CHAPTER 51

 

The next morning, Sydney goes back to Princeton and I go back to work.

Physically, I’m behind the counter in the Balloon Race booth, but mentally, I’m trying to work out some way to set things right for Sophia, Hannah, Victoria, Jeff, and Schuyler. Shakespeare wrote a play called All’s Well That Ends Well, and that’s exactly what I need: a way to end up with everyone happy.

Because their unhappiness is all my fault.

While I go through the motions of drumming up a crowd, my mind wanders to one of my solo speeches from the show, during the middle of all the love misunderstandings. It’s about Puck putting a magic potion on the confused lovers’ eyes so they’ll wake up and realize who their true loves are.

I just have to find my own magic elixir.

Then it hits me.

Ice cream!

No. Frozen custard!

It’s creamier, which makes it even more magically delicious than ice cream. And nothing against Jeff Cohen, Bossy D. Cow, or Swirl Tip Cones, but nobody makes better custard in Seaside Heights, New Jersey, than Kohr’s. They’ve had their stand on the boardwalk since forever. Their specialty is orange-and-white swirl cones—where the orange custard curls through and hugs the vanilla stuff. It’s very romantic, especially for a dairy product.

I’ll stage an event. Offer my confused lovers a free Kohr’s cone, which I’ll pay for out of what little money I have left. I won’t tell any of the guests who else I’m inviting. Everybody will just accidentally meet at the same time in the same place to be sprinkled with my magic potion, which I can order with sprinkles.

It could work.

But wait a second, I tell myself.

Jeff Cohen works at an ice cream shop. He won’t be wowed by the offer. He can help himself to all the free samples he wants.

“No, he can’t,” Bill tells me when he drops by the booth after knocking off work at the T-shirt shop around three o’clock.

I just told him my goofy idea for getting everybody together and why it won’t work.

“His boss, Mr. Peterson, is a real stickler about employees dipping into the ice cream tubs for freebies. He won’t even let them eat the broken cones. Jeff would love a free orange-and-white at Kohr’s.”

“But how do we get everybody in the same spot at the same time?”

“We do what Shakespeare would’ve done,” says Bill. “We send them missives. You know—those fancy, scrolled invitations sealed with wax.”

Since I have to keep working, Bill volunteers to make up the invitations and deliver them to Schuyler, Jeff, Hannah, Victoria, and Sophia. I let him borrow La Bicicletta to deliver our anonymous invitations.

Nobody will know they’re coming from me. Because if they did, they probably wouldn’t show up.