The Cupcake Diaries Collection: Katie and the Cupcake Cure; Mia in the Mix; Emma on Thin Icing; Alexis and the Perfect Recipe (11 page)

I took one off the rack. “I kind of like this,” I told Mia. “It looks good on the mannequin. But she doesn’t have a head, so anything would look good on her, I guess.”

“No, I like it!” Mia said. I could tell she was excited. “Try it on!”

The dressing rooms were lined up on the side wall. A salesperson used a key to open up one of the silver doors for me. I stepped inside and tried on the dress.

I looked at myself in the mirror. “Not bad,” I had to admit.

Then I heard Mia’s voice outside. “Katie, come out! I am dying to see how you look!”

I cautiously stepped outside the dressing room. Mia’s eyes got wide when she saw me.

“Ooh, it’s perfect! Turn around!” she ordered.

I felt like the world’s worst fashion model as I turned in a circle for Mia’s inspection.

“You have got to get it,” she said. “Wear it with some short black boots and it’ll be fabulous.”

“What if I don’t have short black boots?” I asked.

“Then you can borrow mine!”

I looked at the price tag. It cost less than the money Mom had given me to spend. “I think I’ll get it,” I said. “That was easy!”

Then I heard a familiar loud voice nearby. “That dress is gross, Mags. I wouldn’t wear that to gym class.”

Sydney!
I had to get inside that dressing room before she saw me. I turned to run, but it was too late.

“Isn’t it a little too early for Halloween, Katie?”

There she goes,
I thought. If I couldn’t escape, I might as well face her.

I spun around. “What do you mean, Sydney?”

“Well, that’s a grape costume, isn’t it?” she asked. “No, wait—you’re that purple dinosaur.”

She made me so angry! I wished I had some great comeback to give her. But as usual, she left me tongue-tied.

“You know, Sydney, violet was a hot runway color this fall,” Mia said in that supercool tone of hers. “I was just reading about it in the color trends column in
Fashion Weekly
.”

Now it was Sydney’s turn to get tongue-tied. But she managed to recover. “Violet or not, it’s an ugly dress.”

For the first time ever, I thought of something to say to Sydney. And I wasn’t afraid to say it, either. Maybe Mia was rubbing off on me a little.

“I don’t care if
you
think it’s ugly,” I said. “I like it.”

Then I marched back into my dressing room and out of the corner of my eye I saw Mia smirk. My heart was pounding. Something about that dress made me feel good. Good enough to tell stupid old Sydney to shut up.

And that’s why my purple dress is still my favorite dress to this day. And as it turns out—it’s my lucky one, too.

S
aturday morning was, as the skateboarding dudes in my school say, intense. Mom and I got up super-early and started mixing batches and batches of icing. The girls came over, and Emma’s mom came over to help too.

It took hours, but we got everything done. My mom and Emma’s mom iced the cupcakes with me. Mia wrote the letters on them with her perfect handwriting. Alexis and Emma made a big cardboard sign for the table that said
CUPCAKES
$2.00. Then they helped us with the icing.

By eleven o’clock we had two hundred perfect cupcakes. We carefully transferred them to Emma’s mom’s minivan, and she drove them to the school. My mom and I brought the sign, a cash box, one
blue and one yellow tablecloth, and plastic trays for the cupcakes.

The day was perfect for a fund-raiser—sunny but not too hot. When we got to the school, the big parking lot was roped off with police tape. There were a bunch of canopies set up in a square all around the lot. Blue and yellow balloons tied to the canopies waved and wiggled in the air. We searched around until we found a table with a note that said
CUPCAKE CLUB
on it.

We started setting up. We spread out the blue tablecloth and then draped the yellow one over it in another direction so you could see both colors. Alexis and Emma taped up their sign. We put about half the cupcakes on platters. Then we stood back and checked out our table.

“Not bad,” I said.

“It’s a little flat,” Mia said, turning her head sideways. “Maybe next time we could put the platters on pillars or something so that some are high and some are low.”

Mom walked up behind us and put her arm around me.

“Well,
I
think it looks perfect!” she said. “Why don’t you girls go stand in front of the table? I’ll take a picture.”

We quickly lined up: me, Mia, Alexis, and then Emma.

“Say ‘cupcake’!” Mom called out.

“Cupcake!” we shouted.

Alexis glanced at her watch. “We still have fifteen minutes. Let’s check out the competition.”

“Good idea,” I agreed.

We walked around. There must have been about a dozen tables besides ours. The basketball team was still setting up their dunking booth at the end of the parking lot. The girls’ soccer team had a booth where they would take your picture, print it out, and put it in a frame. Then you could decorate the frame with shapes like stars and soccer balls. Then we walked past the Chess Club’s table.

“Oh, no!” Emma cried. “A bake sale!”

The table was covered with paper plates topped with cookies, brownies, and yes—cupcakes.

“I think our table stands out more,” Mia whispered to us. “And they don’t have special Park Street Middle School cupcakes, either.”

“Besides, they have mostly cookies,” Alexis pointed out. “And they’re only charging fifty cents each for those.”

Mia and Alexis made me feel better. I think Emma felt better too.

Then we heard loud music coming from the other side of the parking lot. It was dance music, just like I’d heard in the clothing store the night before. We all turned our heads at the same time.

The PGC had set up their booth!

“Let’s get a closer look,” Mia suggested.

We walked across the parking lot. I hated to admit it, but the PGC booth looked really cool. The table was covered with a black cloth with silver stars dangling from it. There were glittery makeup cases all over the table. They had a banner (the printed kind you order from the store) tied to the canopy up above. It read
PGC’S MAKEOVER MAGIC
.

“What exactly are they doing?” I wondered out loud.

We walked even closer. Sydney and Bella were busy spreading out makeup and brushes and stuff on the table. Bella had a small sign on the table in front of her that said,
GOTH MAKEOVERS ARE MY SPECIALITY
. She was wearing a black dress with a poufy skirt. Her reddish-brown hair was pulled back in a sleek ponytail, and her face looked kind of pale. Smudgy dark makeup ringed her eyes.

Next to her, Sydney wore her long blond hair straight and sleek. She was wearing a long white T-shirt over a gray tank with black leggings and
boots. It reminded me of an outfit that Mia might wear.

Callie was sitting at a tiny round table set up next to them with a cash box behind her. I noticed that she was dressed exactly the same as Sydney.

So was Maggie. She looked as perfect as Sydney and Callie, except that a long lock of frizzy brown hair was hanging over her eyes. She darted through the crowd, handing out “Makeover Magic” flyers.

“Flyers! Why didn’t we think of that?” Alexis said with a frown.

“We don’t need flyers to sell cupcakes,” Mia said. “Cupcakes sell themselves.”

The PGC booth worried me. I mean, it looked really good, a lot better than our table with its cardboard sign. Maybe Sydney had been right all along—they were going to win the contest with their secret weapon.

“Speaking of selling cupcakes, we should get back to the booth,” Alexis said.

That’s when Maggie bumped into us.

“Oh, hi,” she said, shoving a flyer into my hand. “When things get slow at your cupcake stand, stop by for a makeover.”

“We’ll try, but I don’t think things are going to get slow,” I said.

We walked away, determined more than ever to sell every last one of our cupcakes.

“The PGC might have music and flyers and glitter, but we have delicious cupcakes!” I cheered. “Let’s go win this contest!”

We ran back to our cupcake booth just as the fund-raiser officially opened. A bunch of people came in all at once. We were right by the front entrance, which was a good thing. Almost everybody stopped to check us out. They said nice things like “Wow, it’s the school colors!” and “What nice cupcakes!”

But for the first few minutes, nobody bought one.

Then Mrs. Moore, my math teacher, came to the table.

I almost didn’t recognize her. When she’s teaching us, she wears skirts and blouses and dark colors. Her hair is mostly gray and she always has it pulled back.

But today she was wearing a sweatshirt with a teddy bear on it and jeans. Her hair was loose and went down to the top of her shoulders. I thought it looked nice that way.

“Hello, Miss Brown,” she said. She looked at the table. “It must have been a lot of work to make all of these cupcakes.”

“There are more in boxes,” I told her. “We made two hundred. Well, two hundred and four, actually. That’s seventeen dozen.”

I was hoping my math would impress her, and maybe it did.

“I’ll take one, please,” she said, and handed me two dollars in exchange for a cupcake. She took a bite right in front of me.

“Vanilla!” she said. “My favorite.”

Then she walked away.

I couldn’t believe it. “It’s our first sale!” I cried. Everyone let out a cheer. I turned over the money to Alexis, who was in charge of the cash box.

Mrs. Moore must have brought us good luck, because we started selling cupcakes like crazy after that. Some people asked for blue, some people asked for yellow, but most people didn’t care which ones they got.

We were so busy selling cupcakes that I forgot about the PGC booth—until a friend of Mia’s came to our table. I recognized her as one of the girls Mia talks to in the hallway.

“Hi, Sophie,” Mia said. Then she gave a little gasp.

I turned away from the cupcakes to see what had startled Mia. Then I noticed—Sophie’s face looked really strange. Her skin had so much white makeup
on it that she looked like a clown. The dark makeup around her eyes was smudged everywhere.

“I know,” Sophie said, noticing Mia’s face. “It’s terrible, isn’t it? And it cost me five dollars!”

That’s when I realized—Sophie was a victim of the Makeover Magic booth!

“It’s not so bad,” Mia said.

“I was hoping to look pale and mysterious, but this is too much.” Sophie sighed. “You should see what’s going on over there. It’s more like Makeover
Tragic
than Makeover Magic.”

Mia and I looked at each other. Then I turned to Emma.

“Can you and Alexis handle things for a minute?” I asked.

Emma nodded. “No problem.”

We quickly made our way to the PGC booth. A big crowd had gathered around.

“Maybe Sophie just got unlucky,” I said. “It looks like they’re doing great.”

We inched our way closer so we could get a better view. I realized that most of the crowd wasn’t in line to get a makeover. Instead they were watching the action at the booth.

Sydney swiped a brush across the face of a girl sitting across from her.

“There,” she said. “You’re ready for the runway!”

The girl turned around, and a few people giggled. I tried not to laugh myself. Sydney had put so much fake tanner on the girl that her face looked like a tangerine. Glittery blue eye shadow covered her eyelids.

“I don’t know much about fashion, but that doesn’t look right to me,” I said to Mia.

“That shouldn’t look right to
anybody
,” Mia whispered back.

“Okay!” Sydney called out. “Who’s next?”

Nobody stirred. Then the girl with the orange face nudged her friend. “You promised you would get one if I got one.”

The friend looked terrified, but she knew she had to go through with it. She slowly walked up to Callie and handed her five dollars.

“Thanks,” Callie said with a smile. But I know Callie really well, and behind that smile I knew she wasn’t really happy. I felt just a little bad for her.

The crowd thinned out, and Callie noticed me and Mia standing there.

“Hey, Katie,” she called out. “Do you want a makeover?”

“Um, you know I don’t wear makeup,” I said. “Sorry. You should come check out our cupcake
table. I bet your dad would like one. They’re vanilla.”

A woman I didn’t know tapped me on the shoulder. She wore sunglasses and her brown hair was swept back in a tan scarf with designs on it.

“Did you make the cupcakes with the school colors?” she asked.

“Yes—I mean, we did,” I said. “We have a club. The Cupcake Club.”

“They were beautiful
and
delicious,” she said. “Made from scratch, I could tell. I would love to have you make some for the PTA luncheon this spring. We’d pay you, of course.”

Mia and I exchanged glances. Someone wanted to pay us to make cupcakes. Just like professionals. How awesome was that?

Maggie flew up to the woman. “Mom! The Cupcake Club is a
rival
booth! You’re consorting with the enemy.”