Donut Days Read Online Free Page B

called in to discuss my mom’s sermon.
    “I don’t want to go to Mrs. Stein’s,” Lizzie said, interrupting my thoughts. “Can’t I just come with you tonight?”
    “Sorry,” I said. “No can do.”
    “But Mrs. Stein smells like cough drops,” she protested.
    I smiled, trying not to laugh out loud. Sometimes Lizzie could be a pretty funny, cool kid. Except, of course, when she drove me crazy, which was a lot. Like when she’d skip around the house, singing “This Little Light of Mine” with her heart in every word. Or when she’d pull cupcakes out of her Easy-Bake Oven and hand them to my mom, saying, “Eat this in remembrance of me.”
    When we read Hamlet junior year in English and learned about literary foils, I actually thought about Lizzie and wondered if she was mine.
    She was petite, whereas I was built like a rugby player. There was also the fact that Lizzie liked anything that was pink and ruffled and frilly and I’d rather eat glass than put any of that stuff on. I wasn’t a total tomboy, and I certainly wore lip gloss and makeup, but I knew I was never going to just plain . . . sparkle the way she did. It was hard to be around her and not think God had put an angel on loan just for you.
    Lizzie interrupted my thoughts by loudly haaa- ing her breath on the window and drawing a steamy heart on the glass. “That’s for Mommy,” she said, pointing to it. “Mommy says her heart is full every time she looks at me.”
    “Must be nice,” I mumbled, thinking how I was more apt to give my mom a heart attack. But it wasn’t hard to see why Lizzie would make my mom’s heart swell.
    She breathed on the window a second time and drew another heart. “There’s my heart,” she said. “It gets filled up with love about you.”
    I glanced over at the streaky, lopsided heart and suddenly wondered why Lizzie had to be so darn sweet. Because it meant I felt like a huge pile of dog crap every time I bossed her around or told her the angel wings she made out of paper and strapped to her back with Band-Aids were stupid.
    I looked at the heart Lizzie had drawn for me and tried to think nice thoughts. After all, it wasn’t her fault my mom totally adored her and bought her clothes, where I had to mow, like, six lawns before I could head over to Old Navy for some jeans. I shouldn’t be mad at Lizzie just because of the way my mom acted. “Um, thanks for the heart,” I said. “That’s nice.”
    Lizzie picked at her little-girl tights. “Where are you going tonight?” she asked.
    “I’m going to a donut campout.”
    “What’s a donut campout?”
    “Well,” I said, trying to find the right words, “it’s kind of like this campsite that people go to before a Crispy Dream donut store opens.”
    “Why?”
    “Because they really love the donuts,” I said, which was only partly true, since the stories about the Crispy Dream camp in our local paper, the Paul Bunyan Press, had seemed to indicate people had a slew of reasons for coming to the camp. Like Lloyd Barker from Fargo, North Dakota. Last week, the Press had quoted him as saying: “I’m planning to drive 350 miles to Birch Lake just to be one of the first in line. I was at the opening of the Kansas City Crispy Dream not too long ago, and my goal is to be at a Crispy Dream opening in every state in the Union.”
    There was a picture of Lloyd with the article too. He was standing on his farm in Fargo, wearing overalls and a plaid flannel shirt, and smiling so big, you thought his face might crack. His rough farmer hands were like loaves of bread, and both of them were clutched around a box of Crispy Dream donuts. The box was empty and the caption read: “Lloyd Barker looks forward to a fresh dozen.”
    A couple years ago, when the Crispy Dream company found out that people were willing to pilgrimage to their donut stores and wait for days until they opened, they decided to capitalize on it. They started assigning “donagers”—or donut