Bliss

  Rose was patiently awaiting her first noncustomer when, out of the corner of her eye, she spotted Devin Stetson floating listlessly in a darkened corner of the square, alone.

  Aunt Lily caught her staring at the blond boy. “Who’s that?” she asked.

  Rose was too shy to answer.

  “Why don’t you go dance with him?”

  Rose shook her head no. “We’ve never even had a real conversation.”

  “Well, this is a perfect opportunity to try it out, because he won’t remember it in the morning!”

  “I don’t think he’d like me very much.”

  “Who wouldn’t like you? You’re beautiful, you’re talented, you’re going places.”

  Rose couldn’t quite believe that Aunt Lily meant what she said, but still, the words sounded lovely, and they propelled Rose forward. If she was ever going to speak to Devin, tonight was the night. She felt somewhat invincible.

  She made her way through the mob to where Devin Stetson was dancing. He wasn’t attempting to plow through any real disco moves like the others; he was just sort of stepping back and forth. Rose stood facing him and mirrored his movements. He looked up in surprise.

  “Ih,” he said.

  “Ih.”

  “Uoy kool ssorg,” he said, which she flipped around in her head and took to mean “You look gross.” On any other day this would have made her run to the nearest bathroom and whimper silently inside the stall, but on this special night she took it to mean that she looked pretty good.

  Rose wished she had a mirror to check and see if the makeup Aunt Lily had helped her put on was still there, but she didn’t. So she assumed that it was and smiled. “Sknaht,” she said. “Uoy oot.”

  Then Devin turned around and sort of pushed the back of his head into her cheek, which, she supposed, was his backward attempt at a kiss. She melted at the touch of his baby-fine blond hair on her face. He smelled like soap and dreams.

  From the corner of her eye, she could glimpse Aunt Lily standing behind the table at Pierre Guillaume’s, giving her a thumbs-up.

  Just as Rose had closed her eyes and fully embraced the beauty of this moment, backward though it was, Ty came up behind her and tapped her on the shoulder.

  “Excuse me, mi hermana. I’m sorry to interrupt your fun, but no one is eating the cake.”

  Then Rose remembered a pivotal part of her plan that she’d forgotten about. If they wanted people to take free cake, they would need a sign.

  She tore herself away from Devin’s soft blond hair. Whatever happened after this—if he went back to ignoring her at school, if he didn’t know her name—she’d remember this moment forever. “Eyb, Nived,” she said, and then she was off.

  Rose and Ty tilted over one Pierre Guillaume’s huge white umbrellas, while Sage, the expert in backward print, dipped his finger in a bowl of leftover blackberry topping and smeared it over the white umbrella, writing:

  EW ERA YRGNUH! OD TON EKAT RUO EKAC!

  Rose and Sage turned the umbrella it on its side on top of one of the tables. Ty ran to the van and made the announcement into the microphone, just to get everything started. “O-dd ton ee-kat ru-oh e-kak!” Then he cut the music.

  If there was ever a need for a radio DJ to speak backward, Ty would be more than qualified for the job.

  Mrs. Havegood was the first to see the umbrella sign near Pierre Guillaume’s. She pointed at the sign and screamed, “KOOL! EKAC!”

  Mrs. Havegood walked backward toward the table, then got on all fours and crawled backward under it, so that she was facing the cake, then she took a slice and devoured it. “EKAC!” she cried, beating her chest like a baboon.

  And with that, she picked up individual slices of cake and sent them hurtling like footballs into the crowd. “OG GNOL!” she howled.

  Meanwhile, the teachers and librarians seized their slices of cake and, after shoving them into their mouths, smeared the excess chocolate all over their faces, then grabbed all the empty cake pans and licked them clean as they hooted and stomped through the square.

  Mr. Bastable and Miss Thistle caught two of the slices that Mrs. Havegood had sent airborne and fed them to each other. The rest of the crowd surrounded the tables like pigs at a slop trough. They didn’t bother to pick up the cake—they bent their heads to their plates and ate without their hands.

  Rose wondered when this terrifying display would give way to the normal human behavior that the torte recipe had promised.

  She didn’t have to wonder long.

  Miss Karnopolis the librarian was the first to come to. She shook her head and saw her fellow librarians’ heads buried in cake pans, then felt the sticky blackberry syrup she’d smeared on her face.

  Then she noticed that it was the middle of the night.

  “Oh my!” she exclaimed. “What am I doing awake! It’s well past my bedtime! And why is my face covered in”—she wiped a finger over her filthy forehead and licked off the black residue—“chocolate?” Then Miss Karnopolis ran—in the usual, frontward way—toward her home.

  Miss Thistle came to just as she tackled the shirtless Mr. Bastable. “No! Bernard Bastable, why do you haunt me thus!” And she clambered off his rotund form and stormed home, cursing the moon.

  Mrs. Havegood brushed chocolate crumbs from her dress. “Why are my clothes inside out?” she cried.

  One by one, the rest of the multitude came to, shaking their heads in confusion, then politely tossing their paper plates into the trash cans and heading back to their houses, wondering how in God’s name they’d ended up outside in the middle of the night covered in chocolate, and vowing never to speak about this event again.

  By the time the last person had slunk from the square in shame, the sky had broken into a pale pink. The early morning sun glinted on the smattering of paper plates and plastic forks left on the brick plaza by those too disoriented to remember to throw them into the trash bins where they belonged.

  Rose and Ty took a plastic garbage bag around the plaza and picked up.

  “So, we’re sure that did the trick, right?” Ty asked, looking exhausted.

  Rose nodded. “Oh yeah. Definitely.”

  “Cool,” Ty said, and he patted her on the back. “You know, I think Aunt Lily really digs me now. I’m glad I got to spend all this time with her. She’s, like, muy caliente.”

  “Good, I guess,” Rose said, but it was the reverse of what she felt. As she walked away, she felt the sting of his words. Rose had assumed that she and her brothers were growing closer. Could she have been so wrong? Were they just doing this for Lily the whole time? she pondered. Am I still invisible?

  As soon as Lily pulled the van back into the driveway, Ty untied the speaker from the roof and dragged it onto the front porch, where Rose knew it would probably stay for months. Rose and Sage gathered all of the empty cake pans and carried them into the kitchen, where they found Mrs. Carlson sitting on the countertop, nervously chewing gum, her eyes wide and bloodshot and her hands shaking.

  “Well!” she spat. “Look who decided to join us!”

  Rose wasn’t sure what she meant by us until she noticed Leigh running backward around the rolling countertop, still gurgling in backward English.

  As if that weren’t bad enough, Leigh had washed herself and combed her hair and put on a darling velvet tea party dress that Purdy bought her once for a wedding but which she’d refused to wear. Her Polaroid camera was nowhere to be found. In her backwardness, Leigh had transformed herself into a miniature pageant queen.

  “She’s been this way all night! I heard something that sounded like disco music in the distance, and I certainly would have gone, because disco music is the only thing that ever brought me any semblance of joy, but I couldn’t leave the house, now could I? Not with our little spawn of Satan running around backward!”

  Rose and Sage exchanged a cryptic glance, then dropped the dirty cake pans in the sink and ran out to the backyard.

  “No! You can’t leave again!?
?? Mrs. Carlson cried out the door. “I haven’t slept in a fortnight! I’m legally insane! I no longer hold myself responsible for my actions!”

  Rose called out to Aunt Lily. “Leigh is still backward! We need more torte!”

  But there was none left. The townspeople had eaten every slice. Even the cake pans themselves had been licked clean by the ravenous librarians.

  Rose ran to the satellite dish, praying that there might be just a scrap of the batter left—she shouted with joy when she spotted a tiny pool of hardening batter in the very center, just enough for a torte the size of a silver dollar.

  Rose scooped the batter out of the satellite dish with a spoon and dropped it into a buttered white ramekin.

  “You’re baking?” Mrs. Carlson screamed at Rose as she pushed the ramekin into the oven. “Do you people do anything other than bake?”

  Rose turned and looked Mrs. Carlson straight in her leathery Scottish face. “I’m sorry you got stuck here all night, I really am. But we were all dealing with some important business. And I have a funny feeling that right now all Leigh needs is just a little bit of chocolate cake. So please step aside.”

  Mrs. Carlson glared at Rose like she wanted to individually eat all of her fingers, but she backed away from the oven, and Rose cooked the batter for fifteen minutes until it was puffed and dark.

  “Ghiel!” Rose called to her little sister, surprised at how adept she’d become at spinning words around in her head.

  “Not you, too! Spawn of the devil!” shouted Mrs. Carlson.

  Rose held the cake high above her prim and proper little sister’s head. “On ekac rof uoy!” she admonished, which, of course, made Leigh desperate for the tiny chocolate bomb. She jumped high in the air and seized the plate from Rose, then gobbled up the cake and let out a little burp. Then she shook her head out, dazed, yawned grumpily, and marched upstairs to her bed—forward.

  “What was in that cake?” Mrs. Carlson asked, audibly licking her lips.

  Rose shrugged. “Sometimes a girl just needs some chocolate.”

  Mrs. Carlson harrumphed. “I am going to bed.”

  Aunt Lily piped in. “We are all going to bed. But first things first: We’ve got to open up the bakery in one hour—just to make sure everyone is back to normal.”

  Ty and Sage went upstairs with Leigh and Mrs. Carlson, but Aunt Lily held Rose back. “That was, in a word, sensational. Everyone in your family, Rose, is fine. Your parents, your brother, your baby sister, are fine. But you, you are sensational. You win the day.”

  Rose hugged her aunt and pondered things as she climbed the stairs. Sage was still annoying, and Ty was still aloof, but they had come together and formed a team, and that had meant more to her than any bit of praise or respect she’d ever gotten.

  In the bathroom, Rose went to brush her teeth and looked in the mirror with shock. All of the makeup had worn off—the running around and baking and sweating must have done that. She was no longer glamorous.

  Had the lipstick and the eye shadow still been there when she’d spoken to Devin? It was impossible to know. Aunt Lily had called her sensational. But staring into the mirror now, all Rose felt was ordinary.

  And in that moment, she decided that she would rather be sensational than ordinary. She would do anything to feel like she felt today for the rest of her life.

  Just about anything at all.

  CHAPTER 16

  Sunrise, Sunset

  Rose woke up after only a half-hour of tossing and turning. She was too anxious for the day’s events to really sleep. Today was like Christmas, only the present she was hoping for wasn’t something new—she was praying that her magic had worked, and that everything would be just as it always had been: kind of boring.

  Rose stared wide-eyed out her bedroom window. It was only 7:30 a.m., but the sky already glowed a bright blue. Even the sun was anxious.

  Rose decided that if even one person marched into the bakery backward that day, she would have to leave town forever. She would run to another town far away and get adopted by a lovely couple who couldn’t have children of their own, and she would never tell them about her origins as a magical baker and how she had once ruined an entire town and then abandoned it like Victor Frankenstein abandoned his monster.

  Not that she was under any pressure or anything.

  While Rose gazed out the window, plotting her escape, she heard a knock at the front door. She bolted down the stairs into the front room, still in her rumpled jeans and striped T-shirt from the night before.

  A man was rapping delicately on the glass door of the bakery.

  After a moment of confused squinting, Rose recognized him as none other than Calamity Falls’ premier acrobat and exotic dancer, Mr. Bastable.

  His appearance was anything but normal. He wore a handsome burgundy sweater under an impeccably tailored gray blazer. He had obviously showered—recently!—because the white poofs of hair on either side of his head sparkled in the sun like fresh-picked cotton. When Rose opened the door, her nose was blasted with the smell of cologne.

  Rose’s heart almost stopped in her chest. It wasn’t over yet—there was something wrong with Mr. Bastable. He was clean and pressed and dressed like a professor, or a newscaster. He looked positively dapper.

  He was still backward.

  But then Mr. Bastable said, in plain English, “Good morning, Rose,” and she breathed a sigh of relief. His breath glowed with the smell of mint. What had gotten into Mr. Bastable? At least he hadn’t called her Esor.

  “Good morning, Mr. B…,” she answered warily.

  “Please forgive me for coming so early. I’ll need two carrot-bran muffins.”

  Rose peered at him with confusion. Mr. Bastable usually came in around 8:30 a.m., when the bakery officially opened, and he had never, in the decade Rose had known him, ordered more than one muffin. Rose reached under the glass counter for two carrot-bran muffins, plopped them in a white paper bag, and handed them to Mr. Bastable.

  “Thank you,” he said, and then he sat down on the wrought-iron bench outside the front window.

  This was terribly strange, and made Rose think that perhaps the Back-to-Before Blackberry Torte had only half worked: Maybe it made people walk and speak normally but turned their routines upside down. Mr. Bastable always hurried away from the bakery as though his life depended on it. But there he was, sitting straight as a pole on the bench outside. He wasn’t even eating his muffins.

  At around eight a.m., Chip came into the shop and helped Rose prepare the bakery for the morning.

  “Did I miss anything crazy last night?” he asked.

  “Oh, no.” Just a townwide zombie disco party, Rose thought.

  Rose and Chip wiped down the glass-front case and the mosaic café tables and set new trays of muffins in place of older, stale ones. All the while, Mr. Bastable just sat on the bench. The sun grew hotter and she could see him dabbing at his forehead with a napkin. At one point he took off his blazer. But otherwise he didn’t move, and he didn’t eat either of his muffins. He just sat and waited.

  At eight-thirty, when Rose flipped the sign on the front door to OPEN, Mr. Bastable was still waiting on the bench.

  “What’s he doing?” asked Aunt Lily from right behind her. Rose gasped and jumped.

  “Oh, we’re not sure,” Rose answered.

  Lily disappeared into the kitchen to help Chip while Ty joined Rose at the counter. A crowd of about ten had gathered outside the door.

  “I think everyone is okay,” Rose told Ty, who had put on a clean striped shirt and a pair of khakis. “They’re walking normally, and they seem to be talking normally. There’s just the curious case of Mr. Bastable. He hasn’t moved in an hour.”

  “Is he waiting for someone?” asked Ty.

  Rose didn’t have time to answer as the crowd burst through the front door and formed a noisy line at the counter. Mrs. Havegood was first. She was wearing a loud red dress and a mink stole.

  “Rose, dear,
I need three dozen snickerdoodles, but real snickerdoodles this time.”

  “I’m sorry about that last batch, Mrs. Havegood,” said Rose. “I know the Cambodian president must have been disappointed.”

  “Oh, he was indeed. We ordered pizza instead, and it turns out that he is lactose intolerant. He vowed never to visit me again, and I told him that was just fine. I am tired of entertaining foreign heads of state. They all have bizarre accents. You can’t understand a thing they say. In any case, would you mind fetching me some regular snickerdoodles, Thyme?”

  Ty flared his nostrils like a bull. “Not at all,” he said, still upset with Mrs. Havegood for lying. He ducked into the kitchen.

  Mrs. Havegood beckoned Rose in close as they waited for Ty to return with the cookies. “Come here, Rose. I’m going to tell you a truth,” she whispered. “When you have all the money in the world, like I do, sometimes even that isn’t enough. And you have to invent things that are even more fabulous than all your money. That is a truth.”

  Rose looked Mrs. Havegood straight in the eye and smiled. It was a startling admission from the biggest liar in town. Rose suddenly stopped hating Mrs. Havegood and saw her for what she was: lonely.

  Ty returned with a white box filled with little tan snickerdoodles. “Here we are, Mrs. Havegood. So the real snickerdoodles are for…?”

  “Me and Jimmy Carter.”

  “Former U.S. president Jimmy Carter?” Ty scoffed, and Rose swallowed a laugh. At least Mrs. Havegood hadn’t lost her sense of imagination entirely.

  “Yes,” she said. “Jimmy and I are not ashamed to say we love snickerdoodles that much.”

  Ty glared at Mrs. Havegood. He wasn’t about to let her win this one. “Let me see him,” Ty said. “Let me see Jimmy Carter.”

  Mrs. Havegood shook her head. “He’s very shy.”

  “You’re lying,” said Ty, his voice growing louder. “You’re a lying liar who lies about everything.”

  Rose cupped her palm over Ty’s mouth. “Ty!” she said.

  But it was too late. “Fine!” Mrs. Havegood cried. “Jimmy!” she called out the window. “Come in here, Jimmy!”