Shake It Off

by Suzanne Nelson

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Dawson’s Creamery Crazy Shake Recipes

  Sneak peek at I Only Have Pies for You

  About the Author

  Also by Suzanne Nelson

  Find more reads you will love …

  Copyright

  “It’s over,” I moaned as I collapsed into the booth across from my best friend, Leila. Even the sugary aroma wafting from the milkshakes behind the Sip & Shake counter—one of the best scents in the entire world—couldn’t cheer me today. My spirits sank even further when I realized that Leila, her thumbs flying over her smartphone screen, hadn’t even glanced up. Not that I could blame her. If I had my phone with me, I’d be doing the exact same thing right now.

  I was still reeling from the fact that Mom and Dad had taken away my phone privileges for the entire summer.

  I tried again, louder this time. “I said … It’s. Over.”

  “Huh?” Leila’s eyes flicked to my face, then back to her screen. “Oh. You mean your life?” She shrugged. “Yeah … it’s over for sure.”

  Her nonchalant tone made my stomach clench. I wanted her to be as upset as I was. We were about to be separated for the whole summer. But she didn’t look very upset. She looked as smilingly pretty and put together as always. Her enviable golden-bronze skin—so glowing compared to my own pale complexion—shimmered with the blush her parents let her use, and her sunflower-yellow maxi dress (which I’d picked out) made her look older and more sophisticated than any other soon-to-be seventh grader I knew.

  “But, hey,” she continued, “I ordered your fave, the Purple Pixie Dust. On me as a parting gift.”

  The Purple Pixie wasn’t actually my favorite. All the towering milkshakes at Sip & Shake were amazing, but my favorite was the Heavenly Heath Cheesequake: a dulce de leche milkshake with bits of crumbled Heath bar and caramel cheesecake topping. I didn’t correct her, though. Nobody ever corrected Leila Flores. “Thanks. I have to drink quickly, though. I can only stay for a little while.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Right. I forgot. The whole forbidden friendship thing.”

  “Not forbidden.” I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. “More like … discouraged.” My parents didn’t know I was meeting Leila here after school. They hadn’t exactly told me I wasn’t allowed to hang out with her. They’d said they were “worried about her influence” on me, and that I was “spending all my time with her.” Then they’d told me the summer would be a “good break” from her. Leila, though, had been completely nonplussed when I’d confessed their critique to her.

  “Parents are so pedestrian,” she’d said. “They’ll forget everything by next week. Mine always do.”

  I had my doubts about that. My dad is a seismologist and my mom is a professor of archaeology. Studying earthquakes and the demise of thousand-year-old civilizations seems to have fine-tuned their parental alert systems. They never forget anything.

  “So where did you tell the ’rents you were going this afternoon?” Leila asked, her thumb swiping through her Instagram feed. I tried to see what she was “liking,” but the pics were scrolling by too fast.

  “To the library to return some books.” I shrugged. “And I am. As soon as we’re finished with our shakes.”

  She laughed. “Well, they can’t punish you more than they already have. They took away your phone and they’ve exiled you for the whole summer. I mean, it’s not like you cracked your screen on purpose.”

  “I know,” I agreed. “I set it down on the locker room floor for two seconds and …” I cringed, remembering the ominous Crunch! when Sheena Jackson had stepped backward, right onto my phone.

  “And two months away from Chicago?” Leila added. “It’s like they’re stranding you on Mars.”

  A car honked its horn, and I glanced out the window at the bustling street. Only a few blocks from my family’s apartment and our middle school, Sip & Shake was the perfect hangout. I didn’t just love the shakes; I loved that I could watch what felt like the entire world pass by outside the windows. Living in the main downtown area of the city, the Loop, felt like being at the center of a glittering galaxy of skyscrapers. Everywhere, there was something to see and do: light and people and beautiful noise. And I was about to lose it all.

  I dropped my head into my hands. I wasn’t leaving Chicago as punishment for breaking my phone, but that hardly mattered. It felt like the worst kind of punishment all the same. “Two months on a farm.”

  Leila’s nose wrinkled, as if the very word summoned the smell of cows and chickens. “I still don’t understand why your parents couldn’t have just taken you to California with them. I mean … California or Iowa?” She raised her hands palms up and moved them up and down, as if she were a scale weighing the two options. “It’s a no-brainer.”

  “I know.” I sighed. “I begged them, but they’re both going to be so busy with work.” Dad was doing a hands-on field study of the San Andreas Fault, and Mom had agreed to teach at a summer program at Stanford University. They’d been waiting until I was old enough to make this trip, and this year they’d decided I was. “They thought it would be fun for me to visit the farm instead.” I couldn’t admit the real reason Mom and Dad were sending me to my aunt and uncle’s farm—especially not to Leila.

  “Fun?” Leila smirked now. “Fun the way purgatory is fun.”

  “What am I going to do in small-town Iowa?” I hadn’t visited my aunt, uncle, and cousins in years, but I remembered the musty smell of the farmhouse, the sour-milk scent of the creamery, and the flat fields of soybeans and corn that stretched for miles. The nearest town was at least a twenty-minute drive away.

  “I don’t know,” Leila said. “My parents told me we might be passing through Omaha on a family road trip to Colorado this summer, and that was cringe-worthy enough. Iowa’s way worse. At least your cousins are out there. What do they do for fun?”

  I shrugged. “Last time I visited, I was seven. We played together. You know, swung on the tire swing. Swam in the creek—”

  “Omigod. There’s a tire swing? Is there an outdoor spigot, too, with one of those pump handles? Or better yet, an outhouse?” She giggled.

  “It’s not like that,” I mumbled, my face heating.

  Leila snapped her fingers. “Wait. I’ve got it. You could learn to knit … or crochet … whatever. And then create your own fashion line. Call it … Farm Chic. Or Manure Maven. Even better!”

  She bent over laughing, and my stomach lurched. Manure Maven? But within seconds, I was laughing alongside Leila, playing it off as a great joke. Leila just had a sharp sense of humor, that was all. And even if her jokes were sometimes interpreted as digs by other kids at school, it hardly mattered. Because everyone—whether they understood her humor or not—appreciated her flawless beauty.

  It was her amazing confidence that had made me want to be her friend from the moment she walked into the DeWitt Brayburn school six months ago. I’d figured it was a long shot; the most popular girls were soon vying for spots at her lunch table. I’d never really cared about popularity before. But then I’d been assigned as Leila’s peer guide for her first few days at our school. I offered her a couple of my tried-and-true fashion tips—like how to pair one of her dad’s slouchy sweaters with a chic skirt—and before I knew it, she was inviting me to
join her at lunch.

  “It’s just until she gets to know people,” I explained to my friends Devany and Jane, who I’d known since kindergarten.

  Jane had been skeptical right from the start, as if she knew it was only a matter of time before I’d defect to Leila’s lunch table for good. Leila just appreciated my fashion experimentations and obsession with Project Runway more than Dev and Jane did. Most mornings she FaceTimed me so I could choose her outfit and accessories for school. So I evolved away from Dev and Jane, or maybe we outgrew each other, until I was hanging out with Leila all the time, and only waving to the two of them when we passed in the hallways. Then the YouTube disaster had struck in May, and I’d barely spoken to them since then.

  My face flushed at the memory of the YouTube video, but Leila, seeing my expression, misread the reason for it entirely.

  “Come on, Bria. Get a handle on the sulking.” Her voice was silk-smooth but commanding. “We just finished our last day of sixth grade! I didn’t come here to be depressed. I came here …” She smiled when a waitress set down two titanic shakes in front of us. “For this.” She swept a hand, beauty-vlogger style, around her frosted glass mug, which was coated with a layer of frozen ganache icing dotted with malt balls and sprinkles. Balanced atop the shake itself was a brownie covered with whipped cream and chocolate shavings, and sticking out of the brownie was a skewered chocolate-covered banana. “The Chocolicious Brownie Bonanza.”

  “Sorry. You’re right.” I mustered a smile as I peered down at my own shake, the Purple Pixie. There were three Pixy Stix jutting up from the blackberry-flavored shake, and a stack of blackberry and strawberry macarons stuck onto the straw. Purple sugar crystals dotted the pink icing that coated the top of the glass. It was mouthwatering, but something about the way it looked bothered me. The straw and Pixy Stix were too symmetrical, too perfectly balanced. I tilted the Pixy Stix, pointing them at three haphazard angles, and then slid the macarons off the straw and settled them into the mountain of whipped cream atop the shake.

  “There.” I sat back, pleased with the shake’s new look. “Better.”

  Leila snorted. “I am going to miss your artistic eye.” She sighed. “If only you could work that design magic on Heidi Brent’s wardrobe.”

  Heidi was a frequent star on Leila’s fashion-critique YouTube channel. I shook my head. “Now that would be a lost cause.”

  “There you go,” Leila said appreciatively. “Way to overcome the funk.”

  I slid a spoonful of the shake into my mouth, and the tart sweetness of blackberries zinged pleasantly over my tongue. It wasn’t Heath and cheesecake, but it was still delish. My spirits rose a bit. “I bet the summer will go fast, and before I know it, we’ll be back here, getting more shakes.” I took another bite. “In the meantime, we always have snail mail.”

  Leila grimaced. “Ugh. I’m getting a hand cramp just thinking about it.” She shook her head. “Just nab one of your cousins’ phones. Then you can text me whenever.”

  The next bite lodged in my throat. Did my cousins Wren and Luke even have phones? Last year when they’d come to Chicago for Thanksgiving, neither one of them did. Was I going to spend my summer in a social media black hole? No texting? Nothing?! It made me want to scream. I coughed instead. “I’m not sure that’s—”

  “If you want it badly enough, you’ll make it happen.” Leila’s voice was no-nonsense. A second later, she guffawed into her shake and put her hand up to her mouth, whispering, “Heads up. Fashion disaster. Jane Woodard to your right. Pleated midi skirt with cropped flannel top.”

  I glanced over to where Jane stood in line to order. Since I’d known her, Jane had sported a bookish-grungy style that mirrored her love of reading and Pearl Jam. It was entirely unique to Jane, and I’d never had an issue with it before. But Leila thought Jane’s patterns and colors clashed, and since she loved my style and hated Jane’s, she had to be right.

  Jane’s eyes met mine for the briefest second, her mouth curling on the brink of a smile. Then she registered Leila in the booth across from me, and she instantly broke eye contact, her near-smile gone.

  Jane had never brought up the YouTube video to me, and yet every time she looked at me, I caught a disapproval, or maybe sadness, in her eyes that made my throat a little tight.

  Now I took in Jane’s outfit, feeling Leila watching me.

  I scoffed, then said in a low voice, “Disaster. Totally.” My heart panged, then buoyed as Leila nodded her approval of my assessment.

  “We are the fashion slayers!” She grinned and then, with her phone tucked under the table, snuck a pic of Jane’s outfit.

  Normally I would help her find the perfect headline to post with her video, but I looked down at the remains of my Purple Pixie instead. I’d promised my parents I wouldn’t have anything to do with Leila’s YouTube channel again. I hadn’t told Leila that, though, and I wouldn’t now, either. She’d only roll her eyes and make a comment about my parents’ ridiculous rules. The rules were ridiculous, but I didn’t want to lose any more privileges than I already had. Meeting Leila here had been risky enough. And that reminded me … “Hey, what time is it?”

  Leila checked her phone. “A little after three thirty.”

  I stood up so fast I nearly knocked over my now-empty shake glass. “I’ve got to go! I told Mom I’d be back home by four and I haven’t even gone to the library yet.”

  Leila sighed and stood up. “If we’re going to stay best friends, you’re going to need to get over this whole honesty thing. The less you tell the ’rents, the better. We’ll have to work on that when you get back.” I nodded, and she gave me a light-as-air hug. “Remember: Get your hands on a cell phone ASAP. I need the ‘Bria eye’ for summer clothes shopping.” Then she sat down again, her focus already on her own phone once more.

  “I’ll see you soon!” My voice tried to rise cheerily but ended in an uncertain squawk. Leila didn’t look up again, and neither did Jane when I tiptoed past where she was seated with her milkshake.

  I stepped onto the sidewalk and into the throng of people. My parents were probably already packing the car for the drive to Iowa. By this time tomorrow, I’d be in the middle of nowhere, and I was so not ready.

  “Bria!” Mom’s voice was chirpy with excitement, her hand nudging my knee. “Bria, wake up! We’re almost there.”

  Groggily, I opened my eyes and looked out the car window. Looming in nightmarishly huge proportions was a dancing cartoon cow sipping a milkshake. The cow’s googly eyes swirled around in her head, animated by some motor hidden behind the billboard she danced upon.

  “That is so wrong.” I grimaced. “That cow is basically a cannibal. Gross.”

  Mom giggled, her brown curls bouncing, as if being within a few miles of her childhood home made her revert back to her five-year-old self. “That sign’s been there for forty years. I love it.”

  I studied the billboard. Next to the cartoon cow, in bright pink letters, the sign read:

  TURN HERE FOR DAWSON’S DAIRY AND CREAMERY.

  HAYRIDES, CORN MAZE, MILKSHAKES, AND MORE!

  IT’S UDDERLY DELIGHTFUL!

  Aunt Beth and Uncle Troy could’ve come up with better advertising when they inherited the dairy farm after Grandpa’s and Grandma’s passing. But noooo. Aunt Beth had wanted to stay true to Grandpa’s memory and left the sign unchanged. “Even the pun is tacky,” I muttered.

  Dad and Mom shot each other a meaningful “parenting” look, and I knew they were none too happy about my attitude. Which was fine by me, because I was none too happy about this entire arrangement.

  “Come on, Ree-Ree,” Mom tried. “The sign’s endearing.”

  I sighed at Mom’s use of my pet name. I’d never minded it until Leila had spent ten minutes laughing about it when she’d come over to our apartment a few months ago.

  “Ree-Ree? Seriously?” She’d been doubled over laughing. “What are you? Three?”

  “Please don’t call me Ree-Ree, Mom,”
I said now. “I’m not a baby.”

  Mom’s shoulders stiffened, and she said softly, “Sorry. I keep forgetting you don’t like it anymore.”

  I pulled my eyes away from the garish billboard to the flat green fields. The sunset sky was wide and unbroken, so expansive compared to the fragmented sky of Chicago. This sky was almost too immense; it gave me the sensation that I might get sucked up into its great, purpling vacuum and never be seen again.

  We turned down the lane leading to the Dawson farm and creamery, and soon corn and soybean fields were replaced by fenced-in pastures full of grazing Holstein cows. Up ahead there was a white silo, low-lying whitewashed outbuildings, and the red house and creamery that made up the Dawson farm.

  Panic and resentment washed over me. “I can’t believe you’re making me do this!” I burst out. “All because of that stupid YouTube video, which wasn’t even my fault!”

  “That’s not why we’re doing this,” Dad said quietly. “Your aunt and uncle could use the extra help at the creamery. The Fourth of July is only a few weeks away, and they always plan a big event on the farm for it. But more than that … we do want you to use this time away from home to think about the choices you’ve made over the last year—”

  “Leila’s not a bad influence!” I shouted. “I’ve told you that a million times.”

  Mom sighed. She reached for my hand, but I yanked it away. “Bria. You’ve changed over the last year. You’re starting to grow up, we know, but you haven’t seemed like yourself.”

  “You don’t know who I am. And if I’ve changed, it’s for the better.”

  I waited for them to argue, but they were silent.

  We pulled into the darkening parking lot of the creamery. I could make out a path of stepping stones that wound past the little restaurant, milking barns, silos, and a petting zoo populated by bleating goats. Beyond that was what looked like the beginnings of a corn maze.

  Mom scrambled out of the car and went running (yes, actually running) toward the farmhouse behind the creamery, calling my aunt’s name.

  I glanced up at the red house. It was a half a century old and showed its age with weather-beaten wooden siding and warped windows. With its wraparound porch, hanging baskets of geraniums, and rocking chairs, it could almost be charming. But to me, it looked old-fashioned.