100 Days of Cake Read online

  Honestly, Pickles is probably too much of a homebody for any of it. “Why do I need to go anywhere?” he’d say. “I’ve got everything I need right here in my shell.” Gotta love him.

  “Since you seem to have quit all your extracurriculars”—Mrs. Peck is apparently still talking—“the SAT might just be your saving grace. It looks as though you were in the ninety-second percentile when you took the PSAT sophomore year.”

  I want to tell her that sophomore year and anything BDF (before divisionals freak-out) might as well have been the 1400s. The time of the first Molly. Back before I even knew Alex. (For the five-hundredth time since yesterday, I wonder about him at the mall with my sister and her friends.)

  “. . . So if you can pull your GPA up the first half of the year and score in the top tenth percentile on the SATs, you might be able to salvage something. Does that sound doable? Otherwise we should really start to recalibrate our expectations for the more selective state schools.”

  Mrs. Peck is just staring at me, and I realize she wants an answer.

  “SATs to the rescue. Got it.”

  Before Mrs. Peck can say anything else, my mom, wearing an apron over her skintight tank dress like a porny Mrs. Fields, comes in from the kitchen with a tray boasting today’s misadventure in batter.

  “I thought maybe you two ladies could use a little break,” she says, and presents us with a lemon cake topped with a sticky yellow drizzle that looks exactly like raw egg yolk. My teeth hurt just from looking at it.

  “When life gives you lemons, make lemon cake,” I mumble.

  “What’s that, sweetie?” Mom asks, and I tell her it’s nothing as I dutifully take a piece and smush the corner with my fork so she won’t realize I’m not actually eating it.

  Mrs. Peck, meanwhile, thinks this cake might be almost as magnificent as the SATs. After initially waving a slice away, saying how she “shouldn’t” because she tries to stay away from sweets and is watching her (Elle-level skinny) figure, Mrs. Peck devours the whole thing and even gives a longing look toward mine.

  “Really, this is just lovely, Lisa,” Mrs. Peck says to my mom. “You simply must give me the recipe.”

  Of course Mom is only too happy to start talking about the 100 Days of Cake challenge, and how she just thought she would “give it a whirl” because she’d never tried anything like it before and she wants to show her girls how important it is to finish things, and more wa wa waa. Mrs. Peck nods enthusiastically, and Mom is beaming. At least one of us is benefiting from the $150 an hour Mrs. Peck is charging.

  Then Mom turns her focus on me and asks how it’s going. She’s using the singsong, Molly-might-shatter voice again.

  “Well, I think we’ve made some tremendous progress today. Right, Molly?” Mrs. Peck says, and looks at me. I’m not sure if she’s trying to get me to go along with her lie so Mom doesn’t question her employment, or if she is genuinely deluded enough to think that this afternoon was remotely productive.

  “Sure.” I nod. “SATs are the great white hope.”

  Mom cocks her head in a question, and then I feel awful again.

  “Yeah, no, this has been really . . . informative,” I say.

  That must be good enough, because Mom nods and goes back to the kitchen, and Mrs. Peck starts waa wa waaing about how I’ll definitely need to add a “community service component” to my applications. She gives me some pamphlets of places that have student volunteer programs but suggests that it would look more impressive if I could show initiative and organize a project on my own.

  “Last year I had a young man put together a complete fund-raiser for the family of a friend who broke his back in a zip-line accident,” she says. “He got into Brown, Northwestern, and was wait-listed at Yale.”

  I consider asking if I should encourage my friends to take up dangerous new hobbies to increase my chances of getting into Florida Atlantic, but think better of it. “I’ll keep my eyes peeled.”

  “Good. Just make sure you act soon. A lot of places will be overwhelmed by volunteers once admissions season starts in the fall.”

  Before she leaves, Mrs. Peck reaches into her Day-Glo orange messenger bag and pulls out a yellow Hacky Sack with a smiley face sewn on above her company name—Admissions Ace!

  “It’s a stress ball.” Offering a huge gap-toothed grin, she tells me that she hopes it can help me work through some of my issues. “Senior year can be a very challenging time, but I think we’re definitely on the right track with you now.”

  More than anything, I want to hurl the ball at the space between her teeth.

  DAY 28

  Blueberry Crumble Delight

  The next day at FishTopia, I’m throwing the stress ball at the wall while Alex fills Charlie’s water bottle up with these teeny nano fish. This is the first day we’ve worked together since I saw him with V and Meredith Hoffman at the mall, and even though I’ve been dying to ask about it, I’m too freaked out to say anything now. For some reason I’m scared of what he might say—that hanging out with V is more fun than being with me or something. (Hello, no shocker there.) So instead I tell him about my ridiculous experience with Admissions Ace!

  “Even the woman’s name is annoying. Mrs. Peck. She makes me want to peck, peck, peck my eyes out because she peck, peck, pecks on my last nerve.”

  I start talking in this extremely nasally voice that doesn’t actually sound much like Mrs. Peck but is kind of funny, or at least I hope Alex thinks it’s kind of funny. “Mawww-lee, you’re never going to get into community college with those grades, so it’s really now about whether you want to work at McDonald’s or Walmart—although, Walmart is going to be tough this year. Come on, Mawwww-lee. You have to decide everything about your life right now, this very minute. Mawwww-lee, the clock is ticking!”

  Alex chuckles. From his crabitat on the counter, Pickles gives me an encouraging look, so I continue.

  “Then she’s going on and on about the SATs, as if they’re the cure for cancer. Aren’t they, like, totally biased?” I’m not entirely sure what I’m talking about, but before Elle started on her save-the-planet kick, she was all about social inequality and spent a lot of time raging against things like “institutionalized racism” and “cyclical poverty.” I’m pretty sure standardized tests came up a lot.

  “Maybe,” Alex says, and I can see that he’s just humoring me, which is completely frustrating.

  “And she said I need to start volunteering.” I throw this out as definitive proof that my hour with Mrs. Peck was on par with stepping in dog crap and dropping your ice cream cone. “Don’t you think it would look awfully suspicious if all of a sudden I started working at a soup kitchen or something? College admissions people probably gag when they see a billion seventeen-year-olds who just happen to suddenly hear the call of duty right before sending out their application packets. It’s sooo hypocritical.”

  “I don’t know, Mol.” He’s stopped fiddling with the fish and the water bottle. “What’s so wrong about a little motivation?”

  “Et tu, Alex?” I try to sound light, but I can feel that swirling, icky feeling in my gut, and all at once my heart is beating faster.

  “Like, not to rip on JoJo or anything, but do you really want to end up like her? Working here for ten bucks an hour forever?”

  “Well, I definitely don’t want to find stray teeth at my boyfriend’s place.”

  “Seriously, though.”

  “Of course not. I . . . I just don’t see why we have to decide everything for all of eternity right this second.” I swear my heart is beating directly in my eardrums. “I can’t even decide when I want to sign up for driver’s ed.”

  “So you really haven’t thought about where you’re going to college at all?”

  Alex is looking at me as if he’s uncovered something earth-shattering and majorly disturbing. Looking at me like T.J. did when he broke up with me because I wasn’t the sunny dream girl that he’d thought I’d be.

  For on
ce this doesn’t make me sad, but furious. Alex is the one who shoved me up onto some stupid pedestal and decided I was this “really cool girl.” Dr. B. is right; this is Alex’s issue, not mine. I’m fuming, but Alex just goes right on talking about his grand plans.

  “I know I’m gonna have to get my grades up this fall,” he says. “And I’ve been taking that prep class—”

  “Shut up.” I cut him off with a lot more force than is probably necessary. “Seriously, if one more person says one more flipping word about the SAT or service components or how I’ve already messed up my life beyond repair, I’m going to scream so loud that every last tank in here shatters into a zillion pieces. So can you please, please, please, please, please just stop talking about this?”

  Alex is genuinely startled, like I legit slapped him. For what feels like two hours but is probably really only twenty seconds, we just stand there and listen to the hum of all the aquarium pumps.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, all ginormous golden retriever eyes, and instantly I feel a thousand times worse.

  “No, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to jump down your throat,” I say. “It’s just, we’re at FishTopia, we’ve got Pickles and Wang’s Palace. Can’t we watch Golden Girls and not talk about this stuff for a while?”

  “Sure,” he says, but he still seems really hurt.

  We climb onto our counter, and he clicks the set on, both of us moving as if we’re robots. It’s the episode where Dorothy, Blanche, and Rose all have the flu but insist on going to the big Volunteer of the Year gala anyway. My heart is still sprinting in my chest, and it’s hard to concentrate, which is fine, since Alex and I must have seen this one about five times. Still we diligently stare at the screen until everything is tied up with its perfect sitcom bow. The gals are the best of friends again, and they’ll stay that way until the next installment, when some new situation will briefly test their bond for thirty minutes (actually twenty-two minutes, with all the commercials they run in syndication).

  Pickles is peaking out of his shell and seems very satisfied with the conclusion. Lifting him out of the crabitat, I set him in my palm and stroke his shell.

  “You see, it all works out okay,” I assure him.

  “Why do you like that little guy so much?” Alex asks hesitantly, like he thinks I might blow up at him again.

  Shrugging, I tell him I don’t know.

  “He’s not like a dog or a cat that can actually love you back or anything,” he says.

  “That’s kind of the reason.” As I’m saying this, I realize it’s true. “Like, the world is so big, but to Pickles it’s just a plastic critter box with sand on the bottom, and he is totally cool with that. He can munch on a carrot, drink his water, climb onto the couch if he really wants to mix it up. And when he doesn’t feel like doing any of that, he can crawl back into his shell and shut out the rest of the world.”

  Alex looks at Pickles, as if he’s expecting the crab to confirm or deny this. Pickles does nothing but move one of his legs. Then Alex is looking at me like I’ve morphed into a wolf like in the stupid Twilight books. It’s such a good thing I never agreed to go out with him; that would have made his disappointment in me so much worse.

  On TV the Golden Girls theme begins. Thank you for being a friend/traveled down the road and back again.

  Another episode is starting, so we sit back and watch.

  DAY 31

  Mango Explosion Cake

  This has got to be Mother Nature’s idea of a cruel joke,” I say. It’s been ten minutes since I got to Dr. B.’s, but I’m still sweating from the bike ride over. I had to put Pickles’s crabitat by the window air-conditioning unit so he wouldn’t overheat. “Seriously, a hundred and eight degrees is just mean.”

  Dr. B. laughs. Since I was too busy panting and sweating to talk when I first showed up, we’re just listening to some of the music he had on when I came in. He’s been trying to convince me that Pearl Jam’s Ten is the greatest debut album in the history of the world or something.

  I’ve heard some of the songs before on the nineties radio station my mom loooves. (She and my dad actually met at a club in Miami the night Kurt Cobain died. Grunge was a very big thing for them, and I’m not even making that up.) And Alex played part of “Alive” on his guitar one day when we were hanging out on the FishTopia roof, but it’s kind of cool to hear the whole album.

  This one song, “Black,” is so sad and beautiful that I get a little choked up listening to it. Eddie Vedder warbles in this deep back-of-the-throat way about how he has all these spinning thoughts in his head and all his pictures have been washed in black. Then there’s this part about how he goes for a walk and hears the kids laughing, but it just sears him. I know that he’s probably talking about some ex-girlfriend or something, but it’s like the song was written for me.

  When it ends, I have Dr. B. play it again.

  Oh, and twisted thoughts that spin round my head

  I’m spinning, oh, I’m spinning

  “Good stuff, huh?” Dr. B. asks when it’s done. I hadn’t realized I’d closed my eyes, and now I’m all embarrassed.

  “It’s okay, I guess,” I say, and then smile, because we both know I’m in love with it.

  “Maybe it’s just that they were big when I was so young and impressionable.” Dr. B. winks at me. “But early Pearl Jam gets me every time. To this day, when I hear ‘Daughter,’ I can still smell the ramen my roommate was always cooking freshman year.”

  “Oh.” The glow from the music immediately ends, and I’m back in this world where everyone is obsessed with college.

  Deep down I guess I knew that Dr. B. had to have gone to school somewhere to be a psychologist. But Dr. B. is, like, the only person in all of Coral Cove who isn’t constantly nagging me about this stuff, so I never really think about it much.

  “Where did you go?” I ask, because it’s polite, not because I want to talk about college anymore with anyone ever.

  He points to the two diplomas framed and mounted on the wall behind the desk. Clearly I’m not the most observant girl in the world, because I’ve been coming here for a year, and this is the first time I’ve ever noticed them. Squinting, I can just make out the regal font and the years. University of Pennsylvania.

  An anvil drops in the pit of my stomach. So Dr. B. has an ivy-coated education. He’s not just one of all those people fixated on college; he’s kind of the king of college. And it makes me wonder about all our sessions, if he’s been humoring me when he makes me feel smart or special. Maybe it’s just some shrink tactic to keep me from getting hysterical?

  Also noted: unless Dr. B. is some Doogie Howser prodigy who graduated at twelve, he’s only, like, three years younger than my mom. When I’m twenty-five, he’ll be forty-seven.

  “So Penn for both undergrad and grad school?” I ask.

  “Yup.”

  “So you’re, like, super-smart?”

  “Eh.” He shrugs. “I was good at taking standardized tests, and my parents both went there, so I was a legacy. They give you points for that.”

  “My mom went to some cosmetology school in Boca,” I say flatly.

  “And your dad?”

  “He went to Miami University.” This is true; I wasn’t lying to Gina and Tina. But I’m not even sure if he actually graduated or if he liked it or what his major had been. Mom talks about Dad in these safe, sweet little sound bites—how he ran to three different stores to get her the specific variety of mac and cheese she wanted when she was pregnant with V, how he once spent hours trying to solder the leg back onto my plastic horse figure after he accidentally stepped on it—but she rarely talks about who he was or what he did. For the nine millionth time, I consider how different my life might be if Dad were around.

  “Where you go to college isn’t the be-all and end-all,” Dr. B. is saying. “If I had to do it all over again, I would probably take some time off, travel or do something daring you can only do when you’re young. At the very least I woul
d have gotten out of Philly.”

  “Is that where you’re from? Philadelphia?”

  “Born and raised.”

  “So how did you end up here? You don’t moonlight at J&J, do you?” I ask, happy that college isn’t the be-all and end-all.

  “Love, of course.” He puts his hands over his heart in this mock romantic gesture. “My fiancée got a gig hosting Coral Cove Today, and the next thing you know, everything we own is in a U-Haul and we’re driving down South.”

  “Oh, I’ve seen that show a few times. Local cable, right?” It’s this grainy series on Channel 1 where they mainly just talk about the guy from the Murder Island movie and interview the J&J brothers. I’ve never seen the woman from the photo on Dr. B.’s desk on it.

  “Yeah, but Whitney was only there a few months before she got hired by Fox 9 in Miami.”

  “You didn’t want to go with her?”

  “I did. I do, but her gig was only temporary at first, and I’d already started a practice here, yada, yada, yada.”

  “Bummer.”

  “Well, we’ll work it out once we finally get married.” He seems to remember that I’m there. “It’s all for the best, though. If I had gone right to Miami, I might never have met you, Molly Byrne.”

  Feeling myself blush, I look down. “Thanks,” I mumble.

  “So tell me about how your week is going.”

  We talk about why I find Mrs. Peck so frustrating. And he seems to understand, even if he did go to Penn.