Katie and the Cupcake Cure

by Coco Simon

  Now, take math class. I wish I could say that Mrs. Moore was suddenly nicer, but I can’t. What happens now is that every time Mrs. Moore says something serious, or threatens to give us all detention, I write down what she says so I can use it the next time I do an impression of her. She’s not so scary anymore.

  Not that everything is perfect. Take gym class. On Tuesday we were picking teams for flag football, and Sydney said, “Don’t pick Katie unless you want to lose!” She said it really loudly, and a bunch of kids laughed. Sometimes I feel like saying something, but I don’t. I keep waiting for the time when we have races outside on the track. I’ve been a faster runner than Sydney ever since third grade.

  Then something happened in English class on Wednesday. It didn’t happen to me, exactly, but to another member of the Cupcake Club: Alexis.

  Here’s what happened. At the beginning of class Mrs. Castillo told us she was giving us a vocabulary worksheet for homework. But she didn’t hand it out. Then, right before the bell rang, Alexis raised her hand.

  “Mrs. Castillo, what about the vocab worksheet?” she asked.

  Everyone groaned. Everyone except for me, Mia, and Emma.

  We know that Alexis is just like that. She likes to do things exactly the way you’re supposed to. She especially likes to make teachers happy.

  As you can guess, nobody was happy with Alexis.

  “Thanks a lot, Alexis,” Eddie Rossi said from the back of the room.

  “Yeah, what, are you in love with homework?” added Devin Jaworski.

  “Please settle down,” ordered Mrs. Castillo. “You’re lucky Alexis reminded me. Otherwise you’d have double homework tomorrow night.”

  But of course that didn’t make anyone feel better. When the bell rang and we poured into the hallway, a lot of the boys were still giving Alexis a hard time.

  “Teacher’s pet!”

  “Thanks for the homework!”

  Alexis started to look like she might cry. I felt bad for her.

  “Leave her alone,” Mia said bravely, and we all hurried off to our lockers.

  That was pretty much the worst thing that happened all week—until Cupcake Friday.

  Mia came into the cafeteria carrying a really pretty pink bakery box. She opened the lid to reveal four perfect cupcakes with chocolate icing dotted with chocolate candies.

  “They’re so pretty,” Emma said.

  “I hope they taste good,” Mia said with a small frown. “We didn’t have any vanilla. And I lost count when I was putting in the teaspoons of salt. I might have put in an extra amount.”

  Alexis pounded her fist on the table. “Let the second meeting of the Cupcake Club begin!”

  That’s when Sydney and Brenda—I mean, Bella—walked by. Sydney stopped cold.

  “Cupcake Club?” she asked. “Are you serious? What is this, third grade?”

  “Yeah, that’s so lame!” Bella added, making a big deal out of rolling her eyes.

  “Not as lame as a Popular Girls Club,” Alexis said under her breath.

  Sydney raised an eyebrow. “Excuse me? Did you say something?”

  Alexis, Emma, and I were all kind of afraid of Sydney. But not Mia.

  “Maybe I’ll bring some next time for you to try,” she said coolly.

  Sydney snorted. “No thanks,” she said, and then she and Bella walked away.

  “Well, that was fun,” I said.

  “Who wants a cupcake?” Mia asked.

  We all reached for one, but I had a little knot in my stomach. I watched Bella and Sydney slide into their table with Callie. They were all reading some magazine. I tried not to look.

  The cupcakes were good. They tasted a tiny bit weird because of the extra salt, but not too weird. Plus the icing was especially delicious.

  “Nice job,” I told Mia, and she smiled at me. I could tell she was proud.

  That same day, when the eighth-period bell rang, I was walking to my locker and I saw Mia talking to a bunch of girls from her class. They were all laughing.

  For a second I got a strange feeling. Then it hit me. Not that I care about how “cool” people are or anything, but Mia is a lot cooler than me. What if she got bored with the Cupcake Club? What if she found other friends, like Callie had?

  “There’s no use in worrying about what might happen,” Mom always says. “Concentrate on how things are right now.”

  I remember a lot of stuff Mom tells me, usually because she says it over and over again. Also, it’s just me and her most of the time, so I guess she’s a pretty big part of my life.

  Anyway, I’m glad I remembered that. Because right now, Mia was my friend. She rode the bus with me every day and ate lunch with me every day. She invited me to her house and baked cupcakes for the Cupcake Club.

  Maybe in the future that would change, just like things had changed with Callie over the summer. But for now, everything with Mia was all right.

  Mia saw me standing there and waved.

  “Hey, Katie! See you on the bus!”

  See? Sometimes Mom is right.

  CHAPTER 13

  Alexis Has an Idea

  I did see Callie a few times over the next few weeks. One night my mom invited the Wilsons over for Italian food night. It’s kind of a tradition between our families, like the Labor Day barbecue. My mom makes tons of pasta and salad. She lights candles on our dining-room table, puts out a red-and-white-checkered tablecloth, and goes all out, of course. But it’s actually usually a pretty fun night.

  Then another night Callie called and invited me to come over and watch the first episode of Singing Stars on TV. It’s our favorite show. I had a good time, even though Callie kept getting texts on her cell phone the whole time.

  Mostly I hung out with the Cupcake Club. Everyone came over one Saturday, and Mom showed us how she makes her P-B-and-J cupcakes. And one night Mia invited me over for dinner. Her mom got takeout food from an Indian restaurant. I’d never eaten Indian food before, and it was good—and spicy. Mia’s mom and stepdad were nice, and her stepbrother, Dan, seemed nice too. Which was kind of a surprise, because Mia is always saying what a beast he is.

  Oh, and I got detention from Mrs. Moore. Twice. But the whole class had it, so it wasn’t so bad.

  And the best thing was that I could talk to Mia, Emma, and Alexis about it. That’s mostly what the Cupcake Club did. We baked cupcakes; we ate cupcakes; and we talked about stuff.

  Things were not perfect, but they were good.

  One Monday we were eating lunch, and everyone was talking about the announcement that Principal LaCosta had made that morning after the Pledge of Allegiance.

  “This morning your homeroom teacher will be distributing permission slips for the first dance of the year,” she said. “Please hand them in by next Monday if you’re going to attend. This year’s dance will be bigger than ever. That afternoon, we’ll be holding a special fund-raising event for the school. Check your flyer for details.”

  Now we were sitting around the lunch table, looking at the flyers.

  “I always heard we had dances in middle school,” Alexis said. “I just didn’t think it would be so soon.”

  “Do you think we actually have to dance at the dance?” I asked. My mom loves the movie Grease, and in that movie the high school kids twirl and throw one another in the air and stuff like that. I didn’t think I could do that in a million years.

  “We had dances at my old school,” Mia informed us. “Sometimes people danced. Mostly everyone just hung around and talked.”

  “Did boys and girls dance together?” Emma asked. She sounded a little worried.

  “Sometimes,” Mia replied.

  We were quiet for a minute. I think all of us except for Mia were feeling nervous about the dance.

  “Did you see the part about the fund-raiser?” I asked. “It’s going to be in the parking lot of the school. If you have an idea to make money for the school, you can set up a booth. The booth that makes the most money will get a
prize.”

  “I heard the basketball team is doing a dunking booth with all of the gym teachers,” Alexis reported. “I bet that will make a lot of money.”

  “Maybe we could have a dunking booth for math teachers,” I joked.

  Over at the PGC table, Sydney was talking in a loud voice on purpose.

  “Our club is going to have the best booth at the fund-raiser,” Sydney bragged. “That’s why we have to keep it top secret.”

  Alexis rolled her eyes. “This is supposed to be for the whole school, not just the Popular Girls Club,” she said. “Only Sydney can turn a good cause into something about herself.”

  “I wonder what their top secret idea is?” Emma asked.

  Alexis had that look on her face where you know the wheels of her brain are spinning faster than a car’s.

  “You know, I bet we can raise a lot of money just by selling cupcakes,” she said. “Who could say no to a cupcake for a good cause?”

  “That’s not a bad idea,” Mia agreed. “But we’d have to make a lot of cupcakes, wouldn’t we?”

  Alexis took out her notebook and started scribbling numbers.

  “There are about four hundred kids in the school,” she said. “Let’s say half of them go to the dance. That’s two hundred. Then there are teachers. And parents, and younger brothers and sisters. So let’s say that’s another two hundred people, for a total of four hundred. Now let’s say that half of those people buy cupcakes—”

  “We’d need two hundred cupcakes,” I said, and then gasped. “Oh no! I did math. Mrs. Moore must be getting through to me.”

  “That sounds like a lot of cupcakes,” Emma said.

  “Not really,” Alexis said. “It’s about seventeen dozen. We could bake a few dozen at a time over four or five days. Since it’s for the school, I bet we can ask our parents to donate the ingredients. If we sell each cupcake for fifty cents, we’d make a hundred dollars.”

  “Fifty cents?” Mia asked. “At the cupcake shop in Manhattan, they charge five dollars a cupcake. Katie’s cupcakes are just as good as theirs.”

  Alexis’s eyes were wide. “Who would pay five dollars for one cupcake?”

  “Maybe we could charge two dollars a cupcake,” Emma suggested.

  “That could work,” I chimed in. “If we sold all of the cupcakes, we’d make four hundred dollars. We might even win the contest.”

  “We should definitely do this,” Mia said, her eyes shining with excitement.

  “I’m sure this is better than whatever Sydney is planning,” Alexis said smugly.

  I looked over at the PGC table. I wasn’t really thinking about beating Sydney. I was thinking about Callie. She wasn’t too interested in the Cupcake Club when I talked about it. But if we won the fund-raising contest . . . maybe Callie would be convinced she was in the wrong club.

  “I’m in,” I said. “So how exactly are we going to make two hundred cupcakes?”

  CHAPTER 14

  The Mixed-up Cupcakes

  We should have a meeting so we can figure this out,” Alexis suggested. “We could do it at my house this time. How about Saturday?”

  “I’m going to my dad’s this weekend,” Mia said.

  “Next weekend should be fine,” Emma said. “It’s a month until the dance, anyway.”

  “We need to figure out what kind of cupcake to make,” I reminded everyone.

  “We can do that next week,” Alexis said. “We’ll work out a schedule, too.”

  So the following Saturday I showed up at Alexis’s front door with a whole bunch of recipes and enough ingredients for a couple dozen. If we were going to decide on a cupcake, we would have to do some research.

  Alexis lives in a brick house with a very neat front lawn. The bushes on either side of the white front steps are the kind that are trimmed into a perfect globe shape.

  Alexis looked surprised when she answered the door.

  “Hi, Katie,” she said. “What’s all that?”

  “It’s for our meeting,” I explained. “So we can experiment with cupcake flavors.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I thought we were just going to talk about it.”

  “Why just talk when we can taste?” I asked.

  Alexis led me into the kitchen. I’ve been in her house a few times so far, and I’m always amazed how clean it is in there. For example, there is nothing on the kitchen counter, not even a toaster. Our counter has a toaster, the big red mixer, a cookie jar shaped like an apple, Mom’s spice rack, and usually a bowl of fruit.

  Alexis’s mom was at the kitchen table, setting up a pitcher of water and glasses for our meeting, along with a bowl of grapes. I noticed there was a piece of paper and pencil at each of the four places around the table.

  Mrs. Becker was wearing a button-down light blue shirt and dark blue dress pants. I’ve never seen her wear jeans, not even on a Saturday. Her hair is auburn like Alexis’s, but it’s cut short.

  “Hello, Katie,” she said when she saw me. She noticed the bag I was carrying. “Did you bring snacks? How nice.”

  “It’s actually supplies, so we can make test cupcakes,” I told her.

  “You mean you’ll be baking?” she asked. “Oh dear. I didn’t know you’d be baking today, Alexis.”

  “We’ll clean up when we’re done, Mom,” Alexis said. “Promise.”

  “It’s true. We clean up all the time when we bake at my house,” I added.

  Mrs. Becker gave a little sigh. “All right. But let me know when you are ready to turn on the oven!”

  She hurried out of the kitchen.

  “Mom doesn’t like it when the plan changes,” Alexis explained. “Especially when there’s a mess involved.”

  “I promise we won’t make a mess,” I said. Then I remembered what my kitchen usually looks like when I bake cupcakes. “Well, not too much of a mess, anyway.”

  Emma and Mia arrived next, at the same time. Alexis neatly piled up the pencils and paper, and I took all of the ingredients I’d brought out of my bag. Besides the basic cupcake-making stuff, I had mini marshmallows, chocolate chips, nuts, sprinkles, red-hot candies, tubes of icing and food coloring, and a jar of cherries—just about everything I could grab from the pantry.

  “Mmm, everything looks so yummy,” Mia said.

  “Well, I was thinking that we have to make a really incredible cupcake if we’re going to sell a lot,” I said. “Something we’ve never done before.”

  “How do we do that?” Emma asked.

  “We experiment,” I said. “Mom and I do it all the time. That’s how we came up with our famous banana split cupcake. Only I didn’t have any bananas, so we’ll have to come up with something else.”

  I turned to Alexis. “Do you have a mixer?” I asked.

  “Not the kind you have,” she replied. “It’s the one you hold in your hand.”

  “That’s fine,” I said. “First we need to make a regular vanilla batter.”

  I had made so many vanilla cupcakes over the last few weeks that I didn’t need a recipe at all. Pretty soon we had a perfect bowl of batter ready.

  “Now we just have to figure out what to add in,” I said.

  “Everyone loves chocolate chips,” Mia suggested.

  We stirred some in.

  “Marshmallows go well with chocolate,” said Alexis.

  Emma nodded. “Definitely.”

  We added some mini marshmallows to the batter.

  “What about nuts?” Emma asked. “It might be good to have something crunchy in there.”

  “Some people are allergic to nuts,” Alexis pointed out.

  “That’s true,” I said. “But sprinkles are crunchy too. Maybe we could put sprinkles in.”

  Alexis wrinkled her nose. “You mean put them in a cupcake instead of on top?”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  Nobody had a good argument. I dumped in half a bottle of rainbow sprinkles.

  “They look good,” Mia said. “And I don’t think there’s
room in the bowl for anything else.”

  We scooped all of the batter into the cupcake tins Alexis put out for us. Because of all the stuff we mixed in, there was a lot of batter left over.

  “I don’t have any more pans,” Alexis said.

  “No problem,” I told her. “We can always bake more when the first batch cools.”

  Mrs. Becker came in to preheat the oven for us. She raised her eyebrow when she saw our cupcakes.

  “My, those look interesting,” she said.

  “Wait till you taste it, Mom,” Alexis told her. “You’re going to love it!”

  While the cupcakes baked, we whipped up some plain vanilla icing.

  “Should we add anything into the icing?” I asked.

  “I think the cupcakes have enough inside them,” Mia said.

  “Good point,” I said.

  We cleaned up our mess while we waited for the cupcakes to bake. When the timer rang, Mrs. Becker helped us with the oven.

  “Do you take them out now?” she asked.

  “We need to test them first,” I said.

  Mom had taught me how to stick a toothpick into the middle of a cupcake. If it came out clean, it was done. But if it had batter on it, the cupcake needed to cook more.

  I stuck a toothpick into the middle of one of our mixed-up cupcakes. When I took it out, it wasn’t clean. But it didn’t have batter on it. It had gooey marshmallow, chocolate, and a sprinkle stuck to it.

  I frowned. “I’m not sure if it’s done or not,” I said.

  Alexis looked over my shoulder. “They look done. They’re a little brown on top, see?”

  I realized there would be no sure way to tell if the cupcakes were done. We might as well take them out. Besides, I was dying to try one! The delicious smell of baking cupcakes was taking over my brain.

  We put the cupcakes on a rack to cool. Normally, we talk a lot when we’re waiting for cupcakes to cool off. But that day we stared at our cupcakes, like we were going to cool them off with the amazing power of our minds alone.

  Finally Mia blurted out, “Maybe we should try them without icing. You know, to get a true sense of how they taste.”