Grace Makes It Great Read online

  For Erin Falligant, fine editor, writer, and friend

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Contents

  Chapter 1: A Birthday Wish

  Chapter 2: Good News, Bad News

  Chapter 3: Cosmic Cupcakes

  Chapter 4: On a Roll

  Chapter 5: The Idea Girl

  Chapter 6: A Baking Blog

  Chapter 7: The Great Robot Invasion

  Chapter 8: For Sale

  Chapter 9: Dreams of Paris

  Chapter 10: A Painting Party

  Chapter 11: Destiny

  Chapter 12: La Grande Pâtisserie

  Chapter 13: The Winter Magic Express

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  Glossary

  Preview of Tenney

  Copyright

  rom the moment the train conductor called out “All aboard!” to the moment I took my last bite of lunch in the dining car, I’d grinned from ear to ear. Seated across from me, Ella and Maddy smiled back. We rode the slow-moving Bentwick tourist train—creaking, squeaking, clattering, and swaying—along the rails. It was the perfect way to celebrate my tenth birthday with my family and friends.

  Everything in the train car felt fancy—the dark woodwork, domed ceiling, and lacy valance curtains above white tablecloths. Outside, the valley was a vast green quilt with a few patches of orange and red. The maple trees were just beginning to turn, but in a few weeks, they would be on fire with color. The early-afternoon sun warmed my shoulder as a crisp breeze drifted through the open window.

  We passed fields of pumpkins, and orchards where workers on stepladders filled baskets with red apples. Across a pasture, six horses galloped away from us, their heads high and tails outstretched.

  When we passed a flock of chickens, Ella exclaimed, “Rhode Island Reds! Just like ours at home!” Her dad had been raising chickens to collect eggs, which we sometimes use for our baking.

  Grandpa straightened up in his seat as we wound past the sparkling Blackstone River, carrying canoes and kayaks beneath bridges and through old mill towns. “Y’know, girls,” he said, “some of those buildings date back more than two hundred years to the American Industrial Revolution.” He nodded toward the stone houses before they disappeared behind us.

  Dad’s eyes met mine and he gave me a knowing smile. Today, Grandpa was our unofficial tour guide. He knows a lot about Blackstone River Valley history, and Dad and I have heard a lot of it before.

  Despite the rocking motion, the server—Grandpa called her a “porter”—managed to carry a cake glowing with candles toward our crowded table. Wearing a black vest over a white blouse, she looked from my friends to me. Her brass name tag read “Destiny,” and when she smiled, deep creases appeared around her dark eyes. “September nineteenth. Who’s the lucky girl?” She had a thick southern accent, which is unusual here in Massachusetts.

  I raised my hand. “Me. But my birthday was actually on the seventeenth.” Though taking the Saturday train ride meant waiting a couple of days to celebrate my birthday, it was worth the wait.

  “Well, the happiest birthday to you, darlin’!” said Destiny sweetly. “I have never seen such a pretty cake!”

  “My grandpa baked it,” I explained. “He and my grandma own First Street Family Bakery. But my friends and I bake, too. We started our own baking business.”

  “Is that so?” Destiny said.

  Maddy nodded. “It’s called La Petite Pâtisserie.”

  Destiny looked impressed. “Sounds French.”

  “It is,” Ella added, explaining how we take orders online. “We make madeleines and tartelettes and other French pastries.”

  “How elegant! I love to bake, too. I bet it’s fun to have your own business,” Destiny said enthusiastically. “I just moved here from Atlanta, and I haven’t found a good bakery yet,” she explained. “I’ll remember all y’all and your French pastries—and I’ll look for First Street Family Bakery, too.”

  When Destiny left, Grandma and Grandpa, Mom, Dad, and Josh broke into song, along with my friends. “…Happy Birthday, dear Grace,” they all sang, “Happy Birthday to you!”

  I smiled at the double-layer white cake trimmed with lavender frosting and aglow with ten flickering candles.

  I couldn’t believe it was already my birthday. The summer had flown by! On my trip with Mom to Paris to visit Aunt Sophie, I’d dreamed of starting a French baking business. Since then, working together with my friends, we’d launched La Petite Pâtisserie—or what we liked to call “LPP.” We’d had our first sale at Mom’s half marathon in late August and had sold out of everything on our baking cart. Then we set up our own website, and now, two weeks into school, orders were rolling in!

  “Are you going to watch the candles melt,” Maddy asked, her red hair curled in ringlets, “or make a wish?”

  “What are you waiting for, Grace?” Grandpa teased. “Isn’t this cake up to your standards?”

  Of course it was. It was beautifully decorated, and I knew it would be delicious. Grandpa is an awesome baker. “It’s perfect,” I said. “I’m just thinking about my wish…”

  As tiny pools of wax formed at the top of each candle, I decided exactly what I wanted. More than anything else, I wanted La Petite Pâtisserie to succeed!

  Then I inhaled as much air as my lungs could hold and—with my last ounce of breath—blew out all ten candles.

  When the bell rang at the end of the school day on Friday, I headed toward the door where my teacher, Mr. Bauer, was standing. With the weekend ahead, I’d have more time to catch up on baking—and homework.

  “Have a cosmic weekend, astronauts!” Mr. Bauer said. Our class was doing a space unit this month, and he wasn’t about to let us forget it.

  “Roger that!” replied a few students.

  Mr. Bauer shook hands with each of us as we left. “And remember, reports due Monday.”

  “Or we might be shot off into space?” one boy asked.

  “In space, anything can happen,” Mr. Bauer replied. “Better to always be prepared.”

  Though I’d had my doubts the first day, Mr. Bauer was turning out to be a pretty fun teacher. All around the room, he’d hung posters of planets and stars, rockets and astronauts. When it was time to clean up around our desks, he would say, “Astronauts, ready your stations!” When we lined up to go somewhere, it was for “our next mission.” We weren’t just Room 107. We were Apollo 107, with one main objective: “to gain as much knowledge as possible and return home again.” And we could address our teacher in one of three ways: “Mr. Bauer,” “Captain Bauer,” or “Sir.” After three weeks, I was catching on to his different style of teaching.

  “Grace,” Mr. Bauer said when I reached the door. “I hear you bake. Maybe for your report, you’ll want to write about what astronauts eat. If you like, you could bake something and bring it to class.”

  “Yes, sir,” I answered with a smile. “Maybe I will.”

  As I stepped into the hallway, Ella and Maddy were waiting for me.

  “How does he know you bake?” Ella asked, her dark hair braided in tiny rows.

  I shrugged. “Teachers talk.” My mom is a fourth-grade teacher, too, so I figured she’d mentioned my passion for baking to Mr. Bauer.

  “Plus,” Maddy added, grinning, “we advertise. Our baking business isn’t exactly a secret.”

  We quickly stopped by Maddy and Ella’s classroom, where Mom shuffled through a pile of papers on her desk. I waved from the door. “Hi, Mom!”

  She looked up and smiled. “Hi, Grace. How was your day?”

  “It was good,” I said. “Meet you at home?”

  “Sure thing. See you there, honey!
”

  Ella and Maddy said good-bye to “Mrs. Thomas,” too, and we headed out the front door of the school and found our bikes in the bike rack.

  “Mr. Bauer seems really cool and really, really fun,” Maddy said.

  I felt myself bristle a little. “You mean my mom’s not fun?”

  Ella rolled her eyes and hooked her arm inside mine. “Of course she is, Grace. Mrs. Thomas—I mean your mom—is also a really nice teacher.”

  “I think she is,” I said. Then I sighed. “Honestly, when I first found out that we were in different classrooms, I felt sorry for myself that you were together in my mom’s class and I was stuck in another class. But I’m okay with it now. Mr. Bauer is pretty fun.”

  “Speaking of fun,” Maddy said, pulling her bike helmet over her thick red hair, “are we going to bake today?”

  “Definitely!” I replied. “Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons,” I reminded her. “And Saturdays—at least this month. We have some big orders to fill.”

  “Got it,” she replied.

  I glanced sideways at Maddy. It didn’t matter if I put our plans on our online calendar. She would still have a hard time remembering to check it. Maddy would never be all that organized, but she brought so many other skills to the table. She created a lot of our advertising. Plus, she helped me remember to keep our business fun.

  “I still can’t believe we’re doing it,” Ella said, unlocking her bike. “We’re actually running a business together as friends.”

  “Isn’t it great?” I said as I pulled my bike out of the rack. “First it was an idea, and now it’s a real business!”

  Straddling my bike for a second, I took in the view. Our school sat on the top of the hill above the river. As I looked out across the Blackstone Valley, it reminded me of gazing down on Paris from the high point of Montmartre. Everything I had seen—and tasted—in that city had helped me decide what kind of business I wanted to run.

  Then I pressed down on the pedal and we cruised downhill toward Bentwick and the winding river below. As I biked after my friends, I realized that we all had had very different reasons for wanting to start La Petite Pâtisserie.

  For Ella, it seemed mostly about doing something together as friends. Plus, since her dad was still unemployed, she’d wanted to earn some money to help buy her own school supplies, which she did. Now she hopes to help buy her own clothes, too.

  Maddy seemed most interested in the art and advertising part of the business. If anything needed to be designed—like our brochures and our website—she was all about it. But mostly, she just liked to be part of anything she considered exciting.

  And me? I wanted to see if I could take a hobby I love and launch it into something bigger—into a business I could share with others. I loved the challenge!

  As we biked past City-Way supermarket, Maddy piped up. “Hey, y’know how the City-Way bakery always has that promotion of ‘Buy one, get one free’?”

  “And ‘Buy a dozen, get a dozen free,’” Ella added.

  As we came to a stoplight, Maddy glanced back at us. “So maybe we need to do something like that?”

  Ella wrinkled her nose. “I’m not sure we can afford it,” she said hesitantly. Ella is a whiz at math, and she takes care of recording our expenses—whatever we spend on ingredients, supplies, and packaging—as well as what we make in sales. If she thought we couldn’t afford a promotion, then we probably couldn’t.

  “If things were slow,” I said, “maybe we’d have to offer a promotion or cut our prices. But right now, we have plenty of orders to fill, don’t you think?”

  Maddy nodded in agreement. We rode together silently for the last block before arriving at Ella’s olive-green house. As Ella turned into her driveway, hens cackled from her backyard.

  “I thought they were only supposed to crow in the morning,” I said.

  “They’re not crowing,” Ella replied with a shake of her head. “They’re telling us it’s time to collect some eggs.”

  Maddy giggled. “Great! More fresh eggs for us. See you soon, Ella!”

  “I’ll be over as soon as I can,” Ella called over her shoulder as she disappeared into her garage.

  Maddy and I continued on to Maddy’s white Victorian house. I waited out front while she dashed up the porch steps past the wicker furniture, unlocked her front door, and headed inside with her backpack. In no time, she was back out, her clothes changed, door locked again, and ready to bike with me to my house.

  We continued toward home, biking along the dirt towpath beside the canal. From the shallow water below us, a flock of mallards took off, quacking and flapping as they lifted into the air.

  When we stepped into my kitchen, we were met by two clashing sounds: Josh’s pounding piano chords and Bonbon’s whining and barking.

  “Josh,” I said, glancing into the living room, “you could at least let Bonbon outside when you get home.”

  My fourteen-year-old brother was bent over the piano in the living room. “I was going to, but I had to get this melody out of my head first,” he said, and kept playing.

  I exhaled in frustration and headed for the kitchen. I know that Bonbon is my responsibility, but sometimes Josh gets so wrapped up in his music that he doesn’t notice anything else.

  “How hard is it to let Bonbon outside?” Maddy whispered as she grabbed her apron from the hook in the kitchen.

  I shrugged. “Pretty hard, apparently.”

  With upright ears and big round eyes, Bonbon whined at me from inside her crate.

  “Hi, girl,” I said, opening her crate door. “Of course you want out. You’ve been in here all day.”

  Bonbon tried to run past me, but I held on to her pink collar and steered her toward the backyard. I didn’t want her to have an accident on the floor.

  “I’ll start pulling out ingredients,” Maddy called.

  “Great!” I called back. We couldn’t actually use the oven until Mom got home from school, but we could get going on prep work. Mom would be here soon, anyway.

  When I opened the back door, Bonbon tore down the deck steps and out into the yard. She ran in wide circles within the stone wall, yipping excitedly, and then finally stopped and squatted in the grass.

  “Good girl!” I praised as I cleaned up after her. Then I found her rope toy and called her to me, and we played a quick game of tug-of-war. I wanted to get back to the kitchen, but I knew Bonbon needed to burn off some more energy. I had an idea.

  “Wait here,” I said, stepping toward the gate. Mom and Dad had built gates with metal clasps so that Bonbon wouldn’t keep escaping through the gaps between the house and the wall.

  I pushed through the gate to Mrs. Chatsworth’s yard, knocked on the back door, and asked, “Can Zulu come over to play with Bonbon?”

  I knew the answer would be yes.

  In seconds, I led Zulu, a golden retriever, through the gate to our yard. Bonbon put her head to her paws, her rump in the air. Zulu did the same. And somehow, one of them gave the signal to chase—and they were off, racing around the trunks of the towering oaks and running between Mom’s flower beds.

  I shook my head, smiling. I love my little dog, but taking care of her sometimes feels like one more thing to juggle along with school and baking.

  “Play hard,” I called on my way back inside.

  While I was washing my hands, Ella showed up, and then the three of us set to work.

  Our goal today was to make shells for tartelettes—luckily, something we can make ahead of time—so that tomorrow we could fill them with fruit and deliver orders fresh to customers.

  “Mr. Williams must have spread the word about our tartelettes,” I said, using my fingers to fit a round ball of dough into a small tarte pan. “I just hope we can keep up!”

  Mr. Williams had been our first unhappy customer, but we’d quickly turned him into a big fan of everything we made at La Petite Pâtisserie.

  Ella looked up from our business notebook, pen and calcul
ator in hand. “Tomorrow, once we make our deliveries, we’ll be able to pay ourselves again—maybe fifteen or twenty dollars each.”

  “Woo-hoo!” Maddy chimed in.

  I nodded at the stack of metal pans we’d bought at the Kitchen Shop. “I thought we’d never catch up on spending after we bought all these supplies, but we’re making progress! And maybe someday,” I said with a sly smile, “we could use our earnings to visit Paris.”

  Ella laughed. “Yeah, like when we’re ninety years old.”

  Maddy giggled. “I hope it won’t take us that long to earn enough money. Maybe when we’re nineteen?”

  I grinned. “It doesn’t hurt to dream.”

  When Mom got home from school, she peeked in on us in the kitchen. She carried a shoulder bag brimming with papers and books.

  “Hello, Mrs. Thomas,” Ella and Maddy said in unison. They sounded like they were still in Mom’s classroom.

  “Hi, girls,” Mom said. She smiled, but she looked tired, as she often does at the end of the school week. “Are you ready to use the oven? I’ll need to start dinner soon, too.”

  Over the summer, we’d had all afternoon to bake in the kitchen. Now, we had until five o’clock, which gave us only an hour and a half to work after school—barely enough time to make a mess before we had to start cleaning up again.

  “Mom, while you’re here,” I said, motioning her closer, “we need to check online for orders.”

  She nodded. “I’ll be right there. Let me drop this bag somewhere first. It’s heavy.”

  When she returned to the kitchen, she stood behind us as we gathered around the computer screen. I opened up our website and the screen flashed:

  You have 13 new orders!

  “Thirteen?” Ella and Maddy screamed with excitement. I was excited, too, but I also had this anxious feeling, like a mini avalanche was heading our way and we were at the bottom of the hill, looking up.

  n two days, we got thirteen more orders?” I said. “That’s crazy.”

  “You mean exciting,” Maddy said.

  I clicked on the order screen to get the details. Many of the orders were for small quantities—from one to two dozen—of madeleines, tartes, and bonbons. But one order made me suck in my breath.