The Cupcake Queen

by Heather Hepler

  Linda takes two pennies from a dish and drops them into the machine. “There,” she says, and smiles at us. She counts the bills into my hand. “Next time maybe you shouldn’t wait so long.” I imagine in Linda’s mind we have jars of pennies scattered everywhere.

  We take our now empty backpacks and walk outside. I try to hand Tally half of the money, but she won’t take it.

  “You earned it,” she says, smiling. “Just buy me something to eat. I’m starving.” She was about to grab another bag of pretzels, but Mr. Three-Piece Suit shook his head at her.

  “Like what?” I ask. I stuff the bills into the front pocket of my jeans. We start walking back down the hill and toward the center of town. I look for him, but he’s gone. Just as well, I think.

  “Something sweet,” she says. “Something chocolate.”

  “I know just the place.”

  “How cool is this?” Tally asks.

  We sit near the back of the bakery’s kitchen on upended milk crates. Gram laughed when I told her the story about the pennies, but I think seeing me with Tally was what really made her happy. She pulled two of my bug cupcakes out of the case, a ladybug one for Tally and a bee for me.

  “Your mom is the Cupcake Queen. Awesome,” Tally says. She pulls one of the black licorice antennae off her cupcake and chews it. “Wait a minute. This place opened in the middle of summer. Have you been here the whole time?”

  I shift on the milk crate. “I’ve kind of been hiding out,” I say. I focus on my cupcake, not wanting to look up at Tally. It is sort of weird how I’ve been here for three months and I haven’t really met anyone.

  “I did the same thing when I came here.”

  I look up at Tally, who is busy chewing the second antennae, this one still attached to the ladybug’s head. “Don’t look so surprised,” she says. “You aren’t the only one who was dragged to Hog’s Hollow against her will.” She pauses and smiles at me. “At least that’s what I’m assuming. Most people wouldn’t choose to come here.” She takes a bite out of the top of the cupcake, sending a shower of red sprinkles onto her lap. “You first,” she says through a mouthful of cupcake.

  “Why am I here?” I ask. She nods and takes another bite, smiling at me with red teeth. I take a deep breath and tell her about my parents separating, leaving out some parts. It’s not like it’s a secret, but thinking about it still gives me a stomach-ache. Tally nods and keeps biting at the top of the cupcake. The icing is almost all gone. “I’m going to move back soon,” I say. She just raises her eyebrows at me. “Now you,” I say, before she can ask any questions.

  “Okay,” Tally says. She takes a deep breath and brushes crumbs off her lap. “My mom took off when I was small, so it’s always been just me and my dad. We moved around a lot. Too much, I guess. My dad’s a musician, so we spent a lot of time on the road. So, last winter he decides I need more stability. So now I’m staying with Poppy, my mom’s sister. But my dad’s coming back to get me soon. As soon as things even out for him.” She says it fast, all in one breath, and then looks down in her lap again, suddenly intent on a tiny hole in the knee of her jeans. Something about the way she’s trying to push her baby finger through the hole gives me the feeling I’m not the only one leaving things out. Tally looks up, giving me another half smile before taking another bite of her cupcake. “So, you haven’t met anyone else here?” I think about telling her about the guy on the beach, but decide not to when I realize I know more about his dog than about him. I just shake my head. Tally looks at me like she’s going to say something else, but she takes the last bite of her cupcake instead.

  “What’s the RPS Society?” I ask, reading her shirt.

  “Rock, Paper, Scissors,” she says. “Don’t laugh. Some people take it very seriously.”

  The back door opens. It’s one of the deliverymen from the dairy.

  “Hey, Mr. Fish,” Tally says. Now it seems that everyone in Hog’s Hollow has a food name. “You’re working at the dairy?”

  “Hey yourself, Miss Tally. Just making a little extra money. What are you doing here?” He notices me sitting across from her and smiles. “I see someone has found the ghost girl.”

  “Are you the ghost girl?” Tally asks me. I shrug.

  “She’s been haunting this bakery all summer,” Mr. Fish says, taking off his hat and wiping his forehead with his sleeve. “I was beginning to think maybe only I could see her.”

  “Nah,” Tally says, smiling at me. “She’s real enough.”

  Mr. Fish starts putting the quarts of cream and the boxes of butter into the refrigerator. “How’s Poppy?” Mr. Fish asks. His head disappears behind the door of the refrigerator as he reaches way into the back.

  “She’s good,” Tally says.

  He nods. “You tell Poppy I asked about her, won’t you?”

  “I will,” Tally says. Mr. Fish smiles slightly, but his eyes stay sad. He stacks the empty milk crates on top of one another, letting us keep the two we’re sitting on. He slips the dolly under the rest and tips the stack toward him.

  “See you,” he says to us, pushing the screen door open. He leaves, letting the door smack shut behind him.

  “That was the infamous Mr. Fish,” Tally says, leaning back and brushing at her jeans again. I start to ask why he’s infamous, but before I can, she’s on her feet. “Okay, then. Friday after school. My house.”

  I stand and follow Tally to the back door. She shoulders her backpack and pushes the door open.

  “Your house?” I ask.

  “Big blue house at the end of the beach. Just past the pier.” She pushes through the screen door, and I catch it before it slams shut. I watch her walk to the end of the alley and start around the corner. “Friday,” she calls.

  “Friday,” I say, and let the door shut. I turn and see Gram watching me, smiling. “What?” I ask.

  “Oh, nothing,” Gram says. She walks to the refrigerator and pulls out a sheet pan full of cupcakes. “Any new ideas?” she asks.

  “Maybe,” I say. “I don’t want to tell you in case I can’t do it.”

  “You, Penny, are just like your mother. You can do anything you put your mind to.”

  The just like your mother thing makes me pause for a second. It seems the longer we’re in Hog’s Hollow, the less certain I am about anything. Most of all my mother.

  I sit on the stool in the kitchen and pull out my spiral notebook and pencil. I flip past the designs I made for July (flags and Uncle Sam hats and fireworks). I keep flipping through August. (Sea stars, fishing boats, crabs, beach umbrellas. I even made cupcakes that looked like ice creams. They were huge and baked in real cones.) I had started on September, mostly apples and stacks of books, but I flip to a new sheet of paper and start sketching.

  I love art, but I’m not really what you’d call an artist. I mean, I like to do a lot of crafts, and I have a pretty good eye for detail and design, but I can’t really do things like the artists who used to have shows in my mom’s gallery. Those were all important works of art. I’d rather do things that are fun and make people smile than things that make people fold their arms and say “hmmm” a lot. My dad always called it “the art gallery moan,” like people were responding at such an emotional level that words couldn’t quite capture it.

  I take a measuring cup off the hook in front of me and use it to outline a circle on the sheet of paper. I agreed to work here because Gram said if I didn’t stop moping around the house, she’d find me a job. It was pretty much choose to work at the bakery or get forced to work at the boatyard, scraping the underside of the fishing boats, or at Gram’s friend’s farm, moving compost around. Easy choice. Bakery. At first I just did dishes and stacked supplies and stuff, but then one day my mother got a big order from one of the bed-and-breakfasts, and she needed help. I found out I liked baking and, even more, I liked decorating. Of course I didn’t tell Gram that. She’s impossible when she knows she’s right.

  “Hey there,” my mother says, coming through
the back door. She’s wearing jeans with the cuffs rolled up and a tie-dyed T-shirt I’ve never seen before. She walks behind me and tries to peer over my shoulder. “Can I see?”

  “Not yet,” I say, putting my hand over my drawing.

  My mother turns, reaches into the refrigerator, and takes out a bottle of water. “How was your day?” she asks. I think about French class and Tally and the boy with the dog, who didn’t have the dog this time. And about pennies and Rock, Paper, Scissors and the infamous Mr. Fish. And the seventy-five dollars I have stashed in the front pocket of my jeans. I shrug. “The first day can be pretty hard,” she says.

  “Yeah,” I mumble. Like she has any idea. “It was okay, I guess.” And I guess that’s about right. It was okay.

  “Good,” she says, and I look back down at my notebook. I try to think if OKAY is an acronym for something. I write “Ordinary” for the O and “Average” for the A, but I can’t think of anything for the K and the Y. All I come up with is “Kinda” and “Yellow,” but that doesn’t make any sense. I sigh and try drawing again. I’ll bet Charity didn’t know she’d inspire a new cupcake with her locker prank. I have to work carefully on the proportions. Abraham Lincoln has a really long face.

  chapter six

  So far I have had to change my shirt three times, and that was even before breakfast was over. Shirt number one got splattered when I tried to open the new jar of raspberry jam and ended up wearing half of it. I dumped a mug full of tea on shirt number two. I changed the last time because I found a hole under the arm of my favorite thermal shirt, the one with pictures of sushi all over it.

  “Another big day,” my mother sings, coming into the kitchen. She’s picked up this annoying habit of half singing everything, as if at any moment she’s going to burst into song. And the weird thing is, she does it whether she’s happy or mad or sad or whatever. It’s supremely irritating. She pours herself a cup of coffee and leans against the counter, scrutinizing me. “Is that what you’re wearing?” she asks. I look down at my shirt, reading KISS ME. I’M IRISH. Upside down. It’s written in fuzzy green print that’s starting to peel off from so many washings.

  “Yep,” I say. I think about singing a response but don’t because I’m not sure if she will like it or hate it, and right now I’m not in the mood to be very likable. My mother makes a humph sound and then walks to the end of the living room where the computer is set up. I stare out the window, trying to see through the last of the morning fog.

  Every night this week I’ve gone walking on the beach. I tell my mom it’s for the exercise. I tell Gram it’s because I’m enjoying nature. I tell myself that it’s no big deal. I’ve seen him twice, but both times it was from inside my house. Once when we were eating dinner. We’d just sat down. I couldn’t figure out how to gobble down a whole bowl of soup and race out the door without drawing a lot of unwanted questions. The other time it was raining, so hard that I thought for sure he wouldn’t be out there. But from my dry spot on the glider, I could see two shapes making their way down the beach, one on two legs, the other on four. They were past so quickly that there wasn’t any time to get down to the beach. That and because I don’t run, there was really no good reason for me to be down there. Well, none I want to admit to.

  We’re starting with collages in art. We’re supposed to bring in “items of personal significance” for our project. We’re supposed to express who we are inside. “I want to really see what’s going on in there,” Miss Beans told us. It’s just another example of why I’m pretty sure she’s a new teacher. She hasn’t figured out that one of the greatest desires that most teenagers have is to hide what’s going on inside, not collect it all together and glue it onto a big piece of poster board and then hang it out in the hall for just anyone to look at.

  “This is lame,” I whisper to Tally. Her project is a bunch of liners for CDs and a couple of guitar picks and set lists. I didn’t know what those were until she told me it was just a list of the order of songs that a band plays at a gig. She actually talks like that. A gig. So really her project isn’t about her at all, but about her dad.

  “It’s pretty summer-campish,” she says. I look at my own project and sigh. Mine has a brochure from one of my mom’s art shows, some pictures of me and my friends ice-skating in Central Park, and a bunch of ticket stubs from museums and movies. While Tally’s project is mostly about when she was on tour with her dad, mine is mostly about my other life, my real life. I try rearranging some of the ticket stubs so they look like they’re petals blooming out of the coffee stirrer from Dean & Deluca, but I can’t seem to get what Miss Beans calls “layering.” I check the clock. Only twelve-fifteen. I’m not sure I can rearrange for fifteen more minutes.

  “Penny,” Miss Beans says, walking up behind me. I’m busted. I turn and see she’s looking at me, not my project. “You look like you could use a break.” Okay, so maybe she’s not totally clueless. “Could you take this to the office for me?” I nod and she hands me a thick envelope.

  “Lucky,” Tally hisses at me.

  I walk out of the art room and into the empty hall. I stop by the water fountain and get a drink. I’m in no hurry to get back to class. I just can’t seem to make the leap between craft and art that Miss Beans talked about. She said the difference is that crafts show the artist’s skill while art shows the artist’s soul. Whenever I think of my soul, all I picture is a blobby floating thing that changes color depending on my mood.

  The office is empty when I walk in. I peer into Constance’s bowl of Jolly Ranchers, but all that’s left are a couple of sour apple ones and a few blue ones that I guess are raspberry. It’s weird how one day someone just decided that blue things were going to be raspberry. Why not blueberry, or plum or something? I look around to see if anyone’s watching and reach in for a blue one. The door to the office opens behind me. I drop the candy and turn around, expecting to see Constance walking in, but it’s not her.

  It’s him.

  “Caught you,” he says with a smile. He comes over, peers into the bowl, then shakes his head. “It’s sad really,” he says. “I’m pretty sure those are the same candies that are always left.” He walks around the desk, opens the middle drawer of the file cabinet, and pulls out the biggest bag of candy I have ever seen. He upends it over the fishbowl, filling it all the way to the top with Jolly Ranchers. He raises his eyebrows and tilts the bowl in my direction. I reach out to take a candy. “The flavor you pick says a lot about a person.”

  “You’ve given this a lot of thought,” I say.

  “That’s pretty much my life during third period. Running errands. Developing candy-based theories about people’s personalities.”

  Suddenly, picking a flavor seems to hold a lot of weight. I decide on grape, my favorite.

  “Interesting,” he says. He puts the bag of candy back in the file cabinet and turns to watch as I unwrap the Jolly Rancher and put it in my mouth.

  “So, what’s your theory?” I ask.

  “It’s complicated,” he says. “I’ll give you the short version for now.” I like the way he says “for now.” It hints that there is a “later” out there somewhere. “Grape people are artistic and like to be alone a lot.”

  “What about cherry?” I ask.

  “Cherry people are nice.” He says “nice” like I’d say “boring.”

  “I almost picked raspberry,” I say.

  “Interesting,” he says, nodding. “Raspberry people are adventurous. Risk takers.” I’m not sure that’s me at all.

  “What about the others?” I ask.

  “Watermelon people are popular.” He digs in the bowl, pulling out each flavor as he talks about it. “Apple people try too hard.” He pulls out a yellow one and looks at it.

  “How about lemon?” I ask.

  “Lemon people are mean,” he says. “You don’t want to get on the bad side of a lemon person.” Something tells me Charity is a lemon and the advice is coming too late.

  The door o
pens behind me and I turn to see Constance walk in. I feel myself blush, like I’ve been caught doing something wrong.

  “I have a—I mean, Miss Beans asked me—” I finally just stop talking and hold out the envelope. She takes it and walks around to the other side of the desk, opening it as she goes.

  “Thank you,” she says, looking up at me. “You can go back to class, um—” She pauses, searching my face.

  “Penny,” I say. She nods and looks back at her desk. I glance over at him, but he’s looking at something Constance is handing him. At least now he knows my name.

  I head back to class, sucking on the candy. I’m halfway down the hall when the bell rings. Doors open on both sides of me, and soon the hall is completely filled with people opening lockers and grabbing lunches to take outside or to the cafeteria. I thread my way back to the art room and find it empty. My collage is no longer on my desk but scattered under it. There’s a big footprint in the middle of my paper. Two of my photos are bent in half, and several of them seem to be missing altogether. I start picking everything up.

  “Hey,” Tally says from the doorway. “Where have you—” She stops when she sees what I’m doing. She comes over and bends down beside me. “I’m sorry. I just went to get my lunch. I was going to put your collage away, but Miss Beans . . .” She pauses and looks around. “She was in here. I wonder where she went.”

  The snarky part of me thinks who cares where she went, but I know it’s not Tally I’m mad at and definitely not Tally I should lash out at, so I just keep picking up the pieces of my project and trying to flatten the bent photos.

  “Penny,” Miss Beans says, walking into the room. “I thought you got lost.” She’s smiling when she says it. She walks over to where Tally and I are crouched. “Oh, did someone accidentally knock your project off the table?” I nod at the “knock” part. Not the “accidentally” part. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I had to go and help a student.” She picks up the big piece of poster board. “Charity was having a hard time getting into her locker.” I nod. I’m sure she was. More like she was creating a distraction while one of her friends wrecked my project. Miss Beans sees the footprint in the middle of the paper and looks at my face for the first time. “I have more paper, Penny,” she says.