My parents have now hired every electrician in the county, but nobody has been able to figure out why, every few days, all the lights in the house turn off and refuse, no matter how nicely you ask, to turn back on. What really stumps people is that even when the lights go out, everything else works just fine. I told my parents to stop wasting their money, but they refuse to accept what I think is pretty obvious: when the Purple Demon gets bored, she turns out all the lights so she can watch us bump into things.
The Tuesday after Thanksgiving, I got an email from Charlie. The second I saw it in my inbox, that bad feeling I’d been carrying around since our call was suddenly gone because I knew what the email was going to say: sorry I couldn’t come for Thanksgiving; sorry I didn’t seem sorry; sorry I got off so fast; sorry I didn’t ask one thing about Petersville; sorry about not sending more emails.
Then I clicked it open.
From: [email protected]
Subject: Hey
I MADE IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
And that was it.
I wish I could tell you I sent an email right back and that it said: YAY!!!!!!!!!!!!! That’s what the twelve-year-old kid in that other family, the one I was supposed to be, would have done right after he’d dug up worms in the backyard and made bark tea. But I didn’t. Me, I stole The Wolves of Willoughby Chase off the couch where Jeanine had left it, climbed up to the attic, and stayed there in bed under the covers reading for the rest of the day.
12
After I finished Starting Your Own Business for Dummies, I went back to the General Store to show Winnie the chapter on costs, because it was clear I’d need to know the doughnuts’ ingredients to figure out what it would cost to make them. I was prepared for her to give me a hard time as usual, but instead she acted like she’d known all along I’d need the ingredients to put together the budget. She even said, “It’s about time, Slick.” She’d started calling me Slick by then. I never asked why, but I’m guessing it’s because I’m not, so she thought it was a big laugh.
The next day, I got up early and shut myself in my parents’ office with everything I’d need to work up the budget: the list of ingredients, Starting Your Own Business for Dummies, and a stack of Mom’s peanut butter–butterscotch granola bars. The book says setting goals and sticking to them is key to getting your business off the ground, so I told myself I couldn’t come out until I figured out how much of each ingredient we’d have to order every month.
Things started off okay. I knew my first step was just to come up with the number of doughnuts we’d make in a month. After talking to Winnie, Josh and I had decided that for starters, we’d sell eighty doughnuts every week: forty on Saturday and forty on Sunday. To get the number of doughnuts we’d sell in a month, I just had to multiply the eighty doughnuts we’d be making in a week times the number of weeks in a month:
80 x 4 = 320
The next part wasn’t too hard either. Since Winnie’s recipe made ten doughnuts, all I had to do was to figure out how many batches of doughnuts I’d have to make to get 320 of them:
10 x ? = 320
In fourth grade, Mr. Gratz taught us that if you have a times problem and you’re looking for what to times your number by, you actually need to divide:
? = 320 ÷ 10
? = 32
This is where the problems started.
Problem number one: the list of ingredients was full of annoying fractions. They were all over the place—3¾ cups of flour, 1⅓ cups of sugar, ¼ teaspoon of cinnamon. There were so many fractions I was sure Winnie had put them in there on purpose just to make the math harder.
Problem number two: I wasn’t sure how to multiply fractions using the calculator on my parents’ computer. Was I supposed to turn them into decimals and then multiply them? In the end, I just decided to do the calculations on paper, which took forever.
Problem number three: I knew I was making mistakes, like always. The thing is, all those other times I’d messed up some math problem, it had been in school, and those mistakes hadn’t really mattered since those questions were all made-up. But this problem, the doughnut problem, wasn’t made-up, and if I messed up this time, I’d be messing up something real.
Problem number four: because I was sure I was making mistakes, I kept redoing the problems. And the more worried I got, the more mistakes I made. And every time I redid a problem, I came out with a different answer, sometimes a really different answer.
Eventually, I’d erased and rewritten stuff so many times, I tore the paper. That’s when I threw my pencil at the wall. And then, because that didn’t make me feel any better, I threw a whole bunch of stuff at the wall: a tape dispenser, a plastic cup, a box of paper clips.
I was not in a good way, as Mom likes to say. I needed a break. I was out of granola bars. I’d missed lunch. I needed to eat and go outside and skate so fast I couldn’t think about anything but moving and breathing.
But what about my goal? I’d set a goal, and the book said I needed to stick to it.
Then it came to me. I’d just set a new goal. Something easy. Something fast. The book never said you couldn’t change goals. I looked back at the recipe.
Cocoa: 3 tablespoons. Three was a nice round number. Perfect. I’d figure out how many tablespoons of cocoa I’d need to make 320 doughnuts, come up with how many boxes of cocoa that was, and then I’d
