It's Raining Cupcakes (7 page)

I grabbed the pan of tarts and ran to the family room, and without really thinking, I threw open the door that leads to the fire escape. And just like that, I was standing on the platform, looking down at the street below, with a pan of tarts in my hand.

I swear, sometimes I am not the sharpest knife in the drawer, as Mom likes to say. Why didn't I just go to my room and throw the pan under my bed? Now I was stuck out there until they left, unless I wanted to suddenly appear and have them ground me forever.
They'd told me probably a hundred times the fire escape was off-limits.

The door has glass in it, so I had to go to the very edge of the platform and stand against the railing to keep them from seeing me.

People scurried along the sidewalk below, completely unaware that I was standing above them. I put my hand over my mouth to keep myself from giggling at the thought of jam tarts suddenly raining from the sky. But the pastry in that batch was on the heavy side, and the last thing I wanted to do was to give someone a concussion. I could just picture someone going to the emergency room claiming they'd been hit on the head by a jam tart falling from the sky.

I stood there for a long time, listening to my parents chatting away inside, although I couldn't hear specifically what they were talking about. I took a bite of a tart and wondered if they might be worrying about me. I always left a note letting them know where I was going.

There were stairs that dropped below the platform I was standing on, and those stairs were one way out of the tight spot I'd gotten myself into. The problem
was that the stairs didn't go all the way to the sidewalk. If I took the stairs, I'd have to jump from the last rung to the sidewalk. I couldn't tell how far it was, but from where I stood, it looked like a long way.

So I waited. And I waited. Then I had to go to the bathroom. Bad. I made a mental note to skip the two cans of root beer the next time I decided to hang out on the fire escape for an hour.

Finally I decided I had two choices. Die at the hands of my father, or die at the hands of the sidewalk below. It was a hard decision. But I decided my father might end up being a bit more forgiving than the concrete sidewalk.

I walked into the family room, and neither of them were around. I smiled and did a little skip across the floor. Maybe I could actually get to my room and throw the pan under my bed like I should have done in the first place, and everything would be fine.

I thought I just might make it when I heard my mom from her room.

“Isabel?” She peeked her head out of the bedroom. “Where have you been? You didn't leave a note.”

Then she looked at the pan in my hand. “What's
that?” Now she came all the way out. “What's going on, Isabel?”

“I, um—”

Dad came out of the bathroom across from my room. “Hi, honey. We were getting a little worried. Where'd you run off to?”

“That's what I was just asking her,” Mom said.

As we stood there in that cramped hallway, about a hundred lies fluttered through my brain like butterflies in a meadow. But I knew each one would result in more questions and more lies, and I'm a horrible liar.

My shoulders slumped in defeat. “These are tarts. I was trying to come up with a recipe for the baking contest. I was afraid you'd be mad that I wasn't making cupcakes, so when I heard you coming in, I ran onto the fire escape.”

They both looked at me as if I had just told them I'd robbed a bank. Which right about then, sounded like a better way to make some cash than trying to make jam tarts in a cupcake house.

“I'm sorry, okay? I shouldn't have gone out there. It was stupid, I know.”

“I'm disappointed in you, Isabel,” said Dad. “The fire escape is off-limits. You know that.”

I hung my head and nodded.

Mom took the tarts from my hand. She looked so sad, I thought she might start to cry. “You really aren't going to submit a cupcake recipe for the contest?”

I shrugged and tried to look her in the eyes, but it was too hard. I looked down at the floor again. “I, uh, I don't know. I was just playing around. You know, experimenting. I don't know what I'm going to submit yet.”

Dad put his arm around Mom and took the pan of tarts with the other hand. “They look good, don't you think, Caroline? Want to try one?”

She shook her head. “No, thanks. I'm going to go lie down and read. I'm tired.”

“You do that.” Dad nodded. “Isabel and I are going to have a little chat about the fire escape and how it's only to be used when, you know, there's an actual
fire.
”

The way he said it, I couldn't help but smile. My “thanks for trying to lighten the mood” smile.

He took her to their room while I went into the
kitchen to clean up. He came out a minute later and set the jam tarts on the counter, then walked over to me and gave me a hug.

“What am I going to do, Dad?” I said, my head resting on his chest. “Jam tarts or cupcakes?”

He pulled away and brushed my bangs out of my eyes. “I'm afraid I can't answer that for you, sweetie. It's your decision.”

I sighed. He didn't have to say it with words. His eyes were begging me to make it easy on her. Easy on him. Easy on all of us.

He looked at his watch. “I gotta run. I have an appointment with a vendor downstairs. We're getting bids for the glass cases.”

“Okay. See you later.”

He started to walk away, then turned around. “Oh, and Is?”

“I know, Dad, I know. Stay off the fire escape. Unless there's—”

“—a fire,” we both said at the same time.

“Good girl,” he said as he waved and scurried out the door.

I went to my room and plopped down in my
desk chair. The thing was, jam tarts were different. Special. When I was thinking about them, and baking them, it really seemed possible that I might actually get out of Willow some day.

I took out my passport book and made a note:

A fire escape is really not

an escape at all.

Traveling to New York,

now that would be an escape.

—IB

T
he next couple of days were not ducky at all. I walked around like a dazed and confused cartoon character with question marks floating above my head.

Mom seemed to have her heart set on me entering a cupcake recipe. I wasn't sure it mattered, and I wondered if it would really be as great for our cupcake shop as she thought it would be.

Finally, after thinking about it so much my head actually hurt, I decided I needed to get over it and just do a cupcake recipe.

I threw myself into creating the best cupcake recipe ever. I became determined to come up with something no one had ever heard of. Nothing in the kitchen was off-limits. Boy, did I make some strange cupcakes that week.

Peppermint bubblegum cupcakes. Fruit salad cupcakes. Peanut butter, banana, and marshmallow cupcakes. The list went on and on.

I played around with recipes all week, in addition to helping Mom move all the equipment downstairs and testing a gazillion recipes for her. About then, I think I would have been over the moon with happiness if someone had told me I'd never have to eat another cupcake as long as I lived.

The shop downstairs looked better each day as we got closer and closer to the grand opening. They still needed to paint the walls inside and get the glass display cases moved in, along with a few other things. But the kitchen space in the back of the shop was ready to go. Now Mom spent most of her time down
there, getting familiar with everything. After Stan raved about her cupcakes, her nerves settled down, which I felt thankful for.

Dad had taken on the role of marketing director. He was placing ads in the newspaper and on the radio, trying to get the word out about the grand opening. The telephone poles throughout town were plastered with pink and green flyers.

Things seemed to be going along pretty well, I guess. So I probably should have known something terrible would happen. I mean, isn't that how it works? Just when you think you have it made,
bam
, something bad happens.

I was on my way home from the library, the day before Sophie was due to come home, when a disaster of the worst kind happened. A disaster no one could ever have predicted. Not a natural kind of disaster. No, this disaster was of the man-made kind. A disaster called Beatrice's Brownies.

Beatrice's Brownies was the latest chain to take the nation's sweet tooth by storm. There had been stories on the news lately of cars lined up for blocks and blocks when one opened in a new location.

Part of it was the fact that the brownies had unique flavors. Bavarian cream brownies, banana split brownies, mint chocolate chip brownies, and lots more. But the other part was the experience the customer had once inside a Beatrice's Brownies store. Each customer was greeted with a brownie sample and a Dixie cup of cold milk. Then they could walk upstairs and get a firsthand view of the kitchen down below, where huge vats of brownie mix were stirred and then poured into extra-large pans. My parents and I had watched an entire TV special on the Beatrice's Brownies craze a few months back.

I about fell off my bike when I saw the sign being hoisted onto the old Burrito Shack building. They had been working on remodeling the building for a while, but not a word had been said about who or what was moving into the building. It had all been very hush-hush. But not anymore.

Cars slowed to a crawl, everyone's eyes fixed on the sign. I watched as people pointed and put their hands over their mouths. This was the biggest thing to happen to the town of Willow since the big flood
of 1997, when the whole west side of town basically went under water.

I stood there, feeling sick to my stomach, like I'd eaten two dozen carrot cake cupcakes. How could we compete with Beatrice's Brownies? As the question ran through my brain over and over, only one answer kept popping up: We couldn't.

And then an even bigger question popped up. How could I tell Mom the news?

I told myself I just had to come out and tell her when I got home. But she was so happy with the strawberry lemonade cupcakes she'd made that afternoon, I couldn't do it. Then I told myself I had to tell her over dinner. Except Dad wouldn't stop talking. He told us he had passed out those strawberry lemonade cupcakes to all the workers downstairs, and they had praised her name up and down and sideways. I didn't want to be the wet blanket! Or in our case, the burnt cupcake.

Luckily, they didn't turn on the TV at all that night, so they didn't see the local news. After dinner, Mom went back down to the shop and Dad left to play cards with some teacher friends. I decided I could
wait until Sophie came home to tell Mom. Sophie could help me figure out how to break the news. How to break her heart was more like it.

With the place to myself, I went into the kitchen to work on my recipe some more. The deadline was only five days away. As I pulled a bowl out of the cupboard, I thought of Mom's final list of cupcake flavors for the first month. Her list of eight looked like this:

Old-Fashioned Vanilla

Cherry Devil's Food

Carrot Cake

Pineapple Right-Side-Up

Peanut Butter and Jelly

Chocolate Coconut

Banana Cream Pie

Strawberry Lemonade

If it had been up to me, I'd have had at least one more chocolate recipe on the list. People love chocolate. Beatrice's Brownies proved that.

And that's when it hit me like a chocolate coconut cupcake upside my head. Chocolate jam tarts. Flaky, chocolaty pastry with fresh strawberry jam in the middle.

It was perfect.

Brilliant!

And absolutely, positively
not
a cupcake recipe.

Still, I wanted to try it and see how the tarts turned out. I couldn't help it. I had to know, would they taste as good as I thought they would?