23

A Kitchen Witch

“WHATCHA DOIN’?” FALLON’S VOICE was muffled where it found me, head and shoulders deep in the linen closet. Stretching for the top shelf, I stood on a box on top of a kitchen chair.

“What’s it look like?” I muttered, wobbling as I turned.

I’d been running around since I’d gotten home. Mr. Van had told us we only had fourteen school days left before Thanksgiving break, the discovery of which made me cranky and panicky all at once. After all my work on our Nile Crescent project, I’d fallen way behind on WinterFest—now only SIXTEEN days away—and I was starting to panic. It wasn’t like I would fail sixth grade if I didn’t bring something for a raffle basket. Citizenship grades weren’t exactly real grades, but the basket was also part of being in Brigid Ogan’s student body—about having school spirit. Especially now that I was kind of a group leader, I couldn’t let 6A down.

“Pfft—I don’t actually care what you’re doing. I was just being polite because I have manners.” Fallon’s lofty tone made me roll my eyes. Then I narrowed them when I realized she was still standing behind me.

“Wait, you don’t have manners. You want something, don’t you?” I frowned. “What?”

Fallon bounced on her toes. “Serena, why can’t you—never mind. I just need to borrow, like, seven dollars until I get paid for babysitting the Weeks’ kid this weekend. And I know you still have last year’s birthday money from Bibi.”

“Well, I have it because I’m saving it,” I reminded my sister.

“I know, but I’ll pay you back on Saturday. Jeez, Serena, it’s two freaking days.”

“Technically three,” I said, then shrugged at her expression. “What? On the Roman calendar, day starts at midnight, right? It’s not midnight Thursday yet.”

Fallon’s eyes narrowed to slits. “Serena. Can I borrow ten bucks, or what?”

“Wasn’t it seven?” I wondered, then held up my hands as she lunged. “Don’t kill me!” I squealed, ducking away, then screamed in earnest. I’d forgotten about my standing-on-a-chair-on-a-box thing.

After more screaming, crashing against the wall, knocking off a picture, and landing on my sister—who, I admit, mostly tried to catch me—it was quiet. With a lot of jabbing elbows and knees, we got ourselves up. I rubbed my aching butt as Fallon set the chair upright again.

“Sorry,” she said a little breathlessly. “I didn’t think you’d actually fall.”

I flexed my shoulder. “Eh, it’s fine. I should have just gotten the stepstool.” I rubbed my backside again. “So what’s the ten bucks for?”

My sister brightened. “A new lens! There’s one kit for phones, and you can take super-detailed close-up pictures with one lens or use a fish-eye lens and take panoramas. Cool, huh?”

“I guess,” I said. Fallon’s camera addiction was well documented. “Is it for yearbook?”

“Well, kind of.” Fallon shrugged. “It’s mostly for me. I saw this picture of a fruit fly on the internet, and I wanted to see if I could shoot a close-up like that. Mrs. Vejar’s got these little flower flies in a tank, and I want to find out if they’re hairy like the fruit flies or what.”

Eew. “Um, sounds great,” I said with a weak smile.

Fallon snorted. “Oh my gosh, Serena, your pants are burning.”

“What?” I jumped away from the hallway heater—which wasn’t even on—patting down my legs. Then I rolled my eyes. Right. Liar, liar, pants on fire. My sister was so weird. “Whatever, Flea,” I said, and turned toward my room. “Come take my money and get out.”

“What was it you were looking for, anyway?” Fallon asked again as I dug into my glittery blue metal cashbox for the requested loan.

“Our stamping kits. Remember that one year when Mom made us make an anniversary card for Bibi and Poppy? And we bought a lot of rubber stamps of flowers and stars and stuff?”

“Oh yeah! Those are in the top of my closet,” Fallon told me. “I’ll get them.”

In the kitchen, I pulled out my ingredients, grimacing guiltily at Mom’s fancy cake flour. Despite what I’d said on the vlog I’d uploaded, I wasn’t quite as sure about making salt dough as I’d been earlier—Mom might be really cranky about me wasting food, so I needed to make this quick and get out of the kitchen. Unfortunately, after lining up my ingredients, I discovered one more problem—we didn’t have nearly enough salt for the two cups I needed for salt dough.

I thumped my head on the table in frustration. “Aaaargh!” I groaned. “Why couldn’t this be easy?” Sighing, I opened my eyes and looked sideways at the box of cornstarch. Absentmindedly, I scanned the small print on its side . . . then I stood up and read the recipe right-side up. “Cornstarch clay?” I now had a Plan B. I only hoped it would work as well as Plan A.

One cup of cornstarch, plus two cups of the baking soda beneath the bathroom sink, mixed together in a pot with a cup and a drizzle of water, and . . . it looked like thick milk. Was this going to work? Frowning, I put the pot on the stove.

Stirring the mix over a low flame, I could hear Fallon talking on the phone—again—about her camera lens, and what she was going to do with it. Since she was kind of squealing, I knew she was talking to Sharyn. While Fallon liked bugs, Sharyn was obsessed with taking pictures of buildings. They were well matched as best friends.

I didn’t get squealy about pictures of buildings or bugs. I didn’t love dance, like Julia and Sunita, or adore video games, like Eliana—or my briefcase, like Harrison, or Modern Divas, or sports, or anything other people in my class did. I wondered if I was too boring. Mr. Baumgartner always said that in history, great people had great passion. I wasn’t passionate about anything, exactly, but I loved doing things like making crafts or being on camera for my vlog. Maybe it was just that the word “passionate” sounded too . . . big, and too emo. Maybe I was just a great person who was going to have great passion without squealing. I could live with that.

While I hadn’t been paying attention, the white mixture had changed from watery white to a goo that clung to the spoon and pulled away from the sides of the pot. My sister, still on the phone, popped into the kitchen to grab an ice cream sandwich from the freezer. She peered nosily into the pot as she unwrapped it. “Add milk. Mashed potatoes need more liquid than that,” she instructed, then snatched the spoon and blew on it quickly before moving it toward her mouth.

“No, don’t eat—!”

“BLAAAAAAAAH!” Fallon gagged and spit out the mouthful of clay into the sink.

Over the loud sound of her spitting, I giggled. “I told you, it’s not edible! Sorry!” As my sister gargled, I picked up the spoon and rescued the ice cream sandwich from the splashes in the sink.

“Ugh,” Fallon panted, rinsing her mouth under the sink tap. “No, not you,” she said into the phone, blinking watery eyes as she wiped her mouth with a dish towel, then snatched her ice cream from my hands. “My sister’s trying to kill me with her cooking!”

“Nobody asked you to eat it,” I said, but Fallon had huffed away down the hall.

I dumped the hot clay on the cutting board and got out a rolling pin. When it had cooled a bit, the cornstarch blend, warm and silky-smooth, felt way better than Bibi’s salt dough, which left my hands crusty and dry. Now all I needed was for it to make good, strong birds.

“Here goes nothing,” I muttered.

The clay rolled out easily into a thin sheet, and I hesitated over my choice of rubber stamps and cookie cutters. One of them was a chicken or a duck, but another one could maybe be an owl . . . which reminded me of Lani and JC’s magnets. I wondered how JC felt. The last time I’d called the hospital, Mrs. Gerardo told me Lani was there. Maybe they were working on their project too. Or planning JC’s birthday party. Maybe they’d decided not to invite me . . .

“Knock it off,” I muttered, resisting the weight of the sad feelings. “Think of something else.”

For 6A’s bird baskets, Eliana was making chicken empanadas scalloped in the shape of wings—well, mostly her mom was, but Eli was helping. I wondered what Harrison would do, make little briefcases with wings? I cracked a tiny grin.

An hour later, and my mood was much better. I’d had to make the ornaments thicker than I expected—I couldn’t get the thinner rolled ornaments off the cutting board. When I’d gotten bored with one shape, I’d gently pulled on the cheap metal cutters to make some a little larger, so I had fat birds and smaller birds with slightly different tails. For a few, I’d used ink on my stamp pad, and I hoped the colors wouldn’t fade too much as the ornaments dried.

“So you made soaps?” Fallon, still nosy, but wary now, peeked into the room. “Out of potatoes?”

“I told you—it’s not potatoes and it’s not soap. It’s cornstarch clay.”

“I didn’t know cornstarch made clay.” Fallon peered over my shoulder. “Oh, pretty!”

When I hadn’t left the ornaments white, I’d stamped with a design made with a dark-blue ink to make a nice wintry blue and white, instead of Christmas red and green. Even without their berets, my French hens were looking fancy.

“How did you make the ribbon holes?” Fallon asked, eyeing the neat circles.

“I wiggled around a piece of spaghetti,” I said. “Toothpicks were too small. I’m going to hot glue hairbands to some of them after I sand them and seal them—people can use them for napkin rings or for regular hairbands.”

“French hen hairbands!” Fallon asked. “That is so random. I want one!”

I looked proudly at my birds. They needed to dry overnight—or oven bake for an hour watched closely—but I was done for now. Mom would be home soon, and it was time to clean up the kitchen, plus I was starving.

“This is much cooler than a birdbath,” Fallon said, trailing a finger over a pattern of shooting stars that made wings and feathers on one bird. “NO ONE is going to top this, Serena.”

I shrugged, my smile a little shy. “Fal, I copied it from Artistly. Tons of people have already made them.”

“I know, but I mean nobody at Brigid Ogan, and none exactly like these,” Fallon insisted. She gently punched my shoulder. “This is cool. I like.”

“Even though I tried to kill you?” I teased.

“You tried,” Fallon said, her eyes narrow in mock warning. “But I’m on to you now. Don’t cook. Just keep making chicken hairbands.”

The warm feeling Fallon’s words gave me stayed as I put things away. When I heard Mom’s key in the door, the feeling lit up brighter as Fallon called, “Mom! Hey, Mom, come here! Look what Serena made!”

I couldn’t help the smile on my face. I felt like I could have thought up another fifty cool projects without even breaking a sweat.