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Mr Bastable noticed Gus’s folded ears peeking out from Rose’s backpack. “Hey, is that a cat? What’s wrong with its ears?”
Rose felt Gus’s body tense inside her backpack.
“Oh, nothing! He’s a breed called a Scottish Fold. They just have folded ears.”
“Huh,” Mr Bastable mused, biting absentmindedly into one of the Love Muffins. “Somewhat like the ear of a frog, all folded up on its face.”
Gus dug his claws into Rose’s back. “Ow!” She jumped.
“What?” Mr Bastable said.
“Nothing,” said Rose.
Ignoring her, Mr Bastable took another crumbly bite and swallowed loudly. Suddenly, his eyes flashed a bright green, his back straightened, and he cleared his throat. “Felidia!” he shouted. “I must woo my beloved Felidia once more, for she is a supreme woman, and supreme women must be wooed daily! I’m coming, Felidia!”
Then Mr Bastable turned away, the box of muffins tucked under his arm. He slammed the door in Rose’s face.
“I guess it worked,” Rose said, though she didn’t want to think about what was about to transpire inside the Bastable-Thistle bungalow.
“Ears like a frog,” said Gus. “Of all the ridiculous nonsense.”
Florence the Florist thought that Rose was a burglar until she took a bite out of a piece of Seeing-Eye Shortbread. “Ah! Rose Bliss!” she cried out, and sighed with relief that the Blisses hadn’t forgotten about her.
Rose caught Pierre Guillaume on his day off. “Sacré bleu!” he cried as he took a bite of Frugal Framboise Cake, which promptly dissuaded him from buying a yacht on eBay. “That mother of yours, Purdy, she eez always looking out for me,” he said.
Box by box, Rose went around town, narrowly averting small disasters, until just one box remained: the one in her backpack, the one she’d really wanted to deliver, for which all the others had been only an excuse.
She pedalled up the impossible incline of Sparrow Hill and parked her bike in front of Stetson’s Doughnuts and Automotive Repair.
Rose wondered whether Devin had seen her new haircut. She had got what the hairdresser called “side bangs,” which meant that her black bangs now sloped down from one end of her forehead to the other, instead of the usual straight line that she gave herself in the bathroom mirror. Rose hadn’t said a word to Devin in school, but she thought that maybe he’d seen her bangs in the paper, or in a TV news report. She hated to admit how much the side bangs made her feel like a sophisticated woman, but she couldn’t help it. They just did.
Walking in a sophisticated manner, Rose wandered into the store carrying the box of Breathe-Easy Sticky Buns. They were gooey pillows of sweet dough covered in sticky cinnamon frosting. In the very centre of each was a dollop of crème infused with Arctic Wind – the buns instantaneously cleared the lungs and sinuses of any unwanted goop. Purdy used to make them for Rose when she was home sick from school with a stuffy nose, and they were far more fun to eat than chicken soup.
Rose spotted Devin behind the checkout counter. He sported side bangs of his own, only his were a rich, sandy blond. To her they looked like spun gold. His nostrils were bright red and his eyes were clouded and dull. He blew his nose into a tissue.
“He looks like a sickly version of that Justin Boo Boo character,” Gus whispered from his perch in the backpack.
“Shush!” she hissed, gliding over to the checkout counter.
She gathered herself and took a deep breath. “Hi, Devin.”
Devin quickly wiped his nose, then smoothed his bangs. “Hi, Rose,” he replied gloomily.
“Are you OK?” Rose asked. “Sick again?”
“Yeah, you doh me,” he said, sniffling. He nervously drummed his fingers on the glass countertop. “You’re, like, this celebrity dow. It’s weird.”
Rose’s heart sank. “Bad weird, or good weird?”
Devin stumbled over his words. “Good weird. Oh, defidently good weird. I … uh …” He trailed off. His eyes darted between her face and an empty corner of the ceiling.
Is he nervous? Rose thought. I’m usually the nervous one. Aloud, she said, “I came because even though the bakery is closed, I wanted to bring you your favourite – Sticky Buns! So you’re not forlorn without them.”
Rose nearly kicked herself as the words left her mouth. Forlorn? Why did she say that? She sounded like a ninety-year-old granny. Devin probably thought she was a word-obsessed moron.
Devin opened the box and sank his teeth into one of the thick, pillowy buns. “Mmmmmmmmm!” he exclaimed. “My oh my, that is one gnarly bun.” The m’s and n’s came out crystal clear. “Weird! I can breathe again!” He smiled, and his eyes lost their sleepy look.
“Good weird or bad weird?” Rose teased.
“Good weird,” he replied, smiling.
Back outside, Gus whispered, “He’s not even that cute,” as Rose skipped toward her bike, her feet so light that she felt like she might be receiving assistance from unseen fairies.
“Says you.” Rose squealed, already replaying the moment in her mind like a beloved DVD.
“The basket of your bike is decidedly uncomfortable for travel,” Gus observed, squinting up at the empty wire basket. “And cold. The wind, you know.”
“Would you like to ride in my backpack?” Rose said.
“I thought you’d never ask.”
She knelt down and opened the flap, and Gus leaped inside. From the dark, she could hear him moving around and saying, “Much warmer! This is more like it!”
She reshouldered the pack and had very nearly reached her bike when a voice called out to her from the lookout fence at the top of the hill.
“Are you Rose Bliss?”
Rose turned and saw a hulking figure silhouetted against the afternoon sky. The only person she’d ever seen with such enormous shoulders was Chip – but this man sure didn’t sound like Chip. She moved closer.
“You’re Rose Bliss, aren’t you?” he repeated in a deep, gravelly voice.
The man had a nice-looking face – at least for someone almost as old as her dad – rugged, with a huge head, a square jaw, and narrow, beady eyes. He had thick black hair and wore a track suit made of fuzzy maroon velour. His fingers and the front of his track suit seemed to be covered with a light dusting of flour.
“I don’t like this,” Gus whispered. “What’s that on his fingers? What sort of grown man wears a maroon velour track suit?”
Rose’s parents had always told her not to talk to strangers, but ever since she’d won the Gala des Gâteaux Grands, everyone knew who she was. There was no real point in denying it. “Yes, I’m Rose Bliss.”
“I thought so.” The man gestured over the tranquil pastures of Calamity Falls. “You know what’s a travesty, Rose? The new bakery law.”
Rose softened a bit. “Yeah, it makes no sense.”
“Those people out there,” the man went on, sounding passionate, “they need cake and pie and cookies and doughnuts. Just a little sweet thing once in a while reminds a person of how sweet life is.” He rested his hand on his chest, like someone about to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
Rose nodded. She thought of the lives she had brightened this morning. The people she and her family had helped. But how long would they be able to keep it up? The Blisses had provided enough magic that morning to last the town a couple of days, but they couldn’t really go on baking and delivering everything to people’s homes without being paid. They weren’t broke, not yet, but they couldn’t support the whole town.
“A life without the occasional slice of cake is … it’s an empty life,” he continued, inching closer. “Look out there,” he said, gesturing again at Calamity Falls. “Emptiness. That’s what’s going to become of all those lives.”
Gus reached a paw out of the backpack and swatted Rose’s ear. “I don’t like this!” he whispered.
The strange behemoth of a man bent over so they were eye to eye. “Would you … I mean, do you want to help those people?”
“Of course!” Rose said. She thought of the wish she’d made. She didn’t really believe what the cat had told her (did she?). A wish couldn’t change the world (could it?). But even so, she would take it back if she could. “It’s what I want most in the world.”
“Oh good!” said the man. “In that case …”
He snapped his fingers.
Before Rose could take a deep breath to scream, darkness closed over her and Gus as they were enveloped in a giant empty flour sack.
(#ulink_9d600bba-8648-5555-9d4e-aa2babd10bd8)
THE TWO HOURS that Rose spent trapped in the burlap sack with Gus were by far the worst of her life.
First of all, no one likes to be kidnapped by strangers and tossed into a bag. Questions such as Where are they taking me? and Will I ever return? naturally arise. Second, being trapped in a burlap sack inside a moving vehicle in summer feels essentially like being kept in an itchy oven. A bouncing, jouncing, moving oven. Third, the residual flour that dusted the walls of the bag mingled with her sweat to form a disgusting paste. She scrabbled at the neck of the sack with her nails, but it was firmly tied shut.
Then there was the matter of Gus. “I have claws,” he kept whispering to her. “Just remember that, Rose. They are weapons of mass destruction, these claws.”
Luckily, the man who had stuffed her in the sack seemed not to be able to hear the whispers of the Scottish Fold cat over the hum of the van and the honking of traffic. All Rose could do was keep her wits about her and, every so often, yell, “Where are we going? Let me out of here!”
But there was never any answer.
When the van finally came to a stop, a pair of sturdy arms lifted the sack containing Rose and Gus out of the van. She heard the opening of doors and felt a sudden rush of air-conditioning.
Then the arms set her down in a chair, and the burlap sack was pulled away.
Rose was instantly blinded by fluorescent lights.
She found herself sitting on a rusted metal chair in the centre of a room made of grey concrete. Feeble light peeked through tiny windows near the ceiling. At one end of the room was a grey metal desk covered in manila file folders. The wall behind the desk was lined with filing cabinets of rusted grey metal. The rows of rectangular fluorescent lights that hung from the ceiling sputtered and hummed in the awful way that fluorescent lights do, as if they were actually prisons for thousands of radioactive fireflies.
The room smelled like metal and disinfectant, and Rose suddenly felt a wave of longing for the scents of home: butter and chocolate and cakes just pulled from the oven.
“I don’t like this place,” Gus whispered, digging flour out of the spaces beneath his crumpled ears with his paws. “It looks like an office from a movie about … how terrible offices are.”
She petted the cat on the head. “It’s OK. You’ve got those claws, remember?”
“Indeed,” the cat purred.
Rose shook out her hair. She dusted flour off her red T-shirt and her eyelids and from behind her ears and even flicked some out of her armpits.
“Where am I?” she yelled.
When no one answered, Rose spun around and saw two men standing by a grimy, empty water cooler in the opposite corner of the room. One of them was the hulking, squinty gentleman in the maroon velour track suit who had approached her on top of Sparrow Hill, and the other was a tall bespectacled man. He had a tiny face and a bulbous white head that was entirely hairless. He looked like an illustration of an alien wearing a suit.
“Hello?” she hollered again. “Where am I?”
Neither of the men so much as turned to acknowledge her – they kept chatting at the water cooler, sipping from little paper cones.
“What is this?” said the bald man, gesturing at Rose, so that water splashed from his little paper cone onto the floor. “You were supposed to get the BOOK.”
“It was a no-go on the book, boss,” the man wearing the track suit answered. “The bakery is closed. I couldn’t get in there. So I brought the cook instead.”
Rose gasped. These two had been after the Bliss Family Cookery Booke – but what could they possibly want with it? It was bad enough when Aunt Lily had gotten her hands on the Booke, but when she’d given it back, Rose had thought that she – and her family – were safe.
The wiry bald man refilled his cone of water. “No, not the cook, the book. What we need is the book.”
The bulky man let out a long huff. “But, sir, the cook is the next best thing to the book. She won that French baking contest. She can do it.”
The bald man goggled his eyes at Rose. “But she’s so young!” he said in a sharp, quiet voice. “So scrawny! And she has a cat in her backpack, with broken ears!”
“I can hear you, you know,” Rose fumed. “I’m right here. And if you don’t tell me where I am, I will set my cat on you.”
Gus jumped out of the backpack and sat back on his hind legs, hissing and swiping, with his front legs extended and his claws bared. He looked like a praying mantis.
“And his ears are not malformed,” Rose added. “They are a distinctive feature of the breed.”
“Don’t worry, little lady,” said the thin man. “We’ll explain everything, just calm that old cat down.”
Rose gave Gus a stern look. He shrugged and retracted his claws. “Good kitty,” she said, pulling Gus into her lap and petting him until he was purring. “There,” Rose said. “Now, I repeat: where am I?”
The two men inched along the perimeter of the room toward the desk, keeping as far away from Gus as they could.
The bald man sat in the chair behind the desk, while the man in the velour track suit settled in behind him, leaning against the row of rusted metal filing cabinets.
“Where you aaaaaare,” said the thin man, “is the finest bakery in the universe: the Mostess Snack Cake Corporation.” He tapped his long index fingers together and stared at Rose through his spectacles. He had no lips to speak of – it was as if the skin beneath his nose and above his chin just decided, at a certain point, to stop. “I am Mr Butter, and my muscular associate, whom you’ve already had the pleasure of meeting, is Mr Kerr.”
“Mostess, huh,” Rose said. She had heard of Mostess Snack Cakes, of course. Everyone had. They were the ones with the little white cow in the corner of the package.
At school, Rose’s friends sometimes pulled out packages of Mostess Snack Cakes at the lunch table – little chocolate cakes stuffed with marshmallow, black cupcakes covered in white dots, vanilla cakes stuffed with chocolate cream – each with different names that bore no resemblance to the cake itself, like Dinky Cakes, Moony Pyes, and King Things. Rose never thought to try a bite of her friends’ Dinky Cakes or King Things, because her mother always packed her a delicious homemade treat, and anyway, the snack cakes were gobbled and gone in two bites.
“Misters Butter and Kerr, of the Mostess Snack Cake Company,” Rose repeated. “Got it. Now I can tell the police who kidnapped me.”
Mr Butter opened his non-lips and let out a crisp ha-ha. “Kidnapped! Do you hear that, Mr Kerr? The poor thing thinks that we kidnapped her!”
Mr Kerr stared nervously at Rose. “Ha,” he replied.
“You carried me here in a flour sack,” Rose said. “Against my will.”
“Oh, you’ve misinterpreted the day’s events, Miss Bliss,” Mr Butter went on smoothly. “We haven’t kidnapped you, we’ve brought you here to offer you a job!”
Rose furrowed her brow. “A job? What kind of job?”
“We need help with our recipes,” Mr Kerr said bluntly, rubbing his hands over the smooth velour of his track suit.
Mr Butter glared at Mr Kerr a moment, then turned back to Rose, all smiles. “Yes, that’s the gist of it,” he said, tapping his fingers on the desk. “You see, Rose, we here at the Mostess Snack Cake Corporation were just as horrified as you were by the passage of the Big Bakery Discrimination Act. Of course, the law does happen to benefit our bakery, as we employ well over a thousand people. So we wanted to help a newly unemployed small-town baker like yourself by putting you to work for us.”
Gus fidgeted on her lap. It suddenly dawned on Rose that neither of them had seen a bathroom for hours.
“Think of it as an exchange programme,” Mr Kerr added matter-of-factly. His voice was so deep that it sounded like his throat was trying to swallow the words before they escaped. “Like you kids do in school.”
