100 Days of Cake Read Online Free

Elle: Finishing up here; there in a few.
    â€œI gotta go. I’ll see you at home.”
    â€œYeah, okay.” V lets me go, and I practically run to the door.
    Behind me I hear one of the Jaclyn’s girls snarl, “What was that all about?”
    Closing my eyes, I try not to let it bother me too much. My shrink—Dr. B.—says that sometimes it helps just to take a couple of deep breaths, but it was like breathing through clam chowder. So I do.
    How is it still so freaking hot out?
    When Elle gets to the Jeep, she doesn’t even object when I crank up the AC knob as soon as I climb in.
    â€œSorry I made you go,” Elle says. “I had no idea T.J. would be there.”
    I shake my head and try the breathing thing again.
    â€œAre you okay?” she asks.
    The answer is probably no. I want to scream or cry or go to bed for a week. But it’s almost worse to be honest and have people—even people like Elle, who’s been my best friend for longer than our parents were married—look at me like I’m broken. So I try to rein it all in.
    â€œYeah, that was fun,” I say flatly. “We should definitely go to more parties.”
    When Elle drops me off and I make it upstairs to my room, all I want to do is fall into the huge sleigh bed andpass out, but there’s a piece of horribly dilapidated blue-and-red-stained cake on a plate by my nightstand, along with a note in Mom’s chunky handwriting.
    Hope you had a great time tonight! Figured I’d leave this for you in case you’re hungry. I have a good feeling about this one!
    â€”Mom
    Bunching the note into a ball, I hurl it across the room and miss the garbage can by at least a foot.

DAY 13

Ooey-Gooey Butter Cake
    A fter seeing T.J. last night, and all the weird confusion over being Alex’s Molly , I want to never leave the house again. But if I stay home, Mom will ask a million questions about everything, and that will just make it all so much worse. Plus, I have an appointment with Dr. B. in the afternoon, and I always look forward to those.
    Without incident, I manage to get out of bed, throw on clothes, and bike to the store in the oppressive heat. Since I’m free to work days now that school’s out, I’m supposed to handle the swing shift today—half with Alex in the evening and half with JoJo Banks in the early afternoon.
    During the school year JoJo opens the place and is gone by the time I get there, so she’s just initials on the schedule to me. Based on the name, I thought she’d be some gray-haired soft woman like my grandma, but it turns out she’smaybe four or five years older than me with a streaky orange tan. Who fake-bakes when you live in Florida and it’s a thousand degrees out?
    Strike one against JoJo is that she has Maury Povich’s show blaring on the TV so loud, I can hear it outside the store.
    The little bell on the door dings when I come in, and she briefly looks up at me.
    â€œMolly?” she asks.
    â€œYep.”
    â€œCool. I already checked the tanks,” she says, then turns back to some guy on Maury doing a “You’re Not the Father” dance.
    Strike two is that she gets vocally angry when the next guy insists he isn’t the baby daddy, despite the paternity test results.
    â€œWhy can’t these A-hats man up?” she yells. “That’s your child!”
    It doesn’t seem like she’s talking to me, so I don’t feel any pressing need to respond. On the back of someone’s discarded receipt, I sketch Maury, making his hair extra crazy. Art class was always my favorite before I dropped all my electives.
    A commercial comes on the screen for some antidepressant. There’s an attractive thirtysomething blond woman sitting in a rocking chair in a dark room, watching through the window as her attractive husband, attractive kids, and equally attractive dog are having the time of their livesplaying