Café Chaos: My Family Is Not a Piece of Cake E-Book

Catherine Wilkins

• Herausgeber: Nosy Crow Ltd
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Serie: Café Chaos
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 184

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Hope Crumble and her family serve up cakes, coffee and calamity in this hilarious new series from much-loved author Catherine Wilkins. Illustrated throughout by the brilliant Katie Abey. "A beautifully funny story - effortlessly brilliant." - Romesh RanganathanRunning a bustling café is Hope's family's dream - it's just not hers! While Dad and Gran battle it out in the kitchen, Mum tries to balance the books while serving quiche to hordes of hungry pensioners. Meanwhile Hope's dramatic sister Stacey is determined to turn all of life into a stage and her "wishes-he-was-on-Wall-Street" cousin Connor decides to buy novelty costumes to advertise the business. And then Auntie Rita rocks up...Café Crumble is tipping straight into Café Chaos! Luckily for her family, Hope is there to save the day, though ideally this wouldn't involve dressing up as a giant ice cream and dancing outside the school gates. You'll laugh (a lot), you'll cry (with even more laughter), you'll develop a strange yearning for caroons (whatever they are!). Welcome to Café Chaos! "This funny and relatable story will appeal to fans of Jacqueline Wilson, as well as children who, like Hope, have to stand up to their families to make their wishes heard." - The Bookseller Look out for these the laugh-out-loud funny books by Catherine Wilkins: - My Best Friend and Other Enemies: A Jess Jackson Book - You're Not the Boss of Me! (WINNER Lollies 2024, Teen) - My Brilliant Life and Other Disasters: A Jess Jackson Book - And more café capers in upcoming Café Chaos stories!

Leseprobe

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ii

 My Best Friend and Other Enemies

My Brilliant Life and Other Disasters

My School Musical and Other Punishments

My Great Success and Other Failures

When Good Geeks Go Bad

The Weird Friends Fan Club

You’re Not the Boss of Me!

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iv

v

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1

CHAPTER ONE

“Hope!” my mum calls up the stairs. “Get down here! I need to take your photo for the first day of school.”

“You’ll have to take it later,” I hear my dad say. “We’re busy.”

“But it’s a special, precious day – Two cappuccinos, was it? Takeaway. No problem.” Mum is quickly distracted.

I should probably mention here, my family run a café. And 8 a.m. is a very busy time.

I head down the steep, narrow staircase that separates our flat (home) from our never-ending work, and emerge into the brightly lit, bustling .2

I am very proud of my family and how hard they work. But it does mean everything gets planned around the schedule of when a café is busy. We can only really do things when it’s quiet. (Especially now money is tight since we had our .)

Mum once ran out of the hairdresser’s with wet hair because Dad texted her that a coach full of pensioners on their way to Warwick had broken down in our town and they’d all sat in our café to wait it out.

And, look, this always comes up eventually so let’s just rip this plaster off now – my surname is Crumble and my family’s business is called .

I know. OK? The decision at the time was to lean into 3it. Also, because my Grandma Margery makes a mean apple crumble. It’s the signature dish they built the café around. She won an for it, actually. Anyway. Idon’t particularly think puns are big and clever but here we are.

My family are a nice bunch. Ish. You know, for a load of chaotic, distracted loudmouths who are obsessed with the and who don’t appreciate my . They do provide meals, shoes and the occasional bit of advice, like “What’s for you, won’t pass you” (when they’re refusing to fork out £126 for concert tickets, for example).

I’m the “quiet” one in the family. Or, as my sixteen-year-old cousin Connor would describe it, I have “no USP” (which stands for unique selling point, and is supposed to be the one thing that makes your product better than its competitors). I prefer to think of myself as and .

“Ah, great, there she is!” Mum waves as the digital code lock clicks shut on the door behind me. 4“We have soy milk and coconut milk at the moment if you don’t want dairy,” she tells her current customer.

I watch my mum serve three more people and realise I will need to leave soon if I want to walk to school with my best friend, Leila (and I dowant to do that).

Connor, my cousin, appears behind me and the door clicks shut again. “Out the way,” he says.

“Connor!” Mum calls out. “Can you come and serve for a sec, so I can take a photo of Hope?”

“Sorry, Auntie Bren, I don’t have time,” replies Connor.

“Americano takeaway, yes. Can you take a photo of her for me?” Mum says.

“Sorry, Auntie Bren, I don’t have time for that either,” replies Connor. “I have to go. I’m sure the queue will go down in a moment.”

“That queue isn’t going to dissipate any time soon,” I tell him. 

5“Wooooh,” he says, a bit high-pitched, implying I have used a word.

Butcomeon,whichisit,Connor?(I think sarcastically in my head.) I have no ? OrI actually have a and grasp of language? (I don’t say this out loud.) We’re not supposed to start arguments in the café. Any more.

“All right, have a good first day of school, Muggle,” Connor says, then leaves.

OK. There may or may not be an outdatedfamily joke that I was quite fervently hoping for a letter from Hogwarts. Which evidently has arrived since I am about to start Beanfore High School. ( as it’s affectionately – or worryingly – known to everyone who goes there.)

As Connor leaves, my nineteen-year-old sister, Stacey, comes in from outside, clad in yoga gear. The café door tinkles again.6

“Great! Stacey! Can you please cover for me real quick?” Mum beams. “Sixcappuccinoscomingrightup. I need to take a photo of Hope.”

“Mum, have you seen that delivery outside?” asks Stacey. “Is that for us?”

“What? No. It’s two hours early if it is. I can’t— Hang on. Stacey, get behind here now.”

Stacey saunters over to the counter. “This isn’t my real job,” she tells the waiting customer. “I’m actually an .”

“Stacey – six cappuccinos,” Dad barks from the kitchen. Stacey starts serving, but she’s much slower than Mum. “Faster,” encourages Dad.

“Pretend you’re up for a role of someone who cares about their job,” I suggest.

I can hear Dad scoff from the kitchen, even though it’s .

It’s not that I don’t love Stacey. It’s not that I don’t respect her pursuit of the . She wants to be an actor. That takes a lot of and I salute her for it. My issue is that on more than one occasion during 7Year Six, she picked me up from school dressed in a to “get into character” for an audition she had coming up.

It was so

I know this because Skyla Lipton said, “Oh my goodness, that is soooo ” so that I (and, well, ) could hear.

8

Mum sticks her head back in the café. “I don’t believethis. I’m going to have to sort it.” She vanishes.

“Do you still want a photo of me for my first day?” I call after her.

She reappears momentarily, looking and .. “I do! Please… Umm… Take a selfie! Have a great day! I love you.” And she’s gone.

I hold up my phone and take what I can’t help but feel is a slightly bleak selfie. I look sad. I take another one where I at least raise my eyebrow like I’m taking a sideways look at this situation.

A customer tuts at me and shakes their head, like they think I’m being a typical teenager, all vain and too extremely online. “My mum told me to,” I explain. But the customer pretends not to hear me.

I can’t waitto start secondary school and get out of here and have some actual

9I’m fairly certain that at secondary school – for example – they won’t suddenly bin off lessons to make us all unpack stock instead.

This actually happened at my eighth birthday party at the café.

My party was on a Sunday afternoon and we were supposedto be decorating cupcakes while the café was closed. But then Mum realised there wasn’t space for us all to decorate cupcakes because a delivery had arrived that morning, so she switched our activity to opening boxes.

Mum even gave us box-cutter knives, which a couple of people thought was cool, until Skyla Lipton said it was so and a little bit . 

But then (luckily) Leila and I turned it into a fun game where we all had to pretend we were unboxing for YouTube. Except instead of unboxing cool toys, like Ryan, we were mainly unboxing tins of beans and loo roll. Though a few lucky people did get to unbox crisps.

Anyway. Onwards to secondary school. Where there are . 10

“Babes!” Leila opens her front door and twirls for me (she has already made her uniform look so much cooler than mine). She switches up the twirl to some vogue posing, then finishes with her arms in the air, like her body is saying “ta-da!”

I cheer and give her a round of applause. Her is too infectious not to.

“Is that Hope?” I hear Leila’s mum, Sara, call out from the living room. “Come in, darling! Let me take a picture of you both! First day of school!”

I come in and Leila and I pose in a bunch of different ways, including hugging, pouting and totally deadpan, and eventually her mum tells us to stop.

11

We are officially ready for school. We have to go to school.

“Are you sure you don’t want a lift on your first day?” asks Sara.

“No, Mum,” says Leila. “It’s not exactly far. We are , women.”

“My baby.” Sara dramatically puts her hand on her chest and looks like she might be about to cry. She sighs wistfully, then snaps back to attention. “Do you have enough money?”

“Yes.”

“Snacks?”

“Yes.”

“Take these just in case.” Sara suddenly thrusts packets of crisps at us both.12

“Bye, Mum.” Leila grins as we put the crisps into our new school bags.

“Bye! Be good. Be polite. But stand your ground. And—”

“I know, I know.” Leila rolls her eyes and hugs her mum.

Sara keeps waving from the front door as we walk away. “Be kind! And have fun!”

“Your mum is the ,” I tell Leila.

“I know,” Leila agrees, turning one last time to wave. “I’m a big fan myself.”

I love how close Leila and her mum are.

At some point towards the end of primary school, it started to become sort of “cool” for everyone to complain about their parents. (I think Skyla Lipton started it.)

Like, people would roll their eyes and say things like, “Oh my gosh, my mum is so embarrassing. She thinks she can pull off skinny jeans.” Or “I nearly died! My dad asked me if I like Justin Bieberlake. What an idiot.” And Skyla was like this arbitrator, agreeing and encouraging everyone. 

13And more and more people would join in, finding stuff they didn’t like about their parents, just so they could be part of the conversation. But Leila did. She would always just say simply, “I love my mum. She’s .”

And the incredible thing was, because Leila is so and so , everyone had to adapt to her.

So instead of teasing her and saying, “Oh my gosh, you likeyour mum, how embarrassing,” Skyla had to just go, “Oh. That’s cool. You have a nice mum, you’re lucky.”

And thensome people started saying, “Actually, I like my mum too.” Like Freddie Patterson. But some people still did seem to their parents. Like George Hargreaves. He said his mum was “Darth Vader with a perm” because she grounded him for getting mud all over her newly steam-cleaned carpet.

But this is one of the things I love about Leila. She’s so and so . She’s just my

14I feel instantly happier when I’m around her. I’m so glad we’re starting secondary school together.

And I’m so glad Skyla Lipton is notcoming to Beanfore. She basically ended up being my

by the end of primary school.

And I didn’t mind that much. I mean, I know not is going to like me and that’s fine.

But what made it unfortunate was she also seemed to be in charge of what counted as or . I’d much rather have a nemesis that wasn’t in charge of anything important, like how to pronounce “scone” or something.

Her family are moving abroad because her dad got some new job where he was going to earn

(she was very pleased to tell us). 

15So I’m ! Free from being told my laugh is too ; free from being told I run like a granny; and free from being told I’d be if I dyed my hair blonde, because “it’s the only thing that might save that kind of face.”

The closer we get to our new school, the more we see other pupils on their way, and the more I start to feel. Eventually we are right outside the gate, surrounded by throngs of students clad in brown and yellow. (Yes, the uniform is pretty tasty.)

we’re walking into school! It’s OK. I’m ready for this. It will be fun. Hang on, isn’t that—

“Hey! Leila! Hope!” Skyla Lipton is standing by a huge recycling bin, waving at us.

16

CHAPTER TWO

. Noway!What’s shedoing here? “Leila! Hey!” She waves again as we approach. “Hi, Hope. Oh mygoodness, your uniform looks way too for you!” She laughs. “It makes you look .”

“I think it slaps,” Leila reassures me, grinning.

“Sorry, sorry, yes, it’s ,” amends Skyla.

“I thought you were moving abroad,” I say tersely.17

“Yeah, well, plans change,” she replies. “My dad decided he didn’t want to take that job in the end. It would have been a lot of work relocating.” She adds to Leila, “So here we are! I’m so glad I ran into you. I don’t recognise anyone. Let’s all go in together.”

As we stream through the main entrance, some people jostling and running, I’m struck again by the faint smell of floor polish and detergent that I first noticed on the open day when we looked around. I guess this is how smells.

“Oh wow, Natasha! Is that you? I your hair!” Skyla immediately vanishes into the crowd.

Leila and I look at each other and laugh. “Well, that was short and sweet,” comments Leila dryly, as we arrive at our form room, 7L.

“Speak for yourself. That girl is always trying to me,” I say.

“What do you mean?”

“You were there. She said I look like a in my uniform.”

“Oh, she’s just a bit tactless.” Leila shrugs. “I don’t think 18she meant anything by it. Besides, whenever Skyla says stuff like that, she’s only really embarrassing herself. Not you. So don’t worry about it.”

I try to agree with Leila in my head. But I still think Skyla is embarrassing me morethan herself.

Leila generally agrees with me that Skyla Lipton is, but Leila is too laid back to let it really bother her. (Also, Leila has never been told she is sooo embarrassing.) But I guess it’s not Leila’s fault she’s .

Mrs Long is our form teacher but she’s not here yet. We met her when she came to our primary school, St Joan’s, to talk to us about Beanfore, and again on the “moving up” day when we came here at the end of last term to have sample lessons and learn our way around. She seems pretty nice. I think I like her.

We have desks in here that we can keep our books in, and pegs outside for our coats. And we’ll have registration and any PSHE lessons in here. But then we move around the school to the rest of our lessons. There’s a whole science block with and 19! We have timetables so we know where to go.

Skyla and Natasha are already in the form room as we walk in. “It’s just so cool, it really suits you,” Skyla is telling Natasha.

“Oh, right. You’re in this form too,” I say.

“St Joan’s crew! Whaat whaat.” Natasha does a sort of party-DJ voice as a greeting.

“Check out Natasha’s new hair!” says Skyla.

“It’s called a balayage,” says Natasha proudly, flicking her head like she’s in a shampoo advert. The tips of Natasha’s hair look lighter than the rest of her hair.

“Ohh, nice.” Leila goes over to inspect. “Love it.” (Leila is big into .) Much more than me. Sometimes I let her give me makeovers.

“New school, new hair,” says Natasha happily.

“New school, new watch!” Skyla waves her wrist, showing her new smartwatch. A voice in it says, “I’m sorry, I don’t know how to help you with that.”

“New shoes.” Leila taps one of her carefully chosen shoes. 

20There is the smallest pause while they all turn to look at me.

“Hope, did you get anything new to start school with?” asks Skyla.

“Well, um…” (No. We’re broke. We’ve had a .)“Are you blind?” I joke. “Got a whole school uniform over here!” I gesture at myself. I hear laughter beside me, but I don’t know if it’s at me.

“No.Like, you know, something to make you feel more grownup? No? Oh. Sad. Oh well.”

“What are you even talking about?” A girl has been listening to this conversation and comes and sits at the desk next to mine. The name card that’s been placed on the desk says “Abi G”.

“Um, hi?” responds Skyla, affronted.

“Who even areyou people? Who starts a new school bragging like that? .” She shakes her head, chuckling, then to me. “Hi, I’m Abi. All my uniform is second hand. Don’t worry about them.”

“This is a , actually,” says Skyla haughtily. She’s not used to losing the upper hand. 

21“That’sa good way to make new friends at your new school,” says Abi sarcastically. Then to me, “Do you know them?”

“Yes, we all went to St Joan’s Primary together. This is my best friend, Leila,” I gesture.

“Ohhh, ,” says Abi.

“What?” Skyla is properly annoyed now.

“St Joan’s is that C of E school that no one can get into unless they live like next door. You always win at 22everything. You have a really playground. And a duck pond. You’re the poshoswiththe pond!”

“That’s… Wait – That’swhat people think of us?” asks Skyla, looking aghast as she digests this.

“Yeah. Well, word of advice,” Abi addresses them. “If you want to get on here, I wouldn’t start by about your and how many you own. You’ll get .”

“Hey. It was onepony, and we sold him two years ago because my dad said I wasn’t riding him enough,” blurts Skyla defensively, too flustered to realise what a this is.

Abi looks at her and then

“Good luck,” she says. And then a bell goes, and the room fills up with the rest of our form.

23

CHAPTER THREE

What a first day! I can’t wait to tell Mum all about it as I arrive back to the familiar hum and delicious smell of a fairly busy café. The bell tinkles to announce my appearance and Mum looks up.

“Hope! How was school?” Mum is but distributing paninis. I don’t want to annoy her while she is carrying three plates at once, so I go over to my usual after-school table.

At some point childcare devolved into plonking us in the corner of the café with a colouring book. But now I am eleven I can walk home (well, most of the way with Leila) and I have actual . I sit down in what I still think of as the colouring-book 24corner, briefly look at my homework and decide to get out my pack of cards. I start practising a  where I try to make one card slightly jump out of the pack.

The café is “a modern space with a cosy atmosphere”, according to one online review. The counter runs along most of one side, with the kitchen behind it. And we’ve managed to squeeze in a surprising number of tables. The colouring-book table is pushed right into the furthest corner, behind the quiet end of the counter.

“Enjoy!” Mum puts down the last panini at a nearby table. “Hope!” She is suddenly beside me and I jump and drop some cards. “I said, how was your first day?” 25She approaches me. “I don’t like you ignoring me.”

“I wasn’t ignoring you – you were busy over there,” I explain, gathering up the cards. Mum looks .

“What’s our family motto?” she asks.

“Get off your phone when I’m talking to you?” I offer jokily.

“No.” Mum cracks a smile.

“Everybody has to try for a wee before they get in the car?” I continue.

“No.” She chuckles. “No. .”

“Family First, eh?” I quiz sceptically. “Aren’t you, like, not speaking to half your family?” (Mum’s siblings are variously: annoyed about a lawnmower being broken; upset the café wouldn’t host a birthday party for free; on a prolonged holiday to find themselves.)

“This part of the family,” Mum amends breezily. “So anyway, how was your first—”

I would answer, “The world turned upside down,” but before I can, Mum’s already back at the counter because a little old lady wants a pot of tea and a slice of lemon cake. 

26It’s a shame. Not only is Mum unable to get full sentences out uninterrupted, but she’s denied the opportunity to digest the magnificent news that the girl from primary school is an at secondary school.

And this also deprives Mum of the chance to say “I am surprised’ in that slightly smug way she has. Because Mum never thought Skyla was cool, she only thought she was mean, based on my previous stories about her, and also meeting her.

All the things that made a person “cool” at my primary school – being clever, having rich parents, nice things and nice holidays – are not what makes you at Beanfore.

Having nice things is still relatively important, it seems, but how