How to Bake a Perfect Life - Barbara O'Neal [16]
In the kitchen, there’s a bowl of apples and oranges, and Katie snatches an apple, biting into it eagerly. It’s so juicy, she has to wipe off her chin, and she puts it aside so the computer keys won’t get sticky. At school, they always have to wash their hands before they use the computers.
Katie opens her own special account that Ramona made for her and crosses her fingers. Be there, be there, be there.
Nothing. Nothing from Madison, though Katie had not really expected it. Madison might get to go on somebody else’s computer at their house or something but not until the weekend. Madison’s mother didn’t think they’d even get a little bitty netbook until her dad went back to Iraq. The girls would have to make snail mail work.
Also nothing from Katie’s mom. Though Katie knows not to expect it yet—her mom is probably still in detox, where everybody is too sick to be using computers—she’s disappointed.
The worst is that there is nothing from her dad. He writes her an email almost every week, but there hasn’t been one in a while. Not that she’s been able to get anywhere to read them.
But seeing that empty mailbox makes her heart hurt for a long, long minute, until she takes a bite of apple and promises she will not think of him again for five hours. Just like everything is normal. She read a book that said whatever you think about comes true, and that scares her. What if she can worry him into being dead?
Instead, she wants to think about her dad being okay, only a little bit hurt, making jokes in his hospital bed.
Feeling nervous, Katie thinks about her mother. She is not allowed to talk to her. She gets up, looks out the back windows of the kitchen, and sees that Ramona is still there. The other lady is gone. The smell of bread baking is even stronger here, but it still seems as if nobody else is in the house except her, so she creeps back to the computer and opens a new email.
TO: laceymomsoldier@prt.com
FROM: katiewilson09872@nomecast.com
SUBJECT: safe and sound
Dear Mom,
I know you can’t probably even get to a computer yet, but when you do I wanted there to be an email from me so you didn’t have to worry. I’m staying with Sofia’s mom in Colorado and it’s totally boring but safe, so you don’t have to worry. I’m thinking about you every day. Hope you feel better super-fast and we can be together again.
Love you lots and lots, Katie
She hits the send button. No one will know. It would make her dad really mad. Standing up, she pushes the chair back exactly the same way it had been. Still nibbling her apple to make it last, she wanders through the rooms on this floor, peeking into the big living room and the bedroom that must be Ramona’s. An old-fashioned bed with curlicues made of iron sits in an alcove beneath three windows hung with fragile-looking lace. The bed isn’t made, and Katie likes Ramona better for it, and for the pair of pants that are flung over a chair, and for a couple of pairs of shoes sitting by the closet door, as if they’d been kicked off.
She ambles through the long hallway, stopping to look at framed pictures of a little girl getting bigger and bigger until she turns into Sofia.
The bathroom is amazing. It’s gigantic with black-and-white tiles in diamonds across the floor and a big old tub that you could practically swim in, sitting on sturdy claw feet. One wall is made of glass cubes that make everything look wavy, so right now they are all green and white and blue, like a kaleidoscope. A huge green velvet curtain hangs on rings near the ceiling. Katie pulls it, and it flows on a bar across the glass wall for privacy. “Cool,” she says to no one.
The sink stands by itself beneath a mirror with double lines drawn on the edges. No counter, but behind the tub is a built-in dresser with drawers that have crystal handles. Bottles