Pie in the Sky

by Remy Lai

  But that wasn’t all the terrible things about me that Papa didn’t know. After my teacher at my old school scolded me for being a hooligan while my father worked so hard, after my classmates sniggered about my being Smell Like Cake, I laughed it off. I wanted to burrow into a hole, but I laughed it off. Usually, telling the same joke over and over again very quickly makes the joke not funny. And it worked. Until a few weeks later. It was after school. I was heading to the school gates with Xirong and some other classmates to wait for our families to pick us up.

  I hoped and hoped that Papa wouldn’t call out to me or that my old classmates wouldn’t recognize him.

  I couldn’t even be mad at Xirong, because he didn’t know I hated that nickname. But the worst thing? I laughed along. I laughed at Papa.

  I was wrong then, and I’m wrong now. Making Pie in the Sky cakes is not just about Papa’s forgiving me for coming to Australia without him, but also about his forgiving me for being ashamed of our family’s cake shop just because some kids at school called me Smell Like Cake, and for all the other bad things I’ve thought, said, and done. Once I’ve made up for all the wrong I did to Papa, my English will get way better, I’ll have friends, and everything will be all right.

  “Bunny and mouse caaaaake!” Yanghao sings, interrupting my thoughts. People at the bus stop stare at us.

  I hiss, “Quiet! People are going to think you’re cuckoo.”

  “Why? They can’t understand me.”

  “That’s exactly why they’ll think you’re cuckoo.”

  28

  Rule number fourteen: After a trip to the grocery store, Jingwen and Yanghao are to hide all the ingredients in their schoolbags before they reach home.

  Yanghao and I, with our backpacks filled with eggs, flour, carrots, cinnamon, pecans, walnuts, sugar, and cream cheese, rush home to make a bunny and mouse cake. But when we get there, another animal greets us: Anna’s cat.

  Somewhere in Anna and Mama’s conversation of gibberish, Mama has agreed to let Ginger hang out in our apartment whenever Anna isn’t home. “So the cat won’t be lonely,” Mama tells Yanghao.

  Anna also brings a plastic tray with gray pellets, which Mama tells Yanghao is where Ginger does her business because Ginger is an indoor cat. When they all disappear to find the perfect corner in the bathroom for the tray, I quickly fish out the dictionary from my backpack and look up “indoor.”

  Mango is not an indoor cat. He comes and goes like he’s the king of the world and only returns when he wants ear scratches or food, though I’m sure he’s eaten many mice while roaming the streets.

  Yanghao is way too happy about this part-time pet and busies himself scratching Ginger’s ears. He doesn’t think about how it will disrupt our cake making. Anna says she’ll come by later to pick up Ginger but doesn’t say exactly when. If she comes while Yanghao and I are making cakes, even with the windows open, even if we don’t invite her in and only open the door just enough to pass Ginger over, she’ll smell the cake.

  Once Mama leaves for work, I come up with a rule to solve this Anna trouble.

  Rule number fifteen: Yanghao and Jingwen must always listen for the sound of Anna’s door. When we hear it, Yanghao will immediately take Ginger back to her home, so Anna has no need to drop by ours.

  Surprisingly, when I tell Yanghao this rule, he doesn’t whine, “Why me?”

  Maybe he wants to eat cakes so badly he doesn’t dare annoy me, in case I stop making them. But I thank cakes for his obedience. He’s basically my servant now.

  He also doesn’t question me about rule number sixteen.

  When the phone rings, I follow that rule by pushing all the cake-making stuff to one side of the dining table and replacing them with my homework stuff. Yanghao leaps to the sofa and switches the TV on. That way, when Mama asks us what we’re doing, we won’t be lying.

  But tonight, when Yanghao picks up the phone, it isn’t Mama on the other line.

  “Oh! My mother is not home,” he says, and finishes the call with a bunch of other Martian words.

  “Who was that?” I ask. “What was that last thing you said?”

  “Some woman.” He sticks his finger into the bowl of cream cheese frosting, breaking rule number five. “I said we’re home alone.”

  I slap his arm away. “You told a stranger we’re home alone? What if the stranger is a kidnapper or a burglar?”

  He licks his finger, grabs the yellow notepad, and writes with the help of my dictionary.

  I look over his shoulder. “Rules for Making Cakes, number seventeen … What does the next sentence mean?”

  “Yanghao is not to tell kidnappers and burglars he and Jingwen are home alone.”

  Kidnappers and burglars are not things Mama has ever instructed me about in my lessons on Staying Home Alone for Good Sons Who Listen to Their Mothers.

  I’ll have to run over to Anna’s house and tell her. She’ll call the firemen.

  I’ll have to tell Anna, too, and she’ll call the plumber. I’ll then pay the plumber using the emergency money Mama stashed in the old coffee can in the kitchen cabinet.

  But there’s nothing about dealing with kidnappers or burglars or a little brother who has no common sense.

  29

  And there’s nothing in Staying Home Alone for Good Sons Who Listen to Their Mothers about what to do when you eat so much cake that vomiting is very likely. I reduced the recipe to three quarters, but it’s still too much carrot cake.

  “We should have halved the recipe,” Yanghao says as he stabs his fork into his third-to-last slice.

  My stomach’s full, but not bursting. We haven’t eaten cake for two days. “If I can finish it, then you can too.”

  “But I have a smaller stomach, and I finished a whole bag of gummy snakes—” He clamps his mouth.

  “What? Why? When? Where did you get gummy snakes?”

  He grins sheepishly, his teeth clumped with brown crumbs, and whispers, “I put it in our shopping basket, and you didn’t see. Then I ate it all when you were pretending to do your homework while Mama was still home.”

  “Rule number eighteen: We can buy only ingredients for cakes, not gummy snakes.”

  His belly is so swollen from eating tons of cake that even without the button, his shorts stay up.

  Yanghao and I crawl around searching for the button. After five minutes, he crawls over to me and burps cream cheese frosting in my face. “Jingwen, I can’t eat any more.”

  “Rule number nineteen: Yanghao is not to burp in Jingwen’s face. And you have to finish your half of the carrot cake.” I search under the table. “Take a break, Yanghao. Eat the rest of the cake later.”

  The front door creaks, and I look up from my button quest. The front door’s open, and Yanghao’s gone. So are two pieces of carrot cake. There’s a much louder creak. Anna’s door.

  Crap! Crap! Crap!

  I step outside and see Yanghao and Anna at her door. She holds a plate with two slices of carrot cake.

  “What the heck, Yanghao?” I hiss.

  “I’m not a booger. I didn’t tell her we made the cake. I didn’t say anything, but she assumed these are unsold cakes from Barker Bakes.”

  “What if Anna thanks Mama for the cakes?”

  Anna is smiling, but her eyes ping-pong between us, as if she’s trying to figure out what secrets we’re keeping from her.

  Yanghao grimaces. He really never thinks things through.

  I sigh. “Rule number twenty: Yanghao is not to give cakes to anyone without Jingwen’s okay. But after this, we might as well tear up those rules, because when Anna tells Mama about the cake, there’ll be no more cake making ever.”

  He turns to Anna, waving his hands rapidly. “Don’t tell my mother.”

  “Why not?” Anna asks.

  “Because…”

  Yanghao looks at me, but all I can come up with is one word: “booger.”

  Suddenly he looks like he has a brilliant idea, and he turns back to Anna
. “Because you’re fat!”

  If only I didn’t know what “fat” means, then my eyes wouldn’t have popped open so wide they hurt.

  Yanghao must have also realized he’s a booger, for his face reddens, and he clamps his mouth. Anna, too, looks like she can’t believe anyone as blunt as Yanghao exists.

  White lie? I must have heard wrong.

  But Yanghao asks, “White lie?”

  Anna replies in Martian, and when she’s done, I elbow Yanghao. “Why isn’t she angry?”

  He shrugs. “She said I don’t know how to tell a white lie. She said it’s a lie you tell to save someone’s feelings. She said Mama must have told us Anna has been trying to eat healthily for a long time because her doctor told her to.”

  He turns back to Anna. “You won’t tell my mother? About cakes?”

  Anna puts a finger to her lips. “It’s our secret.”

  He turns to me. “Anna said—”

  “I got that.”

  * * *

  I’m on my hands and knees in the kitchen, searching for Yanghao’s button and thinking about white lies.

  The least bad type of lies, which is the kind-intentioned ones, is white.

  The worst type of lies hurts others. When I get hurt, like when I scrape my knees, I bleed, so these lies must be red.

  Lies of omission are when I say nothing, so they have no color. Maybe they’re invisible and so it’s totally okay to tell as many of these as I want.

  I spot the button under the fridge. I stick my hand into that tight space and grab the button. As I pull my hand out, my palm scratches along something sharp under the fridge. “Ow!”

  There’s a long but shallow cut on my palm. Trickling out of it are teeny tiny drops of red, red blood.

  30

  By the next morning, the cut on my palm has almost completely healed. Even the scab is almost gone.

  When I get to school, Ben and I have our routine cakes greeting, after which I don’t expect to hear from him until Mr. Fart calls on me. My first class is Mrs. Lim’s social studies. I’ve never understood what this subject is really about, because one lesson I’m looking at pictures of the polar caps melting and the next I’m recycling aluminum cans. But at least Mrs. Lim treats me very, very well. She never calls on me or even looks at me. I spend her class doing some math—dividing the recipe for our next cake, white chocolate Swiss roll, in half. That way, we won’t have to give any to Anna and risk her mentioning it to Mama.

  I’m halving the white chocolate when someone passes me a blue sticky note. The someone has adult-sized hands and wears a jade bracelet like the one Ah-po never takes off her wrist. It must be Mrs. Lim.

  Slowly, I look up, trying my hardest not to grimace, because whenever I do, Yanghao always says I look like I’m making a someone-in-the-room-just-farted face. But Mrs. Lim has already walked back to the front of the room and is sputtering more Martian words to the rest of the class. All I catch are tree and Thursday.

  I read her sticky note. Only these words are on it:

  family tree

  remember

  This must be the tree that she’s talking about and the one she kept mentioning in class last week, but I didn’t remember until now since I have no interest in gardening. Thursday is only two days away. That’s not much time to grow some kind of fruit tree.

  As I reach for my dictionary to find out what kind of fruit family is, Ben slips me a note.

  I must still be wearing my someone-in-the-room-just-farted face. I write yes and give him a big smile as I pass the note back to him.

  I think that will be the end of it, but then Ben scribbles something else under my yes.

  What kind of Swiss roll?

  What is “Swiss roll”? What’s Ben asking me? What kind of hairstyle? What kind of face? What kind of alien? I reach for my dictionary that’s sitting at the edge of my desk but quickly draw my hand back. If I use the dictionary, Ben will know that I don’t know some of the words he’s written. It’s no secret my English is horrible, but using the dictionary to understand a one-sentence note is like taking a megaphone and shouting, “Look at me! I’m s l o w! I’m s l o w!” What if he tells Joe and Max? I’m only 70 percent sure that Ben’s nothing like them. But I want to talk to him like Yanghao talks to Sarah.

  Ben slips another note onto my table: Yummy?

  He must be talking about cakes, since that’s all we ever really discuss with each other. He can’t be anything like Joe. Cakes only bring smiles.

  I decide to trust that cakes are lucky and reach for my dictionary. Turns out, “Swiss” has something to do with Switzerland the country. Maybe Ben thinks I’m from there. But before I flip the page to check “roll,” I see “Swiss roll” at the bottom of the definitions for “Swiss.” Ben’s talking about the cake that the cookbook is open to.

  I double-check the spelling and write, white chocolate. Then I pass the note back to him.

  He replies with Cool!

  I write back, Do you like cakes?

  Like? LOVE!

  I want to ask him what’s his favorite cake, but I have no idea how to say “favorite” in English, so I reply with:

  Mr. Hart = Mr. Fart

  He’s definitely nothing like Joe.

  31

  Yanghao is a lot like the king of all boogers.

  We’re passing by the playground after our trip to the grocery store when he says, “Ten seconds!” Before I can figure out what he’s talking about, he bolts up the plane-shaped tower. He disappears into the tube slide. I hear a loud CRACK and a second later, he swooshes out the bottom of the slide on his back. With his backpack on, he looks like an overturned turtle.

  Rules for Making Cakes number twenty-one: Yanghao is not to carry eggs ever again.

  Later, the moment Mama leaves for work, I stop my award-winning acting as the most studious kid and fish out the ingredients—including a new, unbroken carton of eggs—from my backpack. But Yanghao stays put on the sofa, hypnotized by SpongeBob.

  “Let’s bake tomorrow,” he says without taking his eyes off the TV. “I’m still full from yesterday’s carrot cake.”

  “It’s already almost twenty-four hours after. You’d have pooped all that out.”

  “I don’t eat enough fiber.”

  “Carrot is fiber.”

  “Jingwen, you’re a booger.”

  I don’t need him to bake with me, so I start on my own. Brushing the rectangular pan with butter, weighing out sugar, sifting flour, separating egg yolks … I find out Yanghao’s more of a hindrance than a help in cake making. The recipe’s steps are suddenly done at the speed of light. When I take the cake out of the oven, the serial egg killer and greedy, lazy bum finally shuffles into the kitchen.

  Turns out, I’m not as good at math as I thought I was. I used the wrong ratio for the ingredients.

  Our third try goes perfectly.

  I move on to cutting strawberries into halves.

  “Why did Papa choose to put fruit on top of this cake? I thought he didn’t like fruit,” Yanghao says after he has written rule number twenty-two: When Jingwen is using the knife, Yanghao is to keep his hands in his pockets.

  “What do you mean? Of course he liked fruit.”

  “But when Mama cut up fruit, he always ate only one piece and then told us to finish it all up.”

  “Ah,” I say, surprised. I’ve never thought about this. “That was because we could afford only so much fruit, and he wanted us to have more.”

  “What other things did Papa pretend not to like so we could have more?”

  “Fried chicken, BBQ pork, tea eggs…” These are things that I’m only now realizing, too. I prattle on and on. There are a lot of words I have to say about Papa, and Yanghao’s the only one who understands them.

  32

  “I’m broke,” I say, looking at my wallet, open and hungry like the beak of a baby bird. “Only two dollars left. My piggy bank is empty. You have to pay for the ingredients from now on.”
/>   Yanghao pauses midchew. White chocolate cream is all around his mouth like he’s Santa. “I’m poor. My piggy bank is empty.”

  “How can that be? You’ve never paid at the grocery store ever.”

  “I pay at the school cafeteria. During recess.”

  “But Mama packs us lunch.”

  “I buy drinks and snacks.”

  I chomp on my last bite of Swiss roll. “No wonder your button popped.”

  Yanghao plops his last two slices of Swiss roll onto a clean plate. Even though we halved the recipe, he says he can’t finish his and insists on going over to Anna’s to share.

  “What about the money for tomorrow’s cake?” I ask. “It’s tiramisu.”

  He shrugs. “We’ll get five dollars each on Sunday. We can wait until next week to make tiramisu. It’s not like it’s an emergency.” With that, he leaves me alone in the apartment.

  But it is an emergency! I don’t want to waste tomorrow, Thursday, and Friday. The longer we take, the more time I’ll have to think about Joe and Max and all the Martian words I don’t understand, and the greater the chance Mama will find out our secret.

  The ten dollars in total Yanghao and I will get on Sunday will be enough for only one tiramisu. Then we’ll have to wait for the next Sunday for more money. One cake a week. Eight weeks for eight cakes. That’s eight weeks of everything not being all right. This is definitely an emergency!