“I think I could manage some ginger ale. Bring me some?” she called down.
“Sure.”
I told Zoe I’d be back in a second, got the ginger ale, and headed upstairs.
I guess I did take longer than a second, because Mom and I got to talking about how the D turned out, and by the time I got back to kitchen, Zoe was gone. So was the pastry gun.
I found them both in Jeanine’s room. The gun was empty.
“Okay, where’s the cream?” I hoped she could hear how annoyed I was and that she’d actually care.
She grinned. Not a chance.
“You’re gonna be so sick.” I’d assumed she’d eaten all the cream. That’s what I would have done.
“No, I’m not.” She rocked from one foot to the other. “I like stuffing things.”
“Things? Like doughnuts?”
Her eyes moved slowly from one side of the room to the other. “And other things.”
“Things like that?” I pointed to Jeanine’s model of the human heart. I thought I’d caught her eyes stop at it for a second too long as she looked around the room.
She shook her head but smiled bigger.
“What about that?” I was pointing to the inflatable space shuttle next to it.
“Uh-uh.”
“Come on, Zoe. Give it up. Where’s the cream?”
“No, this is fun. Keep trying,” she said, jumping up and down.
I didn’t have time for this. I was just about to yell for my mother when I noticed Paws, Jeanine’s bear, was on the desk and not on her pillow where she always left him.
“Please tell me you didn’t.” I reached for the bear.
Paws felt like he’d gained a few pounds and was disturbingly squishy. I gave him a little squeeze, and something dribbled out onto the floor.
Zoe clapped.
That was it. Enough. I’d done my best. My mother was off the bathroom floor. My shift was over.
I snatched the pastry gun out of Zoe’s hands, dragged her and Paws into my parents’ room, showed Paws’s new trick to my mother, and then went back downstairs.
In case you’re wondering, no, there is no way to clean chocolate cream from the inside of a teddy bear. Mom found this place in Nebraska though that can completely remake stuffed animals with new insides, so in six weeks Paws was back, even better than new. Zoe lost her Dessert Days for the entire time he was undergoing reconstructive surgery, but I’m pretty sure she’d tell you it was worth it and that she’d do it again if she got the chance. Just in case, we keep the pastry gun under tight security now.
19
A few days after Doughnut Day, I woke to Mom shouting, “I thought we were done with this!”
I leaned over the side of my bed and peeked through the hole in the floor. Mom, Jeanine, and Zoe were standing in a circle right under my room staring at something I couldn’t see on the hall carpet.
“Zoe, I don’t even know what to say,” Mom said.
Since whatever it was, it wasn’t my fault, I put the pillow over my head and tried to go back to sleep.
It was no use. Josh’s voice was playing on a loop in my head: “Why should you invest in the Doughnut Stop? The real question is: How can you afford not to?”
They were lines from our investor presentation. We’d rehearsed for hours the day before because we were pitching my parents that morning. Before we’d practiced though, I’d come clean about how I’d made Winnie’s recipe my own. Then I’d made Josh taste a doughnut I’d made from the original recipe and a new one and told him that if he didn’t like the new one better, we’d go with the original. Luckily, the new doughnuts tasted a lot like yellow cake with chocolate frosting, which I now know is Josh’s favorite, so there was no contest. If you like breadier, heavier doughnuts—and there’s nothing wrong with those—you’d probably have gone for the original. But the Doughnut Stop’s specialty is the light, cakey doughnut.
“There’s just one problem,” Josh had said after he’d wolfed down the doughnut.
I knew exactly where he was going. “Winnie.”
“We have to tell her,” he said.
“I know. And if she doesn’t like it, I kind of feel like we have to use the original recipe unless we want to make completely different doughnuts, and I don’t want to do that because the whole point was bringing the chocolate cream doughnut back to Petersville.”
“So I guess we just tell her and pray she’s okay with it.”
“But we don’t have to tell her like now or anything.” I wasn’t prepared to deal with Winnie yet.
“Nope. No rush.” Josh clearly wasn’t either.
When Josh and I were preparing for our investor presentation, I told him everything my dad had taught me about making a good pitch. Josh was now a word-punching master. All his lines had these tunes you couldn’t get out of your head like commercials on TV. I’d tried to convince him to do the whole pitch on his own, but he wouldn’t go for it. He said I had to do it with him because the Doughnut Stop was my idea, and investors would want to see the brains behind the operation. In this case, since our only potential investors were my parents, I had to agree with him.
Even with me doing half the pitch, I still wasn’t sure my parents would come through. I know what you’re thinking: the project was their idea. How could they not support you after you did all that work? That’s what Josh thought too. And it’s not that I didn’t see that. I did. But they’d said some things that worried me. Things like, “Tris, even if the doughnut stand never happens, think how much you’ve learned from this process!” Like I’d been playing a round of Life as the doughnut business guy and wasn’t that a lot of fun. They didn’t get that this wasn’t just a game I was wasting time playing till school started. Maybe that’s how it had begun, but it wasn’t like that anymore. Now I was building something real, an actual business with real doughnuts for real people, chocolate-cream-doughnut-starved people.
I got out of bed, put on my good pants, a button-down shirt, and my only tie. Josh and I had decided to dress up to show my parents how serious we were, and also because the book says you have to dress for success.
It must have been a while since I’d worn my good pants, because as I climbed down the ladder, there was a loud, ripping sound. I waited for somebody to laugh, but nobody even looked up.
“I’m just so disappointed in you,” I heard Mom say as I climbed the rest of the way down.
“But I didn’t do it,” Zoe said, stomping her dress-up Cinderella heels.
“It’s just gross,” Jeanine said. “And it means you’re still a baby.”
“I’m not a baby. It’s not mine. Look at it. It doesn’t even look like mine.”
Jeanine and Mom bent over and studied whatever it was on the floor.
“What are we looking at?” I said, peering over Jeanine. “Oh.”
There, on the hall carpet, was a sizable pile of poop.
“She does have a point,” I said.
“What do you mean?” Mom said.
“It doesn’t look like hers.”
“How would you know? Have you been studying her poops?” Jeanine asked.
“No, I haven’t been studying her poops,” I said, giving Jeanine a dirty look.
Would it kill her to stick up for Zoe? I mean, what did I know? Maybe Zoe had taken a poop right there in the middle of the upstairs hall, and yeah, it was completely disgusting, but Zoe didn’t need Jeanine on her case too. That was Mom’s job. “She just never flushes the toilet,” I explained.
Zoe doesn’t like the flush. She doesn’t trust it will be satisfied with sucking down only what’s in the bowl, so when she does flush, which is only when my parents make her, she quickly pulls the lever and takes off like she’s just lit a stick of dynamite.
Just then, my father came up the stairs. “So, this is where the
party is.”
“Zoe pooped on the floor, and now she’s lying about it,” Jeanine said.
Zoe stomped on Jeanine’s foot with the Cinderella shoe. “I did not!”
Jeanine screamed.
“Let me see, honey,” Mom said, bending over to examine Jeanine’s foot. “You’re okay. Go put some ice on it.”
“What happened to using our words, Zo?” Dad said. “Say, ‘sorry.’”
“Sorry.”
“That’s it? You’re not going to punish her?”
“What were you looking for? Firing squad, guillotine perhaps?”
“She broke my toe!”
“So the guillotine then,” Dad said. “Come on, Zo Zo. We’re going to chop off your head.”
Zoe giggled.
“What kind of a message do you think you send by turning this into a joke?”
“Just go get some ice, Jeanine,” Mom said.
Jeanine made a face and staggered off down the hall.
“Now, what are we going to do about this?” Mom pointed at the poop.
Dad squatted and studied it. Then he scooped Zoe up and leaned his forehead against hers. “Zo Zo, is that your poop?”
“No.”
“Is it Tawatty Tawatty Dabu Dabu’s poop?” I asked.
“I told you, they’re gone.”
“All right then.” My father put Zoe down.
“All right then, what?” Mom said.
Dad raised an aha finger. “What we have here is a case of mystery poop.”
“Tom.” Mom rolled her eyes. “Would you please pretend to be an adult?”
“Don’t worry. The kids and I are on the case. Right, guys?” he said, bouncing his eyebrows up and down at us.
“Don’t look at me. I’ve got work to do,” I said.
“Then would my two remaining turd detectives start with cleaning it up, and would whoever left it, please not do it again?” Mom said.
She so still thought it was Zoe’s.
When I got down to the kitchen, Jim the Kidnapper/Carpenter was sitting at the table drinking coffee out of Mom’s “Number One Mom” mug.
“Oh, hi,” I said.
“Morning,” Jim said.
“I thought my dad said the roof was done.”
“It is, Jax,” Jim said, winking at me. He never told my parents about that day he picked me up in the flood, but he called me Jax every now and then just to show me he remembered, which felt like a typical, creepy kidnapper move.
“So, what are you doing here?” I said.
“Tris!” Mom yelled from the top of the stairs. “‘What are you doing here?’ Really?”
“Sorry,” I said more to her than to Jim. It was weird the way he was just sitting there drinking his coffee in our kitchen like he belonged there. Why did I have to play host?
“No apology necessary. You were curious. Curiosity is useful. Certainly more useful than manners,” Jim said, winking again.
“Thanks,” I said, though I wasn’t at all sure he’d meant what he’d said as a compliment. The wink had thrown me. Usually, a wink means the winker and winkie have a secret, like when he’d called me Jax. But what did this wink mean? It could have meant: both you and I know that asking a direct question isn’t offensive even if your mother doesn’t. But then it also could have meant: both you and I know that you’re just a rude kid, and I’m making fun of you for it.
“I’m actually here for you,” Jim said and then took a swig of coffee. “Winnie told me about your doughnut business.”
“She did?”
I hadn’t expected Winnie to be talking up the doughnuts around town, but it was great news that she was. Starting Your Own Business for Dummies says the best kind of advertising is word-of-mouth because it’s free and creates something called buzz.
“Yeah, so she wanted me to get the process rolling on your business license.” He leaned forward and pulled a square of folded paper out of the back pocket of his jeans.
“Business license? For a little stand.”
“If you’re selling stuff, you need a license.”
This had to be some kind of joke he and Winnie had cooked up. No way a kid needed a business license, but I decided to play along. “Okay, let’s say you’re right. Let’s say I need a business license. What’s that got to do with you?”
“As mayor, I’m on the Chamber of Commerce,” he said, his beard stretching wide with his smile.
Of course! Jim the Kidnapper/Carpenter was also the mayor. How had I not seen that coming? Jim the Kidnapper was the mayor, and a twelve-year-old trying to sell doughnuts on the street out of a cardboard box needed a business license.
This wasn’t a joke. This was Petersville.
“Yeah, been almost five years now. Truth is nobody else wants the job, and I’m not too bad at it.” Jim thumped his belly like the extra pounds in there had something to do with his success.
“Okay, fine. I give up. You’re the mayor, and I need a business license. Can you just tell me what I need to do to get this done as fast as possible?”
All I really cared about was that this wasn’t going to slow us down. We had a timeline: get funding; order ingredients; create buzz; grand opening. We didn’t have time for paperwork.
“You just need to present your business plan to the Chamber of Commerce.”
That minute, the front door swung open, and Josh burst through holding a gigantic, stuffed…thing. It looked like something you’d win at a carnival, big and colorful and useless. It was almost as tall as he was, and THE DOUGHNUT STOP was stitched across it in red letters.
“Wow,” I said. “That’s…one big pillow.”
“It’s a doughnut,” Josh grumbled.
“Oh, right, sorry. Now I see it,” I said.
“I know. I know. I told her not to, but she felt bad that she doesn’t have money to invest, so she did this.”
“Your mom?” I asked.
He nodded. “I think she stayed up all night making it. I couldn’t not take it.”
“I get it,” I said. Not just what it meant about his mom, but what it meant about him.
“I like it,” Jim said, cocking his head to one side and studying the doughnut.
“You do?” Josh turned it around to look at the front of it.
“It would be great advertising if we can figure out the right place to put it,” I said.
“We could strap it to the front of my truck,” Jim suggested as he combed his fingers through his beard.
I laughed.
“I’m being serious,” he said.
“Really?” I said.
“Sure.”
“What’s the catch?”
“No catch.”
“But you’ll want us to pay you, right?” He was offering to let us use his truck as a billboard. Of course he’d want something in return.
Jim shook his head.
“I don’t understand. Why would you do that?”
“Why not?” he said with a shrug.
I didn’t say anything. I’d never met a “why not?” person before. In the city, there’s generally more of a “why should I?” kind of vibe.
“Thanks so much,” Josh said, appreciative, but not at all surprised. He must have seen this “why not” thing before.
“Yeah, thanks,” I said. “That would be great. Talk about buzz. A giant doughnut strapped to the front of the mayor’s car is sure to get people excited.”
“Now we just need to get this business license squared away.” Jim tapped the folded-up paper.
“What business license?” Josh said. “Aren’t we doing the investor pitch now?”
Suddenly, I had an idea about how to get Jim what he needed for the license and stay on schedule.
“We’re actually presenting our busines
s plan to my parents this morning,” I said to Jim. “What if you just stayed for that? Then you could get all the information you need for the license.”
“Sounds good to me. Just gotta make sure Harley can get over here.”
“Harley?” I said.
“Harley Turnby. He’s the other half of the Chamber of Commerce. In fact, if we don’t agree, he’s the deciding vote.”
This seemed like good news. How tough could getting a business license be if Mr. Turnby of Turnby’s Random Emporium was in charge?
“Hey, Jax, can I make a suggestion? Before Harley gets here, go change your pants.” He pointed to my butt. “I don’t much care, but Harley’s kind of old school.”
“Oh, right. Thanks.” I quickly untucked my shirt and pulled it down in back.
Jim was no less creepy, but I had to appreciate a mayor who wasn’t going to hold flashing my Knicks boxers through a hole in my chinos against me, not to mention a mayor who was going to strap a six-foot doughnut to the front of his truck just because he couldn’t think of a reason not to.
20
Normally, I think anyone wearing a bow tie looks just like Orville Redenbacher, the guy on the popcorn box, but when Harley Turnby came through our door, which, by the way, required him to duck and turn sideways, the Michelin tire man is who popped into my head. It didn’t surprise me that someone who sells the Flowbee (a haircutting attachment for your vacuum cleaner) didn’t know that bow ties look ridiculous, but I couldn’t understand why Harley didn’t get that they were health hazards for someone his size. The bow tie was clearly strangling him. His face was bright red, and his neck exploded in sweaty rolls out of his shirt collar.
“Doughnuts, huh?” Harley said when he’d finally made it through the door.
“Uh, yeah, doughnuts,” I said and led him to the living room where everyone else was already waiting. I looked around for somewhere to park him, but the only place left was a stool, which he could have used for a number of things but a seat wasn’t one of them.
Mom stood up. “Please, sit here, Mr. Turnby.”
“Thanks,” I mouthed to her as Harley squeezed himself into the armchair she’d been sitting in.
“Ready?” Josh called from a corner of the room.
The Doughnut Fix Series, Book 1 Page 15