“Cooking’s your thing, not mine,” Jeanine said.

“Yeah, Jeanine would never cut it,” Zoe said.

Jeanine scooted around so she was facing me. “Look, so you don’t like to compete. Get over it. Do you really want to give up this chance to go on television and tell millions of people to come visit Petersville, plus the chance to buy your doughnut robot? You want to throw all that away without even trying?”

No, I didn’t.

What I wanted was to be the Doughnut King of Petersville. And now there was a way. Was I really too scared to give it a shot?

I wrote the Tea King we had all this stuff in common, but he did whatever it took. Was I going to give up without a fight? I’d never become the Doughnut King like that. I’d be plain old Tris forever.

“Fine, I’ll do it.”

Chapter 9

The callback guidelines said I had to bring a dish of my own creation. I could make anything so, big surprise, I was making doughnuts—butterscotch cream-filled ones because I thought they’d score highest in the categories that counted:

1. Creativity: I’d made up the recipe for butterscotch cream myself, and the doughnut had my secret ingredient: mashed potatoes. Also, I’d never seen butterscotch doughnuts anywhere else, and Chef JJ gives extra points for originality.

2. Yumminess: They always sold out first. Clearly, yummy.

3. Presentation: This was the one weakness. I planned to roll it in a sugar-vanilla mixture, but there really wasn’t much wow. It was all just kind of tan. Pretty blah, but there’s only so much you can do to change the look of a cream-filled doughnut, and using food coloring is considered a cheap trick.

Besides telling us we had to bring something we’d made, the show didn’t give us much information about the callback. I didn’t even know how many kids got callbacks. They did tell us a bit about the season format though. It would cover four different regional competitions—I was competing to be in the East Coast one—and the winners of each of those would go on to compete against each other in the finale for the prize money.

On the day of the callback, I got up early, put on my PETERSVILLE, THE PLACE TO EAT T-shirt, and went downstairs to make the doughnuts fresh before we drove to the city.

Making the doughnuts gave me something to focus on, but as soon as I finished and sat down for breakfast, I started to get that “prime buzz” feeling.

My insides were spinning, so I just sat there staring at my charred French toast. Mom had been weirdly off her game since the town meeting.

Dad could smile all he wanted. Mom was not fine.

“Eat!” Jeanine tapped my plate with her knife.

“I’m not hungry.”

“Nervous?” Mom asked.

I shrugged.

Jeanine tapped the plate again. “Not eating is a rookie mistake. Eating a good breakfast before competition is key. Solve-a-Thon. Spelling Bee. Cooking reality show. It’s all the same. You need to feed the brain.”