A Dash of Trouble Read online

  “Actually, I am a pit capable of consuming almost two pounds of candy before I overflow,” Brent corrected her. “I haven’t yet tested my limit of sweet bread, but it’s less dense than candy, so I bet I could get three pounds in before throwing up.”

  Leo giggled. “Gross.”

  “It’s not my fault I like it so much,” Brent complained. “We never have bread in my house. My little sister’s allergic to gluten.”

  “But you come over and eat all the bread at my house!” Caroline laughed.

  “You know,” Leo said to Brent, “I bet if you went and told my tía that I sent you, she’d give you a free sample of anything you want in the bakery.”

  “Really?” Brent’s eyes widened. “What are we waiting for?”

  “Go ahead,” Caroline said. “I want to show Leo the altar.”

  “Later.” Brent didn’t hesitate before hurrying back toward the bakery.

  “What is the matter with boys?” Caroline asked as she pulled Leo toward the ofrenda table in front of Alma and Belén’s tent. It was filled up with mini altars placed by families in memory of loved ones. Orange marigolds and white candles spread across the tables, and colorful strings of papel picado—tissue paper cut into intricate designs—lined the edges. Some people had set up beautiful multilevel shrines complete with glossy portraits of the dead, bottles of Coke or alcohol, painted skeletons, and pan de muerto rolls. Families who had spent less time preparing for the holiday clumsily assembled altars with the help of construction paper and craft supplies strewn across the tables, laughing at their lopsided results.

  That was the part Leo loved most about the festival: everyone got to celebrate in whatever way they wanted, and nobody was left out—even if they didn’t know what they were doing.

  “This one is ours,” Caroline said, pointing to a construction-paper altar near the end of the table. “We made it first thing when we got here.” The altar stood up folded in three parts like a poster board, with a picture of Mrs. Campbell, a bottle of orange Fanta, and a decorative marker pattern of butterflies and flowers. “It’s not very good.” Caroline blushed.

  “It’s perfect,” Leo said, her heart hurting. She wanted to tell Caroline about the secrets, the magic, the messages. The twins’ tent was so close—it wouldn’t be fair not to tell Caroline that there was a way to speak to her mother again.

  “I thought I would be sad,” Caroline admitted quietly. She touched the altar. “I’ve always loved the festival, but . . . I thought it would be too hard this year. I thought it would remind me how much I miss her. But it’s a celebration, and I feel good.”

  Leo closed her mouth and bit her lips closed. Maybe telling Caroline about the magic wasn’t such a good idea right now. What if she didn’t believe, or thought Leo was making fun of her? What if she was just starting to feel better, and talking to her mom made her sad again? Besides, Leo didn’t want to let her family down, spreading their secret right after Isabel had trusted her with it. Instead of speaking, Leo hugged her friend.

  “So,” Caroline said after a minute, “are you going to tell me about skipping class?”

  Luckily for Leo, she didn’t have to make up a lie, because Brent returned with two fistfuls of sweet bread. Caroline gave Leo a wink and mouthed, “Tell me later,” but Leo only glanced guiltily back at the bakery. She didn’t want to break Isabel’s trust, or do anything to hurt Mamá. What was worse—breaking her promise to her family, or keeping secrets from her best friend?

  CHAPTER 9

  NAUGHTY COOKIES

  The festival lasted late into the night, with candles and songs and a parade of people walking from Main Street to the graveyard on Azalea Drive to honor their departed loved ones with more offerings, music, and flowers. After the streets cleared, Tía Paloma and Isabel closed down the bakery while Mamá, Daddy, and the exhausted twins helped the other volunteers pack away the tables and tents and chairs that had been set out. Marisol hid behind the counter, texting her friends, and Leo stood nervously in the bakery kitchen, making sure no one went into the office to discover the book was missing.

  Leo apologized for knocking the cookies over earlier. Mamá couldn’t stop smiling, patting Leo on the head and kissing Daddy’s cheek and dreaming out loud about the mansion she could buy if every day had this much business. With all the orders taken, their dream house was getting closer every day. By the time Daddy drove the truck home, the family barely had energy to wash the paint off their faces before falling asleep, and in less than an hour the house was silent.

  But Leo couldn’t sleep. With the moon shining through her window blinds, Leo stared at the door to her closet, where she had hidden the stolen recipe book. Tires screeched on the highway, and the floating red numbers on Leo’s alarm clock showed midnight. Leo pushed aside her comforter and tiptoed across the room, dodging coloring books and dolls left all over the floor. She groped through her underwear drawer for the hidden book. The house stayed silent. Leo pulled the chain on her bedside table lamp and flipped the pages, inhaling the paper-and-bread scent.

  She wanted to do more magic. She had to do more magic. Her hands and legs itched and her brain whizzed.

  Leo’s bedroom was the smallest in the house, but that had never bothered her much because her room came with perks. The entire back wall was lined with built-in bookshelves surrounding a long desk that held the red-and-white wooden dollhouse Daddy had built for Isabel and Marisol, that had been passed down to Alma and Belén and finally to Leo. Now Leo pushed aside Oso the teddy bear and Susan Marie the rag doll, spread the recipe book open across the desk, and climbed onto her bedside table to reach the top shelf, where Mamá and Daddy stored all the boring grown-up books that didn’t fit in the living room.

  Leo stretched up until she could reach the English-Spanish dictionary Alma and Belén had shared for their eighth-grade Spanish class. She placed the thick blue paperback next to the leather-bound spell book and pulled her old rocking horse over so she could sit facing the desk. She opened the recipe book and started flipping, paying attention mostly to the illustrations and any words she recognized.

  Some recipes took up multiple pages and seemed to require weeks or months of preparation. Others, like Isabel’s snow spell, were simple enough to be explained in a few sentences. Leo saw cakes that had something to do with babies (delivering them? caring for them? making them? Leo wasn’t sure) and pies that would help with training pets. Not everything required baking, but every recipe made something sweet.

  Leo flipped between the dictionary and the recipes, marveling at all the things her family’s magic could do. It made her fingers itch. She couldn’t wait until morning, much less until she was in high school. She needed to try these recipes now. She needed to bake.

  The picture that finally caught and held her attention was a flock of pigs with wings flying off a baking tray. The recipe was for galletas voladoras. “Galleta” meant cookie, and Leo recognized the puerquitos, pig-shaped brown-sugar cookies, in the illustration. She flipped to the almost-back of the Spanish-English dictionary. “Volador” meant flying.

  Flying cookies couldn’t be too much harder than flying flour, Leo thought.

  Under her bed, Leo found the Easy-Bake Oven she had begged for on her sixth birthday. All her sisters were allowed to use the kitchen oven by that time, and Leo had been tired of being the only one who couldn’t bake things on her own. Plugging the oven’s short cord into the socket next to her bedside table, Leo was pleased to see that the lightbulb inside still worked. The plastic toy oven would help Leo keep up with her older sisters again.

  Leo would never get away with sneaking into the kitchen and rummaging through the pantry in the middle of the night, but her Easy-Bake Oven came with powdered cookie mixes in tiny paper packets. Isabel had said that magic was mostly about your heart, though Leo would have preferred making a batch of real puerquitos.

  Leo snuck halfway down the hall to the bathroom (much safer than the kitchen for late-night excur
sions). As she filled a pink plastic cup with water, she jumped at every creak and splash, and when she turned around and saw a pair of glowing eyes staring from the hallway, she nearly jumped out of her skin.

  It was only Señor Gato. Leo wondered briefly if he was magic too (Weren’t black cats supposed to be? Would Señor Gato tell Mamá?), but he simply jumped onto the counter and rubbed his back against her elbow in lazy circles.

  “You’d better not be a spy.” She shook her finger at the cat, who meowed and batted at her hand. After a few scratches behind his ears, Leo returned safely to her room with the water and closed the door behind her.

  Ripping the cookie mix open sent yellow dust floating across Leo’s floor. She tried using Isabel’s spell to clean the mess, but she was too excited to concentrate on snow. Instead, while she poured cookie powder and water into one of the plastic Easy-Bake mixing bowls, she tried to fill her mind with memories of flying dreams and trampolines and watching hummingbirds buzz around the sugar-water feeders Daddy put out in the front yard every spring.

  When the dough was soft enough to shape, she popped a pinch into her mouth as a test; it tasted like super-sugary chemicals. Store-bought mixes were nowhere near as good as Mamá’s recipes, but if magic came from sweetness, then Leo was sure that these cookies would hold their fair share of magic. She added two more packets of mix powder and the rest of her water until she had enough dough for a whole batch of cookies. Then she took a small ball of it and started to shape the miniature oval that would become the body of the pig.

  To make the real cookies, Mamá used a rolling pin and cookie cutters. Cutting the cookies was one of the first things Mamá ever let Leo do in the bakery. Leo remembered how she had cut carelessly, making a whole tray of puerquitos that were missing limbs, ears, or tails. Mamá had baked and sold them anyway, advertised as “Leo’s Lucky Pigs.” Now Leo didn’t have cookie cutters, but she had no trouble shaping the miniature snouts and ears, and she added tiny dough wings over the shoulders of the pigs to make them true flying cookies.

  As Leo slid the first cookie into the tiny slot in the Easy-Bake Oven, she closed her eyes and thought about flight again. She was almost sure she felt a tingling in the back of her throat, a sense that she was really working magic. But it was hard to tell if she was imagining it.

  She set the timer on the plastic oven and bounced up and down on her heels. The moon hid behind a cloud, shrouding everything except for the glowing white and pink plastic. The air filled with the smell of sweet warm dough and spicy magic. Leo pulled her knees up to her chest and smiled.

  The cookie came out of the oven a little brown around the edges but golden and puffy in the center. Leo took the plastic spatula and pried one leg off the hot pan, careful not to push too hard and snap the limb clean off.

  The freed leg wiggled. Leo yelped and dropped the spatula. The leg wiggled again, and then the other leg pulled free of the pan, and then the cookie shook itself out and stood with its thin blobby legs wobbling under it. It shook its wings, lifted its snout toward the ceiling, and leaped into the air. Leo covered her mouth so her giggle wouldn’t wake her family.

  “Come here, pretty,” Leo whispered, but the pig ignored her and flew clumsily toward her bedside table. “Hey, don’t go over there. You’ll get crumbs on my books!” Leo pulled her copy of Matilda out from under the sugar pig. “Now stop that. Hey! That’s my pillow. Don’t you listen?”

  The pig continued digging its snout into her pillow as though rooting for food. Maybe the pig didn’t speak English? “Ven,” Leo tried, and stretched out her arms, like Abuela used to when Leo was small. The pig raised its snout and turned toward her. “Ven aquí.”

  The little pig jumped into the air and flew onto Leo’s raised palm.

  “Bonita.” Leo ran a finger over the pig’s back while a crack appeared across the cookie’s face—the pig looked exactly like it was smiling. “Okay, go on.” She tossed the cookie into the air and let it explore her dollhouse. “Let’s make you some brothers and sisters. Hermanos,” she added, and the pig flew in spirals up toward the ceiling. Leo took this as a sign of approval.

  By the time Leo’s alarm clock read 12:35, six sugar cookie pigs fluttered around the room, poking their snouts into corners and showering crumbs when they bumped into one another. Leo reminded herself to find an excuse to sweep in the morning, because the last thing she needed was ants. She was holding the first pig in her hand—and looking up Spanish commands so she could train it to sit and possibly roll over—when she noticed the other five cookies crowding around the stack of books balanced on the corner of her bedside table.

  “What are you doing?”

  The pigs rushed the pile and, with more force than Leo would have thought their crumbly bodies could handle, shoved the books off the table and onto the ground with a loud thump.

  “Hey!”

  The pigs spiraled around the fallen books, shaking off crumbs in what looked suspiciously like silent laughter. The pig on Leo’s palm jumped off to join them.

  “Stop it,” Leo scolded quietly, waving her hands to disperse the pigs. “Um, para. Paren, all of you! ¡Todos!”

  The cookies moved out of her reach and circled one of Leo’s dolls, a plastic princess whose flexible limbs hung off the edge of the shelf. “Don’t you dare,” Leo warned, but the pigs crashed straight into the doll, knocking her down in another noisy clatter.

  “Cut it out!” Leo waved her arms more dramatically now, trying to grab the cookies as they danced out of her grasp. “Ow! ¡Paren! ¡Paren!” The cookies attacked Leo’s hair and left crumbs on her nose and eyelashes as she continued swatting at them. “¡Paren! ¡Siéntense! Why won’t you listen?”

  “Leo?”

  She froze at the sound of a voice outside her door. The cookies also stopped their attack, turning their snouts toward the door. Leo had just enough time to kick the spell book under the bed, but it hardly mattered, because her door had no lock and there was Marisol blinking through puffy sleepy eyes at the scene before her. At her feet sat Señor Gato, looking a little too pleased with himself.

  Marisol’s eyes moved across the room, landing on Leo—out of bed—the Easy-Bake Oven, and finally the flying cookies. The first pig cookie with the burned edges, snout pointed up at Marisol, darted to the wall, knocking Leo’s guardian-angel plaque off its hook. Señor Gato swiped at the air, but the cookie was too quick for him. Leo winced.

  Marisol sighed and rolled her eyes. “Hold on. I’ll be right back.”

  She returned a moment later with an empty shoe box and a grim expression. Leo and Marisol herded the cookies into a corner and scooped them into the box before they could knock over anything else.

  “Silencio.” Marisol closed the lid on the cookies. “Tranquilo.”

  Either the cookies listened or the spell worked, because after a few crashes, the box went still. Leo let out a sigh of relief. Marisol turned to her and raised an eyebrow. “You want to explain how this happened, cucaracha?”

  Marisol’s intimidating big-sisterness didn’t work like Isabel’s, which made Leo feel guilty. Instead, Marisol had a way of making Leo realize exactly how silly she was being, which was an even worse kind of embarrassment. Marisol’s face always seemed to ask, “Do you try hard to be this annoying, or does it come naturally?”

  “Isabel told me about magic,” Leo blurted. It probably wasn’t right to tell on her sister, but the secret was out already. “She showed me spells.”

  “Uh-huh.” Marisol’s expression did not change. “So Isabel knows about you making flying pigs when you should be in bed asleep?”

  Leo hesitated.

  “That’s what I thought.” Marisol sat on Leo’s bed, almost crushing Señor Gato, who mewed angrily and dashed into the closet. “Flying cookies,” she said, tapping the box in her lap. “Always a fun one. What else have you tried?”

  Leo wasn’t sure if this was a trick. Was Marisol going to get Leo in more trouble if she said she had done more spe
lls? Would she make fun if Leo said she hadn’t done anything more exciting?

  “Just flour snowflakes,” Leo answered honestly. “Isabel taught me.”

  “Of course.” Marisol’s face turned stormy, and she stomped her feet on the floor. She must have seen Leo jump, because she laughed and shook her head. “Sorry. I’m not angry with you, cucaracha. I just think it’s funny that you’re the perfect little Isabel clone that everyone always wanted me to be.”

  Leo didn’t know what to say. Nobody expected Marisol to be Isabel. Nobody expected Marisol to be anything, except maybe a little more respectful to Mamá and Daddy.

  “Oh, Marisol, if you would only practice more.” Marisol imitated Isabel’s bossy voice. “She must be thrilled that you already want to learn, huh?”

  Leo shrugged. “She told me to wait.”

  “And then gave you recipes to try out.” Marisol rolled her eyes. “Before you even know your birth talent. Or did you get the power of influence too?”

  Leo blinked wide eyes at Marisol. “I don’t know. . . .”

  Marisol huffed. “What? Isabel didn’t tell you about birth order?”

  Leo opened her mouth but then closed it and just shook her head.

  “Well, let me tell you a little something, since we’re throwing tradition out the window, cucaracha. For generations, Mamá’s family has had daughters only. Each group of sisters gets certain magical talents based on the order in which they were born. Second-borns like Mamá and me have the power of manifestation, which means we can produce objects—small ones, for the most part—whenever we need them.”

  Leo gasped as Marisol opened both of her palms to reveal a purple lighter and a tube of bright-red nail polish. For years Leo had suspected her sister of shoplifting, but it had been magic all this time. She thought of Mamá’s constant supply of reading glasses and mechanical pencils and couldn’t help bouncing on her heels, wondering if she would get to do anything like that. “And the other sisters?”