Read The Icing on the Cake for Free Online Page B

stains, you might think she’d just stepped out to the corner deli to buy the bottle of water she’s chugging, rather than run two three-mile loops around Prospect Park—the biggest park in Brooklyn.Katie puts the bottle down, takes a deep breath, and then scrunches up her face.
    â€œEw,” she says, pinching her nose, “what exactly is that smell?”
    I hold up a drippy handful of peeled (and deveined!) shrimp and give her an extra perky grin. “Dinner.”
    â€œReally, Lillian, that’s just disgusting,” Katie says, holding up her hand to block her view and turning away. “Are you trying to make me throw up?”
    â€œThat is enough , WeiWei,” my mother says firmly. “I do not put ‘disgusting’ food on my table.” For a girl whose Chinese name means “mighty” and “powerful,” Katie is acting pretty wimpy about a pile of raw seafood.
    I go back to peeling shrimp, making sure to hold each one high enough so that Katie can’t avoid seeing me slice the shell along its back. “And didn’t you get straight As in biology last year?” I ask. “How is what I’m doing any more gross than dissecting a frog or a scorpion?”
    I fully expect my mother to snap at me for egging Katie on, but she looks up just long enough to give me one of her “warning stares” and goes back to chopping bok choy. She’s a biology professor, so maybe she agrees.
    Katie glares at me and then turns to my mother. “I’ll just have some steamed vegetables tonight, Mama,” she says. “With a small scoop of brown rice.”
    â€œI bought two pounds of shrimp at the fish market,” my mother says, her knife moving rhythmically along the thick white stems. “ Jiāo yán xiā has always been one of your favorite dishes.”
    Jiāo yán xiā is salt-and-pepper shrimp. It’s one of the foods that Chinese people traditionally serve on Lunar New Year, but my mother’s is so tasty that we all beg her to make it year-round. Or at least we all used to.
    Katie tosses her water bottle into the recycling bin. “Shrimp is full of cholesterol. I can’t put that in my body while I’m in training.” She squeezes past mymother and heads for the table where her backpack is slung over the back of a chair.
    Mama waves her hand dismissively. “I am not running a restaurant,” she says, pointing to the rice cooker. “We are having white rice tonight.”
    Katie takes a massive textbook out of her bag and shrugs. “I guess I’ll just have greens, then.” She holds up the giant book, which I now see is a Shakespeare anthology. My sister is in the advanced English literature class, of course. “I’m off to memorize my sonnet in the bath. We’re reciting them tomorrow, and Mr. Gupta says I have a ‘flare for the Bard,’ so I don’t want to disappoint him.”
    I’ve heard Shakespeare called “the Bard” before, but who even knows what that means? Katie does, of course, like she knows everything. Or like she thinks she knows everything. She’s only fifteen, but she acts like she’s in college. I don’t know how her friends can stand it. Not that she’s made any real friends since we moved to Brooklyn anyway. There were a coupleof girls on her soccer team who came over a few times back in the fall, and she texts sometimes with her Model UN teammates, but she’s always so busy studying or working out or preparing for a competition, I don’t know when she’d have time for friends even if she wanted them.
    I finish peeling the last of the shrimp and remind myself how lucky I am to have made friends like Liza and Frankie. I don’t even like to think about those first few weeks of school before Mr. Mac put me in their project group and Liza came up with her Big Idea to take Chef Antonio’s cooking class. Moving