Bittersweet Read online

  Weeks blurred into months, and then it was the end of summer, our last weekend before high school. For the first time in history, I wasn’t busy with preseason skate stuff during Joelle Woodard’s annual summer bash. It didn’t matter that Joelle and I weren’t friends. It was the kind of free-for-all where no one needed an invite, so I put on a miniskirt and some body glitter left over from my skater glam stuff. I was ready for a do-over—the kind I never got in competitions. It was supposed to be a fresh start without Kara, but suddenly there she was, dressed in a bright green sundress with eyelet trim on the bottom that floated above her tanned knees as she walked down the basement stairs, a can of root beer in her right hand, her left on the railing. I remember it was root beer and not Coke or orange because she dropped it when she saw me stepping out of the make-out closet with Will Harper, and from that moment on, the smell of root beer would always remind me of her face, crumpled and confused, her head hung low above that bright green dress like a flower crushed on its stem.

  Soon after, she dismissed the closet scene and asked Will out, just like she told me she would that night at the diner. They got together, and I buried my shame in a bowl of cupcake batter. The Hurley’s kitchen was a safe place to be; I was finally good at something else. I could forget about Will and Kara. I could erase Lola Capriani and the private lessons Mom could no longer afford and all of the promises that died when my father left, and I could focus instead on making people fat and happy.

  I’ve been doing it ever since.

  While Trick works on my order, I take five at the counter with my Scarlet Letter homework, a mug of hot chocolate, and one of our best sellers—caramel apple granola cupcakes, a.k.a. Tree Huggers. Two seats over, Earl counts out a stack of dimes from one of those paper rolls you get at the bank, pulls his cardigan tight over his shoulders, and winks at me, hair and eyes and face as gray as the sky. “See ya next time, Dolly Madison.”

  I walk him to the front door and watch him leave, his footprints making uneven holes in the snow-covered parking lot. Behind his little blue sedan, the I-190 overpass glitters with red and white orbs in the distance, the lights of a thousand cars zooming along to some other destination, Watonka no more than an exit with FOOD-GAS-HOSPITAL, just like the sign says. A crumbling smokestack horizon wedged between the city of Buffalo and its southern suburbs. Exurban, we’re called. Ex. Former. No longer.

  Dani joins me at the door, nudging my shoulder with hers. “You’re a million miles away over here.”

  I shrug and press my forehead against the glass. Outside, Earl flicks on his wipers and coaxes the car out of the lot. With my fingertip I draw an X in the frost on the glass over the spot where he used to be. Ex. Former. No longer.

  Dani follows my gaze past the highway. “I know you don’t love the new arrangement, but you’re doing great tonight. Don’t fade on me now—even on slow nights, we have to stick together. You remember what happened with Carly, right?”

  “She’s the reason I’m wearing this lovely dress,” I say. “No offense.”

  “None taken. I rock this thing and you know it.” She shakes her hips a little.

  “Doesn’t count. You could make a Hefty bag look hot.”

  “True. But enough about me. You’ve been acting funny all weekend. What are you dodging?” The smile vanishes from her reflection in the glass and something hazy passes over her face, gray and sad like a cloudless snowstorm.

  I reach into my apron pocket and pull out the letter, wrinkled from all the times I’ve read and refolded it, carrying it with me ever since it passed from Bug’s anthrax detector to my hands.

  “Read this,” I whisper, keeping an eye out for Mom.

  She looks over the letter. “Capriani … she was your coach, right?”

  “Yeah. Mom was still paying off my lessons after we moved—we must be on an old mailing list.”

  “Is this the invitation you unmentioned last night?”

  I nod.

  “Fifty grand? That’s pretty sick, Hud.” Dani folds up the letter and hands it back to me, her eyes soft and glassy. “I know you skate at Fillmore sometimes, but I didn’t know it was like that.”

  “Honestly? Neither did I. But when I heard about this competition, it was like … I don’t know. Like I could finally have a chance to do something with my life, even if Mom can’t afford college and my father …” His latest e-mail scrolls through my head, sent this morning from a rest stop near the Grand Canyon. God’s country, he called it. The soul of the world. “My father just isn’t here.”

  A gust of wind blows across the near-empty parking lot. Snow clouds funnel and swirl beneath the lampposts, and a string of taillights beads along the overpass.

  “The thing is,” I continue, “when Josh asked me to skate with him yesterday, I thought about what it would be like to do it again for an audience—even one person—and I freaked. I don’t think I’m cut out for it anymore.”

  “What? Hudson, you have to find a way to make this happen. Your whole face lights up when you talk about skating. Look.” She touches my reflection in the glass, and I smile, seeing for just a moment what she sees. Nervousness, yes. But hope. Excitement, too.

  “You can’t walk away from this opportunity,” she says. “You’ll regret it forever. I know you.”

  “You’re the only one.” I look out the door again, the wind picking up snow and depositing it across the few remaining cars.

  “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!