The Cupcake Queen Read Online Free PDF Page B

prank. I look at the copper sea around me and wonder if I’m supposed to pick all of this up.
    “Can you spare some change?”
    I turn and see the girl from my art class, the one with the blue-tipped hair, leaning against one of the lockers. She smiles at me.
    “Just leave me alone,” I say. I shake my Chucks to get the pennies off them.
    “You have to hand it to them,” the girl says from behind me. “There must be like fifty dollars here.” I turn and watch as she bends and fills a hand with pennies then lets them fall back to the floor. The tips of her hair sparkle in the light.
    “What do you want?” I ask.
    She stands back up and smiles at me. “I’ll help,” she says.
    “Help what?” I have to keep reminding myself not to cry. My eyes keep forgetting.
    “Help pick it up. The least you can do is take their money.” I turn and face her. “I’m Tally,” she says. She tilts her head after she says it and seems to be watching me, waiting to see what I’ll do.
    “I’m . . .” I look around at the mounds of pennies all over this end of the hall. I look back at Tally and can tell she’s trying hard not to laugh, which makes me start smiling. I try again. “I’m Penny,” but then I’m laughing and Tally’s laughing with me and for one quick moment, I can remember what normal used to feel like.
    We empty our backpacks and take turns holding them open and shoveling the mounds of pennies inside. “The way I see it, you’re lucky your name wasn’t Rotten Egg or something,” Tally says.
    “Yes, because it would be at this very instant that I would realize what a truly terrible curse the name Rotten Egg is.” I scoop the last few handfuls of pennies out of my locker and into my backpack.
    “Maybe you led a very sheltered life. I mean, maybe your parents were named Old Gym Sock and Mothball.”
    We have to leave our backpacks in the office with Constance, who offers us each a Jolly Rancher. We walk back to the main hall, where Tally turns left to go to English and I have to go straight to something called Occupational Investigation.
    “Under the clock after school,” she says.
    “Sure,” I say. “I mean, as long as I don’t have to be somewhere to embarrass myself in front of the whole school again.”
    Tally shakes her head and smiles. “It wasn’t the whole school.”
    “Half,” I say.
    “Maybe half.” She’s still laughing as she turns to walk down the hall toward her class. It’s then that I see the back of her shirt, something that was hidden under the backpack and her hair. RPS FOR PEACE.

chapter five
    After school, Tally and I start walking to the bank to change our backpacks full of coins into bills. “I just can’t figure out how she got all those pennies,” I say. “Even if all of them emptied their coin jars, they couldn’t have come up with this many pennies.” I shift the straps of my pack slightly to keep them from cutting into my shoulders.
    “That part’s easy,” Tally says. We stop at the corner and wait for a truck pulling a trailer full of pigs to pass. The smell seems to cling to us as we keep walking. “Charlotte’s father owns the bank.” We cross the street and start up the block toward the bank. The pennies make even the slight hill hard to climb.
    “Which one’s Charlotte?” I ask.
    “Red hair. Pinched face.”
    “She’s in my French class,” I say, thinking of the girl in the front row who tried to trip me with her backpack.
    “Oui, oui,” Tally says.
    We walk in silence for the next two blocks. The tiny hill at the end of Main Street makes my heart thud in my chest. I look across the street and see the guy from the beach talking to a guy from my math class. The guy from math has a soccer ball in his hands. He keeps dropping it against his knee and catching it as it bounces. The guy from the beach catches the ball and manages to keep it aloft with his knees for almost a minute. It was probably just bad timing, but when he looks in my