The Cupcake Queen

by Heather Hepler

  “Um, luck?”

  She sighs loudly. I follow her up the steps and into the side door of the school. We stop at her locker, where she puts away her backpack and gets out her books for first period. The can of lard is still there, still perched on top of her books. She pushes her locker shut with a click and turns toward me.

  “I knew you were going to throw rock first. It’s the easiest and the most obvious move. It’s also the safest move for a rookie.”

  I shrug. “Maybe,” I say.

  “Before the second round, I said: ‘Let’s see what else you got.’ So, of course you aren’t going to throw rock again. The next obvious throw is scissors.”

  “Why not paper?” I ask.

  “Because I just threw paper. Scissors was the only move that neither of us had used yet. Plus, paper is the hardest move. You have to twist your wrist and throw at the same time.”

  “Why can’t you just do this?” I ask, putting my hand out flat with my thumb up.

  “Vertical paper is a no-no in professional play.”

  I’m still trying to find the irony, trying to find the teasing in her eyes, but it’s not there. “Okay, Tally,” I say, smiling. “Will you teach me?”

  “Of course,” she says. The first bell rings, making me jump slightly. “We’re going to be late,” she says. “Meet me in front of the cafeteria at lunch.” I nod and start walking toward my locker. “Wait,” she says. “I almost forgot.” Tally rummages in her backpack and pulls out two bars wrapped in cellophane. “Here.” She hands them to me. “Lunch.” I flip them over. “It’s pemmican.”

  “It’s what?” I ask.

  “Trust me,” Tally says, and then disappears into the crowd of kids pushing past. I sigh and look at the bars she gave me. Some sort of energy bars. From the label it looks like they might have been the first energy bars, way before PowerBars, but then again maybe they’re just purposely retro. I stuff the bars into the front pocket of my hoodie. Trust her. I pull up on the latch of my locker.

  The smell hits me as I open the door. There on top of my books is a plastic plate. I have to step back to catch my breath. It’s one of my cupcakes—at least it used to be. The smell is coming from what’s been stuck in the middle of it. Where there used to be an icing fish jumping on the end of a fisherman’s line, now there’s an actual fish. A small one, but it’s been in there all night. I take out the plate and drop it into the trash can at the end of the hall. As I walk back to my locker to get out my now smelly books, I hear it behind me. I don’t even bother to turn around to see who it is. It doesn’t really matter who’s laughing. Whether I have to convince my mom that we need to go back or I have to move into my dad’s new place, in a few weeks I’ll be gone and Hog’s Hollow will just be a distant nightmare.

  chapter eleven

  What do you think?” Tally is sitting on a folding chair behind a long table just outside the cafeteria. Stacks of RPS T-shirts teeter in front of her and Blake. Tally had the shirts made in three different colors: blue, orange, and olive.

  “They’re awesome,” I say. “People have been coming up to me all morning and asking about my shirt.”

  “Did you tell them we’d be selling them at lunch?” she asks. I nod. I step to the side to make room for a group of girls. They finally pick shirts, all getting blue.

  “Thank you for your business,” Blake says, taking their money. He shoves the bills into a shoe box. There are several bars of pemmican, just like the ones Tally gave me, on the table in front of him. He takes a bite of one and makes a face, but he swallows it and smiles in Tally’s direction.

  Looking beyond them into the cafeteria, I can see that a bunch of kids have pulled the RPS T-shirts over their own shirts. Apparently Tally was right. A lot of people are into RPS.

  Except for Charity’s friends. One of the Lindseys walks by with Charlotte, very obviously ignoring the merchandise.

  “I told you it would rain,” Tally says. “Now everyone has to come inside for lunch.”

  “How did you get them to let you sell them here?” I ask.

  Blake rolls his eyes. “She had photos of the animals at the ARK.”

  I raise my eyebrows at Tally.

  “I did what I had to,” she says with a smile. Then she picks up a bar of pemmican and takes a bite. She is only slightly more convincing about its taste appeal than Blake was. I start to ask again what’s going on, but Tally turns her attention to a group of soccer players making a mess of a stack of extra-extra-large shirts.

  “Hey.” A familiar voice makes me turn. Marcus picks up one of the shirts and holds it up. He flips it over to look at the back.

  “Penny designed them,” Tally says, winking at me.

  He looks over at me and smiles. “They’re cool,” he says.

  “Oh, hi, Marcus.” Charity pushes herself between us, actually elbowing me slightly to get me to back up. Her friends manage to create a human barrier between me and Marcus. The way they move, it’s like they are a pack of wolves, circling their prey. Charity looks at the shirt Marcus is holding as if it’s covered in mold.

  “Aren’t these cool?” Marcus says.

  She smiles and touches his arm. “That color looks good on you,” she says, sidestepping his question.

  Marcus hands two fives to Blake. Then he pulls the shirt over his head. Charity’s right. The color does look good on him. He picks up his notebook and lunch. “See you around,” he says, and I think he means everyone. Then, just before he walks into the cafeteria, he adds one word: “Penny.”

  Charity tries very hard not to react.

  “Are you buying, or just looking?” Tally asks.

  “Neither,” Charity says.

  Tally takes another bite of the bar in her hand and places it on the table so that the wrapper is faceup. I notice she positions it so that Charity can see the label. With the little puffin or whatever bird is right above the words ALL NATURAL. NO PRESERVATIVES. Charity looks at it for a long moment before Charlotte says, “What’s RPS?”

  “Ridiculous, Pathetic, Stupid,” Charity says.

  “Rock, Paper, Scissors,” Tally says over her.

  Charlotte looks at her for a moment. “As in the game?” Tally nods.

  “See?” Charity says. “Stupid.”

  “The shirts are kind of cool . . .” Charlotte says tentatively.

  Charity glares at her. “I guess, if you like old things,” she says. She turns and smirks at me.

  “Vintage,” Tally says.

  “Faux vintage,” Blake says. This even makes Charlotte smile, but Charity still looks like she’s been sucking on a lemon. A lemon Jolly Rancher maybe.

  “Are you done looking at this stuff?” Charity asks. Charlotte puts the T-shirt down slowly, but even after she lets go, she keeps looking back at it. Charlotte and the three Lindseys follow Charity into the cafeteria.

  “Okay, I know why she hates me, but what does she have against you guys?” I ask.

  Blake shrugs. “She hates whimsy.”

  “Maybe she wanted a hundred percent cotton,” Tally says.

  “No, really,” I say.

  Tally sighs and looks past me. “Remember how Blake said I was banned from Hog’s Hollow Days?” I nod and see Blake smirking. “Remember how I also said you weren’t the only one dragged here against her will?” I nod again. “Well, let’s just say I was pretty angry when I first moved here.”

  “Pretty angry?” Blake asks.

  “Okay, I was really angry. I just got mad. Mad at my dad, at myself. I got mad at everything. I mean, at least until I just decided to make the best of it while I’m here.”

  Blake looks at his shoes and pushes his hands a little deeper into his front pockets. Something has pulled the smile from his face, and I wonder if it’s just the thought of Tally leaving. And what she’s saying is a little too close to what I know I should be doing. Suddenly I feel like the star of a bad public service announcement. This one is titled Just Deal with It.

  Tally
does her half smile and elbows Blake, who shakes himself, as if he was somewhere else and the elbow brought him back. “You tell her,” she says.

  Blake takes a breath. “Okay, you know how every female between the ages of twelve and eighteen in the tricounty area wants to be Hog Queen?”

  “Not every,” Tally says.

  “Well, last year, the H.O.G.—”

  “The Hog’s Hollow Organizational Group,” Tally says.

  “Shouldn’t that be the H.H.O.G.?” I ask.

  “We are not really talking about higher-thinking people here,” Tally says.

  “Anyway,” Blake says, “the H.O.G. decides to do away with the talent portion of the pageant. All of a sudden Tally, the new girl none of us knew, is everywhere, telling everyone that we are ‘subjugating our young girls to a male-dominated paradigm. ’ ” Blake turns to Tally. “Is that right?”

  “Something like that,” Tally says.

  “Turns out that once they decided to take out the talent part, it became just a beauty contest, not a scholarship pageant. Anyway, she called all these feminist groups, and suddenly instead of a rehearsal, there was a protest.”

  “It wasn’t just that I was looking to start a fight,” Tally says. “I mean, I really do think beauty contests are degrading to women. No offense to your mom.”

  “I agree,” I say. And the weird thing is, the mom I know would agree, too.

  “Word got out that the reason the H.O.G. was trying to get rid of the talent portion was because of the chairman,” Blake says.

  “Chairperson,” Tally says.

  “Who was the chairperson?” I ask.

  “Mrs. Wharton.” Blake grins. “Turns out Charity doesn’t really have any talents.”

  I look into the cafeteria. Charity is sitting right next to Marcus, and I mean right next to him. Like if she sat any closer, she’d be sitting in his lap. She laughs at something he says and puts her hand on his arm. She leans toward him a bit, and I can feel my face heating up. It’s then that she looks directly at me and smiles.

  “She’s pretty good at being mean,” I say.

  “She’d get crowned Hog Queen for sure if all she had to do was look pretty and be mean,” Tally says. She pulls the rest of the pemmican bar out and stares at it for a moment, as if she’s having an argument with it in her head. I guess the bar wins, because she puts it back down without taking a bite.

  “So are you going to tell me?” I ask. I gesture toward the half-eaten bar on the table.

  “I’ll give you a hint: read the ingredients.”

  I pull one of the pemmican bars out of my pocket and read the wrapper. Dried fruit, organic flour, lard. What’s with Tally and lard? I can’t ask her, because now she’s helping two guys in backward baseball caps find the right size shirt.

  Most of me says to forget about all of this. By the time the festival comes around and Charity is up onstage vying for the crown, I’ll have figured out a way to get my old life back. I’ll be back in the City and telling all my friends about this and they’ll be laughing and saying, “No way!” I’ll have to keep saying “Way!” because they’ll never believe a place like this exists. Unfortunately it’s only most of me and not all. There’s this tiny part of me that actually does care about all of this, and I need to get out of here before that part takes over.

  I’m supposed to deliver the message about the apartment papers to my mom and I will, but only if she talks to me first. I know it’s stupid. I know it’s just a dumb game that I’m playing, but we’ve been in the house together, just the two of us, for almost three hours and she hasn’t said one word to me. Not one. Since we’ve moved here, she keeps drifting further and further away, drifting back just enough to make a comment about how what I’m wearing or what I’m doing is wrong before she floats away again. If she isn’t going to talk to me, then I’m not going to talk to her. I even put my shoes on the couch, but all she did was look at my feet and frown. She’s been going through pictures, putting some in a box marked ME and some in a box marked PETER. I notice that all of the photos of their wedding go in my dad’s box. I’m not an idiot. It’s not like I need a big flashing neon sign to tell me that things have gotten worse between them since we moved to Hog’s Hollow. But for once I’d like someone to just talk to me. I want to shout that at the back of my mother’s head: Just talk to me! But I don’t, because maybe if no one says anything out loud, it can still change.

  Oscar walks through, holding his stuffed bear in his mouth, and my mother smiles over at him. The cat gets a smile. She doesn’t even look at me when I stand up. I walk into the library and sit down in front of the computer. I check my e-mail. Nothing. I e-mailed my two best friends in the City last night, mostly questions about what they’re doing, but also wanting to talk to someone about things. Normally I’d just call or text one of them, but it feels weird now. I feel the same disconnect that I have with my dad. Like everyone is pretending that everything is normal and nothing has changed, but the reality is that everything has changed and nothing feels normal at all.

  The phone rings and my mother answers it. I brace myself, hoping it’s not my father.

  “It’s Tally,” my mom says. So, officially I should tell her about the papers because she talked to me, but she had to talk to me, so it doesn’t count. I’m not sure what I’m trying to prove. I mean, the papers are going to get signed and they are going to sell the apartment and no one’s going to tell me anything until it’s done.

  “Hello?” I say when I pick up the phone.

  “What are you doing right now?” Tally asks.

  I look around the room for a moment before admitting the obvious. “Nothing.”

  “Good,” she says. “Then grab your umbrella and get down here. I have something to show you.” The phone goes dead.

  I’m not sure I’m up for being around other people right now. I think about calling her back. Think about making up some reason that I can’t go, but then my mother walks past on her way to the stove and she doesn’t even look in my direction.

  “I’m going to Tally’s,” I say, my hand already on the back doorknob. She looks at me and nods, then considers the kettle in her hand. I pause for a moment with the door partly open. She looks so sad. I should say something. I want to say something, but I don’t know what. I start to ask if she would rather I stay, if she wants to talk or play chess or make cookies, but then she looks at me again, the frown back on her face.

  “Close the door. You’re letting all the heat out.”

  I shake my head, grab my windbreaker off the back hook, and put it on, pulling the hood over my head. I have to run all the way down to Tally’s to keep from getting drenched, but the cold feels good on my face. I let my hood fall away from my head and feel my hair whip behind. I wonder if Marcus feels like this when he runs. Like he’s able to get a couple of steps ahead of everything.

  I can see the lights from Tally’s house up ahead. They seem to glow in the fog. I feel winded when I slow down in front of the stairs leading up to her house. As I climb the warped steps, I think about the problem with running from your trouble. The problem is in the stopping. The whole time you think you’re getting away from everything, the trouble is running like mad, too, trying to catch up with you. And it doesn’t slow down when you do—it keeps on sprinting. So when trouble finally reaches you, it hits you hard.

  chapter twelve

  You have got to see this,” Tally says, pulling the sleeve of my jacket and leading me to her computer. Almost the whole screen is filled with an image of a can of lard. Along the bottom are some of those before-and-after photos you see of women on infomercials. The first shows each woman in a too-small bathing suit, standing in bad lighting. The second shows them smiling, in full makeup, and pushed and pulled and tucked until they look fit. I push my damp hair out of my eyes and sit in the other chair in front of the screen. I think about Tally’s weird new eating habits.

  “Tally, are you on a diet?” I ask. She pretends not t
o hear me and clicks the mouse. Another site pops up, this one much busier, with links for instruction manuals, videos, application forms, and something called “Domination.” Tally clicks the Play button on one of the videos. First it’s just a close-up of two pairs of hands in fists, then they do the triple up-and-down move. One hand opens into paper while the other forms scissors. “This is from last year’s championship in Seattle.” A girl who looks to be about our age is handed a trophy with three faux-bronze hands, one in each position. A guy behind her, wearing a Jedi costume, looks like he’s about to cry.

  “What’s with Luke Skywalker?” I ask, pointing to him.

  “There are all kinds of kooks who go to these things.” I can’t help but wonder what kind of kooks we are.

  We watch the rest of the video as they run highlights from the competition. They actually have a reporter doing the voiceover, like it’s a real sport. Tally clicks through more videos and I half watch, half listen as she talks about more strategies and tricks. She clicks the window closed, and there’s the diet site again.

  Beneath all the noise coming from the videos, I can hear music playing. Soft guitar, slow and sad.

  “What is that?” I ask.

  Tally squints at the screen. “Just a Web site I’m fooling around with.”

  “No, I mean the music.”

  “Just music,” she says, quickly muting it.

  “I liked it,” I say, but she’s already up and on her way to the kitchen. She takes out two glasses and opens the refrigerator. She stands there, staring at the carton of milk, the pitcher of lemonade.

  “Do you ever talk to your dad?” Tally asks, still peering into the refrigerator.

  “Yeah,” I say, although the truth is I don’t very much. “He’s pretty busy, though.” He’s always been busy, and not just since we moved here. Too busy for me at least.

  Tally grabs the lemonade and shoves the refrigerator shut with her hip. She hits the door too hard, sending several magnets spinning across the floor. I slide my foot out of my sneaker and use my toes to pick up a broccoli magnet. She watches me and smiles. “That’s a real talent you have there.”