How to Eat a Cupcake

by Meg Donohue

  “So much for welcome to the neighborhood,” Julia said. “Personally, I would have preferred a nice bottle of wine. But I guess that’s not really the style around here.”

  I’d been sidetracked by those words on the plank of wood, but now I turned to Julia. It was hardly a shock that she would take this opportunity to insert one of her breezy slights against the Mission. “Around here?” I repeated. “This kind of thing can happen anywhere, Julia. There’s no need to implicate an entire neighborhood.” Even as I said this, my mind was racing. Those words. Those specific words. Could it really just be a coincidence?

  Julia gave a little shrug. She looked down at the piece of wood between us and nudged it gently with the toe of her alligator-skin flat. “Poor wood. It makes it through the building and then demolition of a barn one hundred miles away, only to be destroyed by stupid drunk kids in the Mission. Well, not destroyed, I guess. Burt says he can sand it down and it will be good as new. Or, you know, good as old.”

  I was hardly listening to her. “This is all too weird,” I murmured. The memory of slips of paper fluttering slowly down to the ground around me clouded my thoughts. My tongue felt thick and dry in my mouth. “Those words . . .”

  Julia kept her eyes trained on the wood. “I guess someone doesn’t want us in the neighborhood.”

  I lifted my gaze to stare at her. Was she really going to pretend those words held no history for us? “Julia,” I said. “Those words: ‘You don’t belong here.’ You know it’s not the first time I’ve seen them.”

  Julia blinked, hesitating for a moment, then shook her hair back. “I’ll call the alarm company and see if I can get them in here sooner than next week. Somebody in the neighborhood is clearly in a tizzy about gentrification”—her lips curled around the word—“or whatever.”

  “Gentrification!” I cried. “But I live here. I’ve lived here for six years—I’m not some outsider swooping in!”

  Julia smiled ruefully. “Some might argue that living somewhere for six years does not disqualify one from being part of the gentrification process.”

  I couldn’t believe it. She was saying I was an outsider here, too! Was there nowhere she would allow me to feel at home? I took a deep breath and tried to match her gratingly calm tone. “We’re employing locals,” I said, gesturing toward the kitchen door through which the steady stream of workmen’s chatter still spilled. “We’re creating jobs. We’re improving foot traffic, which will help other local businesses.”

  She waved her hand in front of her. “Oh, I know, I know. You’re preaching to the choir.” She sighed. “All I meant was that I think we need to try not to take the graffiti personally.”

  I read those fluorescent orange words on the redwood plank again. “How can I not take this personally? How can I look at those words and then look at you standing there in front of me and not think that somehow, in some way, the two are connected?” I shook my head. “It just makes me think I should never have done this. I should never have let you back in my life.”

  “Annie—” Julia began slowly.

  “Just tell me you remember,” I interrupted. “At least give me that.”

  She hesitated, nudging the plank again with her toe. “I remember,” she said at last, as nonchalantly as if she were agreeing with some comment I’d made about the weather.

  I sighed and sank back against a table the workmen had set up in the corner, my eyes burning with some strange mixture of relief and anger at Julia’s small admission. I wasn’t crazy. I knew she remembered everything about that year. I knew she remembered the truth.

  The rumors about me had all started when a series of thefts rocked Devon Prep during our senior year. First, Katherine de Verona’s Birkin bag was stolen from the bathroom counter while she was in a stall. Then Lauren Pearlman’s Gucci wallet was lifted from her backpack. Other students lost expensive coats, gold key rings, Tiffany charm necklaces.

  One day a few weeks into those incidents, my friend Jody told me to meet her in the school courtyard during lunch. When I walked outside, I realized it was drizzling. Other than Jody, who sat at a small metal table in a corner of the courtyard near the rock garden, the usually crowded eating spot was empty. Jody looked up and blinked rapidly when I approached, then looked back down and began gnawing her fingernails with an anxious abandon she typically reserved for the Sour Patch Kid candies she kept in endless supply in her backpack.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, dropping into the chair across from her. Even for Jody, who was as socially adept as a possum, this rainy meeting was odd.

  “It’s Clayton Reardon,” she whispered, still gnawing on her thumbnail and not meeting my eye.

  “What? Come on, Jody, out with it. You’re being weird.”

  When Jody looked up, a deep, acne-scarred crease had formed between her eyebrows. “Clayton Reardon,” she repeated, only a fraction louder now. She glanced around and then leaned across the table toward me. “This morning in gym he told everyone he saw you unzipping book bags in the hall. People are saying that you’ve been stealing our stuff and pawning it to send money to your family in Ecuador.”

  I laughed and then, when I realized she was serious, stopped and stared at her in stunned silence. “What are you talking about?” I sputtered. “Stealing? My family in Ecuador? I don’t know anyone in my family but my mother!” And thanks to her insistence on assimilation, I thought, I barely speak a word of Spanish! The accusation would almost have been funny if it weren’t so damn bigoted.

  “I know,” Jody said quickly. Her pale face was pinched with discomfort. “I know. But that’s what everyone’s saying. I thought I should tell you.”

  I sat back in the chair, my mind racing. The rain was falling harder now and we both pulled up the hoods on our jackets. “Why would Clayton say that about me? What did I ever do to him?”

  “Nothing.” Jody resumed biting her thumbnail and seemed to retreat deeper into her hood. “But you know how they are.”

  By “they” she meant the rest of our classmates, and I understood as she spoke just how hopeless the situation was. Clayton Reardon’s word was practically gospel at Devon. In the eyes of my classmates, I was now a thief. I took in Jody’s darting eyes and renewed commitment to eating her fingers and sighed. “Thanks for telling me,” I said. “You should go. No reason to be late for class.”

  We both knew that class didn’t begin for another fifteen minutes, but Jody rose so quickly her chair nearly toppled over. She hoisted her enormous backpack onto her shoulders. “I’ll see you later,” she said. “Hang in there.”

  Once she was gone, I sat alone at the table until the bell rang, my face burning with anger and frustration, acutely aware that even the rain could not shield me from the countless pairs of eyes I felt staring down at me from the classroom windows surrounding the courtyard.

  After school that day, I trudged up the St. Clairs’ grand staircase. I couldn’t have explained why I’d decided to talk with Julia about those rumors—it had been months, maybe even a year, since we’d shared anything close to the sort of honest, heartfelt conversations our friendship had once been built on. I guess it just showed how upset I was about everything, and how alone I felt.

  I certainly wasn’t intending to snoop. Julia’s relationship with Jake Logan was still in its early days and it didn’t occur to me he might be with her. I was just about to push open her bedroom door when I heard his voice coming from inside. And he was talking about me. My hand, mere inches from the door, froze. I stared at it, thinking of the split-second pause of a bird just before it plummets, shot dead, to the ground.

  “Annie cracks me up,” Jake was saying. “Has she always been so funny? I wonder if she’s home yet.”

  “Anita Quintana?” Julia asked, using my full name as though she barely knew me. She gave a sharp little laugh, nothing like the belly laugh I was used to hearing from her. “Oh,
Jake. Annie’s the St. Clair family project. She’s just the housekeeper’s daughter. Our favorite little bushy-haired charity case. It’s so sweet you’re nice to her, but didn’t you hear? She’s the one who’s been stealing everything at Devon!”

  And just like that, I knew. Something in her voice told me concretely what I think on some level I’d been circling all afternoon: Julia had started those rumors about me. I didn’t bother to listen for Jake’s response, but turned and crept back down the stairs, my cheeks wet with tears.

  Over the next couple of weeks the treatment I received from my classmates plunged from benign neglect to active hatred—boys hissed menacingly in the halls; pencils were tossed at my back in class; my backpack was continually overturned and emptied. And then came the day in April when I opened my locker to find it stuffed with little slips of paper with the words “YOU DON’T BELONG HERE” typed on them in capital letters. I tried to gather those slips of paper as they drifted to the floor around me, but passing classmates silently kicked them back fluttering through the air, until I felt trapped inside some awful, nightmarish snow globe.

  Later that day, I was summoned to the principal’s office and placed on temporary suspension.

  “It’s for your own good while we sort this whole thing out,” Mr. Crane said, but I could see the accusation in his eyes.

  When I arrived home early from school, the look on my mother’s face—a heart-crushing mix of concern, loyalty, and disappointment—was the day’s final, and worst, injustice.

  Any sort of suspension required a note be sent out to the colleges I’d applied to, which meant that the Cal admissions department soon alerted me that it was closely reviewing the situation as well. I was never allowed to return to Devon Prep, but, unable to prove anything, the school did eventually mail me my diploma. It wasn’t until after my mother had died that fall that a gym teacher caught the school’s front office assistant, Ms. Sherman, brazenly lifting Chanel No. 5 perfume from a student’s field hockey bag. It turned out Ms. Sherman had a taste, but not the paycheck, for designer goods. Oddly, I felt a little sorry for her. I remembered seeing her smoking cigarettes around the corner from school, looking miserable and too thin in starchy pants. It turned out that being surrounded by a bunch of kids who had all of the beautiful things she’d never been able to afford knocked her a little off her rocker. She couldn’t have been the first person Devon Prep drove crazy. I hoped her lawyer played the insanity card.

  And now, right in the middle of the cupcakery floor, those same awful words that had traumatized me so deeply ten years earlier had resurfaced. I really believed I had basically come to terms with everything that had happened so long ago, but now I was thrust back into that dark, thorny place. Standing tall and straight under the bare bulbs of construction lighting, Julia applied a fresh coat of lip gloss. Just watching her made me nearly shake with anger. Her shiny, pearly nails irritated me. Her thin gold watch annoyed me. Her perfectly twisted scarf drove me practically certifiable. Noticing me staring at her, she paled.

  “Annie,” she said. “You have to realize it’s just an awful, awful coincidence.” I glared at her in silence and her steady gaze wavered. “If you won’t even give me the benefit of the doubt,” she asked, “how will you ever learn you can trust me?”

  “If I don’t give you the benefit of the doubt,” I said sharply, “I’ll never have to be reminded that I can’t trust you.”

  Julia’s lips quivered and then suddenly her eyes were filling with tears. I couldn’t believe it. I’d seen her shed tears only twice through our entire childhood—the first, when Curtis accidentally ran over her cat, and Lolly, who’d been complaining about the cat hair on her Oriental rugs for years, swore that another pet would never again cross the St. Clair threshold; the second, at my mother’s funeral. Now this was already the second time in a few short months that she was crying in front of me. I felt the heat of my anger drop a degree or two. Whatever she had going on in her life, whatever weird journey had made her decide that opening a cupcakery with me was what she needed to do right now, I could not begin to fathom.

  Julia’s a vampire, I’d vented to Becca the other day, but instead of blood, she sucks the sense of humor right out of me. And here I was, letting her feed on me again. When push came to shove, did I truly believe Julia had something to do with that graffiti? No. And did I really think she would ever check her pride long enough to apologize for starting those rumors back in high school? No. I refused to spend any more time torturing myself by waiting for something that would never happen. I looked around the shop as she swiped the smudges of mascara from below her eyes. We needed, I realized, to get back to focusing on the business.

  “Well,” I said, nodding toward the redwood plank, “at least orange complements our color scheme.”

  Julia blinked, then laughed shakily. “Small favors, I guess.” She sniffed, looking around the shop. “It’s coming together, isn’t it?”

  The dark wood floors, though currently coated with dust, gave the shop a richness it hadn’t had before. The large, black-steel-framed front window and door were in place, as was the steel-and-glass display counter and shelving units. In the next week the front bar would be installed (assuming the graffiti snafu didn’t set things back too long), the dark red Treat logo would be transferred onto the front window and door, the chandelier would go up, and work on the kitchen would be completed. I had already hired two assistant bakers and Julia had hired two women to help manage the register, cupcake counter, and coffee bar.

  “We’re moving along,” I said.

  Julia sighed, clearly relieved. She reached into her oversized leather bag, pulled out her phone, and checked the cupcakery’s to-do list. “How are the recipes coming?”

  “Fine,” I said. I mentally ran over the menu I’d been creating. “It would be even better if I had my mother’s recipe book . . . there’s this tres leches dessert with rum syrup she used to make that could be an amazing cupcake. And her passion fruit meringue. Remember that?”

  “Yes!” Julia cried. “It was heaven. We have to find that book. Why don’t you come over later in the week and we’ll turn the house upside down?”

  I nodded. “I guess it couldn’t hurt to look again. Maybe third time’s a charm.”

  “And we should probably do a little taste test of the menu then, too.”

  I couldn’t help laughing; Julia was all but licking her lips. “Very subtle. I like how you slipped that in.”

  “What?” Julia said, widening her eyes innocently. “I’ll supply the cups of milk and flutes of champagne.” She looked down at the list on her phone again. “How about the vendors—produce, flour, etcetera. You’ve been in contact with them, right?”

  “Yup. I told you, Julia, I’ll handle all of the baking-related stuff, including food purveyors. I know who to call and where to shop. That’s my wheelhouse. You don’t have to worry.”

  “Perfect.” Julia typed a note into her phone and dropped it into her bag. She hesitated, pressing her lips together in a manner that made her look disturbingly like her mother. “Listen, Annie,” she said, “that graffiti . . . it really is just a bizarre coincidence. You believe me, don’t you?”

  Her eyes still glistened faintly and as I looked at her, even knowing full well that she was the master of false sincerity, I felt my shoulders finally loosen and fall from the tense position they’d assumed from the moment I’d seen that graffiti. It was exhausting being angry with her all the time, and she really did appear, whatever her motives, to be trying to make things right. “Yes,” I told her, realizing that, despite my better judgment, it was true. I actually did believe her.

  Chapter 10

  Julia

  “Julia St. Clair, if you miss one more wedding appointment I’m going to lose my mustard!” my mother’s voice rasped through my car’s speakers when I called her after I’d pulled away from the cupcakery. I couldn�
��t help smiling at the mixed metaphor. It was one of my mother’s favorites, passed down from her own mother and her mother’s mother before that as though the words “lose my mustard” were as precious as heirloom jewelry. I suspected I’d let the saying die with my mother.

  “I’ll be there! I promise,” I said as I navigated the streets of the Mission, turning onto Dolores Street with its palm-lined divider and stomach-roiling hills. I was in a good mood after the way my meeting with Annie had ended, even if our cupcakery was under siege by some Mission hoodlums.

  “Just how late are you going to be, Julia? At least give me that courtesy.”

  I glanced at the clock on the dashboard. “Twenty minutes. Maybe less. I’m on Dolores.”

  “You’re still in the Mission?” my mother barked. “Are you driving the Mercedes? Lock the doors. And please get off the phone and concentrate! I don’t know why you didn’t just let Curtis drive you. That’s exactly why we employ him. He would have made sure you were back safe and sound and on the dot.”

  Lock your doors. I had, in fact, locked the doors the moment I’d entered the car back on Twentieth Street, but even I recognized how these words sounded coming from my mother. “Stop worrying. I’ll be there,” I repeated. I ended the call and pressed down on the gas pedal.

  And I really did intend to go to that meeting with the wedding photographer. I was as mentally prepared as I’d ever be to pore over the photographer’s portfolio, discuss the proper ratio of formal portraits to photojournalistic shots, and determine which overpriced package was overpriced enough to handle the demands of a St. Clair wedding. But as I idled at a light a few blocks from the cupcakery, a slim woman in narrow jeans and a gorgeous, funnel-sleeved tweed coat walked in front of my car with a baby strapped snug against her chest. The road wavered. I pressed my eyes shut as a black wave of despair swelled and crashed inside of me, splintering my heart into a thousand throbbing pieces. A horn blared behind me and I managed to pull over through a blur of tears before I dropped my head to the steering wheel. I wasn’t sure I’d ever felt so alone in my entire life.