100 Days of Cake Page 2

  “She okay?” Chris asks.

  “Yeah, uh, she just broke the seal already.” This is so not something I would ever say, and it sounds ridiculous, but Chris bobs his head empathetically.

  “That’s the worst, man. No wonder she was talking all crazy about chemicals.”

  I bite my tongue.

  “So, um, did you come with Ronnie—I mean Veronica?” he asks, and it takes me a good second to realize he’s talking about my younger sister.

  “No, I didn’t even know you guys knew each other,” I say, wondering how Chris Partridge became this weird epicenter of my universe, secretly connected to everyone in my life.

  “We had a study hall together. She said she might stop by.” He looks really dejected that I didn’t know this.

  “Oh, she’s probably coming. I just haven’t seen her since this morning. After school I went right to work.”

  He nods again, still looking like someone filled his pool with natural chemicals, so I tell him that it turns out we also have Alex in common.

  “Shut up! You’re Alex’s Molly?” he asks.

  Alex’s Molly. Chris looks as shocked as I feel. Alex’s Molly.

  “He’s talked about me?”

  “I mean, he said he worked with this really cool girl. I just didn’t put two and two together.”

  Even though it’s already a million degrees out, I feel myself blushing.

  “Is he coming tonight?” Chris is asking.

  “Yeah, when he’s done with band practice.”

  “Sweet. McD is a good dude.”

  From the table of snacks by the screen door, Meredith calls out to Chris that they need more beer.

  “Duty calls.” Chris smiles and trots off.

  This really cool girl. Alex’s Molly. Everything is all jumbled in my head. Is Elle actually right about Alex being into me? What about the Hot Topic girls? What about the way he always seems to be joking when he asks if I want to hang out?

  My phone chimes that I’ve got a new text, and I jump a little, thinking it must be Alex and that he can somehow magically read my thoughts.

  The message is from Elle: Hiding in upstairs linen closet. Mortified.

  I write back: Told C u were drunk.

  Thanks I guess??!!! Have to use b room for real now. BRB

  I really don’t want to hear Gina and Tina go on and on about college anymore, and I don’t have strong connections to any of the other clumps of people, so I sit on a deck chair a little away from everyone and wait for Elle. To avoid looking like a total loser, I pretend to do something extremely important on my phone. When this slobbering adorable golden retriever comes over, I treat it like a long-lost relative.

  Before he died, my dad always used to promise we’d get a dog. That’s one thing I actually do remember.

  “Molly Byrne.” A familiar voice, and my stomach drops.

  T. J. Cranston, all tall and tan and good-looking in this cheesy, Captain America way that your mom thinks is super-handsome—at least my mom did when he picked me up for our first date.

  He was a couple of years ahead of me, but when I got bumped to the varsity swim team sophomore year, we were in the same practice lane, and sometimes he’d tell me he liked my suit or joke about how I was attacking him with my flippers. Then one day he asked me out. My mom and Elle and V were all excited, so I got a little excited. He took me to an Olive Garden knockoff, paid the check, and kissed me good night. We started going out like that maybe once a week, or we’d watch something on Netflix or go to a team party together, and he always gave me rides home after practice.

  He was a nice enough guy—he never pressured me to have sex or do drugs like bad boyfriends always do in sitcoms—but it was right around that time when everything started to really pile up. I’ve always been kind of obsessive about grades and art class and big meets and stuff, but it got to the point where little things like having to pee when I’d already put on both practice suits could bring me to tears, and it just became easier to give up on stuff.

  Finally T.J. asked why I was so mopey, but it wasn’t like anything was actually wrong, and when I told him that, his face scrunched up into this fake sympathetic look like he’d stepped in dog crap. So I never said anything again, but I started to dread seeing him and having to pretend I was this ray of sunshine, when in reality it didn’t even feel like I was there. It was like I was floating above, watching this undeserving girl with blue-green eyes and mouse-poop hair holding hands with Captain America dude, and French-kissing him at the end of the night. Then I’d go inside to my model-home bedroom and cry. Pathetic.

  And then, the day before the divisionals meet, T.J. drove me home after practice, pulled into my driveway, turned off the ignition, and sighed. “You’re a great girl, Molly,” he began. “You’re just kind of different from what I thought before I got to know you.”

  Oddly, out of all the appropriate times to start bawling, I didn’t—I actually felt sort of relieved. But then when I saw him the next day at divisionals talking to this blond junior, something inside me just broke . . . which led to my infamous freak-out at the start of the freestyle relay. For the entire rest of the school year I managed to avoid him—which is pretty impressive, since our school has only seven hundred people total—and then he was off to Florida State.

  But I guess he’s back now, and apparently he’s also BFFs with bloody Chris Partridge! WTF!

  “What’s up?” I hear myself asking him.

  “Well, FSU is awesome.” T.J. gestures to Chris’s older brother, who I hadn’t noticed before. “I pledged Kappa Sig with Robbie.”

  “You guys make good punch.” I hold up my glass.

  “Thanks. How ’bout you, Mol?” He tilts his head a little like he’s trying to be extra sincere, the stuff that annoyed the crap out of me when we were dating. “This year go okay?”

  The panic is circling in my throat.

  “Yeah, it was peachy.”

  I need to get out of here.

  I can’t have Alex come here and see this. See me. Can’t let these people tell him that I’m not this really cool girl he works with. That the real me is a girl who randomly cries in the bathroom between classes. A girl who got hysterical on the starting block before the freestyle relay and ran away, disqualifying the team from the race and ruining the divisionals meet for everyone.

  “Look, for a while now I’ve wanted to say something about what—”

  “No, it’s all good.” I cut him off before he can say any of this out loud. “Actually, I gotta hop. Great seeing you.”

  Then I’m hurrying away, back into the house, the golden retriever following after.

  I try to text Elle that T.J. is here and I have to leave. But I’m so screwed up that I fat-finger half the letters, and it’s auto-corrected to: The hart O gave to hp.

  What? Elle writes back.

  Where r u? Have to leaf.

  To what?

  TJ HERE!!! Meet me at car.

  OK

  I’m nearly at the front door, but the dog is still following me, so I try gently pushing his face back, indicating that he should stay, but he just licks my arm. I try throwing an imaginary ball into the living room, but he’s clearly on to me.

  Ugh. I need to leave; already I can feel tears in the corners of my eyes. I can’t be that girl, not again.

  In the kitchen someone opens the refrigerator, and Lassie immediately loses interest in me and trots off. I make a run for the door, but my phone dings. I look down to read it and smack into a sheet of shiny dark hair smelling of lilacs . . . my sister.

  Veronica is two years behind me at CCH, but she’s with a group of older girls she works with at Jaclyn’s Attic, a trendy boutique in the “revitalized” downtown. Some of the girls I vaguely know from school; the others must go to Maxwell with Alex. They all have perfectly applied eye makeup and smudge-proof lips. All of them are pretty in sundresses or designer shorts and tops that show off shapely shoulders. But even among the gorgeous girl
s, my sister is the standout.

  V got the good genes from Mom—the razor-sharp cheekbones and gravity-defying boobs, the legs that go all the way up.

  “Molly?” she asks, part terror, part straight-up confusion. “Why are you here?”

  “Great to see you, too, V.”

  “No, I mean, I thought you didn’t do stuff like this anymore. Go to parties?”

  “I don’t.” I nod. “I’m leaving.”

  Glancing down, I see a text from Alex: Heading over now.

  I need to get out of here.

  “Wait. Why don’t you just stay?” V grabs my arm and holds it. She sounds like she might actually mean it, even if her friends are giving these WTF? looks. “We’ll, like, bond or something.”

  Just a few years ago we were super-close. But things have been weird since ADF. Since she started in high school too.

  Another text. Not from Alex but Elle: Finishing up here; there in a few.

  “I gotta go. I’ll see you at home.”

  “Yeah, okay.” V lets me go, and I practically run to the door.

  Behind me I hear one of the Jaclyn’s girls snarl, “What was that all about?”

  Closing my eyes, I try not to let it bother me too much. My shrink—Dr. B.—says that sometimes it helps just to take a couple of deep breaths, but it was like breathing through clam chowder. So I do.

  How is it still so freaking hot out?

  When Elle gets to the Jeep, she doesn’t even object when I crank up the AC knob as soon as I climb in.

  “Sorry I made you go,” Elle says. “I had no idea T.J. would be there.”

  I shake my head and try the breathing thing again.

  “Are you okay?” she asks.

  The answer is probably no. I want to scream or cry or go to bed for a week. But it’s almost worse to be honest and have people—even people like Elle, who’s been my best friend for longer than our parents were married—look at me like I’m broken. So I try to rein it all in.

  “Yeah, that was fun,” I say flatly. “We should definitely go to more parties.”

  When Elle drops me off and I make it upstairs to my room, all I want to do is fall into the huge sleigh bed and pass out, but there’s a piece of horribly dilapidated blue-and-red-stained cake on a plate by my nightstand, along with a note in Mom’s chunky handwriting.

  Hope you had a great time tonight! Figured I’d leave this for you in case you’re hungry. I have a good feeling about this one!

  —Mom

  Bunching the note into a ball, I hurl it across the room and miss the garbage can by at least a foot.

  DAY 13

  Ooey-Gooey Butter Cake

  After seeing T.J. last night, and all the weird confusion over being Alex’s Molly, I want to never leave the house again. But if I stay home, Mom will ask a million questions about everything, and that will just make it all so much worse. Plus, I have an appointment with Dr. B. in the afternoon, and I always look forward to those.

  Without incident, I manage to get out of bed, throw on clothes, and bike to the store in the oppressive heat. Since I’m free to work days now that school’s out, I’m supposed to handle the swing shift today—half with Alex in the evening and half with JoJo Banks in the early afternoon.

  During the school year JoJo opens the place and is gone by the time I get there, so she’s just initials on the schedule to me. Based on the name, I thought she’d be some gray-haired soft woman like my grandma, but it turns out she’s maybe four or five years older than me with a streaky orange tan. Who fake-bakes when you live in Florida and it’s a thousand degrees out?

  Strike one against JoJo is that she has Maury Povich’s show blaring on the TV so loud, I can hear it outside the store.

  The little bell on the door dings when I come in, and she briefly looks up at me.

  “Molly?” she asks.

  “Yep.”

  “Cool. I already checked the tanks,” she says, then turns back to some guy on Maury doing a “You’re Not the Father” dance.

  Strike two is that she gets vocally angry when the next guy insists he isn’t the baby daddy, despite the paternity test results.

  “Why can’t these A-hats man up?” she yells. “That’s your child!”

  It doesn’t seem like she’s talking to me, so I don’t feel any pressing need to respond. On the back of someone’s discarded receipt, I sketch Maury, making his hair extra crazy. Art class was always my favorite before I dropped all my electives.

  A commercial comes on the screen for some antidepressant. There’s an attractive thirtysomething blond woman sitting in a rocking chair in a dark room, watching through the window as her attractive husband, attractive kids, and equally attractive dog are having the time of their lives playing catch outside in the yard. As the announcer is reading off the laundry list of side effects—dizziness, drowsiness or tired feeling, upset stomach, dry mouth, changes in appetite, constipation—the woman heads outside, a little hesitantly, and starts playing with her family.

  It’s a different med than the one I’m on, and it seems to be working much more effectively for the Attractives than mine does for me.

  I study my Maury sketch and hope JoJo doesn’t have any commentary on the commercial, too.

  “You go to CCH?” she asks.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m class of 2011,” she says.

  “I just missed you,” I say, hoping to avoid that awkward conversation where we try to figure out if we have friends in common. She doesn’t know Elle, and I hardly talk to anyone else anymore.

  “Demarco still teaching geometry?”

  “I think so.”

  A look of righteous indignation falls across her face. “That A-hat sent me to detention at least once a week. For piddly shit too, like chewing gum.”

  “Sucks.” I try to sound sympathetic. “I had Swinton; he was okay.”

  “Lucky.” She turns back to the TV, where The Jerry Springer Show is starting. Apparently today’s episode features a woman who wants to marry her husband’s grandfather. I take a lap through the aisles to double-check the tanks in case she may have missed something. I even contemplate digging out the broom and sweeping.

  I took the job here because Chuck thinks minimum wage is two bucks higher than it is, and that’s what he’s paying. But the fish really are beautiful. All the bright colors of the mandarin fish and the parrot fish, and the crazy shape of the nudibranch, the way that the tasseled angelfish can disappear in its surroundings. I totally get why people (well, not people in Coral Cove, who couldn’t care less that we’re here, but people in general) might get a tank to try to calm themselves down.

  “Yo, CCH,” JoJo calls from the front. “I’m grabbing lunch from Wang’s. You want in?”

  All strikes against JoJo are erased. Any fan of Wang’s Palace (yes, that is the actual name) is my sister from another mister.

  Wang’s opened a few months ago. It’s this confused mishmash of different Asian cuisines—Chinese, Thai, Japanese—run by a family originally from Brazil. Inside it’s decorated with black-and-white head shots of celebrities, like some of those famous places in LA and Manhattan, only none of those celebrities have ever actually set foot inside. (Not counting Jim and Joe Johnson from J&J Plumbing, the only famous person from Coral Cove is the guy who played the killer in the Murder Island movie. He hasn’t been back in years, despite numerous city council efforts to have him as the grand marshal in the Founder’s Day Parade.)

  Despite all that sketch, Wang’s is actually crazy delicious, and their house special lo mein is clearly made up of whatever food in their kitchen is about to go bad. Sometimes it’s beef and roast pork, sometimes it’s unidentifiable seafood and veggies. Once it was broccoli rabe, a vaguely Mexican sausage, and cashews. That was a good day.

  When JoJo comes back with the steamy clamshell containers, it looks like today is an indistinguishable protein—maybe duck?—and water chestnuts. JoJo and I eat behind the counter, and she gets worked
into a lather about a “surprise proposals” Jerry episode, where men pop the question to girls they aren’t even dating, with mixed results.

  Her cell phone rings, and JoJo groans and hands me the remote. “This might be a while; it’s my A-hat ex.”

  I wonder if she means ex-boyfriend or ex-husband. In Coral Cove plenty of people get married right out of high school, so you never know. She’s still in the back room yelling at the ex two episodes of Family Ties later (Golden Girls doesn’t start until three), when Alex comes in to relieve her.

  Immediately JoJo materializes in the front of the store and collects her stuff from behind the counter. “Audi, kids.” She gives a wave, and the bell on the front door dings her exit.

  “You finally got the full JoJo experience firsthand?” Alex smiles, and I laugh. “I’ve had that pleasure a few Saturdays.”

  “It was definitely something, you freaking A-hat.”

  Alex smiles. “Yeah, JoJo’s cool, though.” He shoves his hands into his pockets. “So, what happened last night? You guys run out to avoid me?” he says nonchalantly, but I still feel a flicker of panic.

  “Elle wasn’t feeling great, so we cut out early. Sorry, I should have let you know, but we left kinda quick.”

  “No worries. She okay?”

  It takes a half second before I realize he’s asking about Elle and the illness I invented for her. “She’s good now.”

  We throw a nod back and forth.

  “Next time, I guess,” I tell him.

  “Sure.”

  More nodding.

  “Oh, I have something for you.” He reaches for his backpack.

  Alarms start wailing in my head.

  We’re seventeen—hell, he isn’t even my boyfriend—this can’t be a surprise proposal, can it?

  Nope. He pulls out a gray T-shirt with orange-and-yellow flames on the front and the words “The Flaming Dantes” printed above them.

  “The band’s got a new name,” he says. “Our drummer just realized he was super-inspired reading The Inferno last year.”

  “Ohhh, I likey.” I’m totally touched, but I also can’t help wondering how many of these shirts they had made.