Alexis and the Perfect Recipe

by Coco Simon

  I froze for a second.

  “Hello?” he said again.

  “No! Come! It’s not too late! It’s . . . a buffet. One more person won’t make a difference. Don’t worry. Just come! I’m sure she’d be happy to see you.” I said, crossing my fingers. Please say yes, please say yes. I hoped for Dylan’s sake.

  He paused. “Well, if you think it’s okay . . . Um, who is this?”

  “I’m Alexis, her sister, and my mom is here, and she’s nodding, so it’s totally fine for you to come,” I lied again, holding my crossed fingers up in the air. I looked over at Dylan. Her face was hidden in her hands as she waited for the final verdict.

  “Oh, okay, that’s really nice,” Noah said, sounding very relieved. “Thanks! So, I’ll be there at seven, right?”

  “Yup, seven it is. See you there!” I sang out and uncrossed my fingers to switch to a thumbs-up sign before hanging up.

  “Yessss!” Dylan screamed as soon as I put the phone back on its base. “Oh, Alexis, you are the best! Thank you, thank you so much!” She jumped up and grabbed me in a big hug.

  She and Meredith and Skylar started yelling and dancing around together in a circle. “Yay! Noah’s coming!”

  At that moment Mom poked her head in to see what the noise was all about. “He’s coming,” I whispered. She didn’t need to ask who.

  “Phew,” she said, and with a wink, she closed the door.

  This was going to be a great night.

  CHAPTER 14

  Nothing > Friends!

  Girls, you look spectacular!” my father said proudly as he wrapped his arms around Dylan and me for the photographer.

  “Gorgeous,” my mother agreed.

  “You two look pretty great, yourselves,” I said. And they did.

  We had arrived early, along with Meredith and Skylar, to make sure everything was set up just right. I checked the cupcakes first, of course, but the restaurant had arranged them beautifully on three tiers of a gold cake stand. They looked really pretty and I knew they’d taste even better!

  Dylan looked really happy about the cupcakes and gave me a hug as we stood in front of the display. “Thank you,” she whispered. She looked really beautiful in her gown, and I even started to tear up a little. I think I was just relieved that we were done with all those weeks of arguing, the cupcakes were done, and this day was finally here!

  I watched as Dylan glanced nervously at the front doors. I knew how she felt. I kept waiting to see handsome Matt walk through the door myself (never mind that he’d be with Emma!) and had gone to the ladies’ room twice to check my appearance in the mirror.

  I had worn my hair down and in loopy curls (thanks to Meredith). I had on a little bit of Mom-approved makeup and a tiny bit of vanilla spice perfume (thanks to Dylan). I was wearing the fuzzy pink dress (thanks to Mia) with a gold chain belt of my mother’s and some gold sandals of Dylan’s. I had a chunky ice-cube necklace from Mia, and it looked fantastic. I had to admit, I was looking pretty good.

  The band was warming up, and my father asked them to play a little bit of “The Way You Look Tonight,” so we could practice our dance. They played the whole thing and when we finished our dance, the whole band applauded!

  Just before seven, people started to arrive. That’s when I got really, really nervous. Luckily, Mia and Katie arrived together right at the start. Emma had gone home after getting ready, so she could come with her family. I wasn’t sure what I would say to her when she came. Still, I watched the door eagerly for the arrival of the Taylors—and for Noah!

  Mia and Katie were getting a soda by the bar and I was saying hi to Dylan’s godmother when Sydney and Callie walked in! And would you believe Callie was wearing that black Dancing with the Stars-type dress from Icon!

  I rushed over to Dylan. “Look who’s here!” I said angrily, grabbing her arm.

  She looked at the door, just as a gorgeous, tall, blond guy walked in.

  “Noah!” she screamed.

  “Noah? No, no, not him!” I said. “He’s cute though! No, Sydney and Callie are here! There they are!” I pointed across the room to where they were standing.

  “Did you invite them?” Dylan asked as she hurried to the door to meet Noah. She didn’t seem concerned at all that the devilish duo had crashed her party!

  “Of course not!” I said, trying to keep up with her.

  “Callie is Jenna Wilson’s little sister, right? Jenna’s here,” said Dylan. Of course! Callie’s older sister was on cheerleading with Dylan. So of course she’d be invited, but that didn’t explain Callie and Sydney.

  “Why don’t you go find out why they’re here?” Dylan said just as we got to the door. “I’m going to say hi to Noah.”

  I watched as Noah kissed Dylan on the cheek, and then Dylan took his hand, guiding him toward the drinks. I was happy for Dylan that Noah showed up, but superannoyed that she wasn’t mad that Sydney and Callie had shown up at her party uninvited! (And after the hard time she’d given me about inviting my friends!)

  I stared at Sydney and Callie for a minute, trying to figure out what I wanted to do. Just then Callie pulled Sydney with her across the room, toward an older girl who I now recognized as Callie’s sister. Jenna had been talking with her friends, and turned around when Callie tapped her on the shoulder. Jenna seemed genuinely shocked to see Callie and Sydney and looked really annoyed.

  Mia and Katie came over. “Did you invite them?” Mia asked, nodding her head toward Sydney and Callie.

  “As if!” I said.

  “Then why are they here?” Katie asked.

  “I . . . ,” I started to say, but then something—or rather, someone—caught my eye. It was Emma, with the rest of the Taylors. I wanted to run across the room to greet them, but then I remembered my fight with Emma, and I held back.

  I checked my dress and my hair, patting everything nervously as the Taylors walked toward me. Jake looked really cute in a little jacket and tie, and Matt and even Sam looked, frankly, gorgeous in their suits.

  “Hi, Alexis, darling! Don’t you look beautiful!” Mrs. Taylor said, greeting me with a kiss. Mr. Taylor did the same as Mrs. Taylor looked around the room. “Now, where’s your mom? Wow, it looks wonderful in here! What a lot of planning you’ve all done! Oh, there she is. I’ll go say hello. Come on, sweetie.” And Emma’s parents took off, leaving their kids standing with me.

  Jake went up to Mia and tugged on her dress to say hi, and they and Katie began chatting about law enforcement, Jake’s favorite subject.

  Sam said, “Great party. Oh, wow, there’s Dylan!” and he walked over to her.

  Then it was just me, Matt, and Emma. It felt really awkward. I hadn’t made eye contact with Emma yet.

  “Hey, would you guys like a soda?” I finally said, looking somewhere between the two of them.

  “Sure,” Matt answered. “Why don’t I get something for you two?”

  Emma and I looked at each other, and suddenly we both burst out laughing. Hard! We couldn’t stay mad at each other, especially not on such a big night.

  Emma put her arm through mine. “Sure,” she told Matt. “I’ll have a Sprite.”

  “Me too, thanks,” I said, giving him my best smile.

  Matt grinned, and as he walked away I pretended to swoon. “He is too cute!” I whispered. “Sorry!”

  “It’s okay,” said Emma. “I’m sorry I was so mean earlier. I guess it was just a little hard to take.”

  “I know I’ve been kind of annoying about it,” I said, thinking about the story Skylar told earlier. “Anyway, I would never sacrifice our friendship for love. If it came down to Matt being my boyfriend or you being my friend, I’d pick you. I swear.”

  Emma looked like she didn’t believe me, but she hugged me and said, “Thanks, but I don’t think you need to make a choice. I love my brother too, you know.” She swatted my arm playfully, then gasped.

  I looked over to see what she was looking at and rolled my eyes. I had, for five minutes,
forgotten about Sydney and Callie, but there they were, still standing around. “Yeah, can you believe they had the nerve to show up?”

  “Unbelievable!” Emma said in a disgusted tone. When Katie and Mia came back (without Jake, who was now with his mother), we started trying to figure out what we should do. We decided that Emma would say something to Sydney, since Sydney had approached her about the party in the first place. I wondered if we should kick them out, but Mia thought that wouldn’t be very ladylike and suggested we tell the manager that there were crashers.

  Emma took a deep breath before crossing the dance floor toward Sydney and Callie, who had just spotted Matt. I watched in horror as they surrounded him, and Sydney snaked her arm through his. It made me wonder about Emma’s comment about Sydney doing all the work for Callie. Maybe Sydney secretly liked Matt herself.

  When Emma joined them, she began talking, and they were all listening to what she was saying. Then Sydney began gesturing and telling some sort of story. Matt watched the whole thing in silence, I was glad to see, and when the bartender handed him the sodas, he took them in his hands and took a few steps away from the group.

  Emma must have made Sydney and Callie feel bad enough to leave, because Callie suddenly grabbed Sydney’s arm and was pulling her toward the door. I hoped they would leave!

  When Emma and Matt came back with the drinks, Emma looked really mad, but Matt was laughing.

  “I hate those two. They are so evil!” Emma exclaimed. “They said Callie’s sister, Jenna, had ‘lost’ her precious cell phone, so they had to deliver it to her. They didn’t want to look out of place, so they dressed up.”

  I looked at Sydney and Callie, slowly making their way to the door. “I wonder how it got ‘lost’ in the first place if it was so precious?”

  “Exactly! So I told them to go,” said Emma.

  Matt was still laughing. “The drama with all you girls!” he said. “I can’t believe it. It’s so dumb!”

  “Believe it, mister,” said Emma as she took our drinks from him.

  “Thank you,” I said to Matt. But as I took a sip, I saw my mother talking to Sydney and Callie at the door. She seemed to be guiding them toward the refreshments instead of the door! What was she doing?

  Now Sydney and Callie headed toward us. That made me madder than ever, and when I am mad, I think the adrenaline makes me do things I would normally be too afraid to do! I looked over at Matt, and he was looking at them, then at Emma, then at me. And right then he and I both said at the same time, “Wanna dance?”

  I couldn’t believe it! I know where my courage came from (the adrenaline from being mad!), but I will never know what made Matt ask me to dance. I don’t know if Emma said something to him before the party, or his mom, or if he decided it himself, but whatever it was, the timing was great.

  Matt and I laughed and hit the dance floor just as Sydney and Callie arrived where we’d been standing. Emma winked at me and went off with Mia and Katie to get some hors d’oeuvres.

  The truth is, Matt and I didn’t have anything to say to each other. We smiled a lot, and since I am a good dancer, I think I impressed him. He is an okay dancer, but for someone so athletic, he’s not that great. I don’t want to say I fell a little out of love with him right then, but between Emma’s and my friendship being on the line, us having nothing to say to each other, and him being only a so-so dancer, my crush kind of lost a little fizzle that night. And I was okay with that. I was proud to have set a goal, and to have reached it!

  As Matt and I danced, I thought about all of my equations and my research. Oh, I was superhappy the whole time I was with Matt, but I decided that when it comes to love, there is no perfect recipe. There are so many ingredients, and things just have to happen naturally. If you need to force them or manipulate them, then they just aren’t meant to be.

  There was a lot of crushing going on that night at Dylan’s party: I liked Matt, Callie liked Matt, maybe even Sydney liked Matt, Dylan liked Noah, Sam liked Dylan . . . and I’m sure there were a lot more equations that may not have a solution. All I know is this:

  Nothing > friends

  I repeat: Nothing is greater than friends!

  CHAPTER 15

  Later that Night . . .

  Dylan’s friends freaked out over the cupcakes. People came up to her all night to rave about them, and in the end, Dylan declared that the s’mores disco gift cupcakes made the party. That and Noah coming. They had a plan to go to the movies the very next night, which just goes to show you that if something is meant to happen, it just does.

  For me, what made the party were the dance with Matt, the look on Callie’s and Sydney’s faces when he and I danced, making up with Emma, Dylan loving the cupcakes, and my big moment on the dance floor with Dad. Everyone gathered around and cheered. We were so good! We would have won if it was a contest! At the end he gave me a big hug and said, “Alexis, you are wonderful. Just the way you are!” I looked over and saw Matt smiling at us, and I smiled back.

  When we got home that night (along with Meredith and Skylar, who were sleeping over), I opened my locked drawer and took out the Matt notebook. It had been fun doing the research online and reading all the studies and their results, but it had been hard to quantify the results in a real-life setting. I needed data that was more concrete. And real feedback. Like tonight. I had reached my goal, and I could cross it off in my planner. Matt and I had danced together.

  I read a quote somewhere that said, “The essence of mathematics is not to make simple things complicated, but to make complicated things simple.” Someone named Gudder said it. I think he or she was right. The whole math thing complicated a simple crush. But on the bright side, I got a great makeover, some good love advice, and a dance with a cute boy. It was all good.

  I wasn’t sure what would happen next with Matt, if anything, or if I even wanted anything to. I needed a new goal, whether it was love-related or not, because when it comes down to it, I am all about setting and reaching my goals. Failing to plan is planning to fail. That’s one of my mottoes.

  So maybe it was time to focus on business again, instead of love. One thing is for sure: If I’d spent as much time on the Cupcake Club this month as I did on Matt, my friends and I would all be a lot richer!

  I ripped the pages out of the Matt notebook. Then I dumped them into the shredder under my desk. It was time for a new goal. I picked up my planner again and on a new goal page I wrote:

  SELL MORE CUPCAKES

  I sent an e-mail to the Cupcake Club:

  Great work! Thanks for putting up with Dylan. And me. Now on to the next assignment!

  xoxo,

  Alexis

  Then I grabbed some SweeTarts and went to see if anyone wanted to watch Dancing with the Stars with me.

  My Cupcake Obsession

  My name is Katie Brown, and I am crazy about cupcakes. I’m not kidding. I think about cupcakes every day. I even dream about them when I sleep. The other night I was dreaming that I was eating a giant cupcake, and when I woke up I was chewing on my pillow!

  Okay, now I am kidding. But I do dream about cupcakes, I swear. There must be a name for this condition. Cupcake-itis? That’s got to be it. I am stricken with cupcake-itis, and there isn’t any cure.

  My three best friends and I formed the Cupcake Club, and we bake cupcakes for parties and events and things and sell them. We’re all different in our own way. Mia has dark brown hair and loves fashion. Emma has blond hair and blue eyes, and lots of brothers. Alexis has curly red hair and loves math. (Can you believe it? But she really does!)

  I have light brown hair, and I mostly wear jeans and T-shirts. I’m an only child. And I hate math. But I have one big thing in common with all my friends: We love cupcakes.

  That’s why we were in my kitchen on a Tuesday afternoon, baking cupcakes on a beautiful spring day. We were having an official meeting to discuss our next big job: baking a cupcake cake for my Grandma Carole’s seventy-fifth birthday bash. Bu
t while we were thinking about that, we were also trying to perfect a new chocolate-coconut-almond cupcake, specially created for my friend Mia’s step-dad, Eddie, based on his favorite candy bar.

  We had tried two different combinations already: a chocolate cupcake with coconut frosting and almonds on top, and a coconut cupcake with chocolate-almond frosting, but none of them matched the taste of the candy bar enough. Now we were working on a third batch: a chocolate-almond cupcake with coconut frosting and lots of shredded coconut on top.

  I carefully poured a teaspoon of almond extract into the batter. “Mmm . . . smells almond-y,” I said.

  “I hope this batch is the one,” said Mia. “Eddie finally started taking down that gross flowery wallpaper in my bedroom, and I have to find some way to thank him. I would have paid someone a million dollars to do that!”

  “You realize you could buy a whole new house for a million dollars, right?” Alexis asked. “Probably two or three.”

  “You know what I mean,” Mia replied. “Besides, you know how ugly that wallpaper is. It looks like something you’d find in an old lady’s room.”

  “Hey, my Grandma Carole’s an old lady, and she doesn’t have ugly wallpaper in her house,” I protested.

  Emma picked up the ice-cream scoop and started scooping up the batter and putting it into the cupcake pans.

  “We need to find out more about your grandma,” Emma said. “That way we can figure out what kind of cupcakes to make for the party.”

  “Right!” Alexis agreed. She flipped open her notebook and took out the pen tucked behind her ear. Sometimes I think Alexis must have a secret stash of notebooks in her house somewhere. I’ve never seen her without one.

  “First things first,” Alexis said. “How many people are coming to the party?”

  I wrinkled my nose, thinking. “Not sure,” I said. Then I yelled as loud as I could. “Mom! How many people are coming to Grandma Carole’s party?”