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
