by Thomas Tosi
When Mr. Paczki saw how big and mad this guy was, he ducked into the back room. I saw him grab a phone.
The blue coach picked up the soggy muffin and held it back like he was ready to chuck it.
A woman at the red table stood up. “You throw that muffin at my girls and it’ll be the last thing you do.”
“Oh sure, your little girls are angels here,” he said. “Well, I saw ‘em out on the pitch this morning, shoving and pushing like nobody’s business. So, if that’s how you teach them to play…” He threw the muffin. It hit the red table with its dry side, bounced off, and smacked into the wall, soggy side first. A spray of wet muffin spitball particles dotted four more people at a table with kids in football uniforms. What was left of the muffin stuck to the pink, green, and white tiled wall and began sliding down.
“Hey, hey, hey,” said a man in black shorts and a striped referee shirt as he rose in‐between the red and blue tables. “I think the adults here just need to calm down and remember this is all supposed to be about the kids.”
Everybody pelted him with doughnuts.
That was when a bunch of kids from the football table climbed over the counter and started grabbing all the doughnut racks.
By the time the police got there, the battle had spread from the shop out into the parking lot. They asked a bunch of questions and wrote down all our names, our phone numbers, and where we lived. But since everyone agreed Marlene had started the actual food fight and Marlene’s dad owns the shop, none of us got arrested or anything. The police just told us all to go home, get cleaned up, and think about what we did.
Celia’s car was mashed with food all over the place—bagel chunks, frosting, jam, you name it. Brian grabbed a cruller off the roof, and James peeled free a strawberry‐iced doughnut that was stuck to the side window. They hopped in the back seat and started eating. They were laughing and recording each other with their phone.
Marlene and her dad had gone back inside and were cleaning up. Marlene’s clothes and hair were a mess. She sure couldn’t have felt too good about how she looked now. Doughnuts were everywhere. A table was turned over, and the chairs were all knocked about. Some of the wire racks looked bent.
I was kind of thinking that none of this would’ve happened if they’d just let me buy my six thousand doughnuts like the game piece said I could. But they had a lot of cleaning up to do, and I felt bad for Mr. Paczki. You probably had to get up pretty early to make all those doughnuts, and he looked tired. The police looked sad, too. But I don’t know if that was on account of Mr. Paczki or all the squished doughnuts.
A Great Big Mess
If this don’t just beat all,” Celia said, slapping the steering wheel with one free hand. She glanced at herself in the rearview mirror.
Sitting up front with her, I could see she’d been hit much harder than me. Celia had been a doughnut magnet. And I don’t mean for plain doughnuts. She was a human schmear—frosting, cream cheese, nuts, and sprinkles everywhere. The worst part was all the jam and jelly in her hair. She looked like she had mousse and squirrel in there.
“Just look at my car,” she said.
“Hey, at least it tastes good,” James mumbled from the back seat through a mouthful of his strawberry‐iced doughnut.
“And how am I supposed to clean all this off?” As Celia finished saying this, drops of rain began pattering on the windshield.
Celia reached for the windshield wiper handle. “At least something’s goin’ right. Here comes the rain.”
“I wouldn’t do that,” Brian said.
Celia did it anyway. And, when she did, wipers sprang to life smooshing and streaking doughnut guts all across the windshield. What looked like one of those cronut things was stuck under the wiper on the driver’s side.
“Hold on, y’all,” Celia said. “I can’t see a blessed thing.” Stripes of red, white, and chocolate brown squeegeed across the glass. You could sort of see through the red areas. Those parts made the outside world look blurry and bloody—not a good thing when Celia started drifting toward the other lane, where cars were coming right at us.
Brian and James hollered and laughed in the back seat.
“Celia!” I pushed my palms with all my might against the dashboard as though that would stop us and leaned my shoulder against my door as if that would turn us.
I tried to brace myself. The horn blared from a red—I think—pickup truck coming at us as Celia swerved back into our lane.
The rain got stronger, and the wipers continued spreading the mush. Celia leaned forward, trying to see through a thin clear streak the cronut left on the glass. She slowed way down. We started leading a parade of cars. With the wetness of the rain in the air and the four of us hyperventilating, the windshield was fogging up. Celia made her way to the side of the road. Actually, she made her way to more than the side of the road. I got jostled on my seat as we bumped up on the sidewalk and then back down to a stop.
Celia didn’t even wait to catch her breath. She reached across the front seat, flung open the glove compartment, which banged down on my knees, and grabbed a handful of paper napkins from about three different drive‐through places.
“Well, don’t just sit there like a bump on a log,” she said, throwing some of the napkins at me. “Let’s get cleaning.”
I couldn’t believe she thought those would work. The rain was pelting the car now, but at that moment, Celia didn’t look like someone I wanted to argue with.
We both got out in the rain to wipe the windshield. Brian and James went back to messing with their phone and didn’t budge from the back seat.
The paper napkins lasted for about two seconds of wiping the mush off the glass. They disintegrated, and then we were left with just using our hands. Celia and I were getting soaked.
The rain seemed to calm her down, though.
“Abe, I am so sorry about the dang mess,” Celia said.
“Don’t worry. We almost got it.” I flicked the crud off my hands and toward a mini river running down beside the curb. The day was warm enough, and the rain wasn’t really bothering me. I mean, you can get only so wet before you can’t get any wetter.
“Shoot, I don’t mean just this.” Celia held up hands showing fingers coated in doughy sludge. “I mean everything. Crammin’ y’all upstairs in the attic and startin’ a fight back in that doughnut shop right in front of your little honey pie.”
“What?”
“Your little sweetie behind the counter back there.” Celia jabbed her thumb back in the direction of the Sweetly Crisp.
“Wait,” I said as I stopped cleaning the glass. “She’s not my sweetie or honey pie. I barely know her.”
“Well, all right, all right, forget it. I’m just trying to say sorry, is all.”
She was trying to hide it, but I could see her smiling, and I didn’t like it.
“She goes to the same school as me. That’s it.”
“Fine, forget it.”
Celia’s smile was gone now, so I started cleaning again.
She looked at the windshield as if she hoped to see her reflection. Her hair was still a horror show but, instead of being stuck out in all directions with jam and frosting, now it was matted down and running. When she couldn’t get a good look at herself in the rain‐spattered glass, Celia strained to see through the windshield and made a face at Brian and James.
“I swear, are those two good for anything?” she said.
Boy, I could’ve told Celia a lot about Brian and James, but I was still thinking about the doughnut shop fight. “I just felt sorry for Marlene’s dad,” I said out loud.
“Whose dad?” Celia looked up at me. “Oh, you mean the honey pie.”
Water was trickling down her face, and I could tell that she wanted to smile again. Instead, she licked a raindrop from the corner of her mouth and turned her head back down toward her work so that I couldn’t see her face.
“I told you, she’s not—”
“Hey, I’
m the one said forget it,” Celia interrupted. “You’re the one keeps bringing it up.”
“I didn’t want their shop to get wrecked or anything. I just wanted the doughnuts the rules said I could get. That’s not wrong, is it?”
Finally, this was something that Celia took seriously. She stopped cleaning. No smile now—she was thinking. The heavy raindrops splattered and plunked on the hood in front of us.
“Y’all might have a case, if that’s what you mean,” Celia said. “But your mistake was just fishing for guppies when you should’ve been going after the whale.”
“Whale?”
“Well, you know that ain’t the only Sweetly Crisp shop, right? I mean, you do know they got Sweetly Crisps all over the country—even down south.”
“Of course I know.”
“So, one little ol’ shop ain’t gonna have no six thousand doughnuts. And the doughnut man—Honey Pie’s dad—he was right. That there contest comes from their headquarters. He didn’t come up with it. He just runs, maybe owns, that one shop. He’s the guppy, see?”
“I guess. But then, who’s the whale?”
“The headquarters. The one all them individual shop’s gotta answer to. That’s your whale, right there.”
“So, I go after the Sweetly Crisp headquarters for the six thousand doughnuts?”
“No, sir. I think you mighta just found a genuine loophole in their contest. But the thing is, Sweetly Crisp headquarters—the whale—they got money…a lot of it. That makes the whale fearsome.”
“And I’m no match for a whale.”
“That’s right. You’d need a miracle to go after a whale like the Sweetly Crisp Corporation,” Celia said.
Mom Finds Out
Stop!” Mom said as Celia, Brian, James, and I walked through the front door.
I thought she was mad about us messing up her floor. Brian and James were okay. They managed to stay out of the worst of the doughnut shop battle. And they didn’t get out in the rain to help clean the car. But Celia and I were dripping wet and shedding Sweetly Crisp chunks. Mom frowned.
“You two go,” she said to Brian and James. For once, they immediately did as they were told.
“Celia,” Mom asked, looking us both up and down, “don’t you have to be on campus today?”
“Yes, ma’am, but I—”
“I think you should go and get cleaned up, then.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Celia is covered in more crud than me, and she gets to go? Uh‐oh, this isn’t about getting the floor dirty.
About halfway up the stairs, Celia stopped to pick up a soggy, cakey fragment that fell from her hair. She peered through the railing and gave me an I’m sorry look before continuing.
“I just got off the phone,” Mom said.
Phone?
I thought about the aftermath of the food fight. Marlene and her dad were standing beside the police officers as they wrote down our names, where we lived, and…our phone numbers.
The police have our phone numbers!
“Mom, I can explain about the po—”
“Paczki,” Mom said it like paunch‐key. “That’s how he says it, right—the man who owns the Sweetly Crisp doughnut shop. He just called the house.”
Wait, the police hadn’t called. It was Mr. Paczki. Is that better or worse?
“You actually started a food fight in a doughnut shop?” Mom said.
“I didn’t start it.”
“Well, the way he tells it, you did.”
“No, I didn’t. In fact, I was barely in it.”
The door from the garage to the kitchen slammed. Faye and Peg came running around and into the other end of the hallway. They stopped short when they saw Mom laying into me.
“Then who do you say started it?” Mom said.
“Honey Pie…I mean Marlene—Mr. Paczki’s daughter. She threw the doughnuts first.”
Mom turned to Faye and Peg. “You two have someplace to be?”
“No,” Faye said. “We can stay and watch.”
“Upstairs. Both of you. Now.”
As my sisters brushed by me, Faye whispered, “Honey Pie,” puckered her lips, and made a kissing sound. She and Peg started up the stairs.
Mom turned back to me. There was something about the look on her face…it was almost like she believed me for a second.
“He did say something about his daughter throwing doughnuts first.”
“So, can I go get cleaned up now?” For some reason, I thought I was going to get off that easily.
“Not so fast. Why would his daughter start throwing doughnuts? Mr. Paczki said something about you trying to cheat him. Were you?”
“Cheat him? I wouldn’t cheat anybody.”
“I’d like to think not. But he said you were trying to buy thousands of doughnuts.”
“So? That’s not cheating.”
“It is if you don’t have the money.”
“I have it.”
“And where would you get that kind of money?”
Peg stopped about halfway up the stairs. Now, she was the one peering down through the railing. Peg looked nervous. I bet she thought I was going to spill it about our deal. I bet she thought I’d tell Mom that the money came from the Peggy bank. I bet Peg thought I’d tell that she still slept with her doll, Mrs. Fuzzy Hair. She was probably already worried about not going to the sleepover.
“It’s my money,” I said.
Peg mouthed the words thank you and went up the stairs.
It took me almost ten minutes to explain to Mom about the game piece from Dad’s coffee cup and the cash equivalent rule. I think Mom was at least a little bit proud of me for being just a kid and figuring out the whole math loophole thing. She had me run through it twice.
“Well, I don’t know why anyone would need six thousand doughnuts, and I don’t know about this contest rule,” Mom said. “But the bottom line is that Mr. Paczki said he doesn’t ever want to see you at his Sweetly Crisp again. And honestly, I can’t blame him. So, you don’t go near that place. Understood?”
“That’s fine with me,” I said, remembering what Celia said about guppies and whales and how going after that one little individual doughnut shop was a mistake. “Can I get changed now?”
“Go on.”
I didn’t take two steps when—
“Oh, I almost forgot, one more thing,” Mom added.
“Huh?”
“Mr. Paczki’s daughter, Marlene. She was really upset by the whole thing. Apparently, she was at the shop waiting for her mother to come pick her up for a piano recital.”
“Why would she be picked up at the doughnut shop?”
“I don’t know. But I think her parents are divorced. Something about the way Mr. Paczki was describing it.”
Maybe that’s why she was so dressed up—and why she got so mad.
“Anyway, when she got all messy,” Mom said, “she missed it.”
“So, she made out. I mean, who wants to go listen to a stupid piano recital?”
“It would have been her recital, Abe. She was crying. Mr. Paczki wants you to stay away from her, too. Got it?”
“No problem,” I said, feeling that Marlene Paczki was the last person I ever wanted to see again. But, as I walked up the stairs, I found myself thinking about her braided hair, that little white smudge of powdered sugar on her forehead, and those swimming pool eyes.
Dreams and Screams
It rained all the rest of that day and into the night. Sometimes, it was just a sprinkle so soft that the only way you knew it was still coming down was to look for ripples in the puddles. Other times, it pelted so hard and loud onto the attic roof you’d have to almost shout just to talk to someone—not that I really felt like talking.
And the wind picked up, too. If this had been later in the fall and the leaves had started to change, those gusts and raindrops would have knocked them all right off the oak tree in our yard. But the leaves were still there, big and green. They were swipi
ng back and forth across the attic window like those heavy wet blanket strips that slap across our windshield when Dad goes through the car wash.
I liked it, although it was a little scary, too. I knew Peg would definitely have Mrs. Fuzzy Hair with her tonight.
We were all in bed—Brian, James, and I on our side of the blanket wall and Faye and Peg on theirs. I was lying on my back, hands under my head, staring at the ceiling. The rain had slowed down for a bit.
“Hey, Abe?” Peg whispered from her side of the attic.
“Yeah.”
“Are you asleep?”
I didn’t answer for a minute. I made a snoring sound just to mess with her.
“I know that one,” Peg said. “You already said ‘yeah.’ I’m not dumb.”
When Peg said that, I got a sour tingling feeling in my stomach and felt bad—like guilty. I don’t know why. It was just a stupid little snoring joke, no big deal. But I couldn’t help thinking of that time I heard Peg call herself dumb. I didn’t want to poke her on that bruise. I decided not to fake her out anymore.
“No, I’m not asleep,” I said.
“Thanks for not telling Mom.”
“Well, I said I wouldn’t, right?”
“Yeah, I guess…. Hey, Abe?”
“What?”
“Faye said that Celia said that you were gonna get six thousand doughnuts with three dollars.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t. Not yet.”
“That’s my three dollars, right?”
“No. It’s my three dollars. We made a deal.”
“Yeah, I guess…. Hey, Abe?”
“What now?”
“Six thousand is a lot, isn’t it?”
“Sure, I suppose.”
“What’re you gonna do with all those doughnuts?”
“I haven’t decided yet.”
“Can I have some?”
“No.”
“How come?”
