“Let’s just get this over with.” Chef JJ pushed the glass away, splashing Samara. “Tristan, get back to your station so we can declare”—she shivered—“declare you the winner.”
This wasn’t how it was supposed to go down.
“Come on. Go, get.” Chef JJ shooed me away.
“But—”
“Just get back over to your station so we can finish!” She gave me one zap with her ice-blue lasers, then spun around, and stomped to the tasting table.
Randy began barking orders at everyone.
“People,” Terrence called, “we’re going to reset the clocks and cut to where Tris left his station.”
I still hadn’t moved.
“What did you make?” Keya asked.
“Cupcakes filled with mocha cream.”
“Save me one?” She gave a small smile.
And right then, I knew what I had to do.
“Hold on.” I went back to my station, got the finished cupcake, and brought it to Keya. “Congratulations,” I said as I handed it to her.
Then I walked off the set.
“Where is he going?” I heard Marco say.
“Tris!” Randy called. “We don’t have time for a break now.”
“Get back here!” Chef JJ yelled.
I stopped at the door, but I didn’t turn around. I didn’t think I could do it if I had to see their faces.
“I cheated!” I called over my shoulder.
Now it was really over.
• • •
The second the door closed behind me, I realized I had no idea what came next. Get to the elevator. That was all I had.
Had the cameras been rolling when I walked out? Did they have me on film saying I cheated?
I looked down. Jeez. The mic was still clipped to my shirt. I ripped it off and dropped it onto a desk as I rushed past.
If they’d gotten me on film, would they show it on TV? Would I have to explain to everyone, not just in Petersville, but every person I ever met for the rest of my life what I’d done?
Would I hear, “Hey, aren’t you the kid who…” everywhere I went forever?
What had I done? Why didn’t I just make crappy cupcakes? Why did I always have to make everything so hard?
I jumped onto an elevator just as the doors were closing.
Now what?
• • •
Bing… Bing… Bing.
The elevator doors opened, and I ran. Across the lobby. Through the revolving door. And out into the plaza.
Then I stopped. I had nowhere to go.
The Airstream was right out front with Josh, Jeanine, and Zoe waiting for me inside, but I couldn’t face them. Not yet.
I walked to the fountain, sat on the bench, and hunched over so I couldn’t see anything but my shoes.
So what happened? That’s the question I was going to get again and again, not just from Josh and Jeanine and Zoe but Zippo, all my aunts and uncles and cousins, my grandmothers, Winnie, Jim, and everyone in town.
I couldn’t imagine getting the words out even once. How would I be able to say them over and over? Maybe I could wear a sign, like one of those big poster boards they use to advertise stuff in Times Square. Or maybe I could email everyone, and beg them to never, ever ask me about it in person because I might drop dead from humiliation right in front of them.
“Hey.”
I didn’t look up but I could see Mom’s red sandals and Dad’s Nikes.
I waited for them to say something else, to ask me what I’d done, to tell me I had to go back and apologize to everyone, to tell me how disappointed they were.
I’m pretty sure time moves extra slow when you’re waiting for something painful like that—like when you’re waiting to get a shot at the doctor—but I really did feel like I was sitting there for hours waiting for them to say something.
After a while, they sat down on either side of me, and I finally looked up.
“Chef JJ is a nightmare. Always was, always will be,” Mom said. “I guess I just thought, I don’t know, time passes. You forget. People change. It feels like a million years ago.”
“Not to her, I think,” I said.
“No kidding,” Dad said.
Just then, over Dad’s shoulder, I spotted Keya and her father crossing the plaza, and in a flash, I was up and running.
“Keya!”
She turned, then saw me and kept going.
“I’m sorry,” I said to her back as she walked away. “Can I just tell you what happened?”
Her father stopped, so Keya did too.
“We have to go,” she said.
I could tell by the look on her father’s face that they didn’t, but I couldn’t blame her for wanting to get away from me as fast as possible. “I just wanted you to know how sorry I was. Really, really sorry.”
“Okay,” she said not looking at me. “But we really need to go. Bye.” Then she walked off, pulling her father along with her.
“Bye,” I said.
I walked slowly back to the bench and sat down between my parents.
“You okay?” Dad said.
The question threw me. “I don’t know.”
“Say more,” Mom said.
Couldn’t they just punish me or yell at me? “Can we do this later?”
“No,” Mom said. “We can’t.”
“Fine. I feel like I won’t ever be able to fix this,” I said to my shoes.
“Didn’t you just fix it?” she said. “If you didn’t deserve to win, you shouldn’t have, and you made sure you didn’t. What else is there to do?”
“But I still feel so…” There was no word for how bad I felt.
“I bet,” Dad said. “Did I ever tell you about that time I shoplifted?”
My head snapped up. “No.”
“I was seven. G-mare said she wasn’t going to buy me any more comics. She thought they were dumb, and they just piled up around the house. And I was obsessed with this superhero series, Secret Wars. Anyway, there was a new one out, and I just had to have it. It seems silly now, but then, I don’t know. I was at the newsstand, and I just took it.”
“Did you get caught?”
“More like I cracked. Uncle Philippe saw me with it and asked how I got it. I think I was actually dying to get it off my chest. He made me take it back and apologize to the owner. Thirty years later, I still remember exactly what that felt like.”
“Did Uncle Philippe tell G-mare?”
“Nope.”
“Yeah, see, that was just you and Uncle Philippe and the guy who owned the newsstand. You apologized, and you moved on. G-mare, Uncle Philippe, the whole world is going to know what I did, and I will never get past it.”
“It will blow over in no time. You’ll see. It’s gonna to be fine.” Dad waved me off like I’d spilled something, like it was nothing a roll of paper towels couldn’t make disappear.
Something inside me that had been ripping little by little tore wide open. “No, it’s not gonna be fine!” I shouted. “It’s not fine if they show me on television saying I cheated, if the whole world finds out that I’m a liar. That’s not fine! The Doughnut Stop is not fine! Mom’s restaurant is not fine! Petersville is not fine! So just stop saying it is.”
“Tris, I told you—” Mom started.
“I know what you said. But I can see things aren’t fine, and I don’t want to waste time pretending they are. That doesn’t help.”
Dad pinched his chin and gave me a long, hard look. “Okay.”
“Okay?” I felt like I’d been running hard at a wall bracing for impact, and the wall had just moved, and now I was falling.
“What do you want to know?” he asked.
“Everything,” I said. “And start from the beginning.”
And they did. And
it wasn’t anything I didn’t already know, but that was never the point.
Chapter 24
The Petersville Gazette
Vol. 1, Issue 52
Town Happenings
Celebrate the opening of The Petersville Inn (the town’s very first!) with doughnuts, Saturday at 2:00 p.m.! Party at The Station House with tours of the cottages running every thirty minutes.
Harry Potter Marathon at the Watch, Cut, and Quilt this weekend. Watch all eight Harry Potter movies while you get the “Harry,” “Ron,” “Hermione,” or “Bellatrix” haircut, then make a quilted portrait of your favorite character.
Featured Series
Things Most People Get Wrong and How YOU Can Get Them Right
By Jeanine Levin
This will probably come as a shock to many of you so you may want to sit down. Ready?
The Earth is not perfectly round. Never was. Never will be.
It’s kind of squashed at the poles and swollen around the equator.
I know. It blew me away too.
You’re welcome!
Join The Doughnut Stop Team!
Wanted: drivers to deliver doughnuts to Albany three mornings per week. Interested? Send email to [email protected].
The morning after the Can You Cut It? East Coast finals aired, I jerked awake.
It was here, the day I’d been dreading since I’d walked off the set.
My room was still dark, and the house was quiet, but I got out of bed and pulled on some clothes. There was no going back to sleep. I’d head into town and get to work early. The sooner I started this day, the sooner I’d have it behind me.
Going back to school would be rough too, but at least kids had a whole month to forget what they’d seen on TV.
Who was I kidding? What they’d seen wouldn’t have been forgotten. The best I could hope for was that it had faded a bit.
By the time I made it outside, the birds were up, and an orange glow was beginning to ooze over the mountains.
I grabbed my bike from the shed and walked it across the grass to the dirt road that zigzags through the woods down the mountainside. I don’t care how good a BMX-er you are. Riding a bike down Terror Mountain is not an option.
Even though the sun was barely up, the air was already thick and wet. By the second zag, my hands were slick on the handlebars, and I stopped to wipe them on my shorts.
At least there were no clouds. Nobody would show up for Dad’s big opening if it rained.
As I rode to town, my brain replayed clips from the night before.
In case you didn’t catch it, the answer to your question is, yes, everything that happened at the Killer Cupcake Competition was captured on film. Everything.
And, yes, it did all end up in the final episode, on television screens all over America, probably all over the world, possibly even the universe. This very second, an alien family on Mars could be chuckling as they watch Mom karate chop Marco away from me, a move I somehow missed in the moment.
And, no, the Can You Cut It? folks weren’t mad about what happened, actually the opposite. They loved it. A producer I’d never met called us the day after we got home to tell us so. “Just like real reality,” the guy said. He was especially into that part where I walked off the set, because it was obvious that nobody had planned it or knew what to do next.
The reason he was calling? Not to warn us that they had the whole Killer Cupcake Craziness on camera and would be airing it. Oh, no. He was calling to inform my parents and me that we were in violation of our contract, and that I needed to return to film my “exit interview.” Oh, and if I didn’t, Mr. Real Reality explained, The Food Connection Company would sue my parents. At first, I thought this was a joke. Then I saw Dad’s face.
So Dad took me back to the city to film my exit interview. It was with Randy and Mr. Real Reality. What they wanted to know most of all? How I’d cheated. I think they were hoping for something like I got dressed up as a ninja, scaled the outside of The Food Connection building in the middle of the night with toilet plungers attached to my hands and knees, picked the lock on the roof door, and then hacked a computer.
They looked pretty disappointed when I explained how the recipe had just popped up on Terrence’s phone in the bathroom. “That’s it?” Randy said.
“That’s it,” I said. She looked so sad, I couldn’t help but add, “Sorry.” Randy wasn’t that bad.
As I biked up the hill just outside of town, one clip flashed through my brain, something else I’d missed seeing that day, Keya’s face at the moment I admitted I’d cheated. It was like a punch in the stomach.
What did she think now? She must have watched the show, seen the interview.
Phoenix had probably already called The Food Connection offices to demand that they give him another shot because I’d cheated, though he’d bombed the Egg-Off all on his own. The person who most deserved another shot was Izzy since she was the one eliminated in the Cloning Contest, and I said so during my interview.
And Harper, what did she think? I shivered imagining her staring me down on her television screen as I admitted what I’d done.
• • •
The lights in The Station House were on when I rode up. It had to be Walter. Mom never got up this early to come to the restaurant, and both my parents’ cars were there when I left home.
I leaned my bike against the porch and went inside.
“It’s me!” I called, ducking under the counter.
Walter was at the stove, stirring something.
“No pupusas?”
“Atol de elote.”
The sweet, milky corn drink wouldn’t fill me up like pupusa, but it was a close second to my favorite of Walter’s dishes from back home.
Walter brought two mugs down from a shelf and poured the steaming liquid into them. He spilled a bit on the counter and wiped it up with the dishrag draped over his shoulder.
“Careful.” He handed me a mug.
I blew into it. The color reminded me of Keya and her butter tea and how I’d never get to taste it.
When it had cooled a bit, we both drank.
“Stop!” Walter slapped his hand over the mug like he’d just realized the drink was poisoned.
“What is it?”
“Not enough cinnamon,” he said like this was a matter of life and death.
After a couple of cranks of the cinnamon grinder over each cup, he handed mine back.
“Okay now?” I said.
Walter took a sip. He tick-tocked his head, then smacked his lips. “Not bad. The corn is perfect though. Riley picked it yesterday.”
I drank some.
“Better?”
“Mmm.”
“It’s good to see you smiling this morning. How are you holding up?”
“I’ll live.”
It was the only time Walter asked me anything about the show, even though given the amount of time he’d spent training me, he of all people had earned the right to ask whatever he wanted to know.
“Hey, what are you doing here?” I said. “Isn’t the restaurant closed today for Dad’s opening party?”
“Oh, I…” Walter looked around the kitchen like he was trying to locate something he’d misplaced. “I’m making a surprise for the, uh, party.”
“Oh, yeah. What?” Walter was a lousy liar.
He cracked a grin, then snapped the dish towel at me. “You got me. You know, my mother always said atol de elote was so sweet, it could make even the most rotten day taste better.”
“Thanks. It did.” And I meant it. At least for a bit, the sweet atol had driven away everything else.
“Good.” Walter thumped me on the back. “I’m going back to bed now. See you later.”
“’Night.”
Walter didn’t need to
watch Can You Cut It? to know what had happened. I’d told him—him and everyone else in town who mattered to me. It was hard at first, but the more times I said it out loud, the easier it got, especially because, like Dad, a lot of people shared their own stories about times they’d messed up. None of them had their stories shown on television to millions of people, but still, it helped.
The worst had been telling Josh and Jeanine. I told them and Zoe on the way back to Petersville after the finals. Zoe didn’t seem to get it—or maybe she did and just didn’t understand why it was a big deal, as someone who looks at everyone’s cards during Go Fish and moves up her piece to the Lollipop Woods in Candy Land when no one’s looking. But Josh and Jeanine, they got it, and even though they never said it, I knew they couldn’t believe what I’d done.
That’s what crushed me: they just couldn’t believe it.
Jeanine kept asking questions about how much I’d actually remembered from Terrence’s email, like she was trying to prove that I hadn’t even really cheated, and it would have been so easy just to let her, but I couldn’t get past this by going backward.
Then there was Winnie. In her opinion, I’d made something about nothing, and then I’d thrown that something—$100,000 of it—in the trash instead of using it to solve our doughnut supply problem. For weeks afterward, every time she saw me, she’d yell, “You never heard ‘finders keepers, losers weepers’?” She’d only stopped when Josh and I proved to her that our doughnut collective was starting to work.
I flipped on the lights in The Doughnut Stop, then turned on the computer.
My Doughnut Stop email inbox was brimming with new mail. Big surprise.
I took a deep breath, held it, then clicked.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Subject: Order
Tris,
Can we change that order to 20 mocha cream, same numbers on the others? The mocha was a big hit, and I’m guessing hearing you talk about how you came up with it on Can You Cut It? last night will make it an even bigger one.
Thx,
B
I hated to think about Betsy sitting in her living room with her family eating popcorn watching me talk about how I’d cheated. Luckily, what Betsy cared about more than anything else was her store, so she was going to buy from us even if she thought I was a horrible person.
The Doughnut King Page 19