The Doughnut Fix Series, Book 1

by Jessie Janowitz

  So, let’s just say, this was one more “surprise” that would have been perfect for that other family, the one with the four-year-old girl who loves staring at sad turkeys in little jails, because that girl wouldn’t have masterminded the biggest turkey breakout in Thunder Hill Farm pick-your-own-turkey history.

  Luckily, turkeys aren’t very smart—how much brain could fit into those tiny heads anyway?—so even with Zoe chasing them out of their cells, yelling, “Run! Run!” they refused to go very far.

  I’d been afraid Mr. Jennings, the guy who owned the farm, would flip out, which particularly worried me because he was the size and shape of a WWF wrestler. But he just laughed. He wouldn’t even let Mom and Dad make it up to him by buying the biggest, most expensive turkey he had.

  The worst part about my parents’ stupid idea was that when Thanksgiving did finally come, and Mom had made this amazing dinner and brought out that delicious turkey, I couldn’t eat it. Not one bite. I kept seeing all those birds running around Mr. Jennings’s yard, and I just couldn’t separate the live birds running around in my head from the bird on our table. And the idea of putting one bite in my mouth was just impossible, like eating something that wasn’t even food, like sand or a pencil or a sister. I tried to talk myself out of it. I tried so hard, but nothing worked. The thing that really drove me crazy: I was the only one who felt this way. Even Zoe, the great turkey rescuer, ate three portions. Of course, they all said it was the best turkey ever.

  Nobody got to eat dessert that night though because before Mom made it, all the lights went out again, just like they had when Charlie called. Dad offered to hold a flashlight while Mom made crepes—they’re his favorite—but she didn’t think it was a good idea. The lights came back on again sometime in the middle of the night but then went out again the next day, so my parents called an electrician. Of course, when he came, the lights worked just fine.

  My parents have now hired every electrician in the county, but nobody has been able to figure out why, every few days, all the lights in the house turn off and refuse, no matter how nicely you ask, to turn back on. What really stumps people is that even when the lights go out, everything else works just fine. I told my parents to stop wasting their money, but they refuse to accept what I think is pretty obvious: when the Purple Demon gets bored, she turns out all the lights so she can watch us bump into things.

  The Tuesday after Thanksgiving, I got an email from Charlie. The second I saw it in my inbox, that bad feeling I’d been carrying around since our call was suddenly gone because I knew what the email was going to say: sorry I couldn’t come for Thanksgiving; sorry I didn’t seem sorry; sorry I got off so fast; sorry I didn’t ask one thing about Petersville; sorry about not sending more emails.

  Then I clicked it open.

  To: JaxTLevin441@mar.com

  From: CKramerRocks@mar.com

  Subject: Hey

  I MADE IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

  And that was it.

  I wish I could tell you I sent an email right back and that it said: YAY!!!!!!!!!!!!! That’s what the twelve-year-old kid in that other family, the one I was supposed to be, would have done right after he’d dug up worms in the backyard and made bark tea. But I didn’t. Me, I stole The Wolves of Willoughby Chase off the couch where Jeanine had left it, climbed up to the attic, and stayed there in bed under the covers reading for the rest of the day.

  12

  After I finished Starting Your Own Business for Dummies, I went back to the General Store to show Winnie the chapter on costs, because it was clear I’d need to know the doughnuts’ ingredients to figure out what it would cost to make them. I was prepared for her to give me a hard time as usual, but instead she acted like she’d known all along I’d need the ingredients to put together the budget. She even said, “It’s about time, Slick.” She’d started calling me Slick by then. I never asked why, but I’m guessing it’s because I’m not, so she thought it was a big laugh.

  The next day, I got up early and shut myself in my parents’ office with everything I’d need to work up the budget: the list of ingredients, Starting Your Own Business for Dummies, and a stack of Mom’s peanut butter–butterscotch granola bars. The book says setting goals and sticking to them is key to getting your business off the ground, so I told myself I couldn’t come out until I figured out how much of each ingredient we’d have to order every month.

  Things started off okay. I knew my first step was just to come up with the number of doughnuts we’d make in a month. After talking to Winnie, Josh and I had decided that for starters, we’d sell eighty doughnuts every week: forty on Saturday and forty on Sunday. To get the number of doughnuts we’d sell in a month, I just had to multiply the eighty doughnuts we’d be making in a week times the number of weeks in a month:

  80 x 4 = 320

  The next part wasn’t too hard either. Since Winnie’s recipe made ten doughnuts, all I had to do was to figure out how many batches of doughnuts I’d have to make to get 320 of them:

  10 x ? = 320

  In fourth grade, Mr. Gratz taught us that if you have a times problem and you’re looking for what to times your number by, you actually need to divide:

  ? = 320 ÷ 10

  ? = 32

  This is where the problems started.

  Problem number one: the list of ingredients was full of annoying fractions. They were all over the place—3¾ cups of flour, 1⅓ cups of sugar, ¼ teaspoon of cinnamon. There were so many fractions I was sure Winnie had put them in there on purpose just to make the math harder.

  Problem number two: I wasn’t sure how to multiply fractions using the calculator on my parents’ computer. Was I supposed to turn them into decimals and then multiply them? In the end, I just decided to do the calculations on paper, which took forever.

  Problem number three: I knew I was making mistakes, like always. The thing is, all those other times I’d messed up some math problem, it had been in school, and those mistakes hadn’t really mattered since those questions were all made-up. But this problem, the doughnut problem, wasn’t made-up, and if I messed up this time, I’d be messing up something real.

  Problem number four: because I was sure I was making mistakes, I kept redoing the problems. And the more worried I got, the more mistakes I made. And every time I redid a problem, I came out with a different answer, sometimes a really different answer.

  Eventually, I’d erased and rewritten stuff so many times, I tore the paper. That’s when I threw my pencil at the wall. And then, because that didn’t make me feel any better, I threw a whole bunch of stuff at the wall: a tape dispenser, a plastic cup, a box of paper clips.

  I was not in a good way, as Mom likes to say. I needed a break. I was out of granola bars. I’d missed lunch. I needed to eat and go outside and skate so fast I couldn’t think about anything but moving and breathing.

  But what about my goal? I’d set a goal, and the book said I needed to stick to it.

  Then it came to me. I’d just set a new goal. Something easy. Something fast. The book never said you couldn’t change goals. I looked back at the recipe.

  Cocoa: 3 tablespoons. Three was a nice round number. Perfect. I’d figure out how many tablespoons of cocoa I’d need to make 320 doughnuts, come up with how many boxes of cocoa that was, and then I’d take a break.

  3 tablespoons x 32 batches = 96 tablespoons

  But how many boxes of cocoa was that? I slid the rolly chair across the floor to the computer.

  “How many tablespoons are in a box of cocoa powder,” I typed into Google and hit Return.

  I crossed my fingers as I read through the results. There it was—fourth from the top. “There are thirty-five tablespoons in one eight-ounce carton of cocoa powder.”

  I rolled back across the desk and wrote:

  8 oz. box of cocoa = 35 tablespoons

&n
bsp; This was like the problem I’d done to figure out how many batches of doughnuts I’d need to make to get 320 doughnuts, only instead of batches I was looking for boxes.

  ? boxes x 35 tablespoons = 96 tablespoons

  ? = 96 ÷ 35

  ? = 2 with 26 left over

  Since I couldn’t buy part of a box, I’d have to round up.

  Finally, I could fill in a square on the order sheet I’d made. Under Cocoa, I wrote: three boxes.

  Done. I’d reached my new and improved (easier) goal. It was definitely break time.

  Down in the kitchen, something sweet-and-spicy smelling was cooking on the stove. I was so hungry, I didn’t care enough to ask what it was. I just spooned out a big bowl and ate it standing up.

  Then I grabbed my skates and ran out the door without even putting on a jacket or gloves.

  When I got on the pond, I didn’t practice hockey stops or skating backward. I just skated as fast as I could. In circles. Without thinking. And it wasn’t boring. It was awesome. And when my legs burned and my ears stung and my fingers were numb and I couldn’t take it anymore, I went back inside.

  I actually couldn’t wait to get back to work, maybe because now I had a plan. I’d get the budget done one small goal at a time. As I ran up the stairs, I decided I’d tackle the butter next.

  Then I got to the office, and all that good feeling zapped right out of me.

  Jeanine was in there. She had the budget in one hand and a red pencil in the other. “I think if you turned the mixed numbers into improper fractions, you’d make fewer mistakes,” she said as she crossed something out.

  My face, which had been freezing only a second before, suddenly felt like it was on fire. I ripped the paper out from under her pencil, making a big red slash across it.

  “Hey! I’m not done. You know how many mistakes there are in there?” she said.

  “I don’t care!”

  “You don’t care?”

  “I mean…” I was so mad, it was hard to speak. “I wasn’t finished. I haven’t…checked it over yet.”

  “Why don’t you just let me do it?”

  “Because…” I started, but then nothing else came out. I couldn’t think of what I wanted to say or how to say it in a way that wouldn’t make me feel even worse.

  I grabbed the back of the rolly chair with both hands and tipped it forward till it dumped Jeanine off. Then I started pushing her out into the hall.

  “Ow! You’re hurting me,” she said, shoving me back.

  “Then get out!”

  The next second, Mom was at the door, breathing like she’d run up the stairs. “What’s going on here?”

  “You need to tell Jeanine to get her own life. Maybe she could start by leaving the house for once.”

  “I was just trying to help. You need help. Look at all these mistakes.” Jeanine grabbed the budget and shook it in my mother’s face.

  “I told you I wasn’t done!”

  Mom stepped between us, took the budget from Jeanine, and handed it back to me. “That’s enough. Jeanine, go downstairs.”

  “But—”

  “Now!”

  Jeanine made a face and stormed out.

  I crumpled the budget into a ball and threw it after her.

  Mom looked at the ball of paper, then back at me. “Don’t you need that?”

  “You heard her. It’s all wrong.”

  “She didn’t say it was all wrong.” She picked up the paper and smoothed it out on the desk. “Here, get back to work, and I’ll send Zoe up with some snickerdoodles in a bit.”

  “I don’t feel like working on it anymore.” I dropped into the chair and looked at all the crossed-out numbers. “Maybe I should just let her do it.”

  Mom frowned. “Is that what you want?”

  Part of me did. The part that just wanted it done. And done by someone who wouldn’t make mistakes. But then, there was the other part of me that didn’t. And not just because Winnie told me I couldn’t trust family or even because it would feel like cheating. It was more than that.

  “Everything’s so easy for her.”

  “Everything?” Mom looked at me hard.

  I shrugged. That’s what it felt like. I didn’t care if it were true.

  Mom put her hands on my shoulders and squeezed. “I got you something. I was going to wait till you got the whole recipe, but I don’t know, now seems like the right time.” She left the room and came back a few minutes later with a cardboard box that she put down in front of me on the desk.

  I picked up a pair of scissors, sliced open the box, and looked inside. Whatever was in there was covered in so much Bubble Wrap, I couldn’t even guess what it was.

  “So?” she said as I uncovered the final layer.

  “What is it?” I didn’t have the first clue what the thing in my hands was. It looked like something you’d use to give a giant a flu shot.

  “It’s for the doughnuts. To stuff them. It’s a pastry gun. See, you fill it with cream here.” She unscrewed the back. “Then you shoot the cream out the tip. It’ll be way easier to use than those bags.” Mom uses special bags with metal tips for filling stuff like cream puffs, but they have to be twisted and squeezed in just the right way.

  I picked up the gun, squeezed the plunger, and imagined a stream of chocolate cream flying out of it.

  “So cool, right?” she said, her eyes all big like she was looking at the world’s first time machine and not just a tool for cramming gooey stuff into baked goods.

  “So cool. Thanks. When did you get this?”

  “A while ago. When you told me about the project.”

  “But how did you know I was going to… I mean, I don’t even have the recipe yet.”

  “Yeah, but I know you. You’ll get it.” She was smiling her big smile, the one that shows her crooked tooth. “And now you really have to get it, right? I mean, you kinda owe me now since I shelled out for the gun.” She crossed her arms and squeezed her lips together like she was suddenly all serious.

  “Okay, okay. But only because you got me the pastry gun.”

  “All right, then get back to work!” She smiled again. “I’ll send Zo Zo up with the cookies soon.”

  I worked straight through the afternoon, took a break for dinner, and then went back to work. It was past midnight by the time I crawled into bed, but I’d filled in every box on the order form. I’d stuck to the plan, one small goal at a time. Then I’d triple-checked my work, and this time, I got the same answers. I knew there were probably a few wrong numbers, but they were my wrong numbers. So I was okay with them because it meant the right ones were mine too, and that felt better than not having any wrong numbers ever would.

  13

  Starting Your Own Business for Dummies said if you were opening a restaurant or café, you should buy your ingredients wholesale. I had no idea what that meant, but one great thing about a book for dummies is that it assumes you don’t know anything about anything. What’s great about that too is when you already know something the book thinks you don’t, you feel kind of smart.

  The gist of wholesale is actually simple. If you’re buying stuff for your business, other businesses cut you a deal on price. We got to buy our ingredients wholesale because we needed them for our doughnut business.

  Josh was actually the one who came up with the list of food suppliers who offered what we needed wholesale. Poking around on the internet, he’d found this food supplier site where you type in your location and the foods you want, press Enter, and presto! It spits out a list of all the suppliers who have what you need and deliver to your area.

  The next step was to call each of the food suppliers on the list and see what kind of deals we could get. Between figuring out what to say and actually making the calls, I figured it would take us a full day. Since most of the suppliers o
nly worked Monday to Friday, we decided to do it on a Monday that Josh had off from school.

  I was still eating breakfast when I heard Josh’s mom’s car coming up the driveway that morning. Mom was hunched over some papers opposite me, and Zoe was playing with pans on the kitchen floor.

  Josh knocked, then opened the door and peeked inside. “Okay to come in?”

  “Yup,” I said through a mouthful of oatmeal. “Almost done.”

  “Hi, Josh,” Mom said without looking up.

  “Hi.”

  “Welcome to Zoe’s Purple Giraffe!” Zoe said as she stirred a pan of ice cubes with a wooden spoon.

  “What’s Zoe’s Purple Giraffe?” Josh asked and not in a you’re-so-weird kind of way, but like he actually wanted to know and was talking to a real person.

  “My restaurant,” Zoe answered, stirring so hard ice cubes flew out of the bowl and across the floor.

  Josh looked around the room as if he were seeing it for the first time. “Cozy. I like it.”

  Zoe sipped from the spoon and made a face. “Too much salt! Hand me the bear!” She pointed to the honey bear on the floor next to Josh’s foot.

  Josh gave her the bear, and she squeezed a long ribbon into the bowl. Then she put her head back and squeezed an even longer one straight into her mouth.

  Josh laughed.

  “Mom?” I said.

  “What?”

  “Do you see what’s going on here?”

  “She’s playing. It’s fine.” She stood up. “Look, can you guys watch her for a bit? I have to go upstairs to talk to Dad about something.”

  “Mom, please. This is the one day Josh has to call food suppliers.”