Bliss

  Rose then saw a way to keep Chip and Lily out of the house in order to fix the mess. “I have an idea! There is a big mess in the bakery, as we all know, and there is a lot of cake on the floor, and we just don’t feel right leaving it like that.”

  “It looks like a cake bomb went off in there,” Ty said.

  “So why don’t you two enjoy a relaxing French lunch—with many courses, multiple courses—while we go and clean up the bakery?” Rose finished, trying not to look like the cat who caught the canary.

  “Yes! Ty and Rose will clean up the bakery!” said Sage.

  “You too, Sage!” Rose said, making sure to include Sage this time around. “The non-adults will clean up the bakery, for a change.”

  Lily and Chip looked at one another quizzically, then, after a moment, Aunt Lily shrugged and said, “All right! How kind! And now for Leigh’s escargots!”

  Leigh shook her head. “Uh-uh. Don’t want ’em.”

  Lily pursed her lips and said, “Okay, but we are still having lunch. I’ve been looking for an opportunity to speak with Chip alone.” She smiled devilishly.

  Chip gulped as Lily slipped her arm into his, and together they strolled inside.

  Sage was pouting. “Why do I have to clean the bakery too?” he whined.

  Rose pulled Sage and Ty into a huddle. Leigh sidled in between Rose and Sage, sat on the ground in the middle of the huddle, and took off her shoes.

  “This is classified intelligence, Sage,” Rose said. “Can you keep this top secret?”

  Sage stopped pouting and nodded with fervor. “I’ll keep it the toppest secret.”

  That wasn’t reassuring, but Rose pressed on. “We’ve been having some trouble with the you-know-what,” she said. “We did a recipe, and it went wrong—”

  Ty cut in. “Actually, it went right. But now we have to go back to the house to figure out how to reverse it.”

  “Exactly,” Rose said. “So, your mission, should you choose to accept it—”

  “You can count on me!” Sage said.

  “—is to watch Leigh while Ty and I find a recipe to fix it!”

  Rose smiled, glad that she’d found a way to make Sage feel included.

  Sage angrily broke away. “Heck no! Babysitting is not spy work. I want to be on the front lines. I want some action.”

  Leigh leaped up. “Me too!” she shouted. “Action!”

  Ty grumbled, “Ahhh, fine.”

  “We don’t have forever, so let’s do this,” Rose said. “And let’s not make any mistakes this time.”

  As Rose and her siblings passed the sprawling green lawn of Calamity Falls Elementary School, she heard kids shouting like they were on a runaway carnival ride. Scattered across the wide expanse of the lawn, approximately two hundred children were engaged in what looked very much like a war.

  Half of them had painted their faces yellow and patrolled the north end of the lawn, while the kids on the southern half had painted their faces blue. The blue-faced kids were hiding behind a half-dozen teacher’s desks, which they had somehow dragged from the school building and lined up like a barricade. Stacked behind the desks were hundreds of supple blue water balloons.

  “It’s Wednesday,” Rose whispered. “Why aren’t they all in summer camp?”

  Sage gulped. “Mr. Fanner is not going to be happy about this,” he said solemnly. Rose and Ty had each gone through Calamity Falls Elementary School terrified of Mr. Fanner, who stormed through the halls every morning and handed out pink detention slips if he saw so much as an untied shoelace.

  But then the strangest thing happened: All of the summer-camp teachers (minus Miss Thistle) made their way down the center of the lawn, smack through the middle of the balloon war, and none tried to stop it. All of them sauntered behind Principal Fanner, who wore a tweed jacket and spectacles and looked like an old-fashioned college professor.

  He was smiling, which was something Rose had never seen Mr. Fanner do. Until that moment, she’d doubted that he even had teeth.

  The teachers reached the sidewalk without getting hit by a stray balloon, then turned in the direction of the Bliss kids.

  When Mr. Fanner spotted Rose and her brothers, his smile disappeared. He raised a finger and started wagging it. “Why are you not at the bakery?” he asked, irritated.

  Rose took a deep breath. “Oh, we had some technical difficulties earlier today,” she replied. “The bakery is closed until tomorrow.”

  The group of teachers standing behind Mr. Fanner let out a disappointed groan.

  “Now what are we going to do?” shouted Ms. Spatz, Rose’s third-grade teacher, a woman whose two front teeth overlapped.

  Mr. Fanner pointed his finger right between Rose’s eyes. “I closed summer camp early today because I didn’t feel like teaching. I wanted cake. Badly. My friends want cake too. And you’re telling us that we can’t get any?”

  Rose suddenly remembered Chip’s list of people to whom he’d given free Cookies of Truth: “Miss Thistle, the teacher—all the teachers, actually.”

  So this was the truth about teachers: As badly as Rose sometimes wanted to leave school and eat a piece of cake, her teachers probably wanted to do the same thing, ten times worse.

  “Fine,” Mr. Fanner spat. “We shall go elsewhere. We shall drive to the Starbucks in Humbleton.” Mr. Fanner turned his nose up at Rose and her brothers and marched away, the rest of the teachers following suit.

  Sage turned to Rose and Ty, a mixture of wonder and horror on his face. “What did you do?”

  When Rose and her siblings walked into the kitchen, they found Mrs. Carlson waiting for them, shaking her fist in the air. “Where have you children been?”

  “You fell asleep, Mrs. Carlson, so we went to lunch,” said Sage.

  Mrs. Carlson squinted evilly at Sage. “Fair enough,” she growled. “But I shan’t let you out of my sight again. Your parents called, and I had to make up a lie that you were all taking a shower!”

  “At the same time?” Ty asked.

  “Well, that’s where the lie fell apart, see? The point is, I’m not letting any of you out of my sight.” She was shaking her fists so furiously that the rollers were coming out of her blond hair.

  Rose said, “All right, well, why don’t you watch Leigh outside while we clean up in here.”

  Mrs. Carlson nodded and ushered Leigh into the backyard, where she started pushing her on the swing. “Don’t you dare photograph me, child!” Rose heard her shout.

  Rose let out a tiny sigh of relief. When they were safely out of Mrs. Carlson’s sight, they filed one by one into the walk-in fridge, Ty leading the way with the flashlight.

  “Oh boy,” Rose muttered to herself, closing the fridge door behind her.

  Sage was rooting around on the wall near the eggs. He pulled out two cartons, just inches from the rolling-pin-shaped knob that opened the secret cellar.

  “Put those back!” Rose barked, running over and replacing the cartons of eggs herself.

  “What?” he shouted. “They’re just eggs!”

  Ty piped in. “Do what Rose says,” he commanded.

  Sage smiled at Rose. “Sorry,” he said. Sage would do anything if Ty told him to—even if it meant respecting his older sister.

  Rose winked at Ty and opened the door to the library, where the three huddled over the book on its wooden podium. Sage flipped the pages as Rose and Ty searched for something that could work as an antidote to madness, or a magical eraser.

  “Here,” said Ty. “This one.”

  Rose read the recipe aloud:

  Sit-Down-and-Stop-Chattering Scones

  Madam Hannah Bliss did make these scones in 1895 on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where she was a schoolteacher. One year, her students were particularly unruly, so she fed them these scones and they were unable to utter a sound for the rest of the year. It was as if their lips fused together.

  Nota Bene: Madam Hannah Bliss later regretted the making of these scones, as she
was eventually prosecuted for causing mutism among an entire community of children.

  Ty nodded happily. “That’ll get everyone to shut up, right?”

  Rose shook her head. “No, Ty,” she said. “We don’t want to make people mute, we just want to reverse what we did. Turn everything upside down…”

  As she said the words, Rose turned to the very back of the book and found a series of smaller pages that sat nestled in a hollowed-out section of the back cover. The front page of this section was labeled ALBATROSS’S APOCRYPHA, and the paper was unlike that of the rest of the book, which was a creamy white. These pages were thinner and grayer and felt rough and crusty, like a cat’s tongue. None of the recipes had dates or stories describing their origins. Rose thought it strange that this section should be labeled Albatross, when Lily had said that that was the name of her great-great-great-grandfather. Could it be the same Albatross?

  She pulled the little gray booklet from its shallow cabinet in the back cover and flipped quickly through the pages. One recipe title caught her eye.

  Turn-Around-Inside-Out-Upside-Down Cake

  “This is what we need,” said Rose affirmatively. “Something that will just reverse everything.”

  Sage shook his head. “I don’t know… That one looks shady.”

  “Well, I’d rather have something that was a late addition to the book that’s correct than something that’s gonna sew everyone’s lips together,” Rose said.

  Ty and Sage ultimately nodded in agreement, and Rose pulled out her notebook to make a copy.

  When they emerged from the kitchen with the recipe for the cake, Mrs. Carlson was standing in the middle of the kitchen with Leigh.

  “There is something wrong with the child,” said Mrs. Carlson, her face even more twisted and confused than usual.

  Then Rose saw what she was talking about.

  “My family has a magical cookbook!” Leigh shouted from where she was sitting on the floor. “They keep it in the fridge! Rose has the key! My family has a magical cookbook! They keep it in the fridge! Rose has the key!”

  Rose’s eyes darted over to the plate of extra Cookies of Truth, which was now empty except for a few sad crumbs.

  “Did Leigh eat those cookies?” Rose asked.

  “I suppose she did!” said Mrs. Carlson. “I brung her in here so that I could use the powder room, and she snuck an entire platter of cookies into her gullet! You leave a child alone for five minutes and she gets herself in trouble!”

  “My family has a magical cookbook!” Leigh shouted.

  “Leigh, stop it! Keep your mouth shut!” Ty shouted. But Leigh couldn’t control herself. She just kept shouting the same thing over and over.

  “Why is she spouting nonsense about a magical cookbook?” Mrs. Carlson asked.

  “I have no idea. She’s always had a very advanced imagination,” Rose said, panicking about her little sister. If Aunt Lily came home, she was going to hear everything.

  Just as Rose was thinking about a possible solution, a tidal wave of screaming rose like a tsunami outside the bakery.

  “What is that godforsaken shrieking?” Mrs. Carlson asked.

  Rose looked up and saw twenty or so girls clawing at the door, banging at the windows, pressing their lips against the glass and waving at Rose and her brothers. And there were more behind those. Almost all of them were holding a copy of the Calamity Falls Middle School yearbook in one hand and a pen in the other.

  “Ty,” Rose said. “You said it was a few girls.”

  Ty gave Rose an aw-shucks kind of look. “A few … dozen?”

  CHAPTER 11

  Recipe the Third: Turn-Around-Inside-Out-Upside-Down Cake

  The sound of banging made Rose look back in horror.

  Out the backdoor, six rabid girls had pressed their flushed faces to the glass. More girls bounced on the trampoline, trying to get a look into the kitchen over the heads of the others. A girl stood on each of the swings—even the baby swing—and one brave girl had climbed on top of the rusty barbecue grate, ignoring the bits of burned hamburger stuck to the grill. Their eyes were bulging out of their heads, big as Ping-Pong balls.

  This was scary stuff.

  Ty pushed a spike of gelled hair off his face, and the girls let out a collective wail.

  “What are these ridiculous girls screaming about?” Mrs. Carlson asked.

  Rose already knew the answer as she eased through the dark brown oak saloon doors into the front room.

  At the sight of her, the dozens of girls who’d congregated outside the front of the shop let loose a deafening roar of disappointment that rattled the glass front of the display case. “Booooooooooo!”

  “Go away!” Rose shouted. “Ty doesn’t like you!” But she could barely hear herself above the din.

  Then a singular voice rose from the back of the crowd. “If he doesn’t come out now, I will rip someone’s face off!” One girl, taller and stronger than all the others, was hurtling toward the front of the crowd, throwing shorter girls to the ground as she passed them. That girl was Ashley Knob.

  Her long hair had been curled into fancy ringlets so shiny and so blond that you had to squint to look at them directly. Her lip gloss shimmered like an expensive watch. Slung over one shoulder was a bag from which a frightened Chihuahua looked out, clearly wishing he were somewhere else. A ring of space opened up around her. Even in the depths of a spell, the girls of Calamity Falls always knew to make way for Ashley Knob.

  Ashley screamed, banging on the window with her fists. “I will set all the furniture from my daddy’s store on fire and throw it through this window!”

  The other girls followed suit and pounded on the glass with their fists. Fearing that the window would give way, Rose thought it best to give the girls what they wanted. “Okay, okay! I’ll hand him over! Just stop it!”

  Ashley Knob raised her arm high, and instantly the banging and chanting stopped.

  Rose found Ty in the kitchen, curled up behind the chopping block with the collar of his button-down shirt pulled up over his eyes.

  “They want to see you,” Rose said.

  “This is ludicrous!” said Mrs. Carlson. “These girls ought to be ashamed of themselves!”

  Rose watched as Mrs. Carlson charged through the saloon doors, then eased herself through the front door of the bakery, taking care not to let in any of the rabid teenagers. “You are all acting like a bunch of ninnies! You need to go home to your parents, now!”

  Ashley Knob seized Mrs. Carlson by the rollers in her hair as the mob lifted her up over their heads and pushed her to the back of the crowd. She tried desperately to claw her way back to the front door, but the girls were too strong. Mrs. Carlson disappeared.

  Rose yanked Ty up by his spiky hair. “You need to get in the front, now! They have Mrs. Carlson! Who knows what they’ll do to her!”

  Ty cowered out of sight of the window. “No way. I don’t even like her.”

  Rose shoved him. “You have to go out there and calm them down.”

  “How am I supposed to do that?”

  It was a good question. But Rose thought of Devin and immediately knew the answer: “You have to kiss the ringleader. Ashley Knob.”

  “That prissy, self-important brat? I’d rather kiss Mrs. Carlson!”

  “I can arrange that,” Rose said.

  Ty fell to his knees. “Please, Rose! If I put my mouth anywhere near those glittery, bubble-gum-gloss-covered fish lips, my life at school will be ruined. She’ll keep me trapped in her talons like she keeps that poor dog trapped in her purse. Do you want me to be a dog in a purse, Rose? Is that really what you want?”

  Rose rolled her eyes. “You don’t have to actually kiss her. You just have to get her to faint, so she doesn’t break the window. It’ll be easy.”

  Rose pulled Sage and Leigh into the front room, and the three stood behind the counter and watched as Ty pushed through the saloon doors. The girls screamed like they had just seen Elvis. Or Just
in Bieber.

  “This is better than when Daddy bought me a helicopter for my sweet sixteen!” Ashley Knob screamed. “And I looooooove helicopters!”

  “Here goes nothing,” Ty muttered over his shoulder. He produced a toy megaphone that Albert kept in the kitchen cabinets and pressed its bullhorn against the tiny mail slot in the glass next to the front door.

  “Ashley Knob.” Ty was on his knees, speaking timidly into the megaphone.

  “Speak, my most delicious one!”

  “Um, kiss me. Like, through the glass,” he stammered.

  “I die!” Ashley cried, then pressed her shimmering pink lips to the glass in a mushy pucker. Ty nervously pressed his lips to the glass where Ashley’s expectant mouth quivered on the other side.

  Sage made a retching sound, and Leigh giggled. “My family has a magical cookbook!” she said, snapping a picture of the screaming mob.

  “It’s working!” Rose shouted to her older brother. “Look!” As soon as Ty put his lips to the glass, Ashley had fallen into a deep trance and sunk to the ground. “Now do it to the other ones!”

  “Do I have to fake kiss everyone?” Ty asked, obviously upset by the prospect.

  “No, just, like, say nice things to them. They’ll be so overwhelmed that they’ll totally pass out.” Rose tried very hard to hide the fact that she was enjoying this just the tiniest bit. She had never seen her big brother so terrified before. He was usually the one in control, too busy to bother with anything having to do with the bakery. Or with Rose. Now he was turning to her for advice.

  “Nice things?” Ty complained. “Just look at them. Do you really think these girls deserve compliments?”

  “There’s no time for thinking, Ty!” Rose shouted. “Just doing! Go forth and compliment!”

  “Callie,” Ty called. A girl with brown pigtails stepped up to the window. “Your hair is bouncy.” Callie’s eyes rolled back in her head and she wilted in ecstasy.

  “Jenna,” he called as another girl with braces and round glasses approached. “You have glasses and braces.” Jenna stiffened like a tree and fell to the ground.