Bliss

by Kathryn Littlewood

  Lily’s suitcase sat open on the little yellow chair in the corner. Rose padded over and looked into the bag. There were a red leather jumpsuit, a blue lace dress, and a tall black bottle labeled magic potion.

  Bingo! The secret to Aunt Lily’s mysterious charisma: She was a witch.

  Rose hated to think what was in that magic potion—maybe something even worse than a warlock’s eye. She carefully uncorked the bottle and cringed, fearing that something horrible would waft out—a howling demon spirit, perhaps? A ghost? A talking bat?

  But nothing wafted out except the mild scent of chemicals.

  Rose peered over the rim of the bottle. Inside was a goopy white substance. She shook the bottle so that a bit of the stuff landed in her palm. She sniffed it again—Rose had definitely smelled it before, whenever she got close enough to Ty to smell his cheeks. There was no mistaking it: the MAGIC POTION was, in fact, acne medication.

  So much for Aunt Lily being a witch.

  A muffled thud came from the front room on the first level of the house.

  Rose jumped in the air, threw the bottle of cream back into Aunt Lily’s suitcase, and tiptoed back up the stairs to see who, or what, had caused the thud.

  The kitchen was still and cold in the gray moonlight, and Rose felt very much alone in her blue nightgown and fuzzy white socks. Rose froze with fear whenever she found herself alone in the dark, so she tended to stay upstairs at night, where there was always some sister or brother or parent nearby. Leigh slept with a night-light, a little smiling ladybug that glowed orange from the wall, and Rose was secretly glad she shared a room with her younger sister—even though she’d never admit it to her parents.

  Rose shivered as she remembered the sleeping dwarf in the jar somewhere beneath her feet and wondered whether he ever woke up.

  Then the sounds happened again: three of them.

  Rose peered over the top of the swinging saloon doors to the front room and saw someone rapping frantically on the front window of the bakery.

  Ty plodded downstairs into the darkened kitchen. “Who’s outside?” he whispered. “And where did you go after we brushed our teeth?”

  “I—I—I—” Rose stuttered, “wanted a glass of water.”

  “There’s water in the bathroom sink,” he reminded her.

  “The kitchen water tastes better,” she said, which was true, but that had nothing to do with why she was currently standing alone in the kitchen. Rose couldn’t let her brothers know about her suspicions—they were both too enchanted by their marvelous Aunt Lily.

  “Whatever,” he said. “I’m gonna go see who’s banging on the door.”

  Rose followed Ty into the front of the bakery.

  “Oh no,” Ty grumbled. As Rose flicked on the light switch, she could see why: The frantic figure of the local dressmaker, Mrs. Havegood, was tapping on the window, her eyebrows raised so high that they looked like they were trying to crawl into her hair. She was wearing a little red dress with chickens printed all over it and clutched at her purse, which was too tiny to hold anything but a thimble.

  “What does she want this time?” Ty muttered, opening the door.

  Mrs. Havegood stumbled into the room, panting. “Thank goodness you answered! I’d worked myself half into a frenzy!” She was speaking with a proper British accent, which Ty and Rose both knew to be fake. Mrs. Havegood had been born and raised in Calamity Falls, but her accent shifted according to which foreign city she pretended to have lived in the longest. Some weeks it was Paris, sometimes Berlin, and once Tokyo, which had been awkward. Mrs. Havegood’s past was like a kaleidoscope: very colorful, always changing, and a complete illusion.

  “I know it’s the middle of the night, but I am in crisis!” she cried. “I just found out that I am receiving a very important visitor tomorrow morning!”

  “Who? The president?” Ty asked, dripping with sarcasm, knowing that whatever answer Mrs. Havegood gave was sure to be a lie.

  “Of Cambodia! Yes! However did you know?”

  Ty stared at her blankly. “The president of Cambodia is coming to your house for breakfast tomorrow morning? Does Cambodia even have a president?”

  “Yes, of course!” she retorted. “He and several other very important heads of state will be coming over just after breakfast. We shall have tea. And cookies. I need snickerdoodles! Dozens of snickerdoodles! And I need them to be ready by morning!”

  “Why are they coming to your house?” Ty asked, egging her on.

  Rose turned back to him and whispered, “Stop!” but it was too late.

  Mrs. Havegood patted down her messy hair. “I am so glad you asked,” she began. “You see, my father was a stunt master, and he once had a television program wherein he traveled the world and communed with dangerous animals. I used to travel with him. One year we went to Cambodia and attempted to tame the rare and lethal black-bearded lynx, which is a very ferocious jungle cat. My father was able to get the lynx to purr on his lap like a little kitten. The Cambodian president was so impressed that he and my father became good friends and hunting partners. He visited us every seven years. And now the time has come for the Cambodian president to again tour the United States, so naturally he will be stopping by for a good old chat and baked goods. So there.”

  Ty squinted and took one step closer to Mrs. Havegood. Even though Mrs. Havegood was obviously lying through her teeth, Rose knew that Ty wouldn’t make fun of her to her face. Their parents had always let Mrs. Havegood ramble on and on—now that their parents were out of town, it was up to Rose and Ty to make sure she felt at home in the Bliss bakery.

  “That all sounds swell,” Rose said, coming between them. “But everyone is asleep right now. I don’t think we’ll be able to have the cookies ready until tomorrow afternoon.”

  “No!” Mrs. Havegood said, trembling. “I need ten dozen snickerdoodles by morning! And for your trouble, I will pay double!”

  Rose knew that she and Ty would have to stay up all night in order to produce ten dozen snickerdoodles. “Are you game?” Rose asked.

  Ty just shrugged nonchalantly. He regularly stayed up till five in the morning playing video games anyway.

  Rose nodded. “All right, Mrs. Havegood. Come back first thing in the morning and pick up your snickerdoodles. It will be an honor to bake cookies for the president of Cambodia.”

  “Perhaps he will award you a medal! He loves medals,” Mrs. Havegood said, bowing and backing out the door. “I’ll be back at nine a.m. sharp!”

  And then she hustled off into the dark.

  Rose and Ty had to tiptoe around the kitchen in socks to avoid waking Aunt Lily, and they had to bake by candlelight in order to avoid rousing Mrs. Carlson, who was very sensitive to light and would notice that the kids were up way past their bedtime.

  “This is ludicrous,” Ty said as he sat on the counter, his tan, lean arms folded across his chest.

  Rose flipped through the index of the Betty Crocker cookbook, looking for snickerdoodles. “Sherbets … shortcake … shrimp … snap peas…”

  “Wait,” he cut in. Rose caught a glimmer of excitement in his eye that was more than just the reflection of flickering candles. “Get the recipes we copied from the book. I’m pretty sure I remember there being one we can use to get back at Mrs. Havegood for being such a crazy liar. Cambodian president? Please.”

  “Ty, we shouldn’t use the book just to play games with Mrs. Havegood. That’s not what it’s for.”

  “You’re right,” he said. Then he pursed his lips into a disappointed pout. “It’s just … since we struck out yesterday, I really want to get back on that baking horse and try again. I … love baking.”

  Rose looked him up and down. Was he serious? Against her better judgment, she nodded. “All right. I’ll go get the recipes.”

  Rose’s heart jumped as she made her way upstairs. Ty was probably manipulating her—acting like he was interested in baking in order to exact revenge on Mrs. Havegood. But so what? Did his real
motivations matter? It was wrong to trick the desperate and neurotic Mrs. Havegood, but it was wrong to lie, too—and Mrs. Havegood was the worst liar in all of Calamity Falls. Maybe Ty was onto something.

  As Rose dug through her underwear drawer for the recipes, Leigh sleeping still as a pebble in her bed, Sage appeared in the door of Rose and Leigh’s room. His curly red hair exploded from the top of his head like a firework on the Fourth of July. “What’s going on?” he whined. “Where is Ty? Why aren’t you guys asleep?”

  Rose hid the handwritten recipes behind her back. “Nothing’s going on,” she said. “Me and Ty are washing dishes downstairs. Just go to sleep—we’ll be up in a minute.”

  Sage’s mouth burst open in an excited cry. “Let me help!”

  “Since when do you want to wash dishes?” she asked. But she already knew the answer—it was since Ty started wanting to wash dishes, which was when Aunt Lily arrived. She had turned everything upside down.

  “We don’t need your help, Sage,” Rose said, maybe a little too harshly. “Just go to bed.” If Rose let Sage downstairs to see what they were doing, he was liable to prance loudly around the kitchen and wake up Aunt Lily or Mrs. Carlson.

  Sage frowned. “Fine,” he said, and he stomped back to his room. Rose felt awful for scolding her little brother, but she wasn’t about to let him spoil the allnighter she’d planned with her big one.

  When Rose got back down to the kitchen, she and Ty flipped through the marble notebook and found the recipe he’d recalled:

  Koekjes van Waarheid (Cookies of Truth)

  It was in 1618 in the Dutch mining village of Zandvoort that Lady Birgitta Bliss did expose the jewel thief Gerhard Boots by feeding him a Cookie of Truth. He did maintain his innocence during weeping testimonies from his seven victims, all poor farmers for whom the jewels were their family fortune. Then, after eating one of Lady Birgitta’s Koekjes van Waarheid, he did admit to the thefts, even as he struck himself about the head and shoulders to make himself stop talking.

  “That’s perfect for Mrs. Havegood!” Ty exclaimed. “Maybe after she eats ten dozen of these, she won’t turn up at our house late at night anymore with fake emergencies.”

  Lady Birgitta Bliss did combine two fists of flour with two fists of brown sugar, three chicken’s eggs, and the gentle sleeping breath of one who has never lied. This proved to be a mild corrective for the most heinous of liars, …

  Etcetera.

  “What was that etcetera for?” Rose wondered aloud. When she was copying down the recipe, Ty had mumbled “Etcetera,” saying that the rest of the instructions were completely obvious stuff, like “let the cookies cool before eating,” so Rose just wrote it down that way. Now she wondered if she’d missed anything important.

  “Who cares?” Ty grumbled. “The real question is: Who do we know who has never lied?”

  Rose thought about whether her own breath would suffice. It might have a few days prior—she’d always despised lying—but the events of the week thus far had spoiled it. Ever since Aunt Lily showed up, Rose had fibbed more than she ever had in her entire life. This realization made her feel … dirty.

  “I don’t know,” Rose said finally.

  Just then, Ty’s head snapped up. “Leigh! Leigh can barely talk, let alone lie!”

  Rose and Ty carried one of the blue mason jars that their parents used to trap magical ingredients upstairs to Leigh’s bed.

  She was sleeping in a little bundle with the covers wrapped around her like a cheese blintz. Leigh had been congested lately because of her allergies—on that day alone, Rose had wiped snot from her nose eleven times. Her breathing was so labored that every time she inhaled, she sounded like a lawn-mower engine trying to start. It was hardly “gentle sleeping breath,” but it would have to do.

  Ty held up the mason jar and whispered, “What do I do with this?”

  Rose threw her hands in the air. “I don’t know, stick it next to her nose?”

  Ty took one look at the little gobs of snot in Leigh’s nostril that trembled and shook with each breath, then handed the jar to Rose. “I can’t.”

  “Fine,” said Rose, “I’ll do it.” She held the open jar over her sister’s growling, snuffling exhaust pipe of a nose and waited.

  The snoring was so powerful that it shook the metal clasp on the jar. After a few breaths, the jar fogged up and Rose gently clasped the lid shut.

  “Got it,” Rose whispered, and they snuck back downstairs.

  Rose and Ty had gotten the knack of the Bliss Cookery Booke measurements, so they multiplied the recipe by ten to make ten dozen—that was ten cups of flour, ten cups of brown sugar, and thirty eggs. They tossed the ingredients in the biggest metal mixing bowl they could find, while the jar with Leigh’s breath trapped inside rattled around on the countertop with the sound of her snores.

  Just as Ty scooped out the final cup of sandy brown sugar, the jar rattled so heavily that it fell over on its side and rolled off the side of the countertop. Rose threw her body under the counter like she was sliding into home plate, and the jar landed with a thud in her lap.

  Ty looked at Rose incredulously. “Nice catch, mi hermana!” he exclaimed, and he held up his hand for a high five. She slapped his hand and blushed with pride. He hadn’t high-fived Rose since before she knew what a high five was.

  As soon as Ty had cracked the final egg into the bowl, it was time for magic. Nothing happened at first as Rose opened the jar over the batter, but after a moment the foggy sides of the jar cleared and congealed into misty little blobs in the center of the jar. Then the honest breath bombs dropped down into the batter and sank to the bottom, then bubbled to the top again like a gurgling swamp. The dough burbled and hissed and spat out gas. The dough suddenly smelled like mustard and pastrami.

  “Gross,” Ty said. “That was in our little sister’s breath?”

  “Twelve counterclockwise stirrings with a bone spoon,” Rose said. Their plastic spoon would have to do. She put some muscle into turning the ever-thickening gloop. As Rose stirred, the batter itself seemed to snore—it expanded and contracted, like it had lungs of its own. One moment it would bubble up as though about to overflow the bowl, and the next it would calm back down into a polite wet wad. It was almost like the dough was alive.

  “This is disgusting,” Rose said to Ty.

  “I think it’s pretty rad,” Ty whispered.

  After three turns, the awful deli smell had disappeared, and after seven turns, the batter had smoothed out into a thick brown soup. With each subsequent turn, the color of the batter lightened—dark chocolate to milk chocolate to a light buttery color, to almost white. After twelve turns, it looked just like cookie dough, and smelled like it, too: sweet and sugary.

  Rose and Ty spooned little dollops of the batter onto cookie sheets—ten sheets in total—and popped them into the big oven. It was four in the morning at this point, and Rose couldn’t remember ever being so tired. Even Ty was yawning. When the kitchen timer dinged, they took the cookies out, set them on the counter to cool, and stumbled upstairs, thoroughly exhausted.

  “Set your alarm for 7:45 a.m.!” Rose told Ty.

  “Sure thing, Sis,” he mumbled.

  “We have to personally hand over those cookies to Mrs. Havegood!” But he had already disappeared into his room, and soon enough Rose was wrapped in her blankets and lost in sleep.

  When Rose woke, she was being tossed back and forth as if by a giant ocean wave. She opened her eyes, frightened, and saw Sage and Leigh bouncing up and down on either side of her bed.

  “Rose! Rose!” cried Sage. “Wake up! Chip says you have to play with us because we’re not being helpful in the kitchen!”

  Leigh kicked Rose in the ribs by accident, and Rose let out a cry. She turned and looked at the little electric clock she kept by her bed and gasped.

  11:14 a.m.

  “Get off!” she screamed at Sage and Leigh, and she tossed away the covers and ran into Ty’s room. He was still sl
eeping.

  Rose galloped downstairs, her heart pounding. Chip was bustling around the kitchen. “Well, there you are!” he said gruffly.

  Just then, Aunt Lily came out from the walk-in fridge, wearing pinstripe pants and a pinafore, carrying several cartons of eggs. Her hair looked bright, black, and shiny. “Rose, darling!”

  “Why didn’t anyone wake me up?” Rose said.

  “We thought we’d let you sleep in! You’ve been working so hard!”

  Then Rose noticed that the trays of cookies were gone, all ten of them. “Did Mrs. Havegood come by for cookies?” Rose asked, praying that all had gone according to plan.

  “You bet,” answered Chip. “Said something about needing cookies for the prime minister of Fiji.” Mrs. Havegood sometimes had trouble keeping her own lies straight.

  Rose breathed a sigh of relief.

  “But,” he began again, “she didn’t want them. She said, ‘I want snickerdoodles, and these are most certainly not snickerdoodles!’” Chip had raised his voice to an airy, grating soprano in order to imitate Mrs. Havegood.

  Lily laughed a deep, throaty laugh. “Oh, Chip!”

  Rose sighed with disappointment. Had she woken up when she was supposed to, she could have explained to Mrs. Havegood that the cookies were actually a special type of snickerdoodle prized in Southeast Asia. As it was, however, Mrs. Havegood had rejected her cookies. All of that hard work gone to waste. Ty would be so disappointed.

  “So you threw them out?” asked Rose.

  “Oh, no,” Chip replied with a smile. “I would never waste food like that! I gave them away.”

  Rose’s eyes went wide. “You … what?”

  “Sure. I gave everyone a free cookie with their order,” answered Chip.

  “People couldn’t get enough of them!” Lily chimed in. “Whoopee!”

  Rose gulped. Oh no! She hadn’t been awake more than ten minutes, but she’d already helped poison the whole town with Cookies of Truth.