Invisible Inkling

“You should let me coach you,” he says. “With my help you’d move up to Hammerhead before winter break.”

“Okay, coach me.” I look down at Patne, Kim, and Chin, spinning and laughing on the tire swing.

“Well,” says Inkling, “you’d go a lot faster with your breaststroke if you rotated your feet like this.”

“Like what?” I know he’s sitting next to me, but I’m staring at empty air.

“Feel my ankles.”

I pat around in the air and finally find Inkling’s ankles. They are covered in thick fur. His legs are a totally different shape than mine, and he’s circling them around every which way. “I can’t tell what you’re doing,” I say. “It seems like you’re just waving them.”

“I’m not just waving them. First I am rotating out slightly, at the top of the frog kick. When the legs extend, I’m flapping them in with a pushing motion. It works against the resistance of the water.”

“No idea what you’re talking about,” I say.

“Feel my ankles!”

I feel them again. “I can’t tell what you’re doing,” I say. “I can’t see your legs.”

He sighs, annoyed. “You’re never getting better if you won’t even try.”

“I try.”

“Not a lot,” says Inkling. “You try, but you only try a little.”

I get down from the tree and go over to the big rock. I climb to the top of it and stare at the outline of the winter trees against the sky. I don’t feel like talking to anyone anyway.

“I have an idea!” Dad says, when Nadia, Inkling, and I get home. He is standing in our apartment kitchen, wearing oven mitts. His scraggle beard has custard on it, and there’s pumpkin goo on his elbow. The kitchen is a mess. Flour on the floor, butter smeared on the counter, a sink full of dishes.

“What are you doing?” Nadia asks.

“I’m going to bake her into submission!” Dad cries.

“Huh?” I have no idea what he means.

“Betty-Ann. If I can make a perfect pumpkin ice-cream whoopie pie myself, our customers will come back. You know our ice cream is better. Betty-Ann will admit defeat. She’ll drive that stupid pink truck back where it came from. I just have to get the hang of making the cake part,” he finishes. “Here, try these.”

He hands us each a pumpkin muffin. We bite in.

“Dad? These are the tiniest bit mushy in the middle.” That is a nice way of saying they are totally gross.

“They’re a little salty, too,” Nadia confesses. “Did you use a recipe?”

“I mixed ideas from a couple recipes together,” says Dad. “And made several batches. The ones in the oven have crushed pineapple, too. That seems like a cool addition, doesn’t it?”

Um, no.

“What’s that smell?” asks Nadia, as smoke begins to billow out of the oven.

Dad leaps forward, waving his oven mitts.

I Am Evil Because of How Bald I Am

Over the next ten days, Dad becomes obsessed with this idea of baking Betty-Ann into submission.

He’s not really a baker, though.

I mean, he’s not a baker at all.

We probably shouldn’t even let him bake. Anything.

For example, he has to remember to wait till the oven is hot enough. (One batch ruined.)

And to grease the pans. (Another batch ruined.)

He has to listen out for the timer to ring, use a hot pad so he doesn’t drop the pan, and not fill the tin so high the batter sloshes onto the floor of the oven. (Ruined. Ruined. And ruined.)

Also, apparently he has to sit in front of the computer a lot, watching baking demonstration videos.

Dad buys stacks of cookbooks looking at recipes for pumpkin cakes, pumpkin cookies, and pumpkin breads. He buys muffin tins, muffin-top tins, madeleine pans, and finally specialized whoopie pie pans from a baking shop in Manhattan.

Since we have no oven in the ice-cream shop, he takes over the apartment kitchen, getting Nadia and Mom to work his shifts so he can perfect the pumpkin cake that will sandwich the slab of vanilla ice cream.

Some of the cakes turn soggy. Some of them crumble when they come out of the pans, and others stick. Some cakes are too crispy, some too puffy.

Some look beautiful but taste awful. Too much nutmeg or too much salt, not enough cinnamon. Inkling doesn’t even like them. “I don’t know why you humans don’t just eat it raw,” he muses. “Two slices of fresh raw pumpkin with some ice cream in between? Problem solved.”

Nadia is grouchy because even though Dad pays her to work, doing all those extra shifts while he’s upstairs baking means she misses art class, misses PSAT prep class, misses studying her spelling words and hanging out with Max.

Mom is grouchy because Dad is spending so much money and because sales of ice cream are way down compared to last November. “Use the public library,” she says. “There’s no reason you need to be buying all these cookbooks.” He’s paying Nadia to work extra hours, buying fancy pans, spending on cans of organic pumpkin and expensive ingredients. Most of the results end up being tossed in the garbage or given to the neighborhood shelter that takes donations of the shop’s leftovers.

As if it’s not enough that Dad is acting crazy and my parents are arguing—I still have to go to stupid swim class.