The Cupcake Queen

by Heather Hepler

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  chapter one

  chapter two

  chapter three

  chapter four

  chapter five

  chapter six

  chapter seven

  chapter eight

  chapter nine

  chapter ten

  chapter eleven

  chapter twelve

  chapter thirteen

  chapter fourteen

  chapter fifteen

  chapter sixteen

  chapter seventeen

  chapter eighteen

  chapter nineteen

  chapter twenty

  chapter twenty-one

  chapter twenty-two

  chapter twenty-three

  chapter twenty-four

  chapter twenty-five

  chapter twenty-six

  Acknowledgements

  Also by Heather Hepler

  Scrambled Eggs at Midnight (with Brad Barkley)

  Dream Factory (with Brad Barkley)

  Jars of Glass (with Brad Barkley)

  DUTTON CHILDREN’S BOOKS

  An imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014,

  U.S.A. • Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England • Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) • Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.) • Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa • Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2009 by Heather Hepler

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  CIP Data is available.

  Published in the United States by Dutton Children’s Books,

  an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  www.penguin.com/youngreaders

  eISBN : 978-1-101-10904-5

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  For Harrison, with love

  chapter one

  The fact that I wasn’t sur prised when my mother handed me the sheet pan filled with pink frosted cupcakes is possibly more disturbing than the cupcakes themselves. They’re pink, I mean pink. Pink cupcake papers, pink cupcakes, pink frosting, pink sprinkles, and now pink rosebuds. It’s like someone drank a whole bottle of Pepto-Bismol and then threw up in six dozen clumps. I can’t even laugh about it with anyone, because anyone who would think this is as funny as I do is three hundred miles away. And maybe three hundred miles doesn’t seem like much, but when you still have two and a half years before you can drive—and that’s only if my mother let’s me have time off from decorating cupcakes to get my license—three hundred miles might as well be three million. All I know is I get to spend the next hour putting exactly fourteen miniature pink sugar rosebuds on each of six dozen cupcakes (that’s 1,008 rosebuds in case you’re counting, and I am) while everyone I know who might think this is as crazy as I do is three billion miles away doing exactly what I wish I were doing right now. Anything other than this.

  “How’s it going?” Gram asks, pushing through the swinging door into the kitchen. I shrug, something I’ve gotten really good at. She pulls open one of the big refrigerator doors and sticks most of her upper body inside. I can hear her talking, but the oven fans and whir of the mixer muffle her words.

  “What did you say?” I ask when she closes the refrigerator.

  “I said your beach cupcakes are a big hit.”

  I nod and keep placing the tiny rosebuds on the cupcakes, slowly spinning the turntable as I go to make sure they’re even. I know my mother will check. Gram puts a tray of vanilla cupcakes on the counter beside me. She lifts one. “These are my favorite,” she says, holding up a blue-frosted cupcake with a tiny sailboat on top. “Of course the kids like the crabs—they have more icing.” She hums as she takes the tray of cupcakes through the door to the front of the bakery. I sigh and use my tweezers to pick up another rosebud and place it on a cupcake.

  Cupcake.

  Six months ago, if someone had said the word cupcake, it probably wouldn’t have even registered. I mean, sure, who doesn’t like them? But a whole bakery devoted just to cupcakes? I asked my mother that when she told me. “Nothing else?” She just laughed, like it was the funniest thing I’d said all day. I didn’t quite believe it until I saw the man putting the final touches on the lettering on the window: THE CUPCAKE QUEEN.

  “Penny.” I jump at the sound of my name and accidentally jab the cupcake with the tweezers, leaving a hole. My mother sighs behind me. “You’re off in dreamland again,” she says. Not true. More like nightmareland. She whisks the mutilated cupcake off the turntable and drops it into the trash, replacing it with a fresh one. “Here,” she says, holding out her hand for the tweezers. I watch as she expertly places fourteen tiny rosebuds all over the top of the cupcake before trading it for another. “You just need to focus,” she says, completing three more in the time it would have taken me to do one. She hands the tweezers back to me. Focus. My mother is quite possibly the most focused person I know. I feel her focusing on my hands as I struggle to pick up another rosebud with my tweezers. It slips and I end up breaking it. The buzz of her cell phone saves me from another lecture on the importance of attention to details.

  She listens for a while after saying hello. “Oh no, it’s okay. We’ll manage,” she says finally, looking at the clock above my head. “Just feel better.” She taps her free fingers against the counter. “Just let me know.” She flips her phone shut with a click. “Great,” she says, her voice flat.

  Gram pushes back through the door with another empty tray. “Lizzie, those summer cupcakes are going like hotcakes.” Ever since we moved from Manhattan, population 1.6 million, to Hog’s Hollow, population 5,134, my mother has been Lizzie. In New York, people called her Elizabeth or Ms. Lane.

  “That was Jeannie,” my mother says, holding up her cell phone. “She’s sick.” My mother sighs again. Probably her tenth sigh in the last hour. “There is no way I can do the setup by myself. I mean, there are the flowers and the china and the linens . . .”

  “Don’t forget the cupcakes,” Gram says. I have to duck my head so that my mother doesn’t see me smile.

  “Yes, Mother,” she says, “the cupcakes.”

  That’s one thing I do like about Hog’s Hollow: my grandmother. She�
�s the only person I know who isn’t afraid of my mother. Even my father’s afraid of my mom.

  “I just can’t do it all alone. Jeannie goes back to college in less than a week.” She stares at the phone, as if willing Jeannie to call again to say that she’s fine, she’ll be right in.

  “Take Penny,” Gram says, pulling another sheet pan of cupcakes from the refrigerator.

  “What?” we both say. My mother looks over at me in time to see me break another sugar rosebud.

  “I don’t think she—” my mother begins.

  “I don’t think I—” I say.

  “You’ll be fine,” Gram says, pushing the door to the front open with her hip. She flashes me a grin before it swings shut, trapping me in the kitchen with my mother.

  “You’ll be fine,” my mother tells me. I can’t tell whether she’s saying this to herself or me. After loading the van with cupcakes, extra sugar rosebuds, four huge bouquets of flowers in various shades of (yep, you guessed it) pink, a stack of white tablecloths, and several totes of rented plates and silverware and glasses, my mother got to work on me. First I had to endure the scrutiny. I should be used to it by now, but I never am. Let me paint the scene. Me: black jeans, black Chucks, black T-shirt. Mousy-brown hair pulled into a low ponytail. Burt’s Bees on my lips. Blue mascara on my eyelashes. I know, but I read in Cosmo that it’s supposed to make your eyes look more dramatic, and I can use all the help I can get. The problem is not so much me, but my mother. She’s a firm believer in looking pulled together at all times, and it seems I’m the opposite of that. Maybe I’m pulled apart. So, there I am, a vision in black with flour streaks on my jeans (and probably my face) and my mother is tilting her head at me, trying to see if I make the cut to go to the country club. And I see her thinking no, but then realizing that she has no choice. It’s either take me with her where she can keep an eye on me, or take Gram and leave me to run the bakery alone. And, then there’s another sigh. “Let’s see what I can do,” she says, walking to the back office, where she keeps her purse.

  Fast-forward ten minutes and I’m sitting in the passenger seat of the van with what she could do all over me. New ponytail. Higher up, like a cheerleader’s. Clean T-shirt—white, not black. A scrub at my eyes dislodged the blue mascara and a swipe of lipstick at my mouth makes it look like I’ve been sucking on a cherry Popsicle all afternoon.

  “Don’t rub at your lips,” my mother says, and I lower my hand into my lap. “This is a great opportunity for you.” She steers across the road and into the parking lot of the Hog’s Hollow Country Club. “There’ll be a lot of girls there your age.”

  I stare at the side of her face, and she looks over at me. Seeing my expression, she laughs. “Penny,” she says, turning into a parking space at the side of the building marked DELIVERIES. “Don’t tell me you didn’t know.” She looks at me again and can tell I didn’t know. “Fourteen rosebuds, fourteen years.”

  She’s talking to me like I’m five, but it’s only because I don’t want to believe what she’s saying. I thought I had a good two weeks before I was going to have to meet anyone. I mean, I’ve met people. A lot of Gram’s friends who stop by on their morning walks to get a breakfast cupcake (one of my inventions) and some gossip. And a lot of my mother’s old friends from when she grew up here. But I’ve been able to duck anyone my age, sliding into the bakery through the back and staying in the kitchen all day before heading home to stay in my room all night. I keep telling myself if I pretend I don’t live here, I don’t. I spend most nights IM’ing my friends back in the City. They’re keeping me up-to-date with everything so when I move back I won’t have missed too much.

  “Earth to Penny,” my mother says, actually waving her fingers in front of my face. “Look,” she says. “Don’t be nervous.”

  “Who’s nervous?” I ask. And the truth is, it’s only partly nerves. Mostly it’s that I don’t want this. Any of it. I don’t want to start a new school and make new friends. I don’t want to have a mother who runs a bakery called The Cupcake Queen instead of the cool art gallery in Chelsea. I don’t want to live in Hog’s Hollow instead of in the Village. And I definitely do not want to carry six dozen pink cupcakes covered in pink rosebuds into the ballroom of the Hog’s Hollow Country Club so that some fourteen-year-old girl named Charity can have a HAPPY SWEET FOURTEEN, as the banner over the entrance says.

  “Come on, Penny,” my mother says. “Try to make the best of it.” She winks when she says it, and I can kind of see the mother that I used to know. The one who would walk with me through Central Park even when it was three below zero. The one who would take me all the way uptown to Zabar’s so we could get a cup of the best hot chocolate in the whole world. Then she blows it. “Just try to focus, okay?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Focus.” As I slide the first box of cupcakes out of the rack in the back of the van and start to carry it inside, I want to tell her that focusing isn’t the problem. It’s what I’m focusing on that sucks.

  chapter two

  I have never done this be fore, but the job sounds simple enough. Go in, set tables with tablecloths, silverware, napkins, forks, etc. Set up cake stands, add cupcakes, check rosebuds, leave. Usually Mom does this alone, or if she needs help, she’ll call Jeannie. Jeannie, who is in college. Jeannie, who has naturally blond hair, a red MINI Cooper, and a boyfriend named Stuart. But instead of Jeannie, my mom has me. And Mom tells me “It’ll be fine” so many times that when I pull the last box of cupcakes out of the van, my hands are shaking badly enough to knock off some of the rosebuds. By the time I get inside it sounds like I have a cardboard box full of marbles instead of cupcakes.

  “Just put it over there, Penelope,” my mother says over her shoulder. I know now that something is up, because my mother never calls me Penelope. It’s unfortunate, too, considering my name. My father, Peter Lane, is a huge Beatles fan. In addition to a cat named Rita (as in lovely Rita meter maid), a dog named Lucy (in the sky with diamonds), and a tank full of fish named after the band members themselves, he decided that he should pay tribute to the Fab Four with his daughter’s name, too. Yep, I’m Penny Lane. I’m told it could be worse, but no one who says that can actually tell me how.

  I place the box full of cupcakes on the table and stand there, waiting for my mother to finish talking to a very large woman with very big hair. Manhattan is filled with women with simple, stylish hair. From what I’ve seen of Hog’s Hollow, the trend here seems to be the more, the better. More hair, more makeup, more jewelry. I start pulling the napkins out of their wrappers. I know a trick to make them spiral into a star pattern instead of just sitting there in a stack. You take a glass and lay it on its side on top of the stack and then twist. I used to do it all the time for openings at Mom’s gallery. Chelsea art openings serve sushi and little crackers covered with slivers of cucumber and spoonfuls of caviar. Here in Hog’s Hollow it’s pink cupcakes and punch made from ginger ale and fruit juice, and watermelons hollowed out to look like baskets to hold little balls of watermelon. There’s something disturbing about gutting a piece of fruit and then reshaping and replacing the guts like it’s art.

  “Penelope, there’s someone I want you to meet.” Again with the Penelope. I walk over to where she is standing with the big-hair woman and a girl wearing enough pink to make Barbie look somber. “This is Mrs. Wharton, and this”—dramatic pause—“is her daughter, Charity.” I take Mrs. Wharton’s hand, which feels like limp lettuce, and smile at her daughter.

  “Um, it’s Penny,” I say softly. Charity looks at me briefly and then past me. I can’t stop staring at her hair. It’s the same color as mine, but where mine tends toward wavy on good days and frizzy on bad days, Charity’s is shiny and smooth and seems to almost glow. The way she keeps shaking her head slightly to make it move makes me understand that she knows exactly how great her hair is.

  “It’s my Charity’s special day,” Mrs. Wharton says, and at first it doesn’t register what she is talking about. Finally,
remembering the sign out front, I mumble, “Happy birthday.” Charity makes her hair ripple again and offers me a cold smile that nearly matches the ice carving on the buffet table. Who has an ice carving of herself?

  “Charity is going into the ninth grade, too,” my mother says to me. When I don’t respond, she continues. “Penelope?” She looks over at me. “Penny is just a little bit nervous.”

  And for the first time in a while, my mother is right. I am nervous. Back home, I had friends. Not a lot, but enough, and then a whole group of sorta-friends. Here, well, other than my mom (who I don’t count) and Gram (who I do, but who’s a little old to be attending high school) and my cat, Oscar (there’s no Beatles reference—I put my foot down), I have no one.

  “Oh, don’t you worry, dearie,” Mrs. Wharton says. “Charity will show you around.”

  Charity smiles again, but as soon as our mothers turn their attention away from us, her smile fades. She looks at me as if the effort of just being near me is painful. “So, you’re new,” Charity says, but the way she says it is almost like she just said, “So, you smell like sweaty socks.” I just nod, wishing I could sound as cool and funny on the outside as I think I do on the inside. “Well,” Charity says, looking at me, waiting for me to say something. “Nice talking to you, Patty.” I start to correct her, but she just walks away, giving me this half wave with the back of her hand.

  I decide that instead of just standing beside my mother, wishing I was anywhere but there, I’ll start setting up. My mother is so into something Mrs. Wharton is saying about the chamber of commerce that she doesn’t notice what I’m doing. I start with the cake stands. I try to make as little noise as possible as I fish through the box holding the various pieces. There are six plastic disks, two of each size, and then four columns that support each disk, forming two tiny towers each perfect for three tiers of cakes or, in this case, three dozen cupcakes. If you’re having a hard time picturing it, think the Parthenon, but smaller and made out of plastic. I start fitting the two towers together, setting them up on either end of the dessert table. I fill the bottom two tiers first, thinking that I don’t want them to topple over from being too top-heavy. I have filled both towers by the time my mother finishes talking and Mrs. Wharton is clapping her hands for everyone’s attention.