“O-kay …”
He is not making this easy. “I need your help. Okay?”
He sits back in his chair, nods.
“Our best friends are dating and if I’m not friends with you then I’ll be the third point in a triangle and that’s always … awkward. But if it’s the four of us, I’ll get to hang out with Jillian and we can do a summer project.”
He says nothing, but his face says he’s skeptical.
The panic feeling comes in a rush. My hands shake. I wonder if I’m hypoglycemic, if I should risk pulling a cupcake from my bag. I could tell him it’s my emergency low-sugar stash. I press into the back of my chair. I can almost hear the squished cupcakes cry in protest.
“Well, I do want to do a summer project because it … gives structure … to the summer.” Even though I’m breathing hard between each sentence, I am communicating. Will is listening. “But I miss Jillian, too.” That is not a lie. Even though it’s not the entire truth.
Will strokes the patches of stubble on his chin. “I could be down with that. As long as I get something out of it.” He leans in so close that when he talks I see three silver fillings in his bottom molars. “I need a girlfriend. And you can help me out there.”
“Um … um …” This is too strange. I’ve got Annelise convinced to flirt with Will to make Parker jealous and I’m planning to send him cakes that I’m sure he’ll believe are from Annelise and now he wants me to help him find a girlfriend? Some other girl could wreck everything. I think fast and, hopefully, smart. “My only real friend is Jillian, and she’s, like, taken. I’d help you if I could.”
“You can.” He stares at me. Really stares at me.
My eyes must go wide as the panic sets in again. He wants me to be his girlfriend?
“Relax.” He laughs, then, whispers, “You’re just for show.” He motions his head toward the kitchen.
Oh I get it. The classic villain move—make friends with the good guys to convince people that you’re good. He needs me to keep his mother happy.
“So … you’ll help me with getting the four of us to do a summer project if I pretend to be your girlfriend.” I cross my arms and sit back. I thought the summer project would keep Will busy and, more importantly, away from me. He could be in charge of one thing, me of another, and then I’d have lots of space to bake and deliver the cakes. And now he wants me to pretend to be his girlfriend? Doesn’t that imply time spent together, just the two of us? “Well, it could work, but we have to have rules.”
“Rules?” He clenches his jaw.
“Relax.” I smile. “I have rules for everything. It makes things easier, not harder.”
“It’s not a problem. I can come up with rules, too.”
“That’s fair, I guess.” I take a deep breath. This is not easy. “Um … fi rst … you and me … we are friends. Only friends. No physical contact. It’s … I don’t really need the complication.”
“Agreed.” He nods. “Except. Around my mom, we definitely need to make it look like we could be more than friends, okay?” He waits for my agreement. “And around everyone else at the lake, we’re just friends.”
I nod and keep my face neutral. They don’t need to know about this. He wants to make sure Annelise thinks he’s available. Yes. This works. I try to ignore the disappointment that twists in my stomach. I know I’m not what he, or any other guy wants. I try to imagine myself as fifteen or twenty pounds lighter. Would that make me better looking?
“This is a deal breaker.” He interrupts my self-flogging. “You’re going to have to trust me. Like if I hold your hand or something it’s only a part of our image. Okay? You can’t, like, debate with me in front of people.”
I nod. We go through some more rules: no dating other people because that could wreck our “image,” no showing up at each other’s house unannounced, but no refusing to come over when invited. Suddenly Will asks, “How do I know you’re not playing me after what happened at the party?”
“I have never been a vengeful person.” I say that straight up. I don’t think I have ever wanted to hurt someone, even if they’ve hurt me. Until now.
“Everyone wants revenge, Chantal. You just hide it.” I hate his smugness and, interestingly, anger fuels my ability to think.
“Trust me,” I say. “Like you said.”
Parker
Not a Masked Man.
I really wasn’t out to rescue her. I walked to her house as a test. See, if I could pass her house without knocking on the door, I knew she was a temporary date, not the kind of girl I wanted to date-date.
But, of course, it got complicated. My mother would have called the cops. I saw the swarm of boys wailing on that guy and his girlfriend’s truck with their hockey sticks and I was, like, holy crap, this is unbelievable. Jillian’s mom was screaming. The two littlest kids, and they were in diapers or those pull-up pants, they were calling him a bastard. By the time the truck tires screeched out of the cul-de-sac, the mom was gone and the boys surrounded Jillian. She covered her face with her hands, and I almost turned around to leave, but I was hooked, like watching some YouTube viral thing you know is too raw. It was, as Will would say, White Trash Central.
And this was the girl who beat me in a foot race, the girl who was number two in our class, the girl who didn’t sleep around, with anyone. She wasn’t white trash, no matter how much it looked like it from the outside.
I cheer for the underdog: the Edmonton Oilers, the Cleveland Browns, the Baltimore Orioles. I like Will even though he’s a scrapper. From where I live, it’s easy to succeed. For people like Will and Jillian, it’s not.
I walked up the driveway carrying one of the abandoned hockey sticks.
“Parker. It’s not a good time.” Jillian picked up both of the little boys, one on each side. They gripped her sweatshirt, strangely contorting her shape, and buried their runny noses in her neck. She didn’t seem to notice that she looked like hell; her hair was back in a greasy ponytail, her eyes ringed in yesterday’s makeup. I’d never seen Annelise that rough; even the times we’d fallen asleep watching a movie at her place she woke up near perfect.
“I … uh …” I searched Jillian’s face for what she wanted to hear. She chewed the flaky skin on her bottom lip. The boys seemed to be waiting to find out what I was going to say, because none of them moved. “Um … I just came by to see how you were doing.”
“It’s embarrassing.” Jillian stared at the ground, like the shoe gazer, trying to figure out which pedal to play next.
“It’s life.” I shrugged. Man, I was dying, like playing a show and realizing the crowd had drifted away. And then, channeling a geek philosopher/health teacher, I added, “Anyway. It’s not your fault.”
One of the three boys sniffled behind me. His brother punched him in the arm. “Quit cryin’, ya baby, or I’ll give you somethin’ to cry about.”
I laughed. I couldn’t help myself. Will used to punch me all the time to toughen me up. Just like us, these kids did stupid, brave shit like attack a grown man and his truck with hockey sticks. I pointed at the slivers of mirror spiking the driveway. I laughed. The three boys with the hockey sticks sort of came around.
“Hey, you got any nets?” I asked the crier. He looked up at me through his flop of brown hair. He frowned but I figured I had him. When I was his age and all my brothers were too busy to hang, sometimes a miracle happened and one of them would take me out to throw the ball. The three boys whooped to the backyard to get the nets and goalie pads.
“Thanks.” Jillian, I could tell, was more relieved than enthusiastic. “I’ll … um … get the Double Minor in some clothes.”
“Double Minor?”
“You know, two penalties at the same time. Hockey?”
“I know. It’s just … funny. Really funny.”
“You think so?”
I nodded.
“Well, if you’re still up for it, I guess we can go for ice cream.”
“Sure.” I wanted to r
each out and kiss her. I wanted her to know that I wasn’t looking for the emergency exit.
Jillian
Not Cinderella.
It’s happening …
No. No. No. Not it.
Parker and me. Dating. Girlfriend and boyfriend. The Parkillian, Chantal says.
Parker laughs; he laughs at things Chantal says and he laughs at things the boys say. He laughs. We laugh together. All that laughing is good. It’s all good. Maybe this is how it’s supposed to happen when you have a boyfriend: you become happier.
But I worry. I worry that I’m a pity girlfriend. What he saw would make anyone pity me. It’s not like he can relate to my life. He has had the same dad his whole life. And his mom was head classroom mom every year of elementary school, in charge of bulletin boards and parties. My mom dropped off a bag of chips at Halloween. I would date me—that’s how sorry I feel for me.
The boys love him. He plays hockey, he wrestles, and he listens to their detailed stories of television show plots. He reads bedtime stories, with funny voices. And my mom likes him. She’s always leaning over and whispering to me, “He’s a real keeper.” But look at all the fish she’s thrown out.
The worst and weirdest thing is that before Parker was at my house all I dreamed about was kissing him and … (You know what those sorts of dreams can be like.) Now, sometimes when he stops me in the laundry room or in the kitchen and he leans in to kiss me, I am strangely reluctant.
I wonder how you get rid of a curse against men in a house.
Chantal
A Planning Princess.
As a straight-A student I appear to be capable of many things. And I am—but not quickly or without the proper research. Example: when I was in the sixth grade my teacher said I took too long solving math word problems. This was inexplicable, she told my mother, because everyone knew I was smart. So I went into training: train A left the station at 1 P.M. traveling at 40 mph, train B left at 4 P.M. traveling at 60 mph … you get the idea. A month later the teacher was asking me to solve problems at the board, claiming she knew all along that I would “just get it.” It was more about not giving up than it was about a sudden magical insight.
It isn’t surprising, then, that when I left Will’s house I went directly to the library where I spent the next three hours poring over cookbooks. I needed to be sure that I could create one beautiful, delicious, scrumptious cake after another. Let’s face it, the cheesecake tasted good but it looked sad. The SRC2 was an unlikely-to-be-repeated miracle save. And the Vampire Vanilla Cupcakes were delicious (though I never shared them with Will)—but you repeat vanilla/ vanilla too many times and your audience is going to get bored. I had to be sure that I was up to the task.
I started with Nigella’s How to Be a Domestic Goddess. It isn’t so much about being a domestic goddess, but feeling like a domestic goddess. You don’t see too many domestic goddesses my age around, but not many girls know how useful it can be.
“Everyone seems to think it’s hard to make a cake (and no need to disillusion them),” Nigella writes, “but it doesn’t take more than twenty-five minutes to make and bake a tray of muffins or a sponge layer cake, and the returns are high: you feel disproportionately good about yourself afterwards. This is what baking, what all of this book, is about: feeling good, wafting along in the warm, sweet-smelling air, unwinding …”
Yes. I devoured her recipes. Her burnt–brown sugar cupcakes, her almond cake, and her dozen variations on chocolate layers captivated me. Her book alone was enough, but the Dewey decimal system is such a hook: 641 is now my favorite subdivision of the preferred 640 class, Home Economics and Family Living. I found The Art & Soul of Baking by Cindy Mushet, Baking, From My Home to Yours by Dorie Greenspan, Pierre Herme’s Desserts by Pierre Herme, oh, and cookbooks by Anna Olson, Alice Medrich, and Rose Levy Beranbaum. I studied their formulations. I realized that I’m no longer baking to eat cake—I’m in love with creating cake. And with the message I’m sending out. The sweet revenge is always there.
I should have slouched all the way home, with the three thickest books in my arms and the additional weight of a bag of baking supplies, but I walked with a new confidence.
When I open the front door, I’m startled the radio is playing until I remember that I left it on, a strategy my mother insisted would keep the burglars away. Michael Bublé serenades me, inspiring me with his “Lost” lyrics. “You are not alone,” I sing with him. “I’m always there with you.” The crescendo to the final chorus is coming and I grab the cordless to serve as my microphone.
I stop singing. As if someone has just walked into the room. And, really, she has.
The flashing light on the phone tells me someone’s left a message. Crud. I was supposed to phone my mother three hours ago. I listen to her message. She’d already texted me her hotel phone number and room number and if I don’t want her to call me every hour for the next twenty-four hours I’d better text her back. I find my phone and text. I am fine. Love you. I try to recover that feeling of … freedom … again, but it’s covered, as if a blob of black ick has dripped on my sweet, buttery yellow day.
I need to forget that I only have unencumbered use of the kitchen until my mom comes home on Saturday; that’s three nights. I pile my groceries in a pyramid on one counter, the cookbooks in a stack on the table. You can handle Mom, I repeat three times. I have to banish worry and doubt so I can bake.
Suddenly, I realize that I’m hungry. Starving. Twelve splendid cupcakes sit on the counter next to my bricks of unsalted butter. I take one and cut it in half, one half for now and the other for five minutes from now. But after the first bite, I pause. Do I want a cupcake? My brain spins. I sort of feel like something healthy. An apple. A peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Maybe a glass of ice water. I’m so thirsty. After I feast on solid brain food, I stare at my cupcakes. Is it fair if I no longer want to eat you? Can I love you enough by looking at you?
The radio plays a summer song, Sheryl Crow singing “All I Wanna Do.” I dance around the kitchen. Who knew that living in my house alone would be so much fun? And that I would be smarter than ever? And that I am such. A fantastic. Singer. And dancer. I dance and let my brain cells go to work for me. My invisible audience cheers.
The solution is easy. I’ll give the cupcakes away. But … the obvious recipients, Jillian and her brothers, won’t work. It’s not that I have to keep my cake baking a secret from Jillian. It’s that I want to. It’s sort of like those makeover shows on TV, where the girl goes shopping in New York with thousands of dollars and she gets her hair and her makeup done and then when she goes home, everyone throws a party for her and she walks in and it’s a big ta da? I want to be that girl. I want my moment. When I surprise them with my baking expertise. I know Jillian will understand.
Before the cupcakes leave my home, I will treat them to a photo shoot. Then I’ll parade them over to Mrs. Ellis next door. After I explain the art and soul of my newly renamed Very Vanilla Cupcakes, I’ll ask her if I can keep her beautiful mixer for a few more days. Problem solved. Next !
The rest of the evening is faultless.
I cream six ounces of unsalted butter with three quarters of a cup of sugar, beating them until very light—almost white—in color. I add three healthy large eggs, warmed to room temperature, mixing completely between each one and, finally, I trickle in heavenly scented vanilla. Honestly, if I was only allowed to smell one thing for the rest of my life I might choose vanilla.
The dry ingredients of sifted cake flour, baking soda, and salt go into a bowl and I whisk them together before I add them, alternately, with the sour cream to the egg batter. I’m careful not to under-or overmix. I pour the batter into the prepared pan (that’s baking speak for buttered and floured) and let it bake in the 350-degree oven for thirty minutes. My joy is irrepressible as I retrieve the exquisitely domed, light, and evenly colored layer from the oven. Success! Again! If only everything were so predictable.
With some of Nigel
la’s ease, I create the same frosting I made the night before, only this time with a little cherry extract and several drops of red food coloring. It takes away the emptiness of a long night alone. Pink pizazz for a girl who is hopeful that life is on an upswing.
Jillian
The Unexpected and Unexplained.
I lost the debate with my mother.
I have won every debate I’ve prepared for, except for the ones that matter the most.
It started when she announced that with Dad 3 leaving town she couldn’t afford to put Ollie in day care for the next two months. I’d known this was coming; I’d listened on the other side of her bedroom door as she talked to a girlfriend on the phone.
Ollie was down for a nap and the Hat Trick and Double Minor were playing video games. I knew I’d have about thirty minutes before a fight broke out. I found my mother sitting in one of our plastic lawn chairs in the backyard. She appeared to be half-ready for work wearing her nursing-home scrub top and her denim cutoff short shorts. She rested her feet in the plastic kiddie pool. She was smoking again? Her right hand held a cigarette to her lips and she inhaled, held the smoke in her lungs, rested her head against the back of the lawn chair and exhaled, a thin, toxic, sighing stream. A lighter and a pack of Marlboro Lights lay in the grass.
I wasn’t sure I could cover each of my debate points, wasn’t sure that she’d let me talk until I was done. I handed her my list of arguments, printed from the laptop Dad 2 gave me before he moved out.
“I don’t think it’s appropriate for me to babysit Ollie while you’re at work this summer,” I began. “Developmentally he needs more stimulation than I can provide while I’m trying to take care of the other boys.”
My mother smiled as she looked over the paper. “Those boys have each other, that’s the good part of having them in sets.”
Her smile encouraged me. Maybe we could talk about this. “But they fight, too, and they get into trouble. They tore the fence down, twice, last summer. And I wasn’t watching Ollie then.”
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