by Simon, Coco
We set the timer for twenty minutes. That’s one of the great things about cupcakes—they don’t take long to cook. While the cupcakes baked, I washed the bowls we’d just used, and Katie dried them. Alexis took a spoon and took a taste of Emma’s cream cheese frosting.
“Mmm, that is sooo good,” she said. “It’s going to go great with the lemon.”
The timer buzzed, and Eddie came running into the kitchen.
“Better leave this to me, ladies,” he said. “Hot stuff coming out!”
I rolled my eyes at Katie, and she smiled back. I knew she could appreciate how corny Eddie can be—she always says how corny her mom can be too.
Eddie removed the pans from the oven, and we showed him how to carefully tip over the pans onto the cooling racks. The cupcakes looked golden yellow and perfect, and they smelled super lemony.
We sat and talked while the cupcakes cooled off. Then I heard the front door bang shut. Dan was back.
“What’s that smell?” he asked, walking into the kitchen. He was wearing his red and white basketball uniform, and he was pretty sweaty.
“Please do not get sweat on the cupcakes,” I told him, and I heard Emma giggle behind me.
Dan ignored me. “I am so hungry. Mind if I take one?”
But he didn’t wait for an answer. He just picked one up, broke it in half, and stuffed it in his mouth.
“Dan!” I shrieked. “Those are for a baby shower tomorrow. We’re being paid to make those!”
Katie, Alexis, and Emma all looked as horrified as I felt.
“Maybe it’s not so bad,” Emma said. “We’re only one short.”
Then Dan made a face. “Whoa, what kind of cupcakes are these? They’re supersour!”
“They’re lemon cupcakes,” Katie said. “They should taste like lemon, but also be sweet.”
Dan handed the uneaten half of his cupcake back to me. “I don’t know. It doesn’t taste sweet to me.”
“You just don’t know a good cupcake when you taste one,” I said. I broke off a piece and popped it into my mouth. The sour taste of lemon stung my tongue.
“Uh-oh,” Katie said. “Is he right?”
I nodded. “It’s really sour. Not sweet at all.”
I handed each girl a piece of cupcake. Each one made a face as she tasted it.
“So, how much lemon did you put in these anyway?” Dan asked.
“I measured it myself,” Alexis replied. “One and a half cups, just like the recipe said.”
Katie frowned. “One and a half cups? I thought the recipe said one half cup.”
“I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure it was one and a half cups,” Alexis said, but her voice didn’t sound so sure.
Katie looked in the recipe book. “Nope. It says right here, one half cup of lemon juice. That’s probably what happened.”
Alexis’s face turned bright red. “Oh, no! I’m so sorry!”
I felt bad for her. “I should have checked when you handed me the measuring cup,” I said. “It’s my fault too.”
“Looks like you guys need to make some more cupcakes,” Dan said.
I looked at the clock. It was already after eight o’clock.
“I’ll do it,” Alexis said. “I’ll stay up all night if I have to, but I’ll finish them.”
“Of course you won’t,” Emma said. “We’re all in this together.”
Katie grinned. “Don’t sweat it, Alexis. You’ve got so many numbers in your brain, you were bound to get them mixed up sometime.”
Alexis shook her head. “I still can’t believe it. I thought I checked it, like, three times.”
“You know, you guys should thank me for eating that cupcake,” Dan told them. “Otherwise, whoever’s paying you would have been pretty disappointed.”
I hated to admit it, but Dan was right.
“You can be our official cupcake taster,” Katie said.
“I don’t know,” Dan said. “It could be dangerous.”
Everybody laughed. Even though we had to start from scratch, it wasn’t terrible, because we were all in it together, just like Emma said.
And that, unlike our cupcakes, was pretty sweet.
CHAPTER 9
Sadness at the Smoothie Shop
It was a night that would go down in cupcake history. First Katie, Alexis, and Emma had to call home to make sure they could stay late. Then we had to get to work on making the cupcakes from scratch again.
This time, we all watched closely as Katie measured each ingredient. After Alexis squeezed more lemons, she took the measuring cup to each of us to check it. It was exactly one half cup.
“Alexis, your flair for perfection has returned,” Katie kidded her.
We filled the cupcake tins, stretching out the batter just a little bit so that we had two extra cupcakes with which we could do a taste test. Mom walked in just as we were putting the second batch in the oven. Even though she looked a little tired, she still looked fabulous. She wore a ruffled ivory shirt with sleek trousers, a gold necklace and bangle bracelets, and, of course, her favorite black high heels.
“Eddie says you had a cupcake emergency,” she said. “Anything I can do to help?”
“We’ve got it under control,” I told her. “When the cupcakes are done, we’ll wait until they cool, then ice them and decorate them.”
I noticed that Alexis was standing six inches from the oven, staring through the glass window that showed the cupcakes baking inside.
“Alexis, what are you doing?” I asked.
“Making sure they don’t burn,” she said. “We don’t have time to make a new batch if this goes wrong.”
“Whoa, I didn’t think of that,” Katie said. She stood next to Alexis and peered through the window.
“Seriously, you can’t look through that thing for twenty minutes, can you?” I asked.
“Oh yes we can,” Katie replied.
“Well, I’m going to do the dishes,” I replied.
Emma grabbed a dishtowel. “I’ll help.”
Katie and Alexis stayed glued to the oven until the timer went off. Eddie came in to take them out again.
“You know what they say. Second time’s the charm!” he said cheerfully.
“Where’s Dan?” Katie asked. “We need our official cupcake taster.”
“In the family room, watching TV,” Eddie replied.
Katie ran out of the kitchen and came back a minute later, dragging Dan by the arm.
“I don’t know if I want this job,” he said. “It’s risky.”
“Very funny,” I said. I handed him a cupcake. “Now taste.”
Dan took a bite. He made a face, just like before.
“Oh, no!” Alexis wailed. “Is the cupcake sour again?”
We were all staring at him. Even Eddie looked nervous.
Dan smiled. “JK! No. It’s good.” We all sighed with relief. Dan hung out in the kitchen a little bit watching us with Eddie, but he didn’t get in our way. I think it’s the first time there were ever that many girls in their kitchen. I wondered if it was a little weird for them.
But we still weren’t finished. By the time we let the cupcakes cool, iced them, and added the flowers, it was almost eleven thirty. Yawning, we began to put the cupcakes in the special boxes we had.
Emma’s mom walked into the kitchen with my mom. They were both yawning too.
“Are you girls ready to go?” Mrs. Taylor asked.
I snapped the lid on the fourth cupcake box. “All done.”
“I’ll drive tomorrow,” my mom told Emma’s mom. “We’ll be by to get Emma around eleven.”
“I’ll be at Emma’s house,” Alexis said.
“Thanks for letting us use your kitchen, Ms. Vélaz,” Katie said.
“No problem,” my mom told her. “Now go home and get a good night’s sleep!”
The girls left, but I still had one thing to do before I went to bed. I wrote “DO NOT EAT” on a piece of paper and taped it to the cupcake boxes. Dan m
ight have helped us out, but I still didn’t trust him.
Luckily, Dan didn’t touch the cupcakes, and they were beautiful and perfect when we dropped them off at Ms. Biddle’s house the next morning.
I’d never been to a teacher’s house before. I was kind of expecting her to live in a mad scientist’s lab, with test tubes bubbling over or something. But she lived in a cute little red house with no test tubes in sight. A fat orange cat was lazing in the sunny window when we rang the bell.
Ms. Biddle was happy to see us. She wasn’t wearing a crazy science shirt. Instead, she had on a yellow button-down shirt and linen capris. Today Ms. Biddle’s outfit said to me that she was happy and calm. Yellow is known to be a very happy color.
“Wow, you guys are professional,” she said. “Come on in.”
The living room and the dining room were decorated with pale yellow and green streamers and matching balloons. She pointed to a skinny table in the dining room with a pile of yellow plastic plates on it.
“I thought we could put the cupcakes here,” she said.
“Perfect!” I said. “We’ll set them up so they look nice.”
We arranged all of the cupcakes on the yellow plates and lined them up on the table. It all looked really pretty.
“My sister’s going to love this,” Ms. Biddle said. “Thanks so much.”
She held out a white envelope, and Alexis reached for it. “I’ll take that,” she said. “Thanks a lot.”
We waited until we were back outside, and we gave one another a high five.
“We did it!” Katie cheered. “Our first paying job!”
“I’m really proud of all of you,” my mom said. “Let’s go to Sal’s Smoothies. My treat.”
Fifteen minutes later we were sitting in a booth at Sal’s. It’s a fun place, with pink walls and lime green cushions in the booths. We each got a different flavor. Katie got banana berry, Alexis got ginger and peach, Emma got strawberry, and I got mango with passionfruit.
Alexis opened up the envelope and counted out the money. “Forty-eight dollars,” she announced. “One dollar per cupcake.”
“We still need to pay back my mom,” Katie said. She dug into her pocket and handed a crumpled receipt to Alexis. “All the ingredients came to sixteen dollars, but we can use the leftover flour and sugar the next time we bake.”
Then I remembered about the sugar flowers. “Mom, do you have the receipt for that?” I asked.
“I think so,” Mom replied. She searched through her purse and came up with a piece of white paper. She handed it to Alexis.
Alexis slurped on her smoothie as she studied it. “No way,” she said. “Those flowers were seventy-five cents a piece?”
“Um, I guess so,” I said. “I thought that was pretty reasonable. Seventy five cents isn’t a lot of money.”
“But seventy-five cents times forty-eight is thirty-six dollars,” Alexis said. “That means we spent fifty-two dollars making these cupcakes—that’s four dollars over budget!”
I felt awful. “I’m sorry, really.”
“Don’t worry about the flowers,” Mom said quickly. “Think of it as a donation for your start-up business. We businesswomen need to stick together.”
“That’s really nice of you,” Emma said.
Alexis was shaking her head. “This is why we need to do a budget every time. We can’t make mistakes like this.”
“It’s our first paying job, remember,” Katie said. “We’re going to make lots of mistakes starting out. Like putting in too much lemon juice.”
Alexis blushed. “You’re right. I didn’t mean to get upset. Thanks, Ms. Vélaz.”
“I think we should save the money we made and use it for our next order,” Katie said. “Then we won’t spend any more than we have.”
“That sounds like something Alexis would say,” Emma kidded her.
Katie grinned. “What can I say? She must be rubbing off on me.”
“I’m sorry, Mia. I didn’t mean to make you feel bad,” Alexis said.
“It’s okay,” I said.
After that, nobody talked about the cost of the flowers again. But I still felt really bad. I didn’t say much after that, and I didn’t even finish my smoothie.
CHAPTER 10
An Invitation
Mom, can we go to the mall?” I asked. We had just dropped off the girls and were heading home, but I needed a serious mall experience.
“Why not?” Mom asked. “I need a new charger for my cell phone anyway.”
Soon we were walking through the doors of the Westgrove Mall. “Are you going to Icon again?” Mom asked.
“I was thinking Blue Basics,” I said. It’s a great shop that sells every kind of jeans you can think of, plus classic shirts and sweaters. I love jeans because everything goes with them. Plus I grew, like, a foot over the summer, so all of mine were too short.
Mom must have been reading my mind. “Good idea. You need some new jeans anyway. I’ll meet you there in a little bit. Cell phone on?”
“And charged,” I told her.
Mom turned the corner, and I headed to Blue Basics, which is on the first floor. I hadn’t gotten far when I saw Sydney, Maggie, Bella, and Callie walking toward me.
“Hi!” I said.
“Wow, I can’t believe we ran into you again!” Maggie gushed.
“It’s like destiny,” Bella said in a serious voice.
“Or maybe it’s just that we all like to look at clothes,” Callie pointed out.
I smiled. “I don’t know. I think fashion is my destiny, sometimes.”
“Well of course it is, with a famous mother like that.” Maggie brushed a stray lock of frizzy hair out of her face. “It’s in your blood.”
“She’s not famous, exactly,” I replied.
“But she knows famous designers!” Maggie said. “I still can’t believe she knows Damien Francis. Have you ever been to his house?”
“It’s not like that,” I tried to explain, but I don’t think Maggie was interested in the boring truth. So I changed the subject. “I’m going to Blue Basics. Do you guys want to come?”
“Ooh, the Double B!” Maggie said. “I could use some new jeans.”
Then Sydney spoke up for the first time. “We’ll go with you,” she said, and I got the feeling that the decision was hers to make.
Sydney walked beside me as we made our way to the store. “Maggie can get soooo starstruck,” she said. “Once she spent a whole day outside Dave’s Pizza in Manhattan because she heard that Justin Bieber liked to eat there when he came to New York.”
“That was such a lie!” Maggie said with a pout. “But at least the pizza was really good.”
“So, does your mom know any other designers?” Sydney asked casually.
“She knows a lot of them,” I said truthfully. “She was in charge of choosing the clothes for the magazine’s photo shoots. So any designer who wanted to get into Flair had to get friendly with my mom.”
“So you must get a lot of free clothing samples, then,” she said.
I shrugged. “Sometimes.”
“But your mom doesn’t work at Flair anymore?” Sydney asked.
“No, she started her own consulting business,” I replied. “So she’s still in fashion.”
Sydney was being nice, but I was starting to feel like I was being interviewed or something.
Thankfully, the questions stopped once we got to Blue Basics. We must have spent an hour trying on different pairs of jeans. I was really glad the PGC girls were there because they stopped me from buying a pair of bleached-out jeans that were too “eighties,” even for me. I ended up with two pairs of skinny jeans that my mom paid for when she got there.
Before I left, Sydney came up to me. “So, Mia, why don’t you eat lunch with us on Monday?”
I hesitated. “Um, I don’t know. I have friends that I sit with already.”
“Your cupcake crew won’t miss you for one day,” Sydney said.
“Com
e on, Mia,” Callie urged. “Let us share you with your other friends.”
I liked the way Callie put it. I wasn’t ditching the Cupcake Club, just sharing my time with other friends I liked. There was nothing wrong with that. It was just one lunch, after all.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll see you on Monday.”
Mom and I each got a big salad from the make-your-own-salad place on the way out of the mall. When we got home, I was anxious to try on my new jeans and plan some new outfits with them.
“Mom, where’s my white button-down shirt?” I asked, after I’d finished petting Milkshake and Tiki.
“I thought I saw it in the laundry basket,” Mom replied.
“Oh, right.” I headed for the laundry room, which is right next to the kitchen. But the laundry basket was empty.
“Mom! It’s empty!” I called out.
Eddie poked his head into the laundry room. “Dan did a wash this morning. Check the dryer.”
I opened up the dryer and saw a bunch of colored clothes. I started to panic. Dan wouldn’t have put my white shirt in with the colors, would he?
But that’s exactly what he did. I pulled out my white button-down shirt, only it wasn’t white anymore. Now it was streaked with pink.
“It’s ruined!” I wailed.
I stomped into the kitchen where Mom and Eddie were sitting and drinking coffee. “Look at this! It’s ruined! It’s all Dan’s fault!”
Usually I can stay pretty cool when something goes wrong. But for some reason, the ruined shirt was making me furious.
“Calm down,” Mom said. “Dan didn’t mean to ruin it, Mia.”
“I’ll buy you another shirt,” Eddie added.
“That’s not the point!” I fumed. “This never happened when it was just you and me, Mom. Why can’t things just be the way they were?”
“Oh, Mia,” Mom said sadly.
I felt like I was going to cry, so I ran up to my room. Tiki and Milkshake were so scared of me that they hurried out of my path. When I got to my room, I slammed the door shut behind me. Then I flopped onto my bed and put a pillow over my head.
I wished we had never left Manhattan. I wished Mom had never met Eddie. I wished a lot of things were different.
I also knew that my wishes didn’t mean anything, and that’s what hurt the most.