Bliss (16 page)

“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.

She promptly stopped talking. She also promptly stopped looking Rose in the eye. She just stared past Rose.

“Leigh? You okay?” Rose said.

Leigh nodded, still staring into the distance, then crawled slowly into the kitchen and up the stairs to her bedroom.

“Where is she going?” Sage asked.

Rose followed her upstairs and watched as Leigh crawled into her bed, turned on her glowing ladybug night-light, and pulled the covers under her chin. She lay there, silent, and closed her eyes.

“Are you okay?” Rose asked again. “Leigh?”

But Leigh was already snoring. It was very much unlike Leigh to go to bed in the middle of the day, without any supper. But then again, she
had
just eaten a whole slice of cake.

In the hallway, Rose passed Mrs. Carlson, who announced, “Since the young one is napping, I'm going to take a nap as well. There's been too much action for the day, and my blood pressure can't take it. The muscleman and the supermodel ought to be back soon, anyway. They can take care of that mess downstairs,” she said. “You are a strange family. You know that, don't you?”

Rose nodded, and Mrs. Carlson said no more, just lumbered slowly away.

Outside in the backyard, Ty and Sage were stacking the plates of cake in the little red wagon that Albert kept in the garage. Rose remembered when her father used to cart her and Ty around town on errands. Now Ty was using it to cart around magical cake that their parents would surely disapprove of.

“I don't know about this,” Rose said. “Leigh is acting weird. She went to sleep.”

“Good,” Ty said. “That oughtta keep her out of our hair.”

“But isn't that a bit weird?” A dull ache had settled in Rose's gut, and that usually meant that she needed to stop whatever she was doing and reevaluate it. The cake had made the girls walk away like robots, and Leigh just fell right to sleep. Was that healthy? It didn't look like the other recipes in the book, and it contained black oily tears from a warlock. Was this really the right solution? She wished she could call her parents and ask. But, of course, she couldn't.

“We didn't do all this baking for nothing,” Ty huffed. “I am personally making sure that everyone in town eats a piece of this stupid cake.” Ty folded his arms over his chest. “Rose, we have to fix the town before Mom and Dad get back.”

“Oh … you're right,” Rose said optimistically. She didn't want Ty to think that she was weak. “It'll definitely work.”

Ty pulled a map of Calamity Falls out of his pocket and walked away, pulling the cart with one hand. “This should take, oh … seventeen hours,” he said grumpily, and he pulled the wagon out the driveway and down the street, leaving Rose and Sage standing alone in the backyard. They stepped back into the kitchen and exhaled.

Now there was just the matter of the mess.

Not only had they failed to clean the front room of the bakery after the librarians' brawl, but they also had dirtied the kitchen beyond repair. Forty-four filthy cake pans were stacked in teetering piles in the kitchen sink; dried gobs of gray-pink dough clung to the sides of the mixing vat and also to the wall and cabinet doors; and Rose had no idea what the clear puddles on the floor were—water, egg white, sweat, or warlock's eye preservative liquid.

Not to mention the mess Rose and Sage found when they wandered outside: Dozens of little dirty paper plates and plastic forks littered the sidewalk. The seething horde of girls had trampled all of the flowers and shrubs outside the house, and there was a gaping hole in the middle of the beloved trampoline where one girl had jumped too high and fallen straight through.

When they opened the door to go back into the kitchen, Chip and Aunt Lily were back from their lunch at Pierre Guillaume's, looking, indeed, like a supermodel and a muscleman.

“I thought you said you were going to
clean up
!” Chip shouted. He stormed angrily upstairs to fetch cleaning supplies. “Honestly, Rose! What were you thinking?”

Lily cornered Rose and Sage by the walk-in refrigerator. She batted her eyelashes in a way that was both attractive and terrifying. “Would either of you mind very much telling me just what is going on?”

Before Rose could think of a suitable lie, Sage blurted out, “It's all because of the cookbook!”

CHAPTER 12

Lying to Aunt Lily

“
C
ooooook-booooook?” Lily asked, drawing out the word to three times its usual length.

“Yes, um, the Betty Crocker cookbook!” Rose could barely breathe—she felt like the air was sticky maple syrup running down her nose and filling her lungs. “See, we made all this wonderful cake, and everyone came to have a piece, and that's why the yard is all trampled and there are all those plates on the lawn.”

Lily knelt down, took off her beret, and shook her hair out—not that there was much hair to shake out. Rose noticed that Lily had a way of kneeling down whenever she wanted to say something important, so that her eyes were directly across from Rose's instead of three feet higher.

“What
kind
of cake did you make?” Lily asked, squinting in a way that let Rose know that Aunt Lily knew she was lying.

“Strawberry,” said Rose without a moment's hesitation.

“Tell her what we really made!” Sage shouted.

Then Rose did something she wasn't proud of: She opened the walk-in refrigerator and shoved Sage inside.

She leaned up against the shut door to keep him from escaping, even as he screamed for mercy. It was a good thing she'd worn rubber-soled sneakers that morning, because she was able to hold the door shut just by bending her knees and wedging her sneakers against the floor.

Now his shouts were muffled. Rose knew that he was screaming about the cookbook, but he could just as easily have been screaming about wanting a Nintendo Wii.

“Regular old strawberry cake, eh?” said Lily, arching her perfect eyebrows. “Did Sage help?”

“Mmm-hmm!” Rose said, nodding. The fridge jolted against her back; Sage had begun throwing his entire body against the door.

“Rose,” said Lily. “It's obvious that you're hiding something. You literally just locked your brother in the refrigerator. Why don't you just tell me what's really going on? It can't be
that
bad. Besides, I did tons of bad things when I was young. Once, I glued my father's shoes to the floor!” Lily let out a chuckle. “Can you believe that? Shoes! Glue! I mean, what was I thinking?”

At that moment, Rose was knocked to her knees as Sage burst triumphantly from the fridge. “I got a running start!” he crowed. “I'm strong!”

“There's no denying
that
,” said Aunt Lily.

Then Sage remembered why he'd been pushed into the fridge in the first place. “Rose is lying!” he shouted, throwing his arms around Aunt Lily's long neck. “We made a cake from the
real
cookbook!”

“What cookbook?” Lily asked.

“We have a magical family cookbook,” Sage said. “Our parents told us not to touch it, but we convinced Rose to let us.”

Rose wiped off her knees and stood. She wanted badly to run to the phone and dial her mother and say, “Mama, we broke out the cookbook and almost wrecked the town and now Sage is telling our pretty, fake aunt about it”—but her tongue had gone all heavy and limp, like a wet sock, and she couldn't get it to move, much less form words.