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