Read How to Bake a Perfect Life for Free Online Page B

mind.) The last place she lived was the only house left in a whole neighborhood of apartments, and it seemed like somebody was always yelling or playing their music somewhere.
    This is good. Very, very good.
    Don’t get used to it .
    She makes herself get out of the soft bed and patters over to the windows in her underwear and T-shirt. Way, way down in the backyard is Ramona, her red hair in a braid that falls all the way down her back, almost to her butt. It’s the longest hair Katie’s ever seen on a grown-up. Sitting on a bench is an old woman, petting a cat.
    The garden looks kind of nice, but what Katie thinks is that she can get to the kitchen and post an email to her mother before Ramona comes in. She brushes her teeth and washes herface. Her dad used to do push-ups every morning, and Katie did them with him, but lately they make her arms feel shaky and she has to quit.
    Her clothes are in a neat stack on a chair in her bedroom, everything all clean and perfectly folded. Katie bends her head into them and smells laundry soap. It almost makes her cry. Tears would actually have spilled if she hadn’t swallowed fast.
    On top of the pile is her favorite sweater, light brown with thin green stripes, and she pulls it on over her T-shirt, along with some jeans that are a little too short. Barefoot, she heads down the first flight of stairs, checking to see which stairs squeak. There’s nobody else around.
    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 promisesshe 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: [email protected]
FROM: [email protected]
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