Cupcake by Rachel Cohn Read Free Book Online Page B

how broke I am. I ran through my summer savings in the first month here! I can't concentrate on schoolwork because I can't stop concentrating on all the debt I am accumulating to be here--and the fact that my meal plan only covers so much, and if I eat one more slice of Koronet Pizza to get me through the day, I might get turned off pizza entirely for the rest of my lifetime. Which would be very, very
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    wrong. And for the record, you were right. The tamales and burritos in this city suck."
    "I love being right," I said, "although it pains me to be right on that count. And you can come to Danny's and my apartment anytime and we will feed you for free. I can't study for you, but we'd love to cook for you!" As proof, I opened the lunch box of cupcakes Danny had prepared for my first day of culinary school. Much as I loved the lunch box effort, his attempts at brotherly kindness are kindly starting to suffocate me. I can figure out lunch on my own!
    "Says the girl who made it through one day of culinary school," Autumn said, biting into the peanut butter cupcake.
    "Shh," I said. "That will just be our little secret."
    If I wanted to spill the real secret, I would confess I never intended to follow through with the culinary school part of the Manhattan adult girl life. One day of class fully fulfilled my expectations of the suckiness I'd encounter should I return for a second day. The gadgets and equipment and ovens and mixers were intriguing, I guess, but it was just way too much ... stuff. The other students, who all appeared at least five or ten years older than me, looked all confident and happy to be there, sure the class was the first step on a path to a dream career. I couldn't take my eyes off the rear window view: escape. I ditched the class during the break, called Autumn, who couldn't wait to escape her afternoon classes, and hello, Central Park--love ya.
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    Here's what I'm going to do, until I figure out a better Plan. I'm going to let my family believe I am going to culinary school, but I am going to Do Something ... Else with that time instead. Possibly I will play Job for a Day, Manhattan-style. One day I will hand out the free daily newspaper outside the subway stops and I will be sure to offer that "Have a nice day!" California platitude ray of sunshine to all the scowly-faced straphangers who haven't had their coffee yet. The next day I will hang out at Strawberry Fields in Central Park and pretend to be a tour guide and I will give totally false information out to the tourists, like "John Lennon originally planned to pursue a career as a Scotland Yard bank robber investigator before his dreams were sidetracked by all that damn songwriting ability," or "If you come to this spot at two a.m. and point your binoculars toward The Dakota apartment building, you may glimpse Yoko Ono in a tawdry moonlit make-out scene with the graveyard shift doorman in that window there." The other days I will probably hang out on my bed, listen to music, and stare out that of rear window, pondering the injustice of the world that Dante, the legendary cappuccino man, apparently returned to Corsica during my leg cast convalescence and is personally responsible for my inability to find proper caffeination in this city. Jerk. When Danny comes home from work and asks, "How was your day, dear?" I will make up stuff about culinary school using an outstanding system of subterfuge wherein I tell him details about the fictional other students while
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    never being held accountable for information about what I may have learned in class: "Brenda from Flushing--you know the girl with the big hair and fake boobs that I told you about who doesn't know the difference between a Le Creuset loaf pan and a regular aluminum one--well I'm fairly sure she is doling out sexual favors to the instructor in the closet of the cookbook library during the breaks, and I will be so pissed if she gets a better grade than me," or "Should I be worried that I ate