Hole in the Middle

by Coco Simon

  “Do you get to eat the extra donuts?” asked Isabella. “Because oh my goodness, I could eat, like, a dozen of those at a time.”

  “No,” I said. “We donate the ones that haven’t sold at the end of the day.”

  Sophia and I exchanged a smile, because everyone always asks me that question.

  People think if you work at a donut shop you eat donuts all day, every day. In elementary school, Joshua Victor asked me if our house was made of donuts.

  “Well, you’ve been known to show up with donuts,” teased Riley, and I laughed.

  I do try to bring donuts to my friends’ houses when we have extra or when Mom brings them home.

  “Work perk!” I said.

  “Oh, I can almost taste those cider donuts,” moaned Isabella. “Shoot, now all I want is a cider donut. It’s definitely better than… whatever this lunch they’re serving is.”

  “My favorites are the coffee-cake donuts,” Michelle said. “And the chocolate ones with rainbow sprinkles. Or the plain glazed ones. Or…”

  “We get it. You like donuts!” Riley said with a laugh.

  Just then the bell rang. We gathered up our stuff and hustled out to our next class.

  As we were going into the hall, Sophia grabbed my arm and hissed, “What is going on?”

  I sighed and shrugged. “She is really good at soccer,” I said.

  “Well, Riley may be good at soccer, but she’d better be good at being our friend,” said Sophia, and before I could respond, she shot off down the hall.

  Isabella, Riley, and Michelle turned in a different direction, heading toward language arts, where they were in a class with my sister Molly. Before they went into their class, I caught Molly’s eye as she walked by in the hallway.

  It was obvious she could tell something was up. She was looking at me as if to say, What’s going on?

  But I just said, “You’d better catch up to your potential new soccer teammates,” and hurried off to my own class.

  Middle school was different, that’s for sure, and I don’t think I like change.

  Chapter 2 Sisterly Love

  My dad is usually home after school. He teaches woodshop at the high school during the year, and in the summer he works for a construction company that his brother owns.

  Molly and I dumped our stuff in the cubbies that he built us, kind of like lockers, near the back door and found him in the kitchen, making a snack.

  You’d think that because Mom’s family owns a restaurant she’d be a really good cook, but she totally is not. She jokes that’s why she married Dad, because he can whip up anything and it’s always delicious.

  I sniffed. “Ooh, popcorn!”

  “And hello to you too, honey,” said Dad.

  He was popping kernels in a deep pot on the stove, and the kitchen smelled like a movie theater. He pushed a plate of sliced bananas and peanut butter toward us.

  “Dad, where are the raisins on top?” Molly asked.

  Dad used to call this snack “ants on a log,” which we thought was hysterical. He slices the bananas lengthwise, smears on peanut butter, then scatters raisins on top. He used to tell us that they were ants crawling on a banana log. We thought it was funny, but it could also explain why I hate raisins… I mean, eww, eating ants! I always pick them off.

  “We’re out,” said Dad. “It’s still back-to-school season, and Mom and I have been so crazed and busy we haven’t been able to get to the market.”

  “So, ant-less?” asked Molly.

  “Yes, I’m afraid we are out of ants, Molls,” said Dad. “So I am making it up to you with some popcorn.”

  “If we put these on top…,” said Molly, cocking her head and thinking.

  “They could be clouds on a log,” I said, taking a piece of hot popcorn.

  “They could be fluffy sheep on a log,” said Molly. “That makes more sense. Why would clouds be on a log?”

  Dad grabbed the grocery list that Mom kept on the fridge door and wrote raisins on it.

  “Okay, I’m still finishing up this summer job and I have to install the cabinets I built,” he said. “So I’m going to head out until dinnertime.”

  This year Mom and Dad have been letting us stay in the house without them home, but only during the day. Dad is always here after school, though, which is nice, even if he’s sometimes really annoying and asks a ton of questions about our day.

  Today, though, Dad was in a hurry.

  “Okay, dinner is in the slow cooker,” he said, “so whatever you do, do not turn that thing off, or we’ll all starve. Mom will be home by five thirty. We both have our phones at the ready, so just text or call if you need anything.”

  “Where’s Jenna?” I asked.

  “At work,” said Dad. “Wait, is she at work? This new schedule…,” he muttered.

  He scurried over to the bulletin board in the kitchen, where Mom keeps a monthly calendar and writes down who goes where on each day. Dad calls it the Command Center.

  “Yep, yep, she went to work after she had a student council meeting, and Mom will bring her home when her shift ends,” said Dad.

  “Dad, did you just lose track of a daughter?” teased Molly.

  “No!” said Dad, but we all laughed.

  Mom is crazy detail-oriented. Everything at home is organized beyond belief. Like the cans in our kitchen cabinets are basically alphabetized. Her socks are folded a certain way and arranged by color.

  Maybe it’s because she’s an accountant, and, as she says, accountants have to be precise about things because they work with numbers. As the accountant for the restaurant, she makes sure that all the finances are up to date, like the staff gets paid, the bills are paid on time, and at the end of the month the restaurant isn’t spending more money than it’s making.

  Uncle Charlie does all the ordering, everything from napkins to food to supplies like extra water glasses, because in a restaurant you are always breaking glasses. Uncle Mike runs Donut Dreams, where I work. Nans plans out the menus and figures out the daily specials, and makes her special donuts, and Grandpa… well, as Grandpa proudly tells everyone, he steers the ship and keeps it on course.

  Everyone has their “own lane” as they all like to say, and they say that a lot to each other, as in “Hey, get out of my lane!” when they step on each other’s toes. Everyone has a different role, but we all work together.

  Dad builds things, so he has to be precise too, but in a really different way. When he’s building something, he’s all about measuring, and remeasuring, and cutting things accurately so everything fits together.But when he isn’t building something he isn’t too precise, which drives Mom crazy.

  Once he went to pick me up at dance class… only I wasn’t at dance class, I was waiting for him to pick me up at the library. He also once dropped off Molly for a playdate at the wrong house.

  He’s always messing up the laundry, too. Just last week Jenna was struggling and trying to get into a pair of jeans until she realized that they were mine; Dad had put them away in her closet instead.

  “I have it together!” said Dad, a little indignantly.

  “Okay,” said Molly. “So you know you have to take me to soccer, right?”

  “What?” said Dad, looking panicked.

  “Practice starts at six,” said Molly. “It’s on the board!”

  Dad went over to the bulletin board. “Oh… yeah, there it is.”

  Just then our phones lit up with a text message from Mom.

  All good? Everyone home?

  “It’s like she senses when we need her,” said Molly, laughing.

  “She probably just wants to check in to see how school was,” said Dad.

  He texted back,

  All OK.

  Molly added,

  Dad forgot soccer.

  About two seconds later, Mom called Dad’s phone.

  He picked up immediately and reassured her that everything was fine and that he would be home in time to get Molly to soccer, a
nd that he would take me with him if she wasn’t home from work yet. He then left the house to finish his work, and the house was nice and quiet.

  Not that my older sister Jenna or Dad or Mom are loud people, but you notice when they are around. I can always hear Mom puttering around the house, or Jenna playing music. Sometimes I even hear Molly practicing with her soccer ball against a wall somewhere, stopping only when Mom or Dad yells, “Molly, cut it out!”

  I wondered if our house would still be like this once Jenna left for college, when it would just be the four of us. It seems so weird that she wouldn’t be here every day. The thing about having two sisters is that you get really used to having them around.

  “Do you ever wonder what it will be like when Jenna moves out?” I asked Molly, who was sitting right next to me at the counter.

  She looked up from her phone. “What?” she asked.

  “When Jenna goes to college,” I said. “When it’s just the four of us instead of five, do you worry that it will be weird?”

  Molly wrinkled her forehead. “I dunno,” she said. “Like will we miss her?”

  “Well, we’ll miss her, sure,” I said. “But I mean, what will dinner be like without her? What will the weekends be like?”

  “Well, the weekends will be easier, because we don’t have to worry about making noise and waking her up,” said Molly, in her very matter-of-fact Molly way.

  This was true. Jenna liked to sleep in on the weekends, and she was always barking at us to keep it down. Molly and I are early risers.

  “But won’t it be like one person is just missing?” I asked.

  I knew Molly wasn’t always into these kinds of conversations, so I was pushing it.

  “Things change, Kelsey,” Molly said in a tone that sounded like she was explaining it to a two-year-old.

  “Oh, never mind,” I said, and pushed away my chair. Molly was making me feel worse instead of better.

  Sometimes getting people to talk in our family was impossible. My cousin Lindsay was the one I used to talk to about everything. We’re just about the same age and grew up together, so in a lot of ways we are more like sisters than cousins.

  But Lindsay’s mom, my aunt Amy, died a couple years ago after being sick for a long time. If you talk to Lindsay, she doesn’t burst into tears or anything, or at least not usually, but I’m always really careful when I talk to her now, especially if I’m talking about my family.

  If, say, I complain about Mom, I’m worried that Lindsay is really thinking, Oh, well, at least you still have your mom. If I tried to talk to her about how weird it would be with Jenna gone, I’m afraid she would think, Well, she’s just going to college. She’s coming back. But my mom isn’t.

  Lindsay is actually really sweet, so I don’t think she’d think those things on purpose, and she would never say them to me out loud, but there are things I just can’t talk to her about anymore.

  “You’d better get your homework started before Mom gets home,” said Molly.

  I looked over, annoyed, and I noticed that while I’d been sitting there thinking, she had already set up her laptop and was typing away.

  Molly is only eight months older than I am, but she acts like she is my much older sister. So between her and Jenna, I really feel ganged up on sometimes and like I am the baby of the family.

  Jenna and Molly are a lot alike. They are both super organized and they belong to a million different clubs and are always thinking about their next project or what they’ll be doing in ten years.

  Dad calls me Kelsey Dreamer because I guess I daydream a lot, and I like to take my time doing things. I just don’t feel that crazy rushing sense or the competitiveness that Jenna and Molly seem to have been born with.

  I opened my laptop, logged in, and clicked over to the homework page and sighed. Ugh. There is so much homework in middle school.

  There was no way I’d finish before dinner, which I hated. I liked to be able to relax after dinner, and have what Dad calls downtime, when you kind of just do nothing.

  I peeked over at Molly. “Do we have to read this whole chapter for history?” I asked.

  “Yes,” said Molly, her hands flying over the keyboard.

  I opened the window and breathed in.

  “Ooh, someone is burning leaves,” I said. I love that smell.

  I positioned my chair so the breeze from outside tickled my face. It was a shame to spend such a beautiful afternoon inside doing homework.

  Then I looked over at Molly again. “Did you finish reading it already?” I asked.

  “Yeeesss,” said Molly with a hint of annoyance, not looking up from her laptop.

  “What is it about?” I asked.

  “KELSEY!” Molly screamed so loud I jumped. “You have to do your own homework! I’m not going to do it for you!”

  “I wasn’t asking you to do my homework,” I said crossly. “I was just curious.”

  “If you’re curious, then open the book,” said Molly, and she sounded exactly like Mom when she said it.

  I sat there for a few more minutes, listening to the leaves crinkle in the wind. Dad was going to make us help rake them up on the weekend.

  “Kelsey, I can help you if you get stuck, but you have to start and you have to try,” said Molly.

  “Okay,” I said, eating some more popcorn. “This tastes so much better when Dad makes it on the stove than in the microwave,” I said. “And it’s fluffier.”

  Molly looked at me sideways. “Thanks for the review, Princess Popcorn,” she said.

  I snickered.

  Molly looked over and giggled too. Then she grabbed a handful and chewed. “You’re right,” she said. “This does taste good.”

  She glanced over at me with a mischievous twinkle in her eye that I know well and said, “Sheep on a log! Well, what if those sheep flew?”

  Then she hurled a fistful of popcorn at me.

  “MOLLY!” I screamed, shaking popcorn from my hair but laughing.

  I tossed some down the back of her shirt.

  “Oh, it is on, Princess Popcorn!” she said, and showered me with half of what was in the bowl.

  We were both throwing the popcorn and cracking up when we heard my mom say, loudly, “Girls, what on earth is going on in here?”

  Jenna peered around her. “Are you maniacs having a popcorn fight?”

  We both said, “No!” while popcorn fell from our hair, and we tried not to giggle.

  Mom sighed and handed me the broom and Molly the dustpan. “I don’t even want to know. And I don’t want to see anything either… please clean up this mess.”

  I started sweeping and Molly scooped up the piles, but we couldn’t stop laughing.

  “Sheep on a log!” Molly whispered, trying to stifle her laughter.

  “What are sheep on a log?” asked Jenna.

  “What happens when you don’t have ants,” I said, and Molly started to laugh even harder.

  “What?” asked Jenna, but she started to laugh too.

  Sometimes that happens when we’re all together. We just start laughing and we can’t stop, sometimes over something silly and sometimes over nothing at all.

  Mom looked at the three of us cackling and threw up her hands. “I don’t get it,” she said. “But the sound of you three girls laughing is always the best.”

  Molly and I settled down and cleaned up and Jenna started to set the table. I felt another surge—this was so nice—the three of us together with our own secret kind of language.

  Why would you ever want to leave it? I just wished it could stay this way forever.

  Continue Reading…

  So Jelly!

  Coco Simon

  About the Author

  From cupcakes to ice cream, and now… donuts! Having written more than thirty books about middle-school girls, cupcakes, and ice cream, Coco Simon decided it was time for yet another change, so she’s switched her focus from ice cream to another favorite treat, donuts! When she’s not daydreaming
about yummy snacks, Coco edits children’s books and has written close to one hundred books for children, tweens, and young adults.

  Visit us at simonandschuster.com/kids

  www.SimonandSchuster.com/Authors/Coco-Simon

  Simon Spotlight

  Simon & Schuster, New York

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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  This Simon Spotlight paperback edition December 2019

  Copyright © 2019 by Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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  Text by Valerie Dobrow

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  Designed by Ciara Gay

  ISBN 978-1-5344-6026-3 (hc)

  ISBN 978-1-5344-6025-6 (pbk)

  ISBN 978-1-5344-6027-0 (eBook)

  Jacket design by Ciara Moriarty

  Jacket illustrated by Joanie Stone

  Jacket illustrations copyright © 2019 by Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 2019946650