The Doughnut King

by Jessie Janowitz

  One more family speaking rapid-fire Chinese squeezed through the narrow entrance into the crowded space between the door, the register, the lobster tank, and the golden, roast ducks hanging in the window.

  “What number are we?” I figured talking about anything other than the show was a good plan.

  Mom grabbed my head and kissed it. “I’m just so…happy.”

  Plan clearly not working.

  “Believe and achieve.” Jeanine nodded knowingly. “Works every time.”

  “Oh, yeah. Believe and achieve.” Kevin gave me a double thumbs-up.

  “Was it the Tea-Drunk Duck?” Grandma Esme asked, poking my mother’s shoulder.

  “No, it was the Gambler’s Duck.”

  “Right. Gambler’s Duck.” Grandma Esme leaned over the counter. “Excuse me, do you know how much longer? We’re number twenty-one.”

  “Sorry, lots of big parties tonight,” the man said and hurried away.

  “Ma, you want to go outside, get some air?”

  “But we’ll lose our spot.”

  “The kids are here. They’ll come get us, right?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  Mom handed me the slip of paper with our number on it and led Grandma Esme out of the restaurant.

  Jeanine, Kevin, and I let the crowd jostle us out from its center until we were pressed against the lobster tank. The three of us turned around and watched the half-dead lobsters drifting through the purple-lit water.

  “Washington,” Kevin said suddenly.

  “Adams,” Jeanine answered.

  “Jefferson.”

  “Madison.”

  “Monroe.”

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “Naming the presidents in order,” Jeanine said.

  “Yeah, I got that. Why?”

  “Because it’s fun. Ignore him,” she said to Kevin. “Adams the Second.”

  “Jackson…”

  Buzz. I put my hand over my pocket and let my head tip forward, knocking into the cool glass of the lobster tank. Something burned in the back of my throat like I’d eaten too much tomato sauce.

  “I don’t know if I can do it,” I said to a lobster floating by.

  “Do what?” Jeanine said.

  So I told her and Kevin about my meeting with Chef JJ.

  “And?” Jeanine said when I was done.

  “And so I don’t deserve my spot.”

  Jeanine crossed her arms. “Yes, you do. It doesn’t matter why she chose you, just whether you’re good enough to be there, which we all know you are.”

  “Hey.” Kevin tugged Jeanine’s sleeve. “Remember what my dad told us about causation? This is really a causation issue, right?”

  “Oh, totally.” Jeanine nodded, then turned to me. “Kevin’s dad is a lawyer.”

  “No kidding.” I rolled my eyes. How could I forget? She’d only told me a million times. “Still not following.”

  “The point is,” Kevin said, “you’re asking the wrong question. You’re asking, ‘Why did I get on? Was it because Chef JJ worked with my mom?’”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “The question you should be asking is, ‘If Chef JJ hadn’t worked with my mom, would I have gotten on anyway?’ If the answer is yes, why she chose you doesn’t matter because it wouldn’t have changed the result.”

  “Exactly.” Jeanine nodded. “And we all know you would have gotten on.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Oh, come on, Tris!” Jeanine said.

  “Look, if it makes you feel any better, my cousin works in TV,” Kevin said. “And she says that people get on those shows for all kinds of reasons that have nothing to do with their cooking skills. Some kids get on just because they’re cute, or because they seem like they’ll pick fights, and fights are the kind of things people love to watch. Your getting on because Chef JJ knows your mom is no different from all the other reasons people get on the show that have nothing to do with cooking skills.”

  This did not make me feel any better. But it did possibly explain Marco’s weird non-cooking-related questions.

  “And what about telling people what happened at the audition?” I asked.

  “I think you should focus on the competition and forget everything else. It’s just a distraction,” Kevin said.

  “That’s exactly what I was going to say.” Jeanine giggled.

  Kevin’s face went red. “What were we up to?”

  “Huh?” I said, because I don’t speak JeanineandKevin.

  “Jackson,” Jeanine said.

  As Jeanine and Kevin went on naming presidents, I took out my phone. There were four missed calls, all from Josh, and a bunch of texts:

  Josh: Did u do it?

  Josh: It has to be over by now

  Josh: WHAT HAPPENED

  Josh: ?????

  Josh: ??!!

  Winnie: How’d we do, Slick?

  We. That said it all.

  I clicked reply and added Josh.

  Me: WE MADE IT!

  Chapter 11

  The Petersville Gazette

  Vol. 1, Issue 5

  Town Happenings

  Don’t miss The Petersville Fair, Saturday, June 14! Petersville, you did it! You made over Main Street, and it looks incredible. Now it’s time to celebrate. This Saturday, new stores will hold their grand openings, and special activities are planned all day:

  Stinky Cheese Farm Store: Ever make your own mozzarella? It’s not stinky, but it’s easy and fun, and melts in your mouth. Come by the shop at 10:00 a.m. and 2:00 p.m. to give it a try.

  The Watch, Cut, and Quilt: Watch The Wizard of Oz while Peggi shows you how to turn your old T-shirts into a cozy blanket, and Deena gives you one of her special movie-themed haircuts, “The Dorothy Trim,” “The Tin Man Buzz,” or “The Wizard Surprise.”

  The Pop Shop: Come to the fire pit in our backyard and learn how to make campfire popcorn using sticks and tinfoil.

  The Board Room: Play Scrabble on a life-size board on Main Street. Board and pieces all made by Hazel herself.

  The Family Clinic: Join Dr. C for free Tai Chi on the lawn outside the clinic at 8:00 a.m., 10:00 a.m., 12:00 p.m., and 2:00 p.m. Beginners welcome.

  Main Street will be closed to traffic on Fair Day:

  Petersville’s own Tris Levin has been selected to appear on the hit TV kids’ cooking competition Can You Cut It? The show will start filming later this month in New York City and will air in August.

  Featured Series

  Things Most People Get Wrong and How YOU Can Get Them Right

  By Jeanine Levin

  How many times have people told you to put your arms over your head when you’re coughing because food or liquid has gone down the wrong pipe?

  Medical experts agree that putting your arms over your head does absolutely nothing. You want to help somebody who’s choking? Take a first aid class and learn how to do the Heimlich maneuver.

  You’re welcome!

  “How late were you up?” Josh asked as he handed a customer the cinnamon pastry gun.

  “No idea. Walter and I were trying to get in an extra knife skills session.”

  The woman on the other side of the counter held up the gun. “So I just put the tip in the hole you made and pull this trigger thing?”

  Josh nodded. “Just make sure to do it slowly or you’ll end up covered in cream.”

  She did as Josh instructed and giggled as the doughnut inflated. “This is so much fun!”

  “It was his idea.” Josh pointed at me.

  “FYO, it’s clever,” she said.

  “Thanks, um, I think the doughnut’s had enough.” Cream was dribbling out the back end.

  “Oh, of course.” She handed Josh the gun and took a bite. �
��Mmm.”

  When she was gone, I sat on a stool behind the counter and leaned my head against the wall. “My whole life, Walter was always so chill. But ask the man to teach you what he knows about slicing and dicing, and it’s like he’s training you for the army. Not kidding, I think I’ve cut over a hundred onions.”

  “What’s your best time?”

  “Not good enough.” I dropped my head on the counter. “And I don’t understand—why can’t I cut them into even pieces?”

  “Because onions are round?”

  “Still. The pieces can be about the same size, and I always end up with some tiny and some huge. You should see Walter’s. They’re perfect. And I try to just copy him, but the guy is like a ninja with that knife. Look at this.” I held up my hands. My thumbs and the first two fingers on both hands were covered with Band-Aids.

  Josh cringed.

  “They look worse than they are. The real problem is that onion juice stings.”

  “Onion juice?”

  “Yeah, you don’t think of onions as juicy but the fresh ones are, and that juice kills if it gets in a cut.”

  Knife technique was my weakest area, but I was definitely getting better. I pretty much had the four basic cuts—the slice, the chop, the back-slice, and the rock-chop—down. The real issue now was speed. My onion chopping time was still slower than anybody who’d ever won Knife Skills Showdown, and I was less than two weeks from competition. I had to get real. There was no way I was winning that challenge. The goal now was just to get fast enough not to finish last and be eliminated.

  In addition to knife skills training with Walter, I was doing two other training sessions every day: recipe creation with Mom and dish presentation with Dr. C. When I wasn’t doing those or making doughnuts, I was practicing on my own, making up recipes from scratch, cooking and plating them until I was too tired to stand. I’d spent the night on the couch a few times because I was just too tired to climb up to the attic.

  “I’ll take a chocolate FYO,” the next customer said.

  “Sure.” I turned to grab the gun from its hook. “Hey, who’s got the cho—Zoe!”

  She froze, aiming the chocolate cream pastry gun directly into her open mouth through the bars on the cage of her hockey helmet.

  “But I’m hungry.”

  “We don’t eat what we’re selling while we’re selling it. How many times have we said it?”

  “Many?” She pulled off her helmet and hung her head.

  “Maybe you just need to eat. Why don’t you go ask Mom for something?”

  She was almost to the door when I realized she still had the pastry gun.

  “Nice try.”

  She made like she was putting it on a table but then broke into a run, the gun hugged to her chest. Josh cut her off, but instead of handing it over, she just hugged the gun tighter.

  “Put it down,” I said.

  “It’s almost empty. Can’t I have this last little bit?”

  “Zo, it’s half full.”

  It’s always seemed wrong to use tickling as a weapon, but sometimes Zoe leaves you no choice. In this case, it was just the threat of the tickle that got her to give up the gun.

  After she left, a couple more customers came in, then it got quiet again. Fair Day had been way less busy than we’d all hoped.

  “Are you nervous, you know, about the show?” Josh asked. “I mean, I know you’re nervous, but good nervous, right? Like, excited?”

  “Yeah, sure, excited nervous.” Up-all-night-in-a-cold-sweat excited nervous.

  There was a loud crash in the ticket office. A second later, Jeanine threw open the door.

  “Why can’t you just do it the way I tell you?” She was shouting and shaking her clipboard like she was about to throw it at us. “If we need something, you don’t put it on the to-do list! You go into the Google Doc I created especially for orders and mark it in the appropriate square!”

  “What’s wrong with her?” Josh whispered.

  “Jim said no to her living history museum idea. You know, the whole Colonial theme thing.”

  “That man has zero imagination,” Jeanine snapped. “But this has nothing to do that! This is about me trying to do my job! And you making that impossible! Do you want me to quit? Do you?”

  Josh looked at me. “Uh, no?” He’d spent enough time with my family to have seen plenty of Jeanine freak-outs, but they’d never been directed at him before.

  “Okay then. Do you think you can manage and just! Fill! Out! The! Google! Doc!” Her face was purple.

  “Sorry, Jeanine,” Josh said.

  “Sorry? Sorry doesn’t help! Sorry never helps!”

  “It’s true,” I whispered to Josh. “I’ve learned from experience, ‘sorry’ never makes the freak-outs less freaky.”

  “So what do you do when she get like this?”

  “Take cover. Wait until it passes.”

  “Like a hurricane.”

  “Exactly. Hurricane Jeanine.”

  “You think this is funny? How funny will it be when you run out of flour!” She marched back into the ticket office and yanked the door closed with a loud crack. Then she opened it and yanked it closed again, making an even louder crack. There were two more cracks, and then silence.

  “Is it over?” Josh whispered.

  “Hard to say. Sometimes there are aftershocks.”

  “What’s up Doughnut Boy?” It was Andy Hubbard, king of the Ice Kings.

  “Hey, Hubb,” Josh said.

  “You guys have any butterscotch cream left?” He crossed his fingers.

  “Yup.” I took the gun down from its hook.

  “How’s it going in town?” Josh took out a doughnut and made a hole in the side.

  “Good,” Hubb said. “I mean, it’s fun. It’s just, you know, there aren’t a ton of people.”

  “I don’t understand why we got so few visitors.” Josh shook his head. “I thought Jim ran ads in the Crellin paper and the Albany Times.”

  “He did,” I said.

  “My dad said he even heard Jim talk about it on 92.2,” Hubb said.

  “Whatever he did, it just wasn’t enough,” I said.

  “Well, it will all change after Can You Cut It? Right?” Hubb knocked my shoulder with his fist.

  “Oh, yeah,” Josh agreed.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I mean, I’m going to do my best to talk up Petersville. You know, wear the T-shirt and everything, but I don’t know how much of a difference it can really make. People are watching the show for the competition.”

  “Millions of people will hear you talk about Petersville,” Hubb said. “It has to make a difference, right?”

  Right, and that’s just what was worrying me.

  Chapter 12

  “Mexican. Go!” Mom spun around from the kitchen sink, clicked down the button on the stopwatch, then held up the screen with the glowing numbers so I could see them ticking by.

  “Uh, chicken and…”

  6…7…

  “Tick-tock,” Zoe said through a mouthful of pasty oatmeal. It didn’t matter how excited Mom was about Can You Cut It? She was still off her food game.

  “Cut it out, Zo!”

  “You know, she’s actually helping,” Jeanine said from the kitchen floor where she was outlining VISIT PETERSVILLE, NY! in silver paint on poster board. “It’s all about getting used to real competition conditions.”

  “Can everyone be quiet so I can think?”

  I’d been training round the clock for the past week, ever since school broke for summer vacation. Now there were just three days left until the show, and Can You Cut It? was all anybody could talk about, especially since Jim had unveiled the Petersmobile, an Airstream he’d tricked out with bunk beds for nine—there were three racks held up by chains like on navy
ships. He’d even gotten Dr. C to paint a mural of Petersville on its sides, complete with all the shops on Main Street and the mountains that rise above the town. An old-timey airplane flew across the sky above the mountains pulling a sign that said, Petersville: Sometimes the Best Things Come in the Smallest Packages. Visit once and you’ll want to stay forever!

  Jim had won the Airstream years ago at a county fair, and besides a few road trips down to Florida, it had sat unused in his front yard. But the idea to turn it into the Petersmobile? That was all Josh.

  And it was genius, even Jeanine thought so. It was also wacky and embarrassing, but still genius, guaranteed to generate exactly the kind of buzz we needed.

  Get this: we were going to sleep in it, parked right in front of The Food Connection on Fifth Avenue for the entire time I was on the show. And by “we,” I mean, Jim, Winnie, Josh, and my whole family. Jim and Winnie would go back to Petersville after the first day or so though. After all, somebody had to run The Doughnut Stop.

  While I was on set, the Petersmobile Team would hang out in the plaza in front of the building wearing their PETERSVILLE: THE PLACE TO EAT T-shirts and holding signs with slogans like, PETERSVILLE: NOT JUST FOR GUYS NAMED PETER and PETERSVILLE: SMALL TOWN VIBE, BIG CITY EATS.

  That last one was a stretch, but no more than lots of other ads I’d seen. Besides, since the makeover, Petersville definitely had way more good food than other small towns, so it was true-ish.

  Mom even came up with an idea for how we could use the Petersmobile when Can You Cut It? was over. It would be like a Petersville food truck, and we’d stock it with local products like popcorn from The Pop Shop and Stinky Cheese Farm cheese, and then drive it to fairs and farmers’ markets.

  …58…59…

  Mom hit the stopwatch. “Time’s up.”

  I groaned. “I got nothing.”

  “You’re trying too hard,” she said. “Loosen up. Be creative.”

  Be creative? That was like saying, “Be smart.”

  “Can we take a break?”

  “No!” Jeanine wagged a Sharpie at me. “Breaks are for krill. Are you krill or are you a shark?”

  “Depends. How much sleep do sharks get?”