The Doughnut King

by Jessie Janowitz

  Also by Jessie Janowitz

  The Doughnut Fix

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  Books. Change. Lives.

  Copyright © 2019 by Jessie Janowitz

  Cover and internal design © 2019 by Sourcebooks

  Cover design and illustrations by Nina Goffi

  Internal images © Carboxylase/Shutterstock, Freepik

  Cover image © RobinOlimb/Getty Images

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. Sourcebooks, Inc., is not associated with any product or vendor in this book.

  Published by Sourcebooks Young Readers, an imprint of Sourcebooks Kids

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  sourcebookskids.com

  Names: Janowitz, Jessie, author.

  Title: The doughnut king / by Jessie Janowitz.

  Description: Naperville, Illinois : Sourcebooks Jabberwocky, [2019] | Summary: Tris tries to save his doughnut business and town of Petersville, New York, by competing on a cooking show.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018057203 | ISBN 9781492655442 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Community life--Fiction. | Doughnuts--Fiction. | Contests--Fiction. | Reality television programs--Fiction. | Family life--Fiction. | Conduct of life--Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.1.J3882 Doy 2019 | DDC [Fic]--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018057203

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Keya’s Spiced Butter Tea

  One-Ingredient Chocolate Mousse

  Peekaboo Mocha Cream Cupcakes

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  For Mom and Dad

  Chapter 1

  Yes!

  I couldn’t get out of there fast enough. And I wasn’t the only one. When that final bell rang, Mrs. Putnam’s entire seventh-grade history class rushed to the door like there was free pizza on the other side.

  I stopped at my locker on my way out of school to drop off my books. I didn’t even want to see them for the next ten days.

  Halfway down the hall, I realized I hadn’t spun the dial on the lock. Whatever. If somebody were willing to commit a crime for my earth science book, they could have it.

  Andy Hubbard, one of the Ice Kings, reached out for a high five as I passed. “Doughnut Boy!”

  I tried to slap his hand on the move but ended up giving more of a high two. “Gotta go!” I called over my shoulder. “Have a good break!”

  Since we’d moved upstate midyear, I’d been at Waydin for only three months, but those school days had been the longest of my life. I swear each second of a Waydin day was equal to five minutes of a P.S. 111 day.

  It wasn’t as if the teachers were any more boring than teachers at my school back in New York City had been. If anything, the teachers at Waydin were better—some were even funny, like Mr. Dodd, who began each class with a Joey Bundano story. Joey was this kid Mr. Dodd grew up with who was always getting into trouble. I’m pretty sure a bunch of the stories were made up—I mean, I don’t think one kid could fill his entire apartment with crumpled newspaper in a single night, and definitely not without waking his parents—but who cares? If Mr. Dodd liked to make up stories just to make us laugh, that was fine by me.

  The teachers at Waydin weren’t the problem. The problem was the kids. There weren’t enough of them.

  If I’m being honest, this wasn’t a problem for everyone. It definitely wasn’t a problem for Jeanine, my brainiac, nine-year-old sister. But if you’re the kid who has spent every year hiding in the back row, waiting until you got home to figure out in peace and quiet when to use “less” instead of “fewer” or how to find the area of a cylinder, this is a big problem. If you’re the kid whose brain turns off when there’s an audience, Waydin is your nightmare, because when there are only twelve kids in your whole seventh-grade class, there is no place to hide. There aren’t even rows. There’s just a circle. And you can see everyone in a circle.

  As you’ve probably guessed, that kid who likes to hide in the back row is me, Tris Levin—or at least it is for another six years until I can legally change my name to Jax. Do you know what it’s like to go around every day with a name that just doesn’t fit? If you do, the good news is that you can change it. The bad news: you have to wait until you turn eighteen.

  Outside, the sky was gray, but kids were lying on the grass using backpacks as pillows like they were at the beach and the sun was shining. Someone was playing music on a phone. It looked like fun, but I didn’t have time to lounge around. I had to get to work. And the truth is, I wanted to. Working’s different when the whole thing is your idea, especially when that idea is doughnuts—mind-blowing, life-changing, cream-filled doughnuts.

  I waited for Jeanine and Zoe in our spot by the side of the building, then together, we walked around back to the parking lot.

  Dad was already there.

  “It came!” He waved a magazine out of the station wagon’s open window. “You made the cover!”

  What? The Doughnut Stop was on the cover of Destination Eating?

  Destination Eating is this fancy food and travel magazine for upstate New York, and I was blown away when they called about doing an article on the doughnut business I started with my friend Josh. But just an article. They never said anything about the cover.

  I jogged across the parking lot and took the magazine from my father.

  There we were: me and Josh, all glossy, knocking doughnuts together, sitting on the ticket counter in the old train station where we opened The Doughnut Stop.

  This was huge. People didn’t even have to read the magazine to learn about us; they’d just have to see it lying around somewhere. Talk about buzz.


  “Let me see!” Zoe pulled my hands down. “Why does your face look like that?”

  “That’s the way his face always looks,” Jeanine said, peering at the magazine over Zoe.

  “You look so clean and shiny,” Zoe said.

  “Um, thanks?”

  Zoe pulled the magazine lower and sounded out the words under the photo. “‘Meet the to-as-t.’ To-ast?”

  “‘Meet the toast of Petersville,’” Jeanine read. “‘Two twelve-year-old boys who opened a doughnut shop in the town’s abandoned train station.’”

  “They don’t make toast,” Zoe said.

  Jeanine rolled her eyes. “It’s an expression. They mean a toast like when you knock glasses together and say, ‘cheers.’”

  “Oh.” Zoe sucked her lower lip. She was clearly still confused.

  Dad thumped the side of the car. “Come on, guys. Let’s go.”

  We all piled in, me up front, Zoe and Jeanine in back.

  I laid the magazine on my knees and then flipped to the article.

  There were a couple of photos of me and Josh in the shop selling doughnuts, and then some of me frying them at home. The article took up almost four whole pages.

  During the interview, the reporter had asked a bunch of questions about how a banker (Dad) and a chef (Mom) ended up moving their family to a tiny town in upstate New York in the first place, and that’s where the article started: Tris explains that when his father lost his job last fall, his parents decided they wanted a new adventure.

  Just so you know, “adventure” was definitely not the word I used. I don’t think I’ve ever used the word “adventure” unless I was talking about an amusement park.

  They packed up and moved from the big city to tiny Petersville, NY, so his mother, a professional chef, could open the town’s first restaurant. When asked to explain where the idea for a cream doughnut shop came from, Tris points to a sign hanging over the counter that reads, “Yes, we do sell chocolate cream doughnuts!”

  “That sign was in the window of the General Store my first day in town, but it turned out that the owner, Winnie, didn’t make the doughnuts anymore, even though everybody said they were…this sounds weird, but people said they were like…life-changing. Now that I tell the story, it sounds kind of bad, but this all started because I just had to have one of those doughnuts. Then I met Josh and we decided to start the business together, and it really is the best thing I’ve ever done. I mean, it’s not easy, but I still love it.”

  I closed the magazine and cracked the window. I was starting to feel queasy from reading in the car. I’d finish it later with Josh when he got to The Doughnut Stop after hockey practice.

  “So how was school?” Dad asked.

  “Fine,” Jeanine said. “Oh, except Ms. Shepard doesn’t want me helping out after vacation.”

  Jeanine’s math is way beyond what they teach at Waydin, so before we started in January, my parents and the principal agreed that she’d do online courses with the Center for Talented Youth and help out in math classes at Waydin during her free periods.

  “But I thought that was going so well,” Dad said. “What happened?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I laughed. “Oh, come on. You correct Ms. Shepard in class in front of everybody.”

  Dad frowned at the rearview mirror. “You don’t. Please, tell me you don’t.”

  “I have an obligation to make sure that the math is correct. That’s why Principal Kritcher put me in there.”

  “Couldn’t you at least wait until after class?” Dad said.

  “So those kids are supposed to learn it wrong for an entire day?”

  I had to admit Jeanine had a point. Dad must have thought so too because he dropped the subject. “How was your day, Zo?”

  “Did you know if you suck really hard on your arm, you can make a heart?” Zoe pushed up her sleeve and showed us her arm in the rearview mirror.

  “You gave yourself a hickey?” I said.

  “A heart. It’s pretty.” Zoe studied her work. “Want one?”

  “Uh, no thanks,” I said.

  “Zo Zo, no hickeys, okay?” Dad said.

  “You mean on other people?”

  “I mean, on anyone.”

  “Why?”

  “Because… Just don’t.”

  Zoe didn’t say anything. I was pretty sure the next chance she had, she’d be spelling her name in hickey.

  “And Tris, what about you,” Dad said. “Last day before break, how was it?”

  “A five.”

  “School is always a five with you.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s kind of its ceiling.”

  “That makes me sad.”

  I hate it when he says that. I mean, I don’t want to make him sad, because he’s a pretty good dad given the other dads I’ve seen, and I think he knows that I don’t want to make him sad, so is he basically just asking me to lie to him?

  “Think of it this way, I never say it’s less than a five, right? So that should make you happy.”

  “But do you ever think maybe, just maybe, it could be a seven? What would that look like?”

  “Not school?”

  “I give up. Any big plans for spring break?”

  “Figure out how to make doughnuts faster.”

  Chapter 2

  We dropped Zoe at home, then headed to town. Jeanine came with me and Dad so she could go to the library, her favorite place on earth.

  My favorite place on earth? The NYC Cake and Bake Supply Company.

  I had to get to The Doughnut Stop to open at 4:00 p.m. We used to be open just weekends, but in February, Josh and I convinced our parents we could handle Friday hours too. It turns out we can’t, but let’s just keep that between us.

  The doughnuts and cream-filled pastry guns were already in the car. On Fridays, I fry the doughnuts and put them in the car before I go to school. The creams I make the day before, and then Dad just throws them in a cooler on his way out to pick us up.

  Mom and I split the old train station: The Doughnut Stop on one side and The Station House, her restaurant, on the other. When we moved to Petersville, the building was just sitting there, empty, and had been since the train decided it wasn’t worth its time to stop there anymore, so Jim, Petersville’s mayor, let us use the place rent-free. It’s a pretty good deal, especially because Mom does the mom stuff she does at home, like make sure the bathroom is stocked with toilet paper, which is definitely a plus. She doesn’t even charge us for it.

  Since the station house is on the far end of Main Street with nothing else around, it helps both businesses because we’re not out there alone. People who come for the restaurant discover The Doughnut Stop, and the other way around. We’ve even done some co-branding.

  In case you haven’t read Starting Your Own Business for Dummies, co-branding is where two businesses work together to sell stuff.

  Dad takes care of the business side of the restaurant, but the whole thing was Mom’s idea, so I always think of it as hers. Hers and Walter’s. Walter is Mom’s best friend. Before I was born, he and Mom cooked together in restaurants back in the city. When Mom opened The Station House, Walter moved here to run it with her because he and his wife, Azalia, wanted their daughter, Larissa, to grow up in the country like they had back in El Salvador.

  It was still cloudy when we got to town, and without some sun, Main Street looked even sadder than usual. Nine small buildings lined the street and half of them were boarded up with FOR SALE signs out front. Maybe they’d started out different colors, but they were all the same peeling gray now. The two exceptions were the library and Dr. Charney’s clinic. The library was the only building on Main Street made of brick, and though it wasn’t a bright red, at least it was a color. There were also some blue-checked curtains hanging in the windows on th
e second floor where Josh lived with his mother, the librarian. The clinic was painted Gatorade green with neon-pink trim, and it popped like it was 3-D. Everything else was flat.

  Dr. C says colors can actually make us happy and that they make you really happy when they surprise you, so he repaints the clinic every few months—usually in the middle of the night, wearing one of those headlamps miners use. Besides being a doctor, Dr. C is a big-time painter and marathon runner. Before I met him, if someone had told me you could be all those things in one lifetime, I never would have believed them.

  Back when we lived in the city, there were six different stores just on my block. When we moved to Petersville, there were just three in the whole town. There was Turnby’s, where Harley Turnby sold whatever he felt like for whatever he thought he could get away with, which in Petersville wasn’t much. Next to that was the General Store, where Winnie Hammond sold hardware and eggs in colors I didn’t know they came in until we moved here, not just white or brown, but green, blue, and something kind of peachy. Across Main Street was Renny’s Gas Mart, just a normal gas station and convenience store, which made it kind of unusual for Petersville. And that was it until I opened The Doughnut Stop and Mom opened The Station House.

  When Dad and I pulled up in front of the station house that day, the line of customers stretched from the door of The Doughnut Stop, down the porch stairs, and halfway across the parking lot. This wasn’t because of the article. It hadn’t even hit newsstands yet. We’d just gotten an early copy because we were in it. This was normal, and had been since the FYOs.

  Back in December, when Josh and I opened The Doughnut Stop, we’d had only one product: prefilled, chocolate cream doughnuts. But by February, we’d branched out to three other flavors: butterscotch, cinnamon, and vanilla. Then in March, I came up with the idea for the FYO: fill-your-own. Now, just a few weeks later, FYO was all anybody ordered.

  I get it. Once you’ve shot cream into your own doughnut, you’ll never go back to prefilled. But you don’t have to take my word for it. Come see for yourself.

  Selling Tip #31: If you’re not gaining a customer, you’re losing one. The Dummies’ Guide to Making the Sale.