“I told you someone must have the cake and they’re late getting here. I’m texting everyone right now. Hardly anyone’s here. I guess you two weren’t the only ones having a late night out.” Annelise catches me looking at her and she winks. “Danielle saw you and Will weaving home.”
No. She is the wrong person to have that information. “Annelise.” I make sure that Jillian hasn’t come out of the bathroom yet. “Can you go for a walk with me?” I really need to do something about my stomach; it’s killing me.
Annelise follows me in the opposite direction of the bathrooms, farther up the hill. I’m not sure how I’m going to approach her, but I need her cooperation.
“Parker. That baby is so cute, isn’t he?” she asks.
“Yeah. It was really nice of you to help out like that.” I wince. It’s like a fist is squeezing my insides.
“Do you really mean that?” She stops and I don’t have a choice. Now we’re standing uh … chest to chest. The discomfort doubles. “I really want to show you how helpful I can be and that, you know, I really like kids and stuff.”
“Oh. I totally see that.” Oh God. She’s got those big eyes and I’m remembering the day I broke up with her and how she was convinced I showed up to surprise her. Her eyes are big with expectation. I remember that she’s going to benefit from the ultimate plan, too, she just can’t know how, yet. Right now, it’s all about getting the right people all in line. “But I need your help in a different way. I need the Cake Girl …”
“She’s the Cake Princess now, we changed her name.”
What a surprise, Princess Annelise. “Oh, I like it. Anyway, I really need her to keep delivering cakes to Will.”
“I think the cake is just late today.” She pulls her phone from her pocket, reads the latest news.
I watch her closely as I reveal my strategy. “Well, let’s hope so. But we need to keep the cakes coming, all the way up to the hockey tournament.”
“I guess I could put a message on the fanpage.” Was she always this good at deception?
“Great. And, could you do me another big favor?” I touch her shoulder and she instantly loses interest in the phone. “I mean, this is so important and it will be so great for you.”
“For me?”
“Yeah, if this works out, you’ll get exactly what you’ve always wan ted.”
She takes a deep breath. And her chest … it really expands. “What is it?”
“The night of the hockey tournament, I want the Cake Princess to reveal who she is. Everyone will be there and she’ll be the most popular girl there.”
Her eyes shift from one of my eyes to the other, then over my shoulder. She’s thinking. My stomach pains double. I knew it was going too well. “But what if Will doesn’t really like his secret admirer? Won’t she be crushed? I don’t want her to get hurt. I like her.”
I know the “her” we’re talking about here is Annelise and she wants to know if I’m going to pick her at the end of the game. I have to find a way to tell her without telling her that she should trust me. “Well, she’ll bounce back. Think about the Bachelor and how he picked that girl, but it turns out she wasn’t the one. And then she got her own show.”
She nods. “The Cake Princess can get her own show. Very clever, Parker … I’ll work my magic.”
“Thanks for helping me out here.” I rub my stomach. “You have no idea what this is going to mean.”
“Actually, I think I do.” She winks at me. “But it will be our little secret.”
I can see Jillian’s returned to the blanket. “Oh and the part about me being out late last night with Will, can that be our secret, too?” I explain that we were strategizing and I don’t want anyone else to know about it.
“Got it. I’ll go to the blanket first. You follow later. Just like old times.” I wonder if all the big game players get gut aches when they’re making the most important moves. The greater good has got to be someone’s vision, a future for the boys and a legacy for the high school. And the coach has to keep the team motivated; that’s all I’m doing. Annelise will get a payoff. Not my girlfriend. But girlfriend of the class president.
Chantal
Sugar, Sugar Hangover.
I smelled her first: coffee, mint gum, and Burt’s Bees hand cream. The smell of organized efficiency. I stayed curled under my comforter, my eyes delicately closed. I wanted to feel what she would do. Her feet stepped across my carpet quickly enough that I got the sense she was glad to see me. And her hand, I know from the overwhelming smell of shea butter, hovered over my forehead. She was indecisive about whether to caress my forehead the way she did when I was small and I had nightmares. The air shifted and I knew that she’d lost her nerve to be the mom she used to be.
I opened my eyes. “Hey, Mom.” She turned around.
“Oh … Chantal. I was … I was … going to let you sleep a bit.”
I yawned and stretched, watching her observe me, my tangled hair, the pimple on my chin. I saw something in her face, disappointment or regret, but it was gone too soon to know for sure. She’d only been away for a week, but she looked different. The worry she always carried around was still etched in the tightness of her shoulders and jaw, and now I sensed something else. Sadness. Hurt. I was about to ask her if anything was wrong, but she spoke first.
“I brought you something.” She reached into the pocket of her Audrey Hepburn capris, and pulled out a rock. Gray with a white circle around it. I sat up and cradled it in my hands.
“You brought me a rock?” Her usual gifts of umbrellas, slippers, and pajamas were practical. “This will make a great paperweight.” I smiled. I was determined that I would find a way to make at least this morning pleasant. I thought about Mitch. My smile grew wider, even if it was misplaced.
“About the rock.” My mother pulls the end of a thick strand of hair through her fingers, in front of the first finger, behind the second, over and over, in a pattern that makes an eight or an infinity symbol. I long for cupcakes; my mother twists her hair. “That rock.” She points at it. “It felt right.”
“Oh.” Now she was sounding a bit like Jillian’s mother who claimed she felt the pull of the moon and the tides so acutely, she could feel the earth turning on its axis. “Thanks.” I smiled.
“I picked it up and it felt right.” She stared at her rock, my rock, while she talked. “When your father and I were dating we’d go on walks, down by the Columbia River and he’d choose a rock. He’d say, ‘This one feels like it’s meant for you.’ He knew what I needed. A rock lasts forever. And I needed that then.”
So it wasn’t just a rock, there’s some kind of lesson I’m supposed to learn. Or she was giving me a concealed message like she’s leaving my dad. Maybe he’s secretly gone to Lettuce Loaf on his own to avoid the conflict, the separation of belongings, the negotiation over me. “I thought you went for some course.” I knew my word choice—some course—would grate on her.
“We had free time.”
“And you collected rocks?” It was good to get her on another subject. We could argue about the rock instead of its hidden messages.
“I went out on walks. Like I used to. I needed to clear my head.” Again with the strange look on her face that I couldn’t read. This time I didn’t want to ask her what was wrong. She shook her head, tried on a smile. “It’s good to see you. To know that everything’s okay. Everything is okay, isn’t it?”
“Yep.” If I’d even imagined I might tell my mother how I’d changed my life in the past week, all thought of that was gone. I’m not some teenager who is under the misguided assumption that her mother would freak when she’d actually understand. We have a track record. And my mother has issues.
“Oh … good. So … there you go. A rock.”
“A rock.”
We smiled.
Two hours later, she’s at her office and I’m biking to Williamson’s Lake. We sort of agreed this morning that I wouldn’t tell her what’s really happening and she wouldn’t tell
me. One day she’ll hunt me down, grill me with questions until she’s satisfied that I’m not the worst she fears: about to get fat, get pregnant, get a B in any subject, lose my interest in intellectual pursuits, or reject her.
My dad used to tell me she was high-strung. As I got older he used words like perfectionism and anxiety, phrases like, it was tough for her growing up. Someday she’ll tell me a piece of the truth about herself, offering up some explanation for her behavior. Maybe she’ll tell me that story again, the one that always makes me cry inside. When she was ten, her mother left her in charge of her four brothers and a sister who was two years old, but didn’t tell her where she was going or when she’d be back. My mother was afraid to ask her dad, since he was worried about his business having already gone bankrupt once. She did what she had to do. She lied to the teachers, told them all the kids were sick and she couldn’t go to school. After a week passed without even a phone call from her mother she thought she’d never go back again. I wanted to go to school, my mother says when she tells this story. I was only ten years old. That’s the part that gets me the most. Eventually her mother came back but my mother, her daughter, never stopped worrying about when she’d leave the next time. My mother keeps things inside and she worries over everything, but she would never give up on me. Just like she never gave up on her siblings. At least that’s what I want to believe.
Suddenly I’m imagining how badly I’d get hurt if I rode my bike over the next steep drop or crashed into the snack shack at Williamson’s Lake. The longer I ride and tell myself that there is no problem, the faster my heart races. My hands begin to sweat. Crud. Crud. Crud. I haven’t felt this, panic, so acutely since before I started baking cakes. I need Jillian. She can always talk me down. I pedal faster. I do not look down.
Will
Batons?
It’s hotter than two rats making out in a wool sock, but Team Popular forces me to stay on the hill. Annelise’s texting has convened more than thirty kids, all of them waiting for the next cake. And if it it doesn’t show I’ll be the guy whose secret admirer dumped him. My head pounds and the five bottles of water I’ve consumed don’t seem to be helping. You can understand why I want to go for a swim. Since the Facebook announcement that the Cake Princess will show us who she really is at the hockey tournament, plans have gone guano.
“Two cakes,” I told Annelise, “that’s it.” I tried to keep my eyes focused on her face instead of her chest to show that I was sincere. “You need to slow the chuck wagon down.”
“Will.” She set her phone down to add another layer of coconut oil to her skin. “Enjoy the ride. This is as close to the paparazzi as you’re ever going to get.”
Even with my sunglasses on and my back against the towel I can feel the rush of the crowd when someone we know starts up the hill. The whispers start. Is she carrying something? No, it’s Chantal. No cake.
Chantal. I ease myself up to sitting. Last night’s convo with her definitely went sideways. I wasn’t so drunk I don’t remember it. And what I remember was her frickin’ attitude. As if she thought she was better than me.
“You didn’t get the cake, either?” Annelise asks.
“Cake?” Chantal raises her eyebrows.
Annelise reminds Chantal of the biggest event that’s happened since the forest fire that got us all evacuated three years ago. “And … the Cake Princess is going to show us who she really is at the hockey tournament. It’s on Facebook. Everyone is going to be there.”
“Fun.” Chantal says. She glances at me and I know she’s thinking that I don’t deserve to be the object of some girl’s affection. She’s thinking she wishes the secret admirer would end it all by Tuesday so she wouldn’t have to go out with me. Whatev. She owes me.
Now Jillian, Parker, and the rug rats join us for the lunch break and all those boys spread throughout the crowd acting like they belong here with the high-fives and the hockey talk. I revert to my behind-the-shades and on-the-towel pose, hoping no one can tell that I’m as jumpy as a rabbit being chased by a dog through a bowling alley.
Annelise’s phone pings and the five or six people nearest me go silent. Maybe this is it, I hear one of them whisper. “It” is the message that reveals who has the cake and why they haven’t gotten here yet. We wait. Finally, Annelise speaks, “Guys? Quiet everyone. Quiet. Oh. Wow. This is unbelievable. Okay. Listen to this.”
Annelise loves to be the center of attention. Obviously that’s why she’s baking all these cakes. “As you know, my dad is on the tourism board. He’s been talking to the mayor and some other people about our summer project. And they’re going to turn it into a tourism event. We can have it downtown. They’re going to block off the street and bring in floodlights from the high school and bleachers for the fans. The Dairy Barn is going to sell ice cream. And that’s just the beginning.”
Conversations erupt. Some girl four people away from me says she’ll organize a halftime show with baton twirlers. It’s hockey, I want to yell. There is no halftime. My head pounds. I need water. Lots of water. Some towns have strawberry festivals or theater days or regattas on the lake. Ours has a charity hockey tournament organized by high school kids and some crazy girl baking cakes. I know I’m supposed to be celebrating. Parker’s over there giving me the nod like I told you this was going to be great.
For real? This could be disaster.com. I’m supposed to be happy about this, my chance at class president and Annelise, but I’m thinking if the secret admirer has backed out, that wouldn’t be so bad. I wouldn’t get what I want, but I also wouldn’t have to suffer any embarrassment on a plan that goes wrong.
I’m composing my exit speech in my head, for the moment when it’s clear that the cake isn’t going to show.
Then the crowd’s energy shifts. The cake has arrived.
Chantal
Rule Change.
I make sure that I’m at the back of the mass of kids as Mitch approaches. It’s hell to be sort-of-short in this situation. I have to look around people’s heads to get a clear view of the cake and Mitch. His hair is perfect today and he’s simply dressed but interesting—rolled-up jeans and a plain T-shirt and a new ball cap. He’s so … noticeably unnoticeable. I Like Him, I think, I Like Him A Lot.
“Chantal.” Jillian pulls my elbow, moves me closer to the center of the action.
“She Likes Me, She Likes Me A Lot,” Will says as he studies the card.
“Told you. Told you,” Annelise taunts.
“Strange you were right on that one. Like maybe you had some insider knowledge …”
Annelise looks at me. Ever since the day I sat in her car and gave her advice on how to get Parker back, she thinks I’ve got the answers. She doesn’t know I’m the Cake Princess, but right now she’s looking at me. At me! And everyone else does, too. Crud. Now … they’re going to think I’m connected. I feel a brain rush and the words form a defense line that I may regret later.
“What’s even stranger is that some girl is choosing Will to secretly admire.” I glance at him for only a second and then at everyone else. “Just kidding.”
And they all laugh. They laugh because a crowd always looks for someone to be different, someone to target. Today it’s Will.
“Bitch.” Will says it playfully, as if we’re on some MTV show, but it doesn’t feel like we’re friends. Not even close.
“Aw …” Mitch rubs Will’s shoulder. “Don’t be such a prima donna. You’re the one getting cakes. All the guys are jealous …”
Will shakes off Mitch’s hand, faces him with fists clenched. He’s going to fight Mitch?
“Let’s have some cake.” Parker pushes between them. As he whispers to Will, Jillian starts slicing the cake and Annelise pulls out the plates, napkins, and forks. Soon slivers of cake are dispersed.
“Chantal.” Mitch is next to me. The sound of his voice sends reverberations of I Like Him A Lot through me. I’m not kidding. The sound of his voice, warm and rich with resonance, reminds me of a cel
lo being played. An Italian cello. “You have to try this cake.” He drives a fork through a corner of it, holds it up for me. “It’s amazing,” he says.
“You really think so?”
He nods as the cake tickles my tongue, the delicate crumbs dissolving so pleasantly with the frosting. “Oh. It really is good. I wonder where the Cake Princess bought it.” I hope that my lie is believable.
“This is definitely not from a mix,” Annelise says. “And I think we need to send the Cake Princess a message that she’s got to take pictures of the cakes from now on, before she delivers them. Like, I think we need to make sure no one is going to, like, copy her.” She looks at me. Again. I stare at my fingernails.
Now I have to document my deliveries. If I make any more.
“Yeah, Will only needs one girlfriend,” Parker says.
Will punches Parker in the shoulder playfully.
“Or video,” Mitch says. “She could make a video and it’ll be like the Oscars. And the winner is …” Mitch has never spoken this many words in a group. Giving him the cake must have given him permission. As if the cake said, you’re one of us.
Jillian suggests that the Cake Princess might be working alone and, therefore, creating a video would be difficult. Mitch turns to me and says that one person could not make a cake a day and have it be this great. I nod in agreement.
“Okay.” Annelise stops chewing the end of her pen. “The Cake Princess is going to make a video of herself. We’ll show it at the hockey game. I’ll let her know.”
“I’m sure you are in close contact with her …” Will leans in close enough that surely Annelise can smell his hair gel.
“Facebook.”
“Right.” Will sits back, defeated.
I can’t object. They’ll suspect me. Maybe I should just tell them now. It’s me. I’m the one. Then I won’t have to make a movie or keep this a secret from my mother. Mitch will know I like him. That will be enough, won’t it?
I start to feel a bit faint, maybe from the heat or the excitement or the sugar rush. Did I even eat breakfast today? I think I was too nervous, worried that I would miss Mitch delivering my cake. That was all I wanted today, Mitch delivering the cake.
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