I stared at him a second, surprised to see him up and nearly dressed for once. “Sorry,” I mumbled as I backed out of the room.
JT and I had been on our own for three years now, ever since our parents died in a late night car crash on their way home from their weekly date night trip into the city. I had to give up my fledgling career and come home to take care of JT and take over the bakery. It was my mother’s dream, you see, the reason why they moved from New York to this small town in the middle of farm country in Texas. A bakery that served everything from donuts to fancy cakes to simple gingerbread cookies. I worked in the bakery all through high school, but I was determined to have a life in the city, working in anything having to do with art. I was an artist. Not good enough to have some show in a fancy gallery dedicated to my work, but good enough to work in a Fifth Avenue advertising firm. And then the accident and everything changed.
“Hurry up, JT. We have to leave in like five minutes. I have this huge cake I’m supposed to deliver in two hours and we just started on the fondant.”
“I’m right here. You don’t have to yell.”
He brushed past me and burst into the kitchen, searching the pantry for something…Pop Tarts, I suppose. But we didn’t have any. That was another thing I needed to add to my to-do list. Grocery shopping.
“Are you coming to the bakery after school today?”
“I have football practice.”
“After that.”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. Sean said something about hanging out at his house tonight.”
“Did you do your homework?”
He shrugged again. That seemed to be the only way to communicate with him: reading the subtle messages in his gestures.
I sighed, wondering what kind of trouble he and his best friend, Sean, were getting themselves into every afternoon. I’d heard rumors I didn’t want to believe. It was a very small town, there wasn’t much he could do that I didn’t eventually hear about. But I hoped that some of the rumors—like tagging the neighboring town’s scoreboard the day before the big rivalry football game—weren’t true.
I didn’t know what to do with JT half the time. He was a good kid. But I barely had time to spend with him between running the bakery and attempting to get a decent amount of sleep every day. But if the bakery failed, we would be financially ruined. But if I didn’t stop spending so much time at the bakery, JT might end up in juvenile detention. It was one of those damned if you do, damned if you don’t situations.
We jumped into the bakery delivery van—the one with my mom’s smiling face on the side under the words, The Happy Bakery—and sped off for the high school across town. We had only gone a mile or two when my cellphone began shouting at me.
I slid it out of my pocket and recognized the prefix for the high school.
“What have you done now?” I asked, shooting a glance at JT.
He simply shrugged once more.
“Hello?”
“Mrs. Monroe?”
“Penelope.”
There was a slight hesitation. Then a clearing of the throat.
“This is Mr. James, JT’s English teacher?”
“Yes, Mr. James,” I said, pronouncing the name with emphases so that JT couldn’t miss it. “What can I do for you?”
“I was wondering: could you come up to the school and discuss JT’s performance in my class?”
“Today?” I asked, already running my schedule through my mind. I wasn’t sure I could fit it in even though I knew it had to be important or else the teacher wouldn’t be calling.
“Yes, ma’am. My conference period is from eleven to noon. Or I could see you after school.”
“It’ll have to be after school.”
“Great. I’ll see you at four.”
He hung up before I could say anything else. I glanced at JT again.
“What’s going on in English?”
JT shrugged. “Don’t know.”
“There must be something going on or he wouldn’t have called.”
JT just stared out the window.
“I really don’t want to go in there without some sort of idea what’s going on. Are you failing? Did you do that essay he assigned last week?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure? Maybe you forgot to turn it in.”
“I didn’t forget.”
“JT…”