All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780007451784

Version: 2015-05-06

For Katherine Tegen, who makes magic with books

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue: Whatever Will Be, Will Bee

Chapter 1: The Cat’s in the Bag

Chapter 2: Making the Mostess of a Bad Situation

Chapter 3: FLCP

Chapter 4: The Moony Pye of Insatiability

Chapter 5: In an Apricot Jam

Chapter 6: Cheesy Home Videos

Chapter 7: The Bunny and the Hag

Chapter 8: Gorging on Glo-Balls

Chapter 9: Two Brothers, with Sprinkles

Chapter 10: Little House on the Tarmac

Chapter 11: Dinky Doodle Doughnuts of Zombification

Chapter 12: On the Wings of Squirrels

Chapter 13: King Things of Revulsion

Chapter 14: Love Is in the Jars

Chapter 15: A Dinky Bit of All-Consuming Greed

Chapter 16: Skirting the Issue

Chapter 17: Let’s Give the Boy Eight Hands

Chapter 18: Boys Do Cry

Epilogue: Lady Rosemary Bliss

Keep Reading

Acknowledgments

Also available

About the Publisher

ROSEMARY BLISS’S DREAMS had come true.

She was the most famous baker in all the world. She was the youngest chef ever to have won France’s famed Gala des Gâteaux Grands. She was the twelve-year-old girl who’d out-baked celebrity TV chef Lily Le Fay and stopped her aunt’s nefarious schemes. She was the local kid who’d saved her hometown and rescued the Bliss family’s magical Cookery Booke.

So why wasn’t she happy?

On the thirteenth morning after returning from Paris, she got up and pulled open the curtains of her bedroom.

Snap. Flash. Click. Click.

That was why.

“Look, up there, it’s Rose!” Click. Flash. Snap. “Rose, how do you feel about your victory?” Click. Flash. Flash. Snap. “Rose! How does it feel to be the best baker in the world?” Snap. Flash. Click. “And at only twelve years old?” Click. Flash. Snap.

Ugh, Rose thought. They’re still here. Gone were the soothing sounds of morning, the wind chimes, the rope of the tire swing creaking against the branch of the old oak outside her window. Instead, the new sounds came courtesy of the group of paparazzi that had taken up permanent residence outside the Follow Your Bliss Bakery. Each morning they waited for Rose to open her curtains and then snapped hundreds of pictures, while calling out for a quote about her prodigious victory.

Rose had always harboured a secret curiosity about what fame would feel like, and now she knew. It felt like being a goldfish: hundreds of big googly eyes staring in at you, leaving you nowhere to run and nowhere to hide, except maybe a little plastic castle.

Rose snapped the curtains shut, and wondered if she’d had enough of baking. It wasn’t worth it, not if it meant this.

“I wish I never had to bake again,” Rose said to no one in particular.

A furry grey head, its ears flattened, appeared from a mound of dirty clothes at the foot of her bed. “Be careful what you wish for,” Gus said. “Wishes before birthdays have a strange way of coming true.” The Scottish Fold cat raised a paw and began licking carefully between each sheathed claw.

“That’s just silly,” Rose said. “My birthday isn’t until the end of summer. Anyway, I didn’t really mean it.” She scratched his head and he purred. “I’d just like to not have to bake for a little bit, you know?” She’d become a baker because she loved her family and her town, and baking was in her blood – but thanks to her victory at the Gala des Gâteaux Grands, everything had been turned upside down.

She knew it had only been a measly two weeks, but the past fourteen days had been the longest of her life. No peace and quiet. No time to enjoy the summer. Baking wasn’t fun anymore; it was something she was expected to do – like homework.

And that was no fun at all. As far as Rose was concerned, unless something changed this summer, she was done with baking for good.

Downstairs, inside the kitchen of the Bliss Family Bakery, the situation was no better. Camera flashes burst through the drawn curtains like stuttering flickers of lightning, and the barking of reporters outside the door made it sound like there were a thousand people outside instead of just a few hundred. Why wouldn’t they leave her alone?

The mail was almost worse.

Rose’s brothers, Sage and Ty, were already sitting in the bakery kitchen, tearing through yesterday’s mail, throwing the unimportant letters into a giant black trash bag and placing the ones that needed answers in a pile. Rose knew the letters were for her (“Your fans love us – I mean, you,” Ty liked to say) but she was tired of having to read them. She didn’t want to look at another letter now – or ever. She just wanted to get back to a normal life.

“Junk,” announced Sage, throwing a stack of balled-up paper into the trash. Rose’s pudgy-cheeked younger brother had just turned ten, but he didn’t look a day older than eight. He had curly, strawberry-blond hair, and the only thing that had grown on him over the past year was the number of freckles on his nose.

“What was in it?” asked Ty. Rose’s handsome older brother had grown, but not enough – lately he had confided in Rose that he was worried that his dreams of NBA superstardom were out of reach.

“The prime minister of Spain wants a cake,” Sage said, flipping through the letters, “Warren Buffett wants an enormous pie-chart pie, with a different flavour for every section.”

“What’s a pie chart?” Ty asked.

“Who’s Warren Buffett?” Rose asked.

“Some nobody who likes pie, I guess,” Sage said, and read another letter. “The United Nations General Assembly wants us to make a cupcake for every ambassador for their next meeting – frosted with the country’s flag, and – listen to this – ‘the flavour of each ambassador’s homeland in every single nibble.’”

“Ugh,” Ty replied. “When is someone important gonna write to us?”

Sage opened the next letter, a heavy pink envelope that wafted out a gentle breath of sweet perfume. He fell to the floor and clutched his chest like a man dying of heartache.

“Now!” he cried, handing the letter to Ty and Rose.

Rose scanned the delicate sheet of stationery:

Dear Wonderful Rose and the Rest of the Follow Your Bliss Bakery!

Please send me a cake. Please. I don’t care what kind. I have to have one of your cakes. I will die without it. I will pay you anything. You can even play in the band on my next tour.

Send the cake soon.

Katy Perry

“No!” Ty gasped. “She must have been watching the competition, seen me, and fallen in love. The cake is just a way to get to me.”

Rose sighed. She knew she should be excited, but all these letters from famous people just made her tired. Baking wasn’t about getting notes from celebrities. It was about mixing and stirring and folding, about flour and butter and sugar and heart, and love, and—

“We’re rich!” cried Ty, holding up a letter embossed with the cartoon image of Kathy Keegan, the name of a big baked goods conglomerate.

“Rose,” Ty said, “they’re offering seven hundred and seventy-seven thousand dollars just for doing a single thirty-second commercial endorsing their products.”

“Why all the sevens?” Sage asked.

“All you have to do is eat a Keegan Kake and say, ‘I’m Rosemary Bliss, youngest winner in history of the Gala des Gâteaux Grands,’ and, um, ‘Kathy Keegan is my inspiration!’” Ty handed her the letter and stared moonily at the ceiling. “If I were married to Katy Perry, and you signed this endorsement deal … none of us would ever have to work again!”

“Kathy Keegan isn’t even real,” Rose answered. “The Keegan Corporation was founded by a group of businessmen. How can I say someone is my inspiration when she isn’t even an actual person? Besides, I would never eat a Keegan Kake. You know what Mum says about cakes that come wrapped in plastic.” She stuffed the letter into her pocket and turned away. She’d had enough of letters.

That’s when she noticed that every available surface in the kitchen was covered in cookie sheets lined with parchment.

Her mother, Purdy Bliss, burst through the saloon doors from the front room of the bakery, her arms laden with grocery bags. She was a sturdy woman with a sweet face and curly black hair and bangs that flopped wildly over her forehead.

“Boys, the buttons!” she cried. “I told you to pipe the buttons and not stop until all these cookie sheets are filled!”

The boys grumbled as they each picked up a pastry bag. Purdy tousled their red hair as they set about piping little blobs of chocolate dough onto the sheets in tidy rows.

“What’s going on?” Rose asked.

“Those reporters,” Purdy said, kissing Rose on the forehead. “We’ll never get on with our lives until they vamoose.”

“I’ll help,” Rose said, feeling enthusiastic for the first time in days. Maybe she could actually be useful.

“Rose, honey,” said Purdy, unpacking the groceries, “you should probably go back upstairs. You’re the one who really sets them off.”

“Am I just supposed to stay in my tower, like Rapunzel?” Rose asked, throwing up her arms. “I don’t think so.” She seized a pastry bag filled with chocolate dough and squeezed out a few orderly blobs as her brothers finished the rest.

“Three hundred buttons,” Purdy said, counting. “Just enough. Children, come here.” She drew Rose and her brothers close to her, gently settling her arms on their shoulders.

The door to the walk-in fridge swung open, and Rose’s great-great-great-grandfather Balthazar emerged carrying a massive blue mason jar lined with chicken wire. From inside it came a sound like ten thousand electric toothbrushes all buzzing at the same time. “You ready?” he asked.

Purdy nodded and cried, “Release the bees!”

Balthazar set the jar down in the center of the kitchen floor, then cracked open the lid. A swarm of bees tumbled forth, filling the kitchen like a horrible fuzzy cloud of buzzing black-and-yellow smoke.

“Behold, the Dread Swarm of the Tubertine!” Balthazar cried, tugging at his beard.

“The cookies are Mind Your Own Beeswax Buttons,” explained Purdy over the sound of the buzzing. “If you eat a cookie imbued with one sting from the Dread Swarm of the Tubertine, you’ll mind your own business. They were first used on the Trappist monks; as a matter of fact, before the fateful day when the monks in the order feasted on these, you couldn’t shut them up. Gab gab gab! After devouring these buttons, the monks took the first vows of silence in the history of monkdom.” Purdy pulled a kazoo from the pocket of her apron. “Behold!”

She pursed her lips and puffed out a rhythmic tango. The swarm of bees immediately stood perfectly still in the air, then scrambled around until each bee hovered over a tiny mound of chocolate dough. The bees looked to Purdy, wide-eyed and ready. Rose could feel a steady flutter of wind from their buzzing wings.

At Purdy’s next blast on the kazoo, each of the three hundred bees plunged their stingers into their mound of dough. They seemed to sigh, and their buzzing grew quieter, and then they looked away from Purdy and one another and flew single file back into the jar.

Balthazar snapped the lid closed.

Ty and Sage crawled out from beneath the table in the breakfast nook, sighing with relief.

“Ew,” said Sage. Rose noticed that the walls and floor were smeared with yellow goop. Sage swiped his finger through a patch. “They slimed the place.”

Balthazar scratched his bald head, and his finger came away dripping with the sticky yellow stuff. He held it to the tip of his tongue. “It’s honey,” he grumbled.

Purdy and Rose shoved tray after tray of the newly stung chocolate buttons into the oven. A few minutes later, they transferred the hot cookies onto a serving tray, and soon after that, Ty and Sage were outside distributing the buttons to the teeming mass of reporters and photographers.

As each reporter bit into a cookie, his eyes flashed as gold as the scruffy neck of a bee, and he quickly hurried off the lawn. Within ten minutes, the flock had vanished from the backyard – cameras, boom microphones, flashbulbs, and all.

Ty and Sage re-entered the kitchen with their empty serving trays. Ty’s hair, which he’d started to gel into three-inch spikes since the Gala, was wilting like a patch of broken weeds, and Sage had a bright pink welt across his forehead.

“Someone hit me with a microphone,” Sage said, fuming. “Those people are animals. Animals, I say!”

Ty held up a sheet of orange paper and said, “Once they’d cleared out, I found this on the front door – they’re taped all over the building.” The edges of the orange sheet trailed bits of tape.

Purdy took the paper from him and read it out loud. “By Order of the American Bureau of Business and Congressional Act HC 213, this Place of Business is CLOSED FOR BUSINESS immediately.”

“Can they do that?” Sage asked. “Don’t they have to talk with us first?”

“We only just hit the big-time!” Ty said, exasperated. “Katy Perry wants cake!”

Purdy furrowed her brow and read further. “The American Big Bakery Discrimination Act states that bakeries employing fewer than a thousand people must cease and desist operation. Big bakeries are suffering due to the unfair advantages of mom-and-pop bakeries throughout the United States. You are to cease and desist selling baked goods for profit henceforward. Violations will be punishable to the full extent of the law.”

Rose gulped and felt something soft butt against her ankle. She looked down and found Gus the cat, who looked up at her. “A wayward wish is a bitter dish,” he said, then threaded himself around her legs. “Told you so!”

EXACTLY TWENTY-SEVEN DAYS later, Rose woke to find her bedroom toasty warm like the inside of a sock fresh from the dryer.

She had suffered through twenty-seven days of waking to morning cold throughout the house, the ovens turned off, the front windows shuttered, the bakery closed for business. Twenty-seven days of living with the guilt that she, Rosemary Bliss, had brought a chill onto her town just by making a simple little wish.

She stretched in her bed and listened to her bones creak and was thankful that it was a warm Saturday in June. There was no need to drag herself through the sad-sack halls of Calamity Falls Middle School. Like everyone else in town, her fellow students had taken a turn for the worse since the Follow Your Bliss Bakery had closed. The teachers lost their pep, the sports teams lost their matches – even the cheerleaders had lost their enthusiasm. “Rah,” they’d mumble at games, halfheartedly shaking their pompoms.

Worst of all, Devin Stetson was affected too, his blond bangs sitting lank and greasy on his forehead. Rose wondered what she’d ever seen in him at all.

And Rose was droopier than anyone: she alone, among all the people in Calamity Falls, knew that she was the reason the bakery had closed.

“Just another week,” she muttered to herself as she lay there.

“Shhhhhh!” a little voice cried from beside her. “Sleeping!”

Rose whipped back the covers, exposing the snoring bundle of pyjamas that was her younger sister, Leigh, curled up like a comma in the space where the bed met the wall.

“Leigh,” Rose said, “you’ve got to stop sneaking into my bed!”

“But I get scared,” Leigh said, batting her dark eyelashes, and Rose felt guilty all over again. Her four-year-old sister’s sudden night frights were probably Rose’s fault, too.

“Another week of what?” someone else purred. Curled up in a tight comma against her sister’s chest was Gus. He opened one green eye and glared at her. The cat had been able to talk as long as Rose had known him – ever since he’d eaten some Chattering Cheddar Biscuits her great-great-great-grandfather had made, in fact. But she was shocked anew every time he opened his tiny whiskered mouth and spoke. “Cat got your tongue?” he asked.

“Until school is out for the summer,” Rose said. “I can’t take it anymore. Everyone’s so mopey!” She sucked in a deep lungful of air and felt comforted by the soft scent of cinnamon and nutmeg. “Someone’s baking!” she exclaimed.

Gus stretched out his front paws and leaned forward, his tail rising straight like an exclamation point. “This is a bakery, you know.”

“But, but, but – we’ve been closed! By order of the government!”

Leigh blinked and scratched Gus’s rumpled grey ears. Since being freed from Lily’s awful spell that caused her to praise her aunt incessantly, Leigh had taken on a Buddha-like serenity, and rarely opened her mouth except to speak the simple truth.

“Closed,” the little girl said calmly, touching the wrinkle in Rose’s forehead, “is just an opportunity to be open in a different way.”

Rose scrunched up her face. “Well, open or closed, if we’re baking, we’re breaking the law,” she said. “We’d better get downstairs.”

Dressed in a red T-shirt and tan shorts, Rose arrived in the kitchen with Leigh and Gus just as Chip entered from the bakery – Chip was an ex-marine who usually helped customers in the store. Rose didn’t know what they’d do without him.

“I don’t understand why I’m here,” he said. “The sign on the front still says CLOSED. The blinds are still drawn. The lights are still off.”

“Good, Chip,” Purdy said. “Now take a seat so I can explain to everyone what’s going on.”

He sat on a stool at the head of the table in the breakfast nook, where Rose’s parents, brothers, and Balthazar were huddled around the table, with its overflowing pile of fan mail. Rose’s father, Albert, held the official letter that had come from the United States government, reading it over and over, as if he expected to find some tiny footnote that negated the whole thing. “This law makes no sense – no sense at all!” he muttered under his breath. Leigh crawled under the breakfast table and re-emerged in her mother’s lap. Rose slid in beside her brothers.

“I agree: It makes no sense,” Rose’s mother announced. “That’s why, beginning today, the Follow Your Bliss Bakery is back in business.”

“But, Purdy!” Albert protested. “That would be breaking the law!”

“Honey, the government says we can’t operate,” said Balthazar, wiping the top of his bald head with a handkerchief. “This document is perfectly clear: unless we employ more than a thousand people, we are shut down. That fancy lawyer, Bob Solomon, hasn’t been able to find a single loophole. And our congresswoman, Big Nell Katey – well, she hasn’t made a bit of headway with those other politicians down in Washington. They’ve got good hearts, the both of them, but we’re up against something sneaky here.”

Gus arched his back and hissed. He began to scratch at the wooden base of the breakfast table like it was a cage full of mice.

“Gus,” Purdy said gently. “No scratching, please.”

Gus sank to the ground and twisted miserably until he was lying on his back. “I’m sorry. It’s how Scottish Folds cope with sneakiness.”

“The law says that we can’t operate for profit,” Purdy explained with a strange glint in her eye. “It says nothing about operating as a charitable organization. We have to stop selling baked goods, but we don’t have to stop baking!”

Ty’s jaw dropped. “You can’t be suggesting that we—”

“—give our baked goods away for free!” Sage finished.

Ty put his head in his hands, careful not to mess up his hair. “I can’t believe what I’m hearing. We’ll never get rich this way!”

“Giving our goods away is exactly what I’m suggesting,” Purdy said. “Our work is bigger than simple profits. Calamity Falls needs us.”

Sage groaned theatrically.

Beside her, Albert smiled and folded up the letter. “We won’t be able to give away our Bliss baked goods forever – we can’t afford to do that. But we can at least do so until we find some way around this backward law.”

“I just know this is Lily’s fault.” Balthazar rose from the breakfast table and began to pace around the room, scratching his beard. “May none of you forget: Lily never returned Albatross’s Apocrypha. I’ll bet you a loaf of Betray-Yourself Banana Bread that Lily is using the sinister recipes in that little booklet to wreak havoc on the government. I should have destroyed it when I had the chance back in 1972.”

Rose’s great-great-great-grandfather was fond of warning the family about the dangers of Albatross’s Apocrypha, a pamphlet of particularly meddlesome and nasty recipes written long-ago by a black sheep in the Bliss family. Usually, the Apocrypha was tucked into a pocket at the back of the Bliss Cookery Booke, but when Lily had returned the Booke after she lost the Gala des Gâteaux Grands in Paris, the Apocrypha was missing.

“We don’t actually know that, Balthazar,” Albert protested, though Rose thought he looked more like he was trying to convince himself than Balthazar. Rose’s great-great-great-grandfather just harrumphed.

“Never mind any of that!” Ty shouted. “The solution to our problems is so obvious! All Rose has to do is one commercial for Kathy Keegan Snack Kakes, and we can all retire to Tahiti. None of us will have to approach an oven again. They’ll be baking for us!” He and Sage gave each other a high five.

“It’s not about the money, Thyme,” Purdy said, flicking her oldest son on the side of his head. “It’s about the people of this town. They need us. And we need them. Baking is our grand purpose.”

“Besides,” said her father, “we can afford it – for now. We’ve always scrimped and saved in case of an emergency. And this? This is as much an emergency as Calamity Falls has ever faced.”

Somewhere deep within her, Rose felt a tiny flame kindle, a fire of hope and a desire to do some good the only way she knew how. “What are we going to do?” she asked her mum.

Purdy smiled, and Rose felt the dreariness of the past twenty-seven days burn away like a cloud at sunrise. “We are now the Bliss Bakery Underground,” Purdy announced. “We will bake all day and all night, and beginning tomorrow morning, we will personally deliver the cakes and pies and muffins to everyone in town. The people of Calamity Falls stuck with us through our hard times, when we didn’t have the Booke. Now we’re going to stick by them.”

Albert tore the official government letter dramatically down the center. “I think that’s the best idea I’ve ever heard.”

Purdy moved Leigh to her father’s lap. She stood up and began pacing the cramped bakery kitchen. “Chip will make a major grocery store run,” Purdy said, looking at her burly assistant. “Albert – will you inventory our magical ingredients?” Standing tall, she added, “We shall not cease.”

“I’ll help,” Rose said, happy for the opportunity to reverse her careless wish and, for the first time in nearly a month, to cut loose and bake – no cameras, no reporters, just three generations of Blisses, doing what they had always done best.

Making kitchen magic.

It was three in the morning.

The heat in the kitchen was as thick as grape jelly. Rose cracked the red egg of a masked lovebird into a bowl of zucchini muffin batter to make a batch of Love Muffins for Mr and Mrs Bastable-Thistle, who, without the magical intervention of the Bliss Bakery, became shy strangers to each other.

“Mum, look,” Rose said as she mixed in the egg, watching the batter thicken and hiss as tiny hearts of flour exploded into the air.

But Purdy couldn’t hear Rose – not over the Malaysian Toucan of Fortune, whose confident squawk she released into a bowlful of pastry cream, then stuffed the cream into a batch of Choral Cream Puffs for the Calamity Falls Community Chorus, whose voices were meek and thin without them. “What was that, honey?” Purdy asked.

“Never mind,” Rose said, continuing with the muffin batter as Balthazar unleashed the gaze of a medieval Third Eye onto a batch of Father-Daughter Fudge for Mr Borzini and his daughter, Lindsey – after eating the fudge, each could more easily glimpse where the other was coming from. “You never want to look a Third Eye directly in its, erm, eye,” Balthazar told Rose. “It could blind you.”

Mental note, Rose thought. Don’t go blind.

The family had been at it for sixteen hours, and Purdy’s master list of baked goods was still only half complete.

The kitchen itself was strewn with blue mason jars filled with various sniffs and snorts and fairies and gnomes and ancient lizards and talking mushrooms and googly eyes and woogly flies and jittering, glowing bobbles of every sort. Hints of cinnamon and nutmeg and vanilla swirled in the air, and all the various sounds coming from the kitchen made Rose hope the neighbours wouldn’t think the Blisses were running a zoo.

Albert had ferried jar after jar of magical ingredients from the secret cellar beneath the walk-in fridge – “Watch your heads, Blisses!” – until the dingy wooden shelves were practically empty.

Ty and Sage had long since gone to bed. At one point, they’d come downstairs for a snack, but they took one look at the magical mayhem, at the chomping teeth and flying rabbits and the explosions of colour coming from dozens of metal mixing bowls, then scurried back upstairs.

There were Cookies of Truth for the infamous fibber Mrs Havegood, Calm-Down-Crepes for the angry, overwrought Scottish babysitter Mrs Carlson, and Adventurous-Apple-Turnovers for the reserved League of Lady Librarians.

There was Seeing-Eye Shortbread for Florence the Florist, who was nearly blind, Frugal Framboise Cake for the French restaurateur Pierre Guillaume, who had a notorious shopping problem, and even something for Devin Stetson, the blond boy whom Rose had thought about at least twice a day for approximately one year, five months, and eleven days. She had made him Breathe-Easy Sticky Buns to help with his frequent sinus infections, which, as far as Rose was concerned, were the only things wrong with Devin Stetson.

By four a.m., Rose felt that the heat from the ovens was slapping her on the head. She told Purdy she needed to lie down just for a minute, and she nuzzled onto the bench at the breakfast table and promptly fell asleep.

Rose woke to bright buttery sunshine and the swatting and drooling of Gus the Scottish Fold cat. “Deliveries, Rose!” he said, batting her on the shoulder with his thick paw. “The list is complete!”

Rose bolted upright and found her mother, father, and Balthazar snoring on the floor. Every surface of the kitchen was covered in white bakery boxes tied with red-and-white-striped twine.

Ty and Sage had already started loading boxes into the back of the Bliss family van. Leigh helped by sitting beside the boxes and patting them with her frosting-covered hands. “Pat-a-cake,” she said over and over again.

Sage strapped her into her car seat and climbed in beside her.

“I’m driving,” Ty said proudly. He was fond of reminding everyone that at sixteen he was old enough to drive, and now he reached into the back pocket of his dark jeans and pulled out his licence. The picture on the front captured the full height of his red spiky hair, though it cut off everything below his top lip. “Phew,” he said. “Just making sure I had my licence. My driver’s licence.”

Rose rolled her eyes.

“Let’s go, hermana,” he said. “I’ll drive.”

“Actually, I think I’m going to make a few personal deliveries on my bike, if that’s OK,” Rose said.

Ty looked at her sideways, then shrugged. “Whatever hermana wants, hermana gets.” Ever since Ty had taken Spanish in school, he added foreign words to what he said in an effort to sound foreign and sophisticated.

Sage called out through the van’s window. “You do know there’s no air-conditioning on a bike, right?”

“I know,” said Rose. While her brothers waited, she rifled through the back of the van and grabbed a few choice boxes. She loaded them in the front basket of her bike and carefully put one special box into her backpack. Just as she was about to set off, Gus hopped inside the basket, too.

Bepul matn qismi tugadi. Ko'proq o'qishini xohlaysizmi?