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

doing. With all her chatting, she’d probably only taped on three wrappers, but they weren’t aligned carefully, and they looked totally lame.
    â€œOkay. We don’t have any extra wrappers to spare,” I said, trying to keep the anger out of my voice. “So we need to really focus here, okay?” I looked at my watch. “We have just two hours to finish and deliver the cupcakes.”
    Olivia rolled her eyes a little at Charlie, and I saw her. I’d had enough. “Olivia, do you not like this job? ’Cause I can find something else for you to do, or you don’t even have to do it if you don’t want. You can just watch, and then we’ll tell you about the premiere when we get home.” I knew I was being nasty, but it worked. Olivia was not aboutto miss out on the event of a lifetime.
    I tried another tack, then. “You know what? Charlie, maybe you should do some assembly, over by Katie and George, and let’s leave the wrappers to Olivia and Mia, okay?” If I got the boy out of the picture, maybe then Olivia would concentrate.
    Charlie shrugged. He didn’t mind at all. It wasn’t like any of the guys wanted to be good at making cupcakes, because that would be embarrassing. I hadn’t thought of that when I signed on Matt and his friends, that it would be a badge of honor to do a bad job. Ugh. Boys are soooo weird!
    Pretty soon, Mia and Olivia got into a groove and began to make progress. Olivia was so into it that her chatter died down, and she got faster and better. By the end of the process, the vast majority of the wrappers looked great, and I knew we could hide the lame ones behind the good ones on the stacked platters.
    I turned back to Katie and George, the popcorn people, and got them a little back on track. They’d been chatting so much that the popcorn was sticking together and was extra lumpy, and they’d sprayed them unevenly. Boy, being a manager was hard work! I was wishing I’d had just a small focused task to do instead. I guess this iswhat being a movie producer feels like!
    Pretty soon, I noticed everyone looking at the clock or their watches or phones. It was five fifteen, and we were due to leave for the premiere at six.
    My dad arrived and complimented us on the cupcakes and said he was ready to drive at anytime. As it turned out, the boys wanted to come, too, and it would be a tight squeeze in our van, so my mom offered to drive her car too. We’d all go. A caravan. Oh goody! Not.
    Finally, we packed the cupcakes—lumpy, kind of cute, definitely homemade looking—into the carriers and set them by the door. We put the final three dozen of “Mona’s” cupcakes into the oven, and then it was time to run up and change. I had to let it go about these cupcakes. They were a concession—a favor—to me and, even more so, to my friends, and I had to just look at them that way. They were our humble contribution. But it just made me resolve that tomorrow’s cupcakes, as simple as they were, would be our finest work.
    Upstairs, Olivia and Mia took what felt like endless amounts of time getting dressed, trying different options and trading things back and forth. It was probably only ten minutes, but I was so antsy, I couldn’t stand it.
    When we were all ready, we scurried out with the carriers to the two vehicles and loaded in the cupcakes. Just as we were about to pull out, Olivia yelled, “Wait! There are still cupcakes in the oven!” I hopped out of the car before my dad had even totally stopped moving. Inside, I raced to the oven and pulled out the trays of cupcakes. I had caught them just in the nick of time. One more minute, and they would have been too hard and completely ruined. I set them out to cool, turned off the oven, and raced back to the minivan, where my dad reprimanded me for jumping out of a moving vehicle. Whoops.
    â€œOlivia. You saved the day,” I said, anyway,