At nine years old, Sage already looked like he belonged onstage at a comedy club. A mess of curly strawberry blond hair exploded from the top of his head, and two freckled, pudgy cheeks took up most of his face. His red eyebrows hovered over his eyes in a look of permanent confusion.
“Sage, why are you doing that?” said Rose.
“I saw Ty do it with popcorn, and he caught most of it in his mouth.”
Ty was their big brother, the eldest Bliss child, and he had one of those faces that made everyone melt. He had wavy red hair and wild grey eyes like a Siberian husky. He was fifteen and played every sport there was to play, and though he wasn’t always the tallest, he was always the handsomest. He was exactly the sort of boy who could toss a handful of popcorn in the air and catch all of it in his mouth. The only thing he couldn’t do was be bothered to help with the bakery. But their parents didn’t seem to mind much. Ty’s face was like a get-out-of-jail-free card that worked better and better with each passing year.
Mr Borzini, who himself was shaped like a peanut, lumbered out from the back storage room. “Hiya, Rosie!” he said with a grin. Then he saw the macadamia nuts on the floor and his grin disappeared. “Hello, Sage.”
“We need a pound of poppy seeds,” said Rose with a smile.
“Prrrronto!” Sage said, rolling the r like an Italian and kissing his fingers. Mr Borzini’s frown melted away and he laughed.
Mr Borzini smiled at Rose as he handed over the seeds. “You sure have got a funny brother, Rosie!”
Rose smiled back, wishing that someone thought she was as funny as Sage. She was quietly sarcastic, but that wasn’t the same thing. She wasn’t gorgeous, like Ty. She was too old to be adorable, like Leigh. She was good at baking, which mostly meant that she was meticulous and good at maths. But no one ever smiled at her and said, “Wow! How meticulous and good at maths you are, Rose!”
And so Rose had come to think of herself as merely ordinary, like a person walking silently in the background of a movie set. Oh well.
Rose thanked Mr Borzini and loaded the unwieldy Hessian sack into the metal basket on the front of her bike. Then she dragged her brother outside, and the two of them took off.
“I don’t understand why we have to go and get all this stuff,” Sage grumbled as they worked their way up a hill. “If Leigh spilled it, then she should have to go and get it.”
“Sage. She’s three.”
“I don’t understand why we have to work in the stupid bakery anyway. If our parents can’t run the bakery by themselves, then they shouldn’t have started one in the first place.”
“You know they have to bake – it’s in their blood,” Rose replied, taking a breath. “Plus, this town would collapse without them. Everyone needs our cakes and pies and muffins, just to keep going. We are running a public service.”
As much as she rolled her eyes, Rose secretly loved to help. She loved the way her mother sighed with relief whenever Rose returned with all the right ingredients, loved the way her father hugged her after she’d made a shortbread dough just crumbly enough, loved the way the townspeople hummed with happiness after taking the first warm, flaky bite of a chocolate croissant. And she loved how the mixture of ingredients – some normal, some not so normal – not only made people happy, but sometimes did much more than that.
“Well, I want a copy of the Calamity Falls child-labour codes because I’m pretty sure what they do to us is illegal.”
Rose slowed and clamped her nose as Sage rode past. “So is the way you smell.”
Sage gasped. “I do not smell!” he said, but then lifted his arms in the air to double-check. “OK, maybe a little bit!”
2. Florence the Florist. A dozen poppies
Rose and Sage found Florence the florist asleep in a comfy chair in a corner. Everyone speculated about her exact age, but the consensus in Calamity Falls was that she couldn’t be younger than ninety.
Her store looked more like a living room than a floral shop – yellow sunlight splashed through the shutters on to a little sofa, and a fat tabby cat lay splayed out near a dusty fireplace. A collection of vases near the window were filled with every conceivable kind of flower, and a dozen baskets hung from the ceiling with leafy green vines spilling out of them.
Rose brushed a curtain of ivy away from her face and cleared her throat.
Florence slowly opened her eyes. “Who is that?”
“It’s Rosemary Bliss,” Rose said.
“Oh, I see.” Florence grumbled as if she were annoyed at the prospect of having a customer. “What… can… I… get for you?” she asked, rising and panting as she shuffled towards the vases below the window.
“A dozen poppies, please,” Rose said.
Florence groaned as she bent to collect the papery red flowers. She perked up, though, as she looked over at Sage. “Is that you, Ty? You’re looking… shorter.”
Sage laughed, flattered to be mistaken for his older brother. “Oh no,” he said. “I’m Sage. Everyone says we look a lot alike.”
Florence grumbled for the second time. “I’ll sure miss seeing that heartthrob Ty around when he goes off to college.”
Everyone always wondered what her dashingly handsome brother would do when he was finally old enough to leave Calamity Falls. As much as he seemed destined to leave, Rose herself seemed destined to stay behind. She wondered whether, if she remained in Calamity Falls, she’d end up like Florence the florist – with nothing to do but sleep in a chair in the middle of the day, waiting for something strange and exciting to happen, knowing that it never would.
But leaving town would mean leaving the bakery. And then she would never get to know where her mother stored all those magical blue mason jars. She’d never learn how to mix a bit of northern wind into icing so that it would thaw the frozen heart of a loveless person. She’d never figure out how to fine-tune the reaction among frog’s eyes, molten magma and baking soda – which, her mother had told her, could mend broken bones almost immediately.
“And what about you, Rosemary?” Florence said as she wrapped the poppies in brown paper. “Anything exciting happening? Any boys?”
“I’m too busy babysitting Sage,” Rose said a little too forcefully.
It was true that she didn’t have any time to go on dates with boys, but even if she did, she probably wouldn’t anyway. A date seemed strange and a little unappealing, like sushi. She would like very much to stand with Devin Stetson at the top of Sparrow Hill and look down at the expanse of Calamity Falls, the autumn wind blowing through their hair, rustling the leaves. But that wasn’t a date.
Still, he was the reason she’d taken a shower before she left this morning, combed the knots out of her shoulder-length black hair, and put on her favourite pair of jeans and a blue shirt with just the right amount of lace (very little). She knew she wasn’t ugly, but she wasn’t stunning, either. Rose was sure that if there was any greatness in her at all, it lurked somewhere inside her and not on her face.
Her mother seemed to agree. “You’re not like other girls,” she’d once said. “You’re so good at maths!”
As Rose wondered why she couldn’t be both – the kind of girl who was good at maths and pretty – she and Sage left the shop, poppies in hand.
3. Poplar’s Open-air Market. 2 lbs pippin apples
A short burst of ferocious pedalling carried them over the train tracks to Poplar’s Open-air Market, which was so crowded in the early morning that the lanes between the rows of fruit and vegetable stands were like a parkway during a traffic jam.
“I need apples!” yelled Rose, waving one hand in the air.
“Aisle