Or the living room.
Or the kitchen.
Or Jeanine’s room.
Or any of the other places I checked in the hope that I was wrong about where I thought she’d gone.
Finally, I went back to the kitchen and threw open the basement door. A powdery cloud wafted out.
“Zoe?”
“Don’t come down here!”
I started down the stairs. The cloud thickened.
“Zoe!”
White powder carpeted the basement like fake snow in the Christmas windows on Fifth Avenue. Four empty gallon bags of King Arthur Flour sat crumpled on the landing.
“Go make doughnuts!” Zoe appeared out of the flour mist like a zombie in a horror movie.
“Mom’s gonna kill you.”
“Na-unh. I’m gonna clean it up.”
“How?”
“Dustbuster, nuddy,” she said as she clipped in and zoomed off. But this time, instead of squealing, she coughed and was coughing so hard by the time she reached the end, she couldn’t unclip herself.
“My eyes hurt,” she said, rubbing them.
I helped her down. “Let’s get out of here.”
“But we have to clean up.”
“We? You mean you and Tawatty Tawatty Dabu Dabu.”
“They can’t help.” She plopped down on a mound of flour, and it whirled up around her. “They’re gone.”
“Where’d they go?”
She stared at the floor.
“Zoe, do you know where they went?”
“Home home.” Her bottom lip quivered.
I guess Zoe was still waking up in the wrong place too.
“C’mon. Let’s go,” I said.
She didn’t move.
“Don’t you want to help fill the doughnuts?”
The corners of her mouth twitched. A second later, both arms shot in the air.
“Forget it,” I said.
Her arms jerked higher.
“Ugh, fine,” I groaned as I hoisted every last bowling ball of her onto my hip, and clawed my way up the stairs.
I poured water over her eyes in the bathroom until they felt better. Then we went into the kitchen and rolled out the dough together. Once it was half an inch thick like the recipe said, I let Zoe cut out circles with the top of a glass like Mom had taught us to do for biscuits.
Hot oil plus Zoe seemed like an even worse combination than chili peppers plus chocolate, so back in the box she went while I fried the doughnuts. It took only two minutes for the dough circles to puff up golden, but the whole process took a while because I could only fry two at a time, and as soon as I took them out of the oil, I had to roll them in a mixture of sugar, salt, and vanilla bean.
When all ten doughnuts were fried and sugared and cool enough not to burn off your fingerprints—I’m missing four—I put Zoe on a stool at the counter and handed her the gun filled with cream.
“Okay. Now, nice and slow,” I said and carefully pushed the tip of the gun into a doughnut.
As Zoe squeezed the plunger, the doughnut inflated like it was taking a breath.
“Whoa!” she said, her eyes widening with the doughnut.
Before long, chocolate oozed out the other side.
“Okay, that’s good… Stop… Stop! Stop!”
“You don’t have to yell,” she said, finally letting go.
“Watch it or I’ll French at you.”
Zoe rolled her eyes. “You can’t French.”
I held the doughnut up close to my face and breathed it in.
Cinnamon French toast…funnel cakes…hot chocolate… My mouth went off like a sprinkler. Please, please, please let them taste as good as they smell, I prayed. I crossed my fingers, opened my mouth, and—
Ow!
I looked down just in time to see Zoe pulling away. There was a wet mark on my sleeve.
“You bit me? I let you use the gun and you bit me?”
Zoe’s bottom lip puffed out. “I wanna doughnut.”
“And you’ll get one.”
“But how come you get to go first?”
“Because I made them.”
“I helped.”
I thought for a minute then held up the I-mean-business finger my parents are always using on Zoe. “Don’t ever bite me again. You want to bite everybody else, that’s up to you, but not me. Got it?”
“Got it. We don’t bite Tris.”
“All right then, here.” I handed her the doughnut. “Don’t eat yet. Just hold it.”
Zoe cradled the doughnut as if it were a living thing.
I took another doughnut and shot it full of cream. “Okay, ready?”
She nodded.
“Three…two—”
“One!” Zoe yelled and crammed as much of the doughnut as would fit into her mouth.
I was still holding mine. It was weird, but after everything I’d done, suddenly I couldn’t take a bite. If it was just a good doughnut, I didn’t want to know.
“Mmm,” Zoe moaned and gobbled up the other half. That was a pretty good sign, but it didn’t mean much since I could fill a dog biscuit with chocolate cream and Zoe would go crazy for it. But then, with chocolate leaking out of the corners of her mouth, Zoe said, “I don’t want to be president anymore. When I’m growed up, I’m gonna be a doughnut maker too!”
That’s when I had to know: Had I really just made life-changing doughnuts?
I took a bite, then closed my eyes and focused on all the different things happening in my mouth: springy cake bursting with vanilla; sugar and salt crystals crunching between my teeth; waves of chocolate rolling slow and smooth across my tongue. Mom had been right. The whole was so much bigger than the parts, so much bigger even than something you just tasted. Taste was only in your mouth. This went zinging all over from my toes to my fingers to my brain.
Phew…these weren’t just good doughnuts. They were picture-in-the-paper-get-up-at-dawn-flying-carpet doughnuts.
Phew? Yeah, it’s not how I thought I’d feel either. Sure, I’d expected a little phew, but mostly what I’d expected was Shazzam! And there was none of that. Just phew and kind of a now-what emptiness.
What was wrong with me? Why wasn’t I taking my victory lap around the kitchen? Or running for the phone to call Josh? Or running upstairs to tell Mom? Or just plain shoving another mind-blowing doughnut in my
