Handmade butter (salt optional)

Beef jerky (pretending it’s deer meat)

Cider (because the colonists didn’t always have clean water to drink)

No chairs (because they didn’t have enough for everyone, and we didn’t, either)

Free oysters (Dad said later that he wasn’t sure exactly how this happened.)

Mr. Home said table three had to get serious about our breakfast planning, now that it was March. Which meant more practice butter.

I remembered my heavy cream this time, and we brought in our clean practice-butter jars, ready to be shaken. We screwed the lids on tight and shook. And shook. And shook.

“My arm might fall off soon,” Lizette said.

“I think my arm fell off already,” Angus said. “Which is why I can’t feel it anymore.”

But I loved it. I wanted us to shake those jars together forever. When Mr. Home came over and told us we weren’t even close, I was happy.

“How’s Sonia?” Lizette said.

“Good,” I said. I felt like I should know more things about Sonia. She was almost my sister! “She went to the beach,” I said.

“Really?” Lizette rolled her eyes. “Why don’t I live in California? Angus, what are you doing?”

“High speed!” Angus was in overdrive, shaking his jar a hundred miles an hour.

Lizette smiled. “Wanna race?”

I was about to say I didn’t want to race, when there was a crash. Angus’s jar had slipped out of his hands and hit the floor.

Carolyn Shattuck screamed, even though none of the mess went anywhere near her.

Mr. Home told everyone to stay away from the broken glass. The school custodian came and cleaned up while Angus apologized a lot. He looked pretty upset. Angus almost never makes mistakes.

“Share mine,” I said, and Angus and I took turns shaking my jar until he looked happier and our heavy cream became a solid. I used the back of a spoon to spread some on our bread. (It wasn’t French bread. It was what Dad calls plastic-bag bread.)

“Let’s count,” Lizette said. “One…two…three!”

We all took bites. It was pretty good. We had remembered salt.

“I bet they don’t have bread and butter like this in California,” Angus said, chewing.

Actually, Jesse says there’s a lot of amazing food in California. But I was glad we were all in New York.

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