Read Online Confectionately Yours #2: Taking the Cake! by Lisa Papademetriou - Free Book Online

playing something soft and sweet on a piano. I used to take piano lessons back when we could afford them, but I was never very good. This, to me, sounds a bit like Brahms or maybe Mozart. It’s soothing.
    I peek in, and see a curly blond head bowed over the keyboard. “Kyle?”
    He stops short and turns to face me. His eyes are blank, but he’s wearing a half smile, as if expecting a happy surprise.
    “Don’t stop. It’s just me, Hayley.”
    “Oh, Fred!” Kyle beams, exposing the dimple in his right cheek. Kyle is blind, by the way. His nickname for me goes back to an incident in fourth grade. I was wearing a vintage bowling shirt with the name Fred embroidered over the pocket. I didn’t realize Kyle couldn’t see, and I was baffled about why he couldn’t read my shirt. It was major humiliation for me, but Kyle actually thought the whole thing was funny. “Come on in.”
    I hesitate in the doorway. “I didn’t know you could play the piano.”
    Kyle turns back to the keys and plays a dramatic Ta-da! chord. “Don’t you know blind guys love the piano? Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles …”
    “Art Tatum,” I say.
    “Whoa! Guess who knows her jazz piano, everyone!” Kyle crows. “Do you play?”
    “Just … badly.” I sit down beside him on the piano bench.
    “Hmm.” Kyle shrugs. Then he starts to play the familiar bom-a-did-ah, bom-a-did-ah that makes up the bottom half of “Heart and Soul.” “Show me what you got,” he teases.
    So I come in with plink-plink-plink , and soon we’re playing together. “Anyone can play this song.”
    “But not anyone can make it sound this amazing,” Kyle counters, and he turns his part into an elaborate riff. “So, Hayley, why so down?”
    “You can hear that in my voice?” I take my hands off the keys.
    “I can hear it in your fingertips, when you play,” he says. “And yeah, your voice. What’s up?”
    I heave a sigh. “I don’t know. Artie and I — We’re not getting along.”
    The dramatic opening to Beethoven’s Fifth: Dunh-dunh-dunh-dun .
    “Thanks, Kyle.”
    “Sorry. What happened?”
    “Nothing, exactly.” This isn’t quite true, but Kyle doesn’t press for more info.
    “Is it going to blow over?”
    “I doubt it…. It isn’t really like weather. It feels more like … plate tectonics.”
    “The earth is shifting beneath your feet. Sending up new continents.”
    “Creating oceans.” I toy with the topmost key, making it plink over and over. “And meanwhile, I’ve promised to comeup with some brilliant new cupcake that the drama club can sell as a fund-raiser.”
    “So — what’s the cupcake?”
    “I don’t know. I mean, the musical is about a pop star, so I was thinking maybe … poppy seed?” I wince as the words come out of my mouth.
    Kyle lifts an eyebrow. “Eeew.”
    “Pop rocks? Lollipops?”
    “Stop, Hayley, you’re grossing me out.”
    “Me, too,” I admit.
    Kyle laughs. His dimple is kind of cute, I realize. And his eyes are a beautiful shade of gray. It’s interesting to sit near a blind person. You can really study their face without embarrassing yourself. Kyle’s skin is pale, but his cheeks are ruddy. He looks like the kind of person who would blush easily, if that were his personality. “So … pop. Hey, what about those things — cake pops? Like, a cupcake on a stick?”
    “Kyle — you’re a genius!”
    “So true.”
    “Don’t make me take it back.”
    “Okay. Besides — I’m not that much of a genius. I didn’t help you with the Artie thing.”
    I blow out a sigh. “Some things can’t be helped.”
    We sit there for a few moments, just being quiet. After a while, Kyle reaches out to the keyboard. Bom-a-did-ah, bom-a-did-ah …
    He pauses and faces me with his eyebrows raised, as if he’s asking me a question.
    Plink-plink-plink, I play.
    Kyle grins. We play “Heart and Soul” together for a while. By the time we finish, I’m smiling again.
    There’s a lot I don’t know about Kyle, but