“Jeanine.” I laughed.
“This isn’t funny! Can you please just help me?”
“I’m trying, but you have to open your eyes.”
“If I open my eyes, you’re going to make me climb down.”
“That is the goal, isn’t it?”
“What if I can’t?”
“Then we’ll get a crane.”
“I mean it.” She squeezed the trunk tighter.
I thought for a minute. Climbing down was the big goal, but maybe I could start her on a small one. “Don’t think about going down yet. Just open your eyes and see how cool it is up here.”
“Just open my eyes? That’s it?”
“That’s it. Just open your eyes and tell me what the really bright star right over our heads is.”
She was quiet for a bit. “It’s not one star. It’s four.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, it’s Capella. Two giant yellow stars and two red dwarves.”
“It’s super bright.”
“Yeah, it is pretty,” she said like she didn’t like admitting it. “You know, I hate it out here, but I love how you can see the stars. That’s one thing you can’t do at home.”
Home was still somewhere else for Jeanine.
For a while, we sat there, not talking, looking up the sky. I kept covering one eye and trying to see the four different stars in that one bright light, but it was impossible.
“Hey, can I ask you a question?” I said.
“I’m not climbing down.”
“I know. I know. Relax. I just want to know why you climbed up in the first place.”
“I don’t know.”
“Come on. Yes, you do. You plan everything. You even ranked the tree for climbability.”
“It’s dumb. It’s too dumb.”
“I do dumb stuff all the time.”
“But I don’t.”
“I hate to break it to you, but, yeah, you do. It’s just a different kind of dumb stuff.”
She took a deep breath and blew it out hard. “Fine. Mom got a call from Waydin Elementary, you know, just about stuff for when we start school, and it got me thinking about the kids here and how they’re gonna to think I’m, you know, weird.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Thanks.”
“Sorry. I just meant, ‘Uh-huh, I’m listening, keep going,’ not, ‘Uh-huh, you are weird.’”
“Anyway, I was looking out the window, and I just started thinking about how I’d never climbed a tree. And how probably if you grew up around here, you’d have to, I mean you just would have, right? Like how could you grow up here and not? So I thought, I’m going to do it, just so I can be someone who’s climbed a tree, so at least there’ll be one thing about me that’s not different.”
“Okay.”
“Anyway, it turned out to be super, super dumb.”
“But just think about all the money you’ll make selling your climbability formula to the other kids.”
“That’s not funny,” she said, though I thought I heard her smiling against her will.
“Hey, you know, Josh and I were talking today about how if the Doughnut Stop does well, we may want to branch out to other flavors of cream. Starting Your Own Business for Dummies says customers get bored if you don’t offer new product lines. Anyway, so I was thinking, it was good you made Harley say it was okay for us to sell things other than just chocolate cream doughnuts.”
“See.”
“Yeah, well, thanks.”
“You’re welcome.”
Neither of us said anything for a while after that, and I began wondering if my parents were looking for us. Unlike when we used to live in the apartment, there were lots of places we could be in the house, and it could take a pretty long time before they thought it was strange that they hadn’t seen us.
Finally, Jeanine peeked around the trunk and said, “I’m cold. I want to go home.”
“You know the only way home is down, right?”
“I know. Can you, like, hold on to me somehow?”
“Like carry you? I don’t think so.”
“No, just hold on to me. So I know you’re there.”
It took me a while to come up with a system that worked, but eventually we were making our way down the tree. First, I’d lower myself to the next branch. Then I’d reach up and guide Jeanine’s ankle to the branch I was holding on to. Since it was almost completely dark now, we had to feel our way from branch to branch.
When my feet finally reached the ground, I held Jeanine’s hand and she jumped down. Then she did something that is not at all Jeanine: she hugged me. And not a quick hug—a long one, tight like she’d hugged the tree.
“Okay, let’s go. I got to get back,” she said, suddenly taking off for the house.
“What’s the hurry?” I called after her.
“I just wasted like two hours up in that tree. The Solve-a-Thon’s in five days!” When she reached the porch, she turned around. “Hey, what do you think of butterscotch?”
“For what?”
“Your next doughnut flavor. It’s just an idea.”
“I love butterscotch.”
“I know,” she said. “Why do you think I thought of it?”
“It’s genius,” I said and meant it.
22
Here’s one thing Starting Your Own Business for Dummies doesn’t tell you: if you’re not a morning person, don’t start a doughnut business.
The doughnuts and I would have to be ready to leave the house by seven thirty if we were going to be set up on Main Street by eight o’clock. Even if I made the dough and the cream the night before, I’d still need at least two and half hours to cut, fry, roll, and fill all forty doughnuts. That meant getting up at four thirty in the middle of the night. I know, technically, it’s morning then, but who are we kidding? If it’s dark, it’s still night, and no matter what kind of clock-changing is happening, it’s always dark at four thirty.
“Can’t you fry and fill the night before?” Josh said when I explained the problem. It was the day before our grand opening, and we were on the pond.
“No way. There’s no point unless they’re fresh,” I said.
“I know, but four thirty? That’s crazy,” he said, sweeping the puck from the goal and passing it to me.
I put out my
