“There’s just one problem,” Josh had said after he’d wolfed down the doughnut.
I knew exactly where he was going. “Winnie.”
“We have to tell her,” he said.
“I know. And if she doesn’t like it, I kind of feel like we have to use the original recipe unless we want to make completely different doughnuts, and I don’t want to do that because the whole point was bringing the chocolate cream doughnut back to Petersville.”
“So I guess we just tell her and pray she’s okay with it.”
“But we don’t have to tell her like now or anything.” I wasn’t prepared to deal with Winnie yet.
“Nope. No rush.” Josh clearly wasn’t either.
When Josh and I were preparing for our investor presentation, I told him everything my dad had taught me about making a good pitch. Josh was now a word-punching master. All his lines had these tunes you couldn’t get out of your head like commercials on TV. I’d tried to convince him to do the whole pitch on his own, but he wouldn’t go for it. He said I had to do it with him because the Doughnut Stop was my idea, and investors would want to see the brains behind the operation. In this case, since our only potential investors were my parents, I had to agree with him.
Even with me doing half the pitch, I still wasn’t sure my parents would come through. I know what you’re thinking: the project was their idea. How could they not support you after you did all that work? That’s what Josh thought too. And it’s not that I didn’t see that. I did. But they’d said some things that worried me. Things like, “Tris, even if the doughnut stand never happens, think how much you’ve learned from this process!” Like I’d been playing a round of Life as the doughnut business guy and wasn’t that a lot of fun. They didn’t get that this wasn’t just a game I was wasting time playing till school started. Maybe that’s how it had begun, but it wasn’t like that anymore. Now I was building something real, an actual business with real doughnuts for real people, chocolate-cream-doughnut-starved people.
I got out of bed, put on my good pants, a button-down shirt, and my only tie. Josh and I had decided to dress up to show my parents how serious we were, and also because the book says you have to dress for success.
It must have been a while since I’d worn my good pants, because as I climbed down the ladder, there was a loud, ripping sound. I waited for somebody to laugh, but nobody even looked up.
“I’m just so disappointed in you,” I heard Mom say as I climbed the rest of the way down.
“But I didn’t do it,” Zoe said, stomping her dress-up Cinderella heels.
“It’s just gross,” Jeanine said. “And it means you’re still a baby.”
“I’m not a baby. It’s not mine. Look at it. It doesn’t even look like mine.”
Jeanine and Mom bent over and studied whatever it was on the floor.
“What are we looking at?” I said, peering over Jeanine. “Oh.”
There, on the hall carpet, was a sizable pile of poop.
“She does have a point,” I said.
“What do you mean?” Mom said.
“It doesn’t look like hers.”
“How would you know? Have you been studying her poops?” Jeanine asked.
“No, I haven’t been studying her poops,” I said, giving Jeanine a dirty look.
Would it kill her to stick up for Zoe? I mean, what did I know? Maybe Zoe had taken a poop right there in the middle of the upstairs hall, and yeah, it was completely disgusting, but Zoe didn’t need Jeanine on her case too. That was Mom’s job. “She just never flushes the toilet,” I explained.
Zoe doesn’t like the flush. She doesn’t trust it will be satisfied with sucking down only what’s in the bowl, so when she does flush, which is only when my parents make her, she quickly pulls the lever and takes off like she’s just lit a stick of dynamite.
Just then, my father came up the stairs. “So, this is where the party is.”
“Zoe pooped on the floor, and now she’s lying about it,” Jeanine said.
Zoe stomped on Jeanine’s foot with the Cinderella shoe. “I did not!”
Jeanine screamed.
“Let me see, honey,” Mom said, bending over to examine Jeanine’s foot. “You’re okay. Go put some ice on it.”
“What happened to using our words, Zo?” Dad said. “Say, ‘sorry.’”
“Sorry.”
“That’s it? You’re not going to punish her?”
“What were you looking for? Firing squad, guillotine perhaps?”
“She broke my toe!”
“So the guillotine then,” Dad said. “Come on, Zo Zo. We’re going to chop off your head.”
Zoe giggled.
“What kind of a message do you think you send by turning this into a joke?”
“Just go get some ice, Jeanine,” Mom said.
Jeanine made a face and staggered off down the hall.
“Now, what are we going to do about this?” Mom pointed at the poop.
Dad squatted and studied it. Then he scooped Zoe up and leaned his forehead against hers. “Zo Zo, is that your poop?”
“No.”
“Is it Tawatty Tawatty Dabu Dabu’s poop?” I asked.
“I told you, they’re gone.”
“All right then.” My father put Zoe down.
“All right then, what?” Mom said.
Dad raised an aha finger. “What we have here is a case of mystery poop.”
“Tom.” Mom rolled her eyes. “Would you please pretend to be an adult?”
“Don’t worry. The kids and I are on the case. Right, guys?” he said, bouncing his eyebrows up and down at us.
“Don’t look at me. I’ve got work to do,” I said.
“Then would my two remaining turd detectives start with cleaning it up, and would whoever left it, please not do it again?” Mom said.
She so still thought it was Zoe’s.
When I got down
