Twelve-year-old Sophie has always dreamed of being an actress and being in front of the camera. When that dream comes true and she's offered a T.V. commercial spot, she's over-the-moon happy. But then she finds out what exactly she'll be advertising: the delectable, ever-popular brownies from BEATRICE'S BROWNIES, which just so happns to be the number one competitor to IT'S RAINING CUPCAKES--owned by her best friend, Isabel's, family. Sophie has a tough choice to make: Follow her dreams or crush her best friend. What's a girl to do? Lisa Schroeder is the author of the teen verse novels The Day Before ; I Heart You, You Haunt Me and its companion novel, Chasing Brooklyn ; Far from You ; and the teen prose novel Falling for You . She is also the author of the middle grade prose novels It’s Raining Cupcakes , Sprinkles and Secrets , and Frosting and Friendship . She lives in Beaverton, Oregon. Find out more about Lisa and her books at LisaSchroederBooks.com or on Twitter at @Lisa_Schroeder. Sprinkles and Secrets Chapter 1 chocolate ice cream THE ULTIMATE COMFORT FOOD I think there are two kinds of happiness. There’s the real kind of happiness when you have to smile because you feel so good inside. It’s like you’ve just eaten the most delicious cupcake or cuddled with the most adorable kitten. When you look around, everything looks like it’s trimmed in gold. Beautiful. Joyful. Happy. Then there’s the fake kind of happiness. Something is supposed to make you happy. Your brain keeps saying you should be happy about this and you want to be, but no matter how hard you try to feel the real happiness, for some reason you can’t. So you smile anyway and put on the best happy show you can because you don’t want to look like a bad person. Sometimes, though, if you’re lucky, the fake happiness eventually and magically turns into real happiness. Today I’m supposed to feel happy and excited. Instead I feel sad and jealous. No one knows that, though. I made sure of it. All day at school I was the picture of happiness. I should get an Emmy for my performance today. Or an Oscar. Or, at the very least, a new tube of lip gloss, because my lips are really dry from all that smiling. As I ride my yellow mountain bike home, my legs pumping hard and fast and my face all scrunched up and ugly because I don’t have to pretend to be happy anymore, I think of that horrible old woman, Miss Gulch, from The Wizard of Oz. The one who took Toto from Dorothy? I probably look like her. What a scary thought. I take a deep breath, slow down my sad and jealous legs, and tell myself to relax. And then I turn my thoughts to the list of things I go to when I’m in serious need of cheering up. Well, not an actual list. That might be weird to have a piece of paper with Sophie’s List of Pick-Me-Ups written at the top and then a list of items that fill the page. Usually I’m a pretty happy person. But there are some days, like today, when the world feels like a big, rotten tomato. (For the record, I hate tomatoes.) I go over my mental pick-me-up list and realize that with the long, boring weekend stretching out ahead of me, I’m going to need almost every single thing on the list to help me through it. First on the list is my dog. Daisy is a Havanese, which means she’s an adorable, white bundle of fluffiness. And before you think I’m really shallow and only love my dog because of how she looks, when I say she’s cute, I mean even her personality is cute! When she wags her tail, which is a lot of the time, her whole body wiggles. She has a small collection of stuffed animals (ones I used to play with) that she’s claimed as hers, and she loves it when I grab one and throw it so she can chase it and bring it back to me to play tug-of-war. And when I’ve worn her out from tossing a bear or a tiger down the hallway a hundred times, she’ll set the stuffed animal down, crawl into my lap, and paw at my hand as if to say, Pet me, pet me! See? So cute! Next on the list is my best friend, Isabel. What can I say about Isabel? She’s the best friend a girl could have. She used to live in the duplex next to ours, but they moved last summer so her mom could open a cupcake shop. The shop is called It’s Raining Cupcakes, and Isabel and her parents live in an apartment above it. I think it’s pretty great, and I’m happy her mom is living out her dream, but I miss having Isabel right next door. We still see each other a lot, but won’t this weekend, which brings me to the actual reason the world feels like a big, rotten tomato. Isabel is out of town, in New York City, so she can’t be a part of my cheer-myself-up plan. In fact, her being in New York City is the reason I’m not happy. She entered a baking contest through a magazine and her recipe was good enough to earn her a spot in the bake-off. The finalists all flew to New York this morning, where they’ll compete in the bake-off tomorrow. I’m the one who told Isabel about the conte