For the Love of Cupcakes - Prologue

For the Love of Cupcakes: Prologue

(I’m so happy to share this. This is the first “chapter” of my new novel, For the Love of Cupcakes. Hope you enjoy.)

Polyvore collage: [x]

                                                               PROLOGUE

       Cake Batter

For as long as I could remember, I’d always believed there wasn’t a problem a good, proper cupcake couldn’t fix. This ridiculous ideology was all my mum’s fault, of course: when I was younger and I’d come home from school with tears in my eyes over some petty thing like a stolen pencil or Kirsty McGregor’s new sparkly shoes (which I was sure violated the school uniform code) my mum would give me a chocolate-chip muffin with a swirl of buttercream on the top and suddenly things would be okay again. As my teeth sank into the soft sponge and vanilla icing engulfed my taste buds, Kirsty McGregor’s stupid flashy shoes would be a distant memory and my favourite spotty pencil forgotten. This cake orientated attitude continued right through my teenage years—fallouts with supposed ‘friends’, secondary school related humiliation, finding out the boy a year above you’ve had a crush on for like, two weeks, is dating some older and prettier girl. My mum would justknow and suddenly, out of nowhere, a strawberry shortcake cupcake would appear on my desk and it was like the totally gorgeous potential soul-mate boy in the year above never existed at all.

It wasn’t until about nine months ago that I realised that some problems couldn’t be fixed with rainbow sprinkles and caramel swirls. I suppose I’d never experienced true heartbreak and pain until that day: suddenly cake didn’t seem like the solution to what I was feeling anymore. I couldn’t just forget and move on; it was a constant, consuming numbness in the pit of my stomach that refused to be shaken off like fake friends and embarrassing moments. Cupcakes became a reminder rather than a cure.

However, nine months on—cupcakes kind of became a legacy.

All mum ever wanted to do was open a cupcake shop. Just a small, cosy place in the centre of town littered with odd tables and chairs and, of course, a massive counter that stretched across the back wall overflowing with her homemade bakes. It was the subject of my bedtime stories when I was little: how she’d work behind the counter, greeting the customers, while I’d apply swirly icing and edible petals and frosting figurines to the orders and pack them away in little white boxes. Dad would be in charge of the ovens (we’d giggle over how he’d have to wear a bright pink apron—the uniform had to be pink, of course) and how my older brother Johnny would wait on the tables, imagining the flush on his cheeks as a pretty girl walked by the massive glass windows at the front. If all the cakes weren’t sold by the end of the day we’d be able to take all of them back home with us and have them for supper, with massive scoops of ice cream and frosted strawberries until all of them were gone and not a crumb remained. It was an idea that fuelled my childhood, but of course stupid reality and school and my parents actual jobs got in the way, leaving my mum’s cupcakes as just a hobby with no way forwards. That was okay, back then, because we had days and weeks and months and years to think about it and say maybe one day. It was when the possibility of years turned into nothing that my whole family was slapped painfully, harshly and abruptly with the knowledge that life can be tragically cut short with your dreams yet to be fulfilled. It was cruel and it was unfair and it’s something I’ll never forgive the vastness of the universe for but it was my first experience of the harshness of reality which, maybe, I’ll learn to accept one day.

I don’t think I’d ever learn to forgive and accept myself for it, though.

It may have been out of guilt, or even regret, more likely love—but it took my mother’s death to finally make her dream a reality. Even though my outlook on reality was a lot more bitter and unforgiving than it was before, I could tell that dad sort of hoped that the sugariness of my all-time favourite dessert would sweeten my perception of the world. Maybe it would, maybe the pastel colours of the walls and the heavenly smell of cake batter would banish my new found cynicism; or maybe they would just be a constant reminder of what I’d lost and never forget. A constant jab poking away in the back of my brain saying this all happened because of you. I was counting on the latter: things were too different now to ever go back to the way things were. I was a completely altered person.

Despite what I thought about my dad’s new business venture, though, I had no choice but to move away from my home of Hampstead to the coastal town of Whitley Bay where Cherry on Top café stood between a vintage jewellery shop and a newsagents, making all other shops in the street look demure in comparison. It was sickening, how similar it looked to my mum’s heavily annotated blueprints, with its big glass windows jutting out into the street and newly panelled wood floor and massive Perspex counter swallowing the back wall. The first time I saw it properly I didn’t leave the house again for four days because it all felt too real. The only reason I came out again was because I couldn’t stand hearing my dad crying about my attitude.

And, now, my dad had somehow forced me into a sickly pale pink apron, and I’d become an employee at the shop I could hardly bare glancing at. It would be good for my confidence, he’d said, like actually interacting with people I had no interest in actually talking to would make me feel less like sitting in the dark with my headphones on, blasting myself to oblivion for a few hours. I had no desire to talk to anybody ever, not anymore. But I accepted the job in the hope it would stop my dad from crying over me.

The job was the least of my problems, in the end. I could cope making idle, meaningless small talk with the customers who I barely needed to make eye contact with for more than two seconds. I couldn’t cope with the addition of Matthew Fitzpatrick into my life; who changed, improved and ruined my existence all at the same time.

I was broken before I met Matt, like the shattered glass in his beat-up telescope and snapped G string on his acoustic guitar. But I was even more broken after he left. Turns out I’m the one problem not even a sticky-toffee cupcake could fix.

Maybe.