Free Emma: Lights! Camera! Cupcakes! by Coco Simon

not?” I asked.
    Alexis—still my best friend even though I was aggravated with her—grinned back. “Mind reader,” she said, and we laughed.

    After school we raced to my house to begin baking. Alexis’s mom had dropped off all the supplies latelast night, and there were huge tubs of butter, sacks of sugar and flour, and dozens and dozens of eggs. It’s a good thing we have a backup fridge in our garage. It’s usually filled with gallons of milk for the boys, but my mom made room, so we were set.
    Alexis had also bought a new kit of food coloring, yellow spray “mist” for the popcorn coloring, and an assortment of extracts to flavor the frosting for “Mona’s” cupcakes.
    I pulled out my pride and joy—my pale pink KitchenAid standing mixer with the adorable quilted cozy cover—and said, “Let the games begin!”
    When my mom got home from work, she took one look at the chaos in the kitchen and ordered pizza; there was no way she was getting to her oven tonight.
    It actually turned out to be kind of fun, baking a hundred and twenty cupcakes. My brothers were in and out, entertaining my friends, and people just ate pizza kind of casually, standing around. It felt like an event. During the small pockets of downtime, we did homework and quizzed one another for the vocab test some of us would have on Friday, and we started to feel pretty psyched that we could pull off two big cupcake orders.
    Then Jake decided to help.
    I heard the crash before I even realized where he was. It came from the garage, and it was loud but not that deadly kind of noise where you wonder if someone got really hurt. I ran out to the garage to find the fridge door open, Jake standing with his hands in the air, and two dozen eggs all over the garage floor.
    â€œJake!” I wailed, and he began to cry.
    Well, I guess it wasn’t the end of the world, of course, but it felt like it at first, despite my mom scolding me to lay off Jake. We ended up losing a crucial forty-five minutes while Sam (nicely) went to the store and bought more eggs. It shook us out of our rhythm and our good mood (do you know how hard it is to clean up gooey smashed eggs from concrete?), and it left us stressed and maybe not so psyched and confident about Friday. It also left us rushing through trimming many of the cupcake wrappers and making the lumps of “popcorn.” Surveying our handiwork, I had to admit to myself that it was pretty amateur looking for the Cupcake Club.
    By nine o’clock, everyone’s parents were arriving to pick them up, and at the end of the night, I wound up on my own with everything to clean up.
    The good news was that eight dozen cupcakes were arrayed on platters on the dining room table, with two dozen more cooling in the kitchen and a nice big bowl of white frosting sat in the (kitchen) fridge. Ten dozen popcorn lumps sat under foil next to a pile of ten dozen popcorn wrappers; those were the only weak links.
    By the time I went to bed (again at nearly midnight), everything was in order, and I was looking forward to Friday’s assembly line, if for no other reason than to get it over with. They weren’t going to be the amazing professional cupcakes we liked to make, but they were something. And they were for Romaine Ford and her famous friends, after all.

    Olivia brought a garment bag to school on Friday, along with a suitcase full of hair and makeup tools, jewelry and accessories, and three choices of shoes.
    â€œOlivia, remember. This is work. You will be paid,” I said, but again she waved me away.
    â€œEmma, this could be my big break. That’s where the real payday comes in. There will be tons of agents and Hollywood people there. Cupcake money looks like peanuts next to their paychecks. And, anyway, part of being successful, no matter what you do, is looking good!”
    I rolled my eyes and hoped things would work out later.
    After school,