by Wendy Mass
“A whole ten bucks! Wow, Mmm Mmm Good must be having an excellent year!” They guffawed again until Big Billy began to wheeze and had to take a puff from his inhaler.
Daisy nudged Logan. “That’s him? That’s Big Billy? He’s, um, not very big. And he’s old.”
Logan nodded. “Eighty-two, to be exact.”
“Eighty-two! Why didn’t you tell me that before?”
He shrugged. “I told you he wasn’t involved.”
Daisy mumbled something, probably to AJ, and then motioned for the three boys to come closer. Logan kept one eye on his parents, who continued to greet old friends.
“AJ thinks whoever Philip’s dad is partnered with will likely be hanging around the judging table, checking out the competition. So we need to keep an eye on anyone asking a lot of questions, especially about the secret ingredient.”
The others nodded.
“I just got a text from Reggie,” Philip said. “My father’s sending someone over to the factory today to get the secret ingredient. Apparently the person originally assigned to the job failed in his mission.”
Daisy rolled her eyes. “Everyone always assumes it’s a guy. Almost all the spies at the mansion are girls!”
“That’s not really the point of the story, is it?” Philip asked.
Daisy grumbled.
Logan grew concerned. He didn’t like the idea of someone trying to get into the factory when no one was around. “What should we do?” he asked. “We can’t let them get it.”
“They won’t,” Philip said, pointing to his briefcase. “Remember? You gave it to me when we left the Cocoa Room last night.”
Logan’s eyes widened. “You still have it?”
“What else was I supposed to do with it?”
“You were supposed to put it back!” Daisy said.
“Good thing I didn’t, though, isn’t it?”
She grumbled again.
Logan had to ask. “Did you, um, look inside?”
Philip shook his head.
“Why not?” Miles asked. “No one could blame you, after all you’re doing to help save the factory.”
“It just wouldn’t be right,” Philip said. “You heard what Max said that first day. It’s only for candymakers. When Logan turns eighteen and officially becomes one, he’ll be able to look inside. I shouldn’t know before he does.”
Logan swallowed hard. “Thanks.”
Philip just shrugged.
Miles held up his pie box. “So, should we get this over with?”
They all turned to look at the long table, where kids were still pulling candy out of boxes and lifting it off trays. “Guess we have no choice,” Daisy said.
Still, no one made a move to head over there. Through the thickening crowd, Logan caught a glimpse of Max and Henry stepping off the escalator, a pile of badges in their hands. “Hey,” he whispered. “Let’s go do it now, before anyone sees us.”
So they ducked low and hurried over to a table that ran the length of the far wall. A spot had been set aside for each contestant, with a large name card and a white ceramic plate. Seeing his name in big letters made it all feel so real to Logan. The others must have felt the same, because they were all hanging back. Daisy looked particularly bleak. Logan didn’t envy her the task of having to tell the judges she lied about her age in order to get into the contest. Even though she hadn’t lied, they’d agreed that confessing the lie was more believable than saying she didn’t know her age.
“You know…,” Philip told her. “If you don’t want to tell them about being thirteen, you could just submit the 3G’s. It’s not like you have to worry about winning and messing up the plan.”
Miles chuckled. “Even when he’s trying to be nice, he insults her.”
“Actually, he’s got a good point,” Daisy said. “But it doesn’t matter. I didn’t bring the 3G’s with me.”
“I know.” Philip reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a plastic bag. “But I did.”
“My 3G’s!” Daisy said, snatching the bag. If possible, they glowed an even brighter green than in the lab.
Daisy whirled around and plopped the bag on the plate in front of the card that read DAISY CARPENTER. Her face instantly brightened.
Up and down the table lay candies of all shapes (a starfish! a miniature globe!), sizes (the smallest looked like a cluster of snowflakes, the largest a life-sized boot!), and colors (every one in the rainbow and a few that weren’t, like Daisy’s). Hard candy, soft candy, things made out of milk chocolate and dark and white chocolate and every mixture in between. Some were impaled on sticks. One looked like a lollypop wrapped in bacon! Upon closer inspection, it turned out to be just that.
The one that Logan kept coming back to was a bowl with different flavors of ice cream, except that the scoops weren’t ice cream, they were candy. It was a great idea, although he couldn’t imagine how they’d package it for sale or how the kid who made it got it to look so real.
“You may want to arrange your candy on the plate, dear,” Logan’s mom said, startling all of them.
“Okay.” Daisy hurried back to her spot and tipped the 3G’s out of the bag. They bounced and slid around as she tried to spread them out on the plate. Truly, there was no way to arrange them, nicely or not.
Mrs. Sweet put her arm around Daisy’s shoulders. “I bet they taste better than they look.”
“You’d lose that bet,” Philip said under his breath.
Logan tried not to laugh.
“And what about yours, dear?” Mrs. Sweet asked Miles, pointing to his name card, next to Daisy’s. “Where are they?”
Miles looked pleadingly at Logan.
Logan made himself a quick promise to clean his room every day, then pointed across the room. “Hey, Mom, isn’t that Miss Paulina from Miss Paulina’s Candy Palace over there?”
“Paulina?” his mom repeated. “She told me she couldn’t make it this year.”
“I’m pretty sure I just saw her turn that corner,” Logan insisted. “By the restrooms.”
“I better go see if I can find her,” his mother said, hurrying off.
Logan felt queasy.
“Nice one,” Philip said. “I’m impressed.”
“You’re impressed that I just lied to my mother?”
Philip shook his head. “No. I’m impressed that you did it so well!”
Daisy went to kick Philip in the shin, but he darted out of the way before her sneaker made contact. “Come on,” she said, “let’s get the other candy out, and then we still have to submit our recipe forms. AJ wants me to scout out anything—or anyone—suspicious-looking before the contest starts.”
Logan stared at his spot on the table. How he’d longed for the day when he’d have his own LOGAN SWEET name card at this contest, and now there it was. A black card with his name in big fancy gold letters. He lined up the Bubbletastic ChocoRockets on the plate as nicely as he could, then didn’t want to look at them anymore. “Okay, your turn,” he told Philip.
Philip lifted the lid of his plastic container and placed the Harmonicandys gently on his plate. “Don’t you think we should test them first?” he asked.
They all looked down to check them out. The beeswax Logan had suggested brushing on top gave them a nice gloss, and the bright lights hanging over the table really made them shine.
Daisy let out a low whistle. “They look sooo great.” After a quick pause, she said, “Oh, sorry, AJ. Won’t do it again. He has a headache,” she explained. “He said my whistling went through his skull.” She rolled her eyes. “Teenage boys are so very dramatic.”
“I don’t think we have time to test them,” Logan whispered as a woman wearing a light blue dress began walking down the length of the table. She was stopping in front of each contest entry, marking something down on a clipboard. Logan had seen this woman at previous conventions. She owned a chain of candy stores, he seemed to recall. The judges were always kept secret until the actual event. One year Log
an’s dad had been a judge, and he hadn’t even told the family until the morning of the contest!
“Who’s that woman?” Daisy asked, narrowing her eyes suspiciously. “She seems awfully interested in what each person made.”
Logan laughed. “She’s one of the three judges. I promise you, she isn’t trying to steal my father’s secret ingredient.”
Daisy placed her hands on her hips. “Hey, more often than you’d think, the last person you suspect is often the person who did it.”
“Who did what?” Miles asked.
“You know, it.”
“Ah, that clears that up.”
“I hate to interrupt this fascinating conversation about the meaning of the word it,” Philip said, glancing nervously at the rapidly approaching woman. “But she’s checking to make sure everyone’s candy is in place.” He looked pointedly at Miles, whose candy was the only one missing out of all thirty-two entries.
Miles looked pained, as if he’d just eaten way too much chocolate pizza.
“I’m really sorry you have to do this, Miles,” Logan said. “Look at it this way. If your Bee Happy candy wasn’t so great, you’d be able to risk entering it. You know, like Daisy can.”
“You’re right,” Miles said, brightening.
Daisy pursed her lips. “I think I was just insulted again.”
Miles slid the pie out of the box and balanced it in his hand.
The woman was only a few spots away now, and Logan knew his mother would soon realize that Miss Paulina hadn’t come after all. He glanced behind them to see that Henry and Max had gotten stopped by admirers, but they wouldn’t be held up for long. “Now would be good,” he urged.
Miles stepped up to the spot marked MILES O’LEARY and placed the pie in the middle of the plate.
“Now let’s get out of here,” Daisy said.
They hurried away from the table, not looking back. Logan knew he wasn’t the only one who had no interest in being there when the judges (and Max! and his parents!) saw that pie.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Once they had filled out their information forms with the name of their candy (or pie), a description, and the ingredients, there was nothing to do but wait and try to avoid Max, Henry, and Logan’s parents. Daisy had gone scouting, and she told the boys to keep out of sight. She directed them to wait inside a back stairwell that led down to an emergency exit. From there they could peer around the corner and see what was happening in the room, but no one could see them.
After she’d gone, Philip said, “I’m going to talk to Henry. I’ll make sure he keeps the others away from the table as long as possible. Once they see the pie, they’ll start asking us all sorts of questions.”
“You’re going to talk to Henry?” Logan asked, surprised. “What will you say?”
“Trust me, I know what I’m doing.” Philip strode off into the crowd before Logan could ask anything else.
Miles and Logan watched the woman with the clipboard stop in front of the card with Miles’s name on it, stare, turn the pie around on the plate, stare some more, then pick it up along with Miles’s card. Miles whimpered a bit as the woman strode purposefully through a door marked JUDGES’ ROOM.
“She’s probably in there trying to figure out if the pie is real or made out of candy to look like a pie,” Logan explained. “Like the ice cream up there.”
“That’s not real ice cream?”
Logan shook his head.
The woman came out a minute later and returned both the pie and Miles’s name card to his spot on the table. Except now the word DISQUALIFIED was stamped in red across his name.
Miles sighed and took a step back, out of sight again. He leaned against the wall. “That is not a nice word. Usually I like words with the letter q in them, but not that one.”
Logan, leaning on the wall next to him, nodded solemnly. He figured this was as good a time as any to ask a question that had been nagging at him since the night before. “Does it bother you that you went through all that, you know, grief when you thought Daisy drowned?”
“I thought about that a lot on the drive this morning,” Miles replied. “And I decided that it wasn’t for nothing. I mean, if it hadn’t happened, I wouldn’t have learned how to make up my own languages—and I’m really good at it. I’ve also learned lots of really interesting things in the library, not only about the afterlife but about all sorts of things. Looking for signs, even when I don’t find them, kind of helps me pay more attention to what’s going on around me. My parents think the whole thing made me withdraw from the world, but in a weird way, it made me more a part of it.”
“Wow,” Logan said. “You really did think a lot about it!”
Miles nodded. “The whole thing taught me a lot about life and losing things. I can kind of see things in people now, like I know when someone else has lost something, and that makes me understand them better.”
Logan wasn’t sure how to interpret that. “Like Philip losing his mom?”
Miles nodded. “Or like if someone’s been through something big.” He met Logan’s eyes when he said the last part. And he kept them there.
At first Logan waited for Miles to explain what he meant. And then, all at once, in a rush of understanding, Logan knew what Miles was referring to. How could he not have realized it? Just because he never thought about his burns didn’t mean others hadn’t. It had been so long since he’d been around people he didn’t know that it hadn’t occurred to him to think about it. But it wasn’t really normal not to have even given it a second thought. Why hadn’t he?
That question set off a whole explosion of others. Had his parents kept him hidden from new people because of how he looked? Had they… had they canceled the tours because of him? The annual factory picnic?
He felt queasy. How could he have been so blind?
Miles put his hand on Logan’s arm. “Hey, you look like you need to sit down. I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean anything by it. Forget I said anything, I’m just rambling. Ignore me.”
Logan shook his head. “No, it’s my fault. I should have said something right at the beginning, the first day.”
“You don’t have to tell me anything,” Miles said. “I’m sure it’s really hard to talk about.”
“No,” Logan said, a little more forcefully than he intended. “It isn’t, that’s the thing. It’s not hard to talk about. I barely remember a time before the accident. So when I look in the mirror all I see is me.”
Logan reached back to that day, seven years before. He hadn’t thought about it in so long. “I remember leaning into a big vat of chocolate. I was trying to get a toy that a friend of mine threw in by mistake. I don’t know why I did it. I knew how hot it was. I was sort of mesmerized by that little truck making this really interesting path as it slipped down deeper. But I really wanted to get the truck back. So I just didn’t think.”
After a pause, Miles asked, “Did it hurt a lot?”
“I’m sure it must have, but I don’t remember. When I get older, I can get skin grafts that will hide most of it.”
“Well, that’s good, right?”
“I guess so. It’s just… I don’t know, it’s stupid—but what if I don’t feel like me afterward?”
Before Miles could answer, a pair of arms grabbed Logan from behind and hugged him tight. So tight that it could only be one person.
“Daisy?”
The grasp tightened even more. “You’ll always be you,” she said. “It doesn’t matter what you look like on the outside. You’ll always be Logan, the Candymaker’s son who’s kind and funny and sweeter than all the candy in his candy factory.”
“I think you’re squeezing the air out of his lungs,” Philip said.
Logan couldn’t see Philip from his current position in Daisy’s choke hold, but clearly he and Daisy must have arrived sometime during the conversation. How much had they heard? Enough, apparently.
Daisy slowly released her grip, and Logan took a few deep breaths.<
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“Any ribs broken?” Philip asked.
Logan felt around. “All present and accounted for.”
“Good,” Daisy said. “Because the judges are about to start tasting!”
Logan’s heart began to pound hard as the four of them left the stairwell.
Philip walked next to Miles and whispered, “I only had a minute to make up a story for Henry to tell the others about why you handed in the pie instead of your Bee Happys, so I admit I wasn’t in top form. Just go with whatever you hear.”
Before they got any farther, Max came running through the crowd that had gathered by the candy table. “Oh, Miles, we heard about what happened! Losing all the Bee Happys at once! What were you thinking, bringing them into the bathroom with you? Couldn’t you have handed them to someone while you went into the stall?”
Miles’s mouth fell open slightly, but he recovered quickly. “I know, it was pretty stupid.”
Henry put his arm around Miles’s shoulders. “How could you have guessed they’d fall down the toilet like that?”
“Yeah,” Miles said, glaring at Philip. “Who’d have seen that coming?”
Logan knew that laughing wouldn’t be an appropriate reaction, but it was hard to hold it in. He turned away so Max and Henry wouldn’t see his efforts and watched as his parents broke free from a crowd of fellow candymakers and headed his way.
As soon as he saw his mother’s face, the way her eyes lit up when she saw him, then clouded over for a split second with worry as she scanned the faces around him, he knew, just KNEW he’d been right about his parents protecting him all those years. Or thinking that they were. He thought maybe he should feel angry, or at the very least, resentful. But all he felt was grateful that he finally knew the truth. Now he could set them straight.
A podium had been set up at the head of the contest table. A hush fell across the room as soon as the three judges stepped up to it. The woman they had seen before was now wearing a sticker on her jacket with the words JUDGE CAROL printed in thick black marker. Alongside her were two men, the taller of whom Logan recognized as Old Sammy, the owner of the world’s largest cocoa-bean processing plant (not everyone grew their own trees!). He didn’t know the shorter man with the white chef’s hat perched on his head, but his name tag declared him JUDGE EDGAR.