sends back a string of emojis – a big red X, two girls standing together and a red lipstick smudge. A few seconds later, they send another big red X and a stop sign, just to be sure.

‘All right, all right. I get the hint,’ Haf says, slipping her phone back into her pocket.

‘Dogs asking for treats?’ Kit asks, closing the door behind her.

‘Ha ha, yeah, I guess. These two know I’m the weakest link.’

As if on cue, Stella and Luna both give her a look that says, ‘Please, I’ve never eaten anything in my life and I could be dying.’

‘Nice try,’ she tells them.

Kit gives the gingerbread an incredulous look as she passes to wash her hands in the sink. ‘Huh. These look different... Are they supposed to be blobs?’

‘Maybe we can slice them into the right shapes?’

‘Maybe. Looks darker than the pictures too, doesn’t it?’ Kit prods the gingerbread slab closest to her, which is less a flat wall and more a series of small hills. ‘It seems like there’s going to be significant structural problems, whether or not we cut them back to the same shape.’

‘Is this in your professional opinion?’ Haf asks with a smirk. ‘Are we going to have difficulties erecting them?’ She snorts, tickled by her own dirty joke, and Kit gives her an exhausted look.

‘Wow, I’ve never heard that one before,’ she says, laying one of the paper templates over what looks like the matching section. Maybe they should have labelled them.

With a sharper knife, Kit slices away the warped edges, putting all spare bits into a little bowl. Haf steals a piece and nibbles on it. It’s not the texture she was expecting. It’s flavoured really nicely, but it’s hard as a real wall and requires a worrying amount of jaw strength to bite into. And then, there’s a bitter aftertaste, which she suspects might be because it’s burned.

‘Blergh, I hope no one is going to actually eat this,’ she says, sticking her tongue out.

‘The book says we’ve got to decorate the roof bit while it’s warm,’ says Kit, taking a handful of sliced almonds.

Pointy end first, she pushes it into the gingerbread, but nothing happens. The gingerbread doesn’t give.

‘Maybe it just needs a bit of encouragement,’ Haf says, trying a slightly different, and yet similarly unyielding, spot. ‘We literally just took it out? How quick did we have to be?’

Losing her cool, Kit tries to force one of the slices in and instead creates a rather big dent in the roof. ‘Oh no. That doesn’t seem structurally sound.’

‘Wait!’ cries Haf, leaning over to grab one of the reference pictures. ‘How about we make some runny icing and glue them to the roof? Then it’ll look a bit like a snowy roof.’

As Haf mixes up icing sugar and water in a bowl, plumes of sweet powder float into the air like smoke. A few flecks land in Kit’s dark hair. She looks snow-dusted.

The packet is right in front of her... She could just grab some icing sugar and lob it at her.