Stars So Sweet by Tara Dairman Page B

Pretty soon, Gladys could tell who was better at making precise measurements and who was better suited to more physical work, like cracking eggs and mixing dough. With eighteen girls working hardon their different tasks, it didn’t take long before there were several trays of cookies baking in the oven, multiple pans of brownie batter on deck, and another large tray of barfi batter firming up in the refrigerator.
    The trickiest part of the entire dessert-making adventure would be icing the cookies so they would look like soccer balls. Gladys had found a video online for how to stretch dots of black icing into pentagon shapes using toothpicks, and she demonstrated for Parm and her teammates on a cooled cookie. It was painstaking work, but the results looked pretty good. Soon, five of the most artistic girls on the team were hard at work on the designs.
    At one point, Parm’s older brother Jagmeet wandered into the kitchen. A few self-conscious giggles arose from the bakers, but Jagmeet definitely seemed more interested in the food than in the girls. “Cookies! Nice,” he said, and reached for the one Parm had just finished decorating. Gladys had never heard her friend scream so loud—or seen Jagmeet, who was a star basketball player at Dumpsford Township High, run so fast.
    Parm had taken a few deep breaths to calm herself down before she realized that Gladys, her teammates, and her mother, who had recently joined them in the kitchen, were all staring at her. “What?” she snapped. “Each of these takes five minutes to decorate! No way was I gonna let him steal one.”
    Her mother smiled. “It’s nice to see you taking pride in your work, Parminder.”
    When her mom stepped away from them, Parm shook her head. “Don’t be fooled,” she said quietly to Gladys. “She’s just hoping that
I’ll
steal one of these cookies. Which I will
not.
Mom still thinks that one of these days I’m gonna wake up and like eating all sorts of things I didn’t like the day before. She’s living in a fantasy world.”
    At that, Gladys couldn’t help but think of her own parents. “Hey, you don’t think your mom will tell whoever picks me up that we were cooking here, do you?” she asked. “Because my parents are
also
living in a fantasy world—one where they think access to the kitchen once a week is enough for me.”
    â€œI’ll make sure she’s busy when your ride comes,” Parm promised, and Gladys would have hugged her if Parm hadn’t been in the middle of decorating another soccer-ball cookie.
    Eventually, the icing on the cookies was set, the brownies were cooled, and the barfi was solidified and cut into tasty-looking cubes. The team agreed to set prices for the items according both to size and the effort it had taken to prepare them: the barfi cubes would sell for a dollar apiece, the brownies for two dollars, and the soccer-ball cookies for three dollars.
    â€œThat way, there are also different price points for students who have different amounts of money withthem,” Parm pointed out. Gladys was impressed—her friend really was getting into the spirit of the bake sale now.
    They had just finished wrapping all the goods in plastic when Gladys’s dad honked his horn outside. Parm immediately moved off into the living room to distract her mother so she wouldn’t head outside to talk to Mr. Gatsby, and Gladys quickly reloaded her blue backpack with the cooking tools she’d brought over. She still missed her lobster, but she had to admit that the new bag had a lot more capacity.
    Gladys collapsed into the station wagon’s backseat a few minutes later. It had felt like fun in the moment, but now the exhaustion of directing three separate baking projects for several hours seemed to hit her all at once. How did professional pastry chefs do it, day after day? Gladys thought of Classy Cakes, the