Текст книги " Bittersweet"

Автор книги: Sarah Ockler

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Текущая страница: 5 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

“Maybe I can help you train.”

“You don’t even like the cold.” She takes a breath to speak, but I shake my head. “Even if I had time to work on my routine, and I could lose the anxiety, I don’t have the cash for another club membership. And I can’t train on Fillmore—I need access to groomed, indoor ice.”

“What a coincidence. I think we both know someone who can get it for you.” Dani smiles, wriggling her eyebrows until I connect all the dots.

“Are you serious? Are you … no. No! That’s straight up crazy. There is no way I’m—”

“Suit yourself,” she says. “But once you figure out you want it bad enough—and I know you do—you’ll talk to him.”

“Miss?” One of the blue-haired knitting club ladies steps out of the bathroom and joins us at the door. She’s a bit winded, and there’s a long piece of toilet paper trailing behind her shoe.

“Just thought you should know,” she says, leaning in close and pointing a finger at my chest, “the powder room is out of toilet paper, and one of the toilets is overflowing.” With that, she waddles back to her table and smooths a crumpled paper napkin over her lap.

I believe this is what Oprah refers to as an “Aha! Moment.”

I look at Dani and sigh, a big one for the ages. “Okay. I’ll talk to him tomorrow.”

Chapter Six

Kill Me, Kill Me Now Cupcakes

Any cake, any flavored icing, served in front of the entire school while wearing your most unflattering, back-of-the-drawer underwear

If I detour down the science hall, cut across the gym, head up one flight of stairs and down another, Josh Blackthorn’s locker is conveniently en route to my first class.

He totally catches me staring from across the hall like the gawker that I’m not, and I flip open my econ book to a random page as if my sole purpose in this hallway at this moment is to save the lives of hundreds of innocent children by defining the term “gross domestic product.”

Here it is! The sum of all market values of goods and services produced by a nation in a given year. Says so right on page ninety-four. Disaster averted! Lives saved! Awards, um, awarded!

Still, he’s smiling right at me, and I can’t escape. I wave and head toward him with my best fancy-meeting-you-here-at-your-own-locker face, front and center.

“Hi, Josh,” I say, super-originally.

He leans against his open locker door, shoulders shifting under a faded Addicts in the Attic shirt. “How’s it going?”

“Good,” I say, once again demonstrating my knack for witty conversation. “So, um, you like the Addicts?” No, idiot. He hates them. Why else would he be wearing their shirt?

“You know those guys?”

“I once skated a routine to ‘Bittersweet.’ My coach thought it was unorthodox, but the crowd loved it. I got a perfect … anyway. It’s pretty much my favorite song.” God. When did I become such a danger to myself and others? I take a deep breath and try to turn down the spaz-o-meter before someone gets hurt.

“For real?” he says. “I love that song. You know the part right after the guitar solo, when he hits that high note? Man, he went to some dark places for that stuff. Sometimes the lyrics just … wow. It’s so cool that you dig those guys.” He looks at me a moment longer like he wants to say something else, something about the band, maybe, or the way one perfect song can make you feel less alone.

He doesn’t, though, so I continue with my original mission. “I was thinking about what you said—the skating stuff?”

Josh shuts his locker, fingers tracing the combo lock. The tips of his ears go red like they did in the cold at Fillmore and that tiny, V-shaped scar jumps out again. Not that I’m making a police sketch or anything.

“Sorry if I freaked you out the other day.” He turns to face me, and my stomach flutters. “Guess my nonstalker plan kinda backfired.”

I smile. “I’m the one who freaked. I wasn’t expecting—”

“You have something on your shirt.” He starts to point at my chest, but quickly redirects to a spot on his own shirt instead. “Right here.”

Hudson Avery’s utter grace and all-around awesomeness? Confirmed. The sweater formerly known as white—and by formerly, I mean this morning, right before I dropped off my presentation cupcakes in the French classroom—now sports a giant orange streak clear across the left nipular region. It takes every ounce of willpower I have—plus a visual of last night’s plumbing disaster—to keep me from aborting the mission and bolting down the hall.

I close my eyes, shift my econ book so it covers the obnoxious stain, and soldier on. “Josh, um … Iwashopingwecouldskatetogetherattherink.”

Josh laughs. “Slow down.”

I open my eyes and look at the floor, black-and-gray speckled tiles that probably haven’t been cleaned since my parents were students here. I take a deep breath. Concentrate. “I thought about it last night, and if the offer still stands …”

“You want to skate with me?”

I nod. “But maybe we could use the rink instead of Fillmore? I’m trying to get back into a training routine, and Fillmore conditions can be unpredictable. Indoor ice would be better for technical stuff.”

“Baylor’s Rink?”

I sigh. “Sorry, you probably can’t, right? It was a stupid idea.”

“No, it’s a great idea. I should’ve thought of it sooner.” Josh scratches the back of his neck, his gaze drifting down the hall. “Let me talk to Will. He knows the rink manager better than I do. He’ll know when we can get ice time.”

I try to keep my smile in check, but my whole body is electrified with possibilities. Of the skating nature, not the hockey boy nature. Not that hockey boy possibilities aren’t equally electrifying, just that they’re—

“Not like anyone else uses the place, anyway,” Josh says. “What’s your number? I’m seeing Will first period, so I’ll … hang on.” He checks the phone suddenly buzzing in his hand. “I need to get this. Talk to you later?”

“Definitely,” I say, but he’s already answering the call, disappearing around the corner along with half the muscles that hold up my legs and the ones that make my lungs work. One slow step at a time, I head to economics on the other side of the school and sink into my desk in the back row.

Overly Analytical Mind, engaged.

Talk to you later … He smiled when he said that, right? Was he asking me, or telling me? Did he mean that he wants to talk to me, or just that he might talk to me, even if he doesn’t particularly want to?

Why did he leave so fast at the end? Who was on the phone? A girl? That’s it. He must have a girlfriend. One from another school. One he was just about to call so he could propose to her, but I interrupted, and then he had to run off to take her call, because weddings don’t just plan themselves, you know.

“Miss Avery?”

The sound of my name pulls me back to the classroom. Ms. Horner, a.k.a. Ms. Fanny Pack, drags her wooden pointer through the age-old chalk dust on the blackboard. No fancy-schmancy whiteboards and dry-erase markers for this establishment, thank you very much.

“Sorry … I didn’t … could you repeat the question?”

“I’d like you to give us a market scenario depicting how the laws of supply and demand impact pricing.”

Everyone’s looking at me like I’m the chair of the Federal Reserve being interviewed on CNN when all I can think about is Josh’s eyes and his smile and how good he must look in his hockey uniform and a whole bunch of other Josh-related stuff about which I can pretty much guarantee neither Ms. Fanny Pack nor the actual Fed chairman cares.

“Anytime you feel like participating,” she says, “jump right in.”

A few people snicker, and someone hums the first few notes of doom from Beethoven’s Fifth. I flip through my textbook as though the answer might suddenly appear there, just like it did earlier at Josh’s locker. “Um, when there’s a low supply of stuff, but a high demand, that means prices will be, um, they’ll—”

“Your family owns a restaurant, do they not?” The woman asks me this as if she isn’t in there every Wednesday with Madame Fromme for the all-you-can-eat chicken dinner special.

“Miss Avery?”

“Yeah.” My voice gets a little stuck inside and I clear my throat. “I mean, yes. My mom owns Hurley’s.”

“And you work for her?”

Someone chants “Cupcake Queen,” and I think of Hester Prynne in my Scarlet Letter book, only instead of being tried for adultery, I stand accused of baking cupcakes at my mom’s diner. Just wait till they find out I’m waitressing for her now, too—double whammy.

“Yes,” I say, face burning. “Sometimes.”

“Think in those terms. What if a competing diner opened across town, with better food at lower prices?” She pulls a box of chalk from her—you guessed it—fanny pack and draws a big yellow square with “Joe’s Diner” across the top. “In that scenario, supply would increase …” Arrows up, drawn in pink. “And demand would decrease.” Arrows down, mint green. “How would that affect your prices?”

“We’d have to lower them, I guess.”

She nods for, like, ten minutes, tight white curls wriggling on her head like a bunch of geriatric spiders. “Because if you didn’t lower your prices …”

“People would go to the other diner and we’d lose business.” Come on, lady, is this econ, or rocket science?

“Exactly.” Multicolored stick people with dollar signs over their heads appear inside the Joe’s Diner square. “And then what would happen?”

Well, Ms. Fanny Pack, if you must know, Mom wouldn’t be able to pay the rent, and after a few missed payments, Mrs. Ferris would threaten to evict us. Mom would have to sell the restaurant just to keep the roof over our heads, but the bills would pile up until, one by one, the utilities got shut off. Mom would sit at the kitchen table and cry while my brother and I huddled in our sleeping bags to stay warm, eating dry cereal for dinner and cursing my father and the landlady and even poor old Diner Joe. Bug would likely turn to a life of crime—nothing lowbrow, strictly the high-net white-collar stuff on account of him being a genius—and I’d go door-to-door hocking cupcakes made from whatever random stuff I could scrounge from our dwindling pantry. So the real question here, Ms. Fanny-P, is not what would happen, but whether I could keep up with the demand for my Soy Sauce Cap’n Crunch Tuna Cakes. Think so?

“Miss Avery,” she says curtly, “I asked you what would happen if your family’s diner lost business.”

“Um … it would … we’d … um …” My entire body is engulfed in flames thanks to this cruel, spider-haired chalk hoarder masquerading as an educator, and while I personally will never leave the apartment again after this public stoning, she’ll probably win an economics award and get promoted to the president’s financial team. “I’m not sure.”

“Well, Hudson, it wouldn’t be a viable model for your family’s income, so you’d be forced to seek other employment. And then we’d all suffer, because I doubt Joe can do cupcakes like you guys can.” She laughs and, certain we understand the cutthroat world of diner economics, erases all the dollar-headed stick people and reholsters the chalk box against her hip.

It wouldn’t be a viable model … I think about Mom’s face as she discussed the books the other night and I laugh, way down deep inside, where nobody can see how desperately unfunny it really is.

Dani has warned me a thousand times that walking and reading is never a good combo, but do I listen? No. And now, with my nose buried in the last few Scarlet Letter chapters, I don’t see hockey captain number one, Will Harper, lurking near my French classroom until I’m practically on top of him. He flashes me his trademark smile—the award-winning, toothpaste commercial kind—and I start looking for the video cameras. The sooner I get confirmation that the events of my life have been staged for some elaborate, televised prank, the sooner I can collect my royalties and hire a good therapist.

“Hudson, what’s up?” He steps closer as I approach, that grin lighting up the dim, beige hallway. “Oh, you have something on your shirt.”

Perfect. Not only is this stain like a scarlet letter M for “Mortification” on my chest, but Will Harper is standing all up in my space, ogling me as random passersby look on. By Watonka standards, it’s practically a scene.

“I know. Thanks.” I try to make myself a little smaller against a row of lockers. Why is he here? Josh was supposed to talk to Will directly, get this rink thing figured out. The last thing I need is Kara Shipley catching me fraternizing with her ex. Talk about a hanging in the town square, Hester Prynne!

“Saw Blackthorn earlier,” Will says, running a hand through his wavy, dark blond hair. “I didn’t know you were training again. I thought you quit after—”

“I’m not training again.”

Will raises his eyebrows. “Does that mean my co-captain’s full of—”

“No. I mean, sometimes I hit the ice for fun. Exercise. It’s nothing.”

“Not according to Josh. He said you, uh … kick ass. More or less.” Will smiles again, leaning in a little closer. Mmmm. He smells … expensive. The delicious kind of expensive that erases your mind right while you’re standing there, which is why the cologne ads always show a pack of jar-eyed girls draped all over the chesty, good-smelling guy as if they forgot their own names the second he showed up.

“Well, Josh said … I …”

“He asked me about getting you ice time at Baylor’s,” Good Will Smelling says. “And I think I can swing it, but on one condition.” He grins at me like he did that night in the closet, right before he moved in for the kill.

I swallow hard. “Condition?”

“More like a proposition. For the Wolves.” Will lowers his voice. “Hear me out. I know my boys are strong. A little unmotivated at the moment, but talented. Thing is, we’re not good with technique, edgework, stuff like that. And our coach is useless—he doesn’t even call practices. Spends most of his time with the football team. Unlike us, those guys win championships.”

“What are you saying?” I ask.

“You need rink time. I need a special techniques coach. I get you the ice … and you teach the boys how to skate.”

My legs go all wobbly again. Convincing myself to skate with Josh was hard enough. Training an entire pack of notorious thugs who haven’t won a single game for as long as I’ve been at this school? A bunch of puck-slapping meatheads who’d probably rather skate naked at Fillmore during a lake-effect snowstorm than learn a single lesson from a girl?

Has this boy been sniffing too much of his own cologne?

I lean back against the lockers, arms strategically folded over my stained sweater. “I don’t know anything about hockey. And I’m already behind on school stuff, and I’m about to pick up a few more shifts at work, and—”

“Where do you—oh, right. The cupcakes. Man, my mom loves those things. I don’t know how you do it. I could never work for my parents—they’d take over my life.”

“Yeah, well, it’s not my dream or anything. I have my own life.” I don’t elaborate. I don’t care how amazing he smells. No way I’m getting all self-disclosey with a guy I’ve only spent about nine minutes of my life with, and that’s including the seven in the closet way back when.

“Good,” he says, his hand landing uninvited on my shoulder. “Because I’m serious about this. We need each other, Hud. Admit it.”

I meet his gaze, ready for a fight, but there’s an unexpected softness there—a bit of playful humor behind all the cocky attitude that takes me off guard. No wonder Kara fell so hard for him. I’m beginning to feel a bit drugged by the whole thing myself.

“Just think about it, okay?” he says quietly. “I called a practice after school this Friday. Text me if you want to check it out.” He grabs one of my notebooks and the pen from behind my ear—the nerve!—and scribbles down his info. I scan the hall for those video cameras again, but my eyes instead find Dani, already sitting at her desk in the classroom. She raises her eyebrows and points to her wrist.

“So you’ll text me?” Will hands over my stuff and leans in close, his breath tickling my neck. “Or do I have to work on you? I can be pretty convincing, you know.”

“I have to go, Will.” I duck into class just as the bell rings and slide into the spot next to Dani, my skin rippling with goose bumps.

“What. The hell. Was that?” she asks.

I shrug, shaking off the eau de Harper. “Josh asked him about the Baylor’s thing. Not gonna happen.”

“He said that? And what’s with all the touching and, like, smoldering looks?”

I laugh. “Smoldering? You still reading that pirate romance?”

“No. I mean yeah. But whatever—I’m serious! The boy kisses you once, and that gives him perpetual license to put his hands on you? After basically ignoring you for three years? I don’t think so.”

“It’s not like that,” I whisper as Madame Fromme shoots us le mauvais œil—the evil eye. “He wants me to—”

“Commencez, s’il vous plaît, Mademoiselle Avery.” Madame beckons me to the front of the class to set up for my presentation. Of course she wants me to go first—she’s probably been eye-fondling those cupcakes ever since I dropped off the box this morning.

“Commencez handing out the goodies, Cupcake Queen,” someone says as I finish arranging the Carousels on the presentation table. I turn around quickly, but I can’t tell who said it, and the room goes quiet again. Outside, a tree branch scrapes the window, craggy fingers tapping the glass as Madame Fromme clears her throat, urging me to begin. Tap tap tap. Tap tap tap.

“Bonjour. Um … je m’appelle Hudson Avery. I am—I mean, Je suis, um …” I lean on the table to steady myself, hands leaving damp prints that fade as I fidget. My fingernails are orange like my shirt. It looks like dried blood.

Frosting stains are usually just another part of the gig. An occupational hazard. A badge. Yeah, I’m the Cupcake Queen, I hand-tint my icing, and I’ve got the ruined clothing to prove it. But now, when I look at the color under my nails and the cupcakes lined up neatly on the table, I see my father’s suitcases, stacked by the door. The moving trucks that came later to collect the rest of his things, all of us redeposited into separate lives. My walk of shame from the ice rink and all those months I spent hiding out at Hurley’s behind an apron and a mixer. I see my mother, too, rushing from the grill to the dining room and back to the office, where each night she counts the till, twice to be sure.

If I don’t buck up and do something different, someday that will be me.

“Je ne suis pas mon travail.” I am not my job. I mumble it in perfect French, just loud enough for no one to hear. Madame Fromme removes her glasses and squints, and in my parallel life, I say it again. In my parallel life, I climb on the table and stomp on all those cupcakes, lions and tigers and bears crushed under my boot as I scream for the class, for the school, for the entire town of Watonka and anyone who’s ever wondered what lies beyond that old smokestack horizon. Je ne suis pas mon travail! Je ne suis pas mon travail! I am not Hurley’s Homestyle Diner! I’m not a waitress! I’m not the Cupcake Queen! I’m just me, alive and whole and happy when I’m skating. When my eyes are closed and my feet glide across the ice. Out there, I forget about my father road-tripping through the desert. I forget about the lines in my mother’s face and her chapped hands, red-raw with burns from the grill and too much time at the sink. I forget about the stains on my clothes and under my nails. When I’m skating, I’m somewhere else. Somewhere better.

But I don’t know how to speak the language of impossible dreams en français, so I swallow it back, blinking rapidly as if it’s just the Lake Erie wind in my eyes.

Tap tap tap. Out beyond the window, past the branches to the barren soccer field, snow dances across the expanse and I want to bolt, straight back to the lake with my skates. But like the old saying goes: It takes forty-two muscles to frown, and only twelve to jam a cupcake in your mouth and get over it. So I smile and begin again, distributing my sugar-sweet merry-go-round confections to the class.

“Je m’appelle Hudson Avery. Je travaille chez Hurley’s Homestyle Diner. Oui, je suis la boulangêre des petits gâteaux.”

My name is Hudson Avery. I work at Hurley’s. Yes, I am the baker of the cupcakes.

But not for long.

“Those cupcakes rock,” Trina Dawes tells me after today’s presentations are done. “Are you doing anything January tenth? I’m having a birthday bash. A hundred people at least.”

“Can’t make it.” Wrong date? Wrong address? No way I’m falling for that joke.

“Make it? Oh, no! That’s not what I meant.” She giggles, her cheeks turning red. “I was asking about ordering cupcakes … I mean … you could totally come if you want to, though. Do you?” She looks up at me and tilts her head, freshly glossed mouth turning into an awkward frown.

“Wait, you thought … that I thought … you were inviting me to your party?” I pack up the few remaining Carousels, hoping my face isn’t the same color as the frosting.

She swipes another cupcake from the box. “I mean, you could—”

“I have a thing that night. An art show. With my brother. He’s, um, exhibiting his … Civil War sculpture. Thing. So I’m busy.”

“Can you still make the cupcakes?”

“Not a problem.” Where are those horribly intrusive fire drills when you need them?

Trina smiles again, her face rearranging itself to happy and casual. “Should I, like, give you my order now? Or do I have to call Harley’s?”

“It’s Hurley’s,” I say with a sigh. “But you can give it to me now.”

“You kicked some serious derrière in there, ami,” Dani says after class. “Don’t sweat Trina’s party, okay? Those girls are like a living issue of Cosmo.”

“Easy for you to say. The whole junior class doesn’t look down on you.”

“Please.” She empties her backpack into her locker, packing away the Nikon equipment she used in her presentation. “People just don’t know you, okay? It’s not the same thing.”

“They know me all right. Cupcake Queen of Watonka, remember? A real celeb.”

Dani drops her books into her backpack and tugs hard on the zipper. “There are what—three thousand people up in this joint?”

“So?”

“So why do you assume everyone around here is so tight? You act like Watonka High is this big bowl of awesome and you’re the only one who didn’t get a spoon. Guess what, girl? It’s high school. Everyone hates it.”

“Not you. You’re always talking to people, smiling, whatever. You have friends here.”

“So do you—you just keep forgetting it.”

“Dani, I didn’t mean—”

“Gotta go. I’ll catch you at work tonight.” She slams her locker, but not that hard, and I let her leave. We never stay mad at each other for more than a few minutes, anyway. I just wish I could be more like her, letting all the bad stuff roll off. Not caring so much what everyone thinks. Full of those confident, front-of-the-house smiles, all the way.

Maybe Dani’s right—maybe they don’t look down on me. Not exactly. For the most part, they don’t even notice me. I spent those all-important clique-forming years on the ice with Kara. While the normal Watonka kids were having playdates and movie nights and sleepovers, we were practicing our lutzes and spins, learning to balance competitive drive with sportsmanship and ladylike grace. By the time I got to high school, I’d lost my skating friends, Kara got swept up in the current of Will’s popularity, and fate had sorted everyone else into groups like change in the till. Other than Dani, I was alone; the rest of the nickels and dimes and quarters had moved on—not against me, just without.

Now when they see me in the halls, they remember only one thing: Cupcake Queen of Watonka. That stupid newspaper picture, me cradling a mixing bowl in my arms like a baby. Well extra, extra! Read all about it, Watonka! I used to be good at something else, too. Something that had nothing to do with taking orders from Trina Dawes or following in my mother’s dream-sucking, Hurley Girl footsteps. Something with a real future. Something I finally have another shot at.

All I have to do is reach out and take it. It’s that simple.

I stash the extra French cupcakes in my locker, flip open my notebook, and turn on my phone. Orange-stained fingertips quick over the buttons, I punch in Will’s number, take a deep breath, and send my answer up to outer space.