The Cupcake Queen by Heather Hepler Read Free Book Online

“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