Bliss

  “Lisa.” A girl wearing what to Rose looked like a potato sack approached. “Lisa. You’re … alive.” Lisa spun in a joyful circle before falling to her knees and swooning.

  Rose watched what was happening like she watched scary movies: with her fingers in front of her face. “Promise me you’ll never act this way over anyone, Leigh,” Rose said, squeezing her little sister’s puffy cheeks.

  Ty called the girls out one by one, doling out the most lackluster compliments Rose had ever heard—but they worked every time. By the time he was done, there were only ten or so girls left standing. “Don’t stop now!”

  “I don’t even know their names!” Ty moaned.

  “Well, then try singing something,” she said, sharing a private smile with Sage.

  “I am not singing.”

  “Ty, we’re in the home stretch. We can’t have these girls busting in on us while we’re trying to bake.”

  “But I don’t know any songs.”

  “Just sing anything.”

  Ty grumbled and stuck the megaphone against the mail slot.

  “Jingle bells, Batman smells…”

  Ty began timidly. The remaining ten girls surged against the glass and dropped one by one to the ground.

  “Robin laid an egg…”

  Ty abandoned the megaphone and danced freestyle around the bakery, humming and jumping long after the last of the girls had expired.

  When Ty finally realized that he no longer needed to sing and dance, he stiffened and cleared his throat and straightened his shirt. The curb outside the bakery was strewn with unconscious girls.

  “You did great, Ty. That oughtta hold ’em for a little while,” Rose said, stifling a giggle.

  “All in a hard day’s work,” Ty said, glancing over at Sage, who was copying Ty’s dance moves by himself in the corner.

  Mrs. Carlson clambered through the piles of young ladies and tore open the front door. “Well, I never!” was all she could say. She wrapped her arms around herself and shook from the trauma.

  “Mrs. Carlson, why don’t you stay in here and stand guard with Leigh? Ty and Sage and I are going to make the girls some cake so they’ll go away,” Rose suggested.

  “Do you really think these crazed creatures with their crazed teenage hormones are going to be quelled by a bit of plain old cake?!” she hollered.

  “This is special cake,” said Rose.

  Leigh perked up. “My family has a magical cookbook!”

  Mrs. Carlson scowled and pulled Leigh onto her lap. “Make it snappy, then.”

  Rose, Ty, and Sage gathered around the kitchen chopping block and consulted their copy of the recipe for Turn-Around-Inside-Out-Upside-Down Cake. Rose glanced at the clock. “Lily and Chip should be a couple of hours at lunch.”

  Ty rolled up his sleeves and smirked. “At Pierre Guillaume’s? A couple of hours if they eat fast. That place has the worst service of any restaurant in history.”

  The list of ingredients was fairly standard—milk, flour, eggs, sugar, butter, baking powder, salt, strawberries—except for the last ingredient, which was this:

  the Tears of a Warlock*†

  Rose had made sure to copy the note about the tears, having learned her lesson about the importance of asterisks.

  *A warlock’s eye does not produce tears of sadness, because a warlock has no deep feeling. When a warlock cries, it is a freakish reversal, a catastrophic event. This provides the needed reversal for the recipe. † This recipe will begin to work immediately but will reach its maximum potential after twelve hours.

  Rose looked at Ty. “Why don’t you go get the war-lock’s eye?”

  Ty shook his head violently. “Get it yourself. I’ve already cried enough tears today—did you see the way Ashley Knob licked the window? That’s going to haunt me for the rest of my life.”

  “Fine. I’ll go. In the meantime, you and Sage better close the shutters on the windows. We don’t want anyone seeing what we’re doing in here.”

  Rose was relieved to find that all the jars were exactly as they’d left them: The first wind of autumn was still turning behind its blue glass, the Dwarf of Perpetual Sleep was still slumbering, and the warlock’s eye was still … floating in yellowish juice. She reached for it and was about to close her hands around the jar when she noticed something: There was a breeze in the cellar.

  The air seemed to breathe in and out, and at first she thought she was just imagining something, but then she noticed that the cool gray mist that hung on the floor was moving: It gently wafted forward and then back, again and again. Was there an air vent in the secret pantry that she hadn’t noticed before?

  Rose tiptoed around the shelf, the blueish light from the jars making everything look like it was underwater, and looked for the source of the mist. There were no vents in the walls—just shelf after shelf of jars. Whatever it was had to be on the floor.

  At last she slowly sank to her knees and crawled.

  On the floor, in the corner of the cellar, was a rusted iron grate like the ones in the house the heat came from. Only this one wasn’t warm; it was cold to the touch, and the mist was bubbling up from beneath it.

  Rose leaned forward and pressed her ear against it. A sound of air being drawn into something wet and huge, then blown out: breathing. Something was under the house.

  Goose bumps rippled across her arms and neck, and Rose slowly began backing away from the grate. As she did, the whisk-shaped key on its string slipped forward out of her shirt and softly clanged against the metal.

  The breathing stopped. And then a voice she barely heard but more sensed as a vibration in her bones said, Who is THERE?

  Rose held her breath.

  I HEAR you, the voice said. I SMELL you.

  Rose closed her eyes and tried to breathe quietly through her open mouth.

  A prettier girl—or a more powerful and important one—wouldn’t be stuck in this kind of situation, on her hands and knees in a magical cellar with some terrifying thing awoken and ready to do God knew what.

  And I KNOW you, the voice said. Help me, and I can help you win your heart’s desire. Is it fortune and fame that you seek? Is it beauty that you crave? Then find the ingredient labeled Tincture of Venus. Mix it with the right recipe, and you will outshine Helen of Troy. Even your aunt Lily! Just try a pinch in your tea.

  By now Rose had backed up against the foot of the steps, and she could no longer make out the iron bars of the grate. Whatever it was under the cellar, it somehow knew about Aunt Lily, and about Rose’s deepest desires.

  She silently stood up and grabbed the warlock’s eye.

  Rose took the jar and behind it caught a glimpse of another jar, this one empty except for a clamshell compact that glowed around its edges. The words “TINCTURE OF VENUS” were printed on the label in little gold letters.

  What she wouldn’t give to be pretty like Aunt Lily—to have power in her fingertips, to be important, to be able to make anyone do anything that she wanted. Girls went crazy over Ty because he was handsome. What if Rose were gorgeous? Would the boys in school go gaga over her? Probably.

  Rose lost herself for a moment, imagining what it would be like to stroll down the middle-school halls and make heads turn. Kids would clamor after her, wanting to be friends with her instead of calling her things like Shake ’N Bake.

  The other kids at school—and the teachers, too!—would dote on her every word, take everything she said more seriously. And maybe her brothers would start being nicer to her. And maybe her parents would trust her more too, and let her bake things from the Cookery Booke, and teach her the right way to do it. Or maybe, once she was pretty, she wouldn’t even need the bakery. She could leave Calamity Falls, go out and conquer the world—

  “Rose! Come on!” she heard Ty shout from the kitchen.

  Her brothers. They needed her.

  Rose glanced back at the Tincture of Venus, back at the mist that had spoken to her. “No, thanks,” she whispered, and climbed
up the steps out of the cellar, warlock’s eye in hand. “Not now.”

  Rose emerged from the fridge just as Ty and Sage finished dumping sacks of flour and teaspoon after teaspoon of baking powder into the stand mixer’s huge metal vat.

  “Here’s enough for forty-four cakes,” Sage announced. “We figured we have to make enough slices for everyone in town, which is about twenty-two hundred people, so, if there are fifty really thin slices per cake, then forty-four should do it…” He held up a cake-cutting diagram he’d made.

  “Great work, Sage.” Rose laid the barbed-wire-wrapped mason jar on the counter, and the eye bobbed up and down in its yellowed preservative juice. It had an iris the color of lavender and a knobby blue tail—Rose knew this was the optic nerve, the bundle of cords that connected it to the brain. It was both beautiful and hideous at the same time.

  Sage flinched when he saw the pickled eye. “Ugh! What is that?” He quivered as he picked up the jar. The eye rolled around and opened, staring straight at Sage in the dim light of the covered kitchen windows. “Where did you get this thing?”

  Rose took the jar from him before he dropped it. She wanted to tell Ty about the voice, but not in front of Sage. “Give me that.”

  “Mom and Dad have some more … exotic stuff,” said Ty. “In a secret pantry. We’ll show you later.”

  “Now,” said Rose, “the real question is, how do we get this ugly thing to cry?”

  Ty folded one arm over his chest and rubbed his chin with the other. “Hmm,” he said. “Well, I think we should start by taking it out of the jar and holding it over the batter, so we’re ready to collect the tears.”

  “Good idea,” Rose said, and slid the jar to Ty.

  “Oh, no—I’m not touching that,” said Ty, clearly grossed out.

  “You always say you want to be more involved, Sage,” Rose said, pushing the jar toward her little brother. “Here’s your chance.”

  Sage just shrieked and threw his arms in front of his freckled, chubby cheeks.

  “Fine!” Rose scowled and bent back the barbwire, then unlocked the metal clasp of the mason jar.

  When she opened the lid, the smell was indescribable. It was like water in a vase of rotten daisies. It was like vinegar that had been used to bathe a sick frog. It was like yogurt from the Middle Ages. It was like the sweat of a corpse, if corpses could sweat.

  “Who farted?” Sage cried.

  Rose clamped her nose with one hand and grabbed at the trailing optic nerve with the other. It flapped away like a fish in a pet store that doesn’t want to be caught, but after a few tries, she had looped the bundle of nerves around her finger and pulled the dangling eye from the jar.

  Ty and Sage were both holding their noses and gagging.

  “How are we going to get it to cry?” Ty groaned.

  “Beats me,” Rose wondered aloud. “What would you say to someone to make them cry?”

  Sage stood over the dangling eye. “Your dog just died!” he shouted.

  The eye turned itself around and glared at Sage, as if to say, Nice try.

  Ty grumbled, “You are the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen!”

  The eyelid squinted itself shut in such a way that it almost seemed to be smiling.

  “Dude, you just complimented it!” Sage said.

  Rose furrowed her brow. How could you get someone—or a severed part of someone, with no feelings—to cry? Rose glanced over at the shuttered windows, where the gaggle of girls was beginning to stir.

  Then she knew what to do.

  “Ty! Hold this!” she cried, thrusting the eye into Ty’s unsuspecting hand. He shrieked like a baby as he clenched his fingers around the stringy, slimy nerves.

  Rose ran to the pantry and grabbed a cleaver and an onion, the biggest yellow onion she could find. She brought them over to where Ty was dangling the eye over the mixing vat. She sliced right down the middle of the onion, cleaving it in half. Then she hacked those halves in half, and kept hacking until the board was covered in little white cubes.

  And as she chopped the onion, the spicy, earthen smell of onion crept up Rose’s nose and made her eyes sting so badly that she could barely breathe. So she did what came naturally: She cried. She cried because of the thing in the cellar, because it was telling the truth—she wanted more than anything to be important, to be famous, to matter. To be pretty.

  She sniffled and waved the cutting board full of onions under the warlock’s eye.

  Ty and Sage had both buried their eyes in their elbows, so only Rose saw when the eye blinked angrily and let drop one thick, oily black tear, which plopped into the vat, and then another, and then another, until gobs of black were oozing out of the corners of the disembodied eye.

  “You guys,” Rose whispered. “Look!”

  The eye itself began to glow with a cold purple light, and the black tears that had seeped into the batter sizzled and popped. Suddenly, the enormous bowl began to spin round on its axis, with a slow metal rattling at first, then faster and faster, like the sort of carnival ride that always made Rose throw up.

  The three of them stepped back. “I’m getting a bad feeling,” Sage said.

  “Shhh,” Ty said.

  The batter was whipped to the walls of the vat, then crept up the sides and bubbled over. But it didn’t spill to the floor. Instead, while the vat kept spinning, the batter kept rising until it was floating near the ceiling in a fat gloopy ball. The shapeless dough rearranged itself into a human face with giant furrowed brows and deep, hollow eyes that glared at Rose. A mouth formed beneath those and wordlessly shouted at her.

  “Leave me alone!” she cried.

  Then the eye stopped glowing, its eyelids closing with an almost audible snap. The face dissolved into the rest of the batter, and whole thing dropped splat back into the vat.

  It was over.

  Ty dropped the eye back into the jar. Rose clasped the lid on tight and took it back to the secret pantry. As she slid it back into place on the shelf, she could swear she heard it—or something—grumble.

  Sage, Rose, and Ty filled up every available cake pan with the batter, which had turned a sickly looking gray-pink color, and crammed them into all the ovens, which they had turned on full blast—the four stacking wall ovens, and the beehive-shaped cast-iron stove in the corner. It was as hot as the basement of a coal-powered steamboat.

  After forty minutes, the little red kitchen timer that Purdy used for her cakes made an optimistic little Ping! sound, and the three Bliss kids flew into action. Ty and Sage pulled all the cakes out to cool, while Rose began slicing the cake and laying individual portions onto paper plates with a plastic fork stuck in each one.

  The three worked in feverish silence. No one said a word until all of the cake was sliced and plated. Every surface in the kitchen was covered with slices of magical dessert.

  By this time, most of the girls had awakened, and Rose could hear them listlessly banging on the window again in the front.

  Rose loaded two dozen plates onto a massive tray the size of a card table, and she and Sage ferried it to the front room. They set the tray down near the door and rapped on the window.

  “Hurry!” said Mrs. Carlson, who’d been watching Leigh the whole time the kids prepared their magical dough. “The beasts have come to!”

  “Silence!” Rose shouted. Aunt Lily and Chip could return at any moment—she had to work fast.

  Only the girls didn’t stop screaming and banging on the window. They only banged harder. Rose felt completely invisible.

  Then Ty swept in and yelled through the megaphone again, “Be quiet!”

  At the sound of his voice, the girls went completely silent and stood at attention.

  “Because I love you all so much, I made you some cake!” he shouted, holding up a piece. This was met with a collective sigh. “If you want any, you have to form a line by the door! Single file!”

  “It’s as if women’s lib was all but a dream!” Mrs. Carlson muttered.

/>   The girls scrambled to line up, clawing at one another to be closest to the door. With trembling hands, Rose unlocked the door, visions dancing through her head of being trampled by a sneering mob of mean girls.

  “If you eat your whole piece of cake,” Ty explained, overenunciating like he was talking to a roomful of kindergarteners, “then I will personally … give you a hug and sign your yearbook with my name.”

  “Just your name?” one of the girls screeched, her voice sharp and piercing.

  Ty shrugged. “Um, and a smiley face.”

  “OMG! OMG! OMG!” the girl shouted, and others began to join in as well.

  Rose opened the door six inches—just enough to pass the paper plates through. As she handed slice after slice to the girls, they stared right through her at Ty.

  Ashley Knob was the last to take a slice of cake. Her blond ringlets were now a wild mess of frizz and dirt. Rose thrust a fork at her, but she just scooped the slice into her manicured hands and gobbled it down whole.

  Ashley’s eyes widened. She turned around without saying anything, then marched away slowly and deliberately. In her wake, all the girls threw their plates on the ground and walked away.

  “What sort of cake is that?” said Mrs. Carlson. “It doesn’t seem like they actually liked it very much. I wouldn’t put that gray stuff in my mouth.”

  Rose sighed. Mrs. Carlson was right. Even though they’d devoured it, they hadn’t seemed to enjoy it.

  “Did that seem right to you?” whispered Ty, his lean, tan arms crossed in front of his dress shirt.

  Rose wasn’t sure. It was odd, the way they’d just dangled their arms, spun around, and walked away like robots, but isn’t that what they’d wanted them to do? Go away? Besides, the recipe wouldn’t reach its maximum potential for another twelve hours, which meant tomorrow morning.

  Leigh was sitting in the middle of the filthy bakery floor expectantly with her arms raised in the air, like she was asking for a hug. Or cake.

  “My family has a magical cookbook!” she yelled. “They keep it in the back of the fridge! Rose has the key!”

  Rose handed her sister a slice of the fluffy gray-pink stuff, and Leigh scarfed it down in two big, messy bites.