by Emma Lord
I don’t want to be someone she has to deal with. Things are already weird enough between the four of us without me making waves.
“Just, uh … send that GIF from Harry Potter. The ‘excuse me, but who are you’ one.”
There’s a beat. “You’re in the right direction, but let’s go edgier than that.”
I close my eyes. “Fine. I’ll text you something else.”
I text Taffy and my mom the idea, walking over to the table, where Jack is still so very clearly Jack that it’s ridiculous he tried to pretend otherwise.
I can’t lie—despite his shenanigans, it is kind of fascinating, watching him and his brother. How two people can be so strikingly similar, with the same build and the same open face, the same rhythm in the way they talk, and still present it to the world in such different ways. Where Ethan is almost coolly self-possessed, like some kind of politician, Jack is an open book—his eyes unguarded and unselfconscious, his tall frame always strewn across chairs like he has settled into himself earlier than most people our age, his dark eyebrows so expressive and honest that it’s laughable he even tried to pull one over on me in the first place.
While I’m staring without meaning to, Jack takes a very long slurp of his coffee. “So. This pool thing.”
I lean forward, leveling with him. We are two people at odds—me rigid and immovable, him just as at ease as ever, meeting my stare with faint amusement.
“What exactly did your coach want?”
“Ethan says we’re supposed to do a half hour of lap swimming a day.”
We only have the pool for two hours at a time. Every single year before this one, they’ve taken the area by the diving board, and we’ve taken the lanes. Half of me wonders if this is Coach Thompkins’s way of getting under Coach Martin’s skin—they are notorious for not getting along, especially when it comes to using the swim and dive budgets—but that doesn’t mean we can’t deal with it.
“How’s this: you get the pool for twenty minutes a day,” I propose. “The last twenty minutes we have rented.”
“And where will the swim team go?”
“We’ll do dry land exercises. Push-ups and lunges.”
“And you’re going to lead that?”
“I’ll ask Landon to do it.”
Jack blows out a breath. “Sounds like it’s all settled, then.”
I blink, surprised. I don’t know Jack all that well, but I’m not used to him being so … reasonable.
“Wanna go heckle my brother?”
Ah. There it is.
My phone pings from the table—it’s a text from Taffy, letting me know she’s in a meeting. My mom immediately texts and asks me to pull up the corporate account on my phone and tweet it instead.
I wait for a beat, wondering why I feel a pinch of guilt sending it. This isn’t my business, and it’s not my Twitter account. It ultimately has nothing to do with me at all. I’m just a set of fingers on a keyboard.
Big League Burger @B1gLeagueBurger
Replying to @GCheesing
*extremely ms. norbury voice*
do you even go to this school? go home
4:47 PM · 20 Oct 2020
I hit tweet and steel myself. Something feels … grimy about the whole thing. Like I’ve done something wrong.
“They’re only, like, three blocks away.”
I put my phone on the table, the screen facing down. “I know where the Met is,” I say, sounding overly defensive even to my own ears.
But Jack doesn’t even seem to notice. “So?” he asks—an invitation.
I feel like I am itching at my seams, compelled to open the phone back up to the corporate account and see what people are saying back to the tweet. It’s strange, how I can’t seem to untangle myself from the company, even though it looks nothing like it did when it first started. When I was little, the whole of the restaurant felt as if it were mine. Paige and I were so defined by it—everyone who worked there knew our names, let us make up ridiculous milkshake combinations, snuck us leftover fries when my parents were in meetings that ran late. The franchise is so corporate that it’s way beyond me and my dessert whims now, but no matter how big we get, I can’t quite squash the part of me that takes it personally.
There’s no way I’m going to be able to focus on anything tonight, not with the stupid notifications piling up. The idea of it is suddenly so suffocating, the last thing I want to do is go home.
“Yeah. Yeah, let’s go.”
Jack blinks. “Yeah?”
“Why not?”
Pepper
We take our drinks and head out, and it occurs to me as soon as we hit the sidewalk, into the cool October air, that I don’t actually have any idea what to say to Jack. I don’t usually have to come up with small talk for anyone, really. I walk to school alone, I walk back alone, and everywhere else I go tends to be in a group.
But Jack Campbell is nothing if not good at filling up silence.
“Where are you from, anyway?”
I wince. It’s not that I lied about it or anything, but after the first few reactions I got name-dropping a city in the South, I decided not to advertise it. “I’m that much of a sore thumb?”
“No, actually. You fit in alarmingly well.” I’m not sure if this is meant to be a compliment or not, and from the slight bitterness in his tone, I’m not sure if he is either. He clears his throat, the edge in his words softening. “But you were one of like, two people we didn’t already know freshman year, so I’m guessing you moved from somewhere.”
I’m never quite sure whether I’m embarrassed or proud of it. Today I settle on some mix of the two.
“Nashville, actually.”
“Huh.” Jack seems to mull this over, his tongue pressing into the side of his cheek. I can see something shift in the way he considers me, and it makes me uneasy—the not knowing.
I clear my throat. “If you’re about to make a cowgirl joke, you can save it.”
“Nah, it was gonna be Taylor Swift–themed.”
“In that case, you may proceed. But with caution. I was really into her when she was still country.”
“Was?”
There’s that little half grin again. I wonder if Jack has ever smiled with his whole mouth. Someday when he’s an old man, he’ll probably just have wrinkles on the one side.
“Am,” I concede. Just two days ago Paige and I were blasting “Shake It Off” so loudly on a three-way Skype call with our dad that he threatened to start singing himself if we didn’t quit. At that point, considering he has neighbors on both sides of him, it was our civic responsibility to shut it down.
We turn the corner and hit Fifth Avenue, which is emptier now than when I usually see it on the weekends. Today it’s mostly tourists and joggers who have gotten home from work. “Where are you from?”
“Born and bred,” says Jack, gesturing out in the direction of downtown. “We live in the East Village. Have since my great-grandparents.”
I feel an unexpected pang, then. An unwelcome kind of longing. My grandparents are still in Nashville too—on both my mom’s and my dad’s side. It seemed like Nashville was the root of our family tree, like there would never be any conceivable reason for leaving. Even now, four years on the other side of it, I haven’t fully come around to the idea.
I shove my bangs behind my ear, but the wet curl pops out, stubborn as ever. My hair is never more unruly than it is after practice, when I can’t style it between school and home.
“So you’re like some kind of unicorn.”
Jack’s lip quirks. “What?”
“When’s the last time you met someone in New York whose family is actually from New York?”
Jack laughs. “Up here? Not for a while,” he says. “But where I’m from … well. You meet a lot more New Yorkers downtown than you do up here.”
It is a true testament to how enthusiastically Ethan and Stephen are going at it with each other that I notice the two of them on the steps before I n
otice anything else in the surrounding area—not the intoxicatingly sweet smell of the nut vendor on the curb, or the massive fountains, or the group of little kids squealing and running up and down the iconic steps of the Met. The two of them are utterly oblivious to all of it, kissing like one of them is about to go off to war.
I clap my hand to my chest before I even realize what I’m doing, as if I’m watching one of the ridiculous rom-coms Paige puts on whenever she comes to visit. “Aw. Let’s just leave them be.”
“What? Where’s the fun in that?” Jack crows.
“They look so happy.”
“They look like they need to get a room,” says Jack. But he’s the one who starts walking away first, shaking his head with a rueful smile. “I should have known you’d be a terrible pranking partner.”
“How exactly were you planning on pranking them, anyway?”
“I guess now you’ll never know,” he says, elbowing me in the shoulder.
I rock to the side and push him back without thinking, the gesture so mindless and natural that only after it happens do I stop breathing for a second, sure I’ve crossed some kind of line. Sometimes it feels as if I’ve been interacting with everyone here from behind some kind of veil—as though I’m allowed to be here, but not engage. To look, but not touch. Like the entire social order of this place was decided long before my arrival, and any involvement I have in it is out of mercy from the people who actually belong.
But Jack is just smirking that faint smirk, walking farther down Fifth.
“So, seeing as I’m captain of the dive team now—”
“Is that so?”
“Well, you’ve seen that Ethan is clearly interested in other varieties of diving at the moment.”
“So you’ve decided to elect yourself?”
Jack shrugs, the smirk taking on a new sharpness. “What’s the point of having an identical twin if you can’t schlep your workload onto them every now and then?”
I hold his gaze. “That doesn’t seem fair.”
Jack is uncharacteristically quiet for a moment, watching a group of siblings stand very, very still for a caricature artist as their fanny pack–clad dad flits around them taking video of the whole thing.
“Yeah, well, I’ve got nothing better to do, so.” He licks his upper lip. “So, we should probably start coming up with ideas for fundraising. Before the coaches get on our asses about it.”
“Yeah, probably.”
“What else do we have to square away?”
I’m not sure how seriously I’m supposed to entertain this. Is Jack really just going to take over duties for Ethan and let him take the credit? I love Paige more than anyone in the world, but I can’t imagine giving up that much of my free time this close to trying to impress college admissions boards.
“Uh … well, there’s fundraising. And picking out options for people to vote on for the team shirts this year. And Ethan and I were supposed to meet up every week to plan things for meets—like sending out directions to other pools for away meets, and who’s bringing snacks. And write up the newsletter for the parents.” I’m sure at any second he’s going to interrupt me and back out of this massive time suck, but he just stares back, waiting for me to finish. “It’s—kind of a lot.”
Jack doesn’t miss a beat. “Fundraising, shirts, newsletters, snacks. Got it.” He shoots a glance back in Ethan’s direction, even though he’s well out of sight. “How about we grab food after practice?”
I stop walking. “Are you asking me out?”
The mischief in his eyes makes me regret asking before I even finish the sentence. I brace myself, sure he’s going to do that thing guys do, that thing Paige warned me about—Wow, someone thinks highly of themselves, or some similar belittling comment. Instead, he stretches his back and says, “Well, I wasn’t. But now that it’s on the table…”
I cross my arms over my chest.
“Not a date,” says Jack, holding his hands up in surrender, the eternal Jack grin still branded across his face. “Just to work out the season. We can go once a week, like you and Ethan planned.”
I consider him for a moment, still waiting for some kind of punchline, some ulterior motive. I don’t find any, so I offer my hand for him to shake. He raises his eyebrows at me. I raise mine right back.
Then he claps his hand to mine, shaking it firmly, just once. There is something warm and grounding in it, something that seems to mark a shift between Jack Campbell then and Jack Campbell now. Like maybe I have misjudged the idea of him I had in my head for the last few years.
Jack hikes his backpack up onto his shoulder and looks down Seventy-Eighth Street. “I’m gonna catch the 6 train home. See you tomorrow?”
“Yeah, see you then.”
It’s only then I realize we left my seven-block bubble a few blocks back. I stand on the sidewalk for a minute, feeling ridiculous for the jolt it sends through my system, staring at the back of Jack as he waits for the light to change as if he’s some sort of compass. He pulls his phone out of his pocket, still within earshot when he scrolls for a moment, pauses, and lets out a low “Shiiiiiiiiiiit.”
I touch my own phone, buried in the pocket of my jacket. It’s back to reality for us both.
Jack
Wolf
Do you ever just do something really, really stupid
Bluebird
No, actually. I’m perfect and I’ve never done a single stupid thing in my life
Bluebird
But actually all the time, always. You good?
Wolf
I mean, my parents are less than pleased with me right now. Well, my dad’s not pleased. I think my mom secretly is, but is trying to do that whole solidarity thing
Bluebird
So what did you get busted for?
Wolf
The usual. Selling hard drugs. Joining a cult. Starting an underground fight club for teens, except the one rule is you HAVE to talk about it. Don’t know why my parents won’t just get off my back
Bluebird
Seriously. Cults are a big commitment. They should have more respect.
Bluebird
But I feel you. Also experiencing some not so great parental pressure
Wolf
College stuff?
Bluebird
Hah. I wish
Wolf
Would joining a fight club help?
Bluebird
Now that you mention it …
Bluebird
Ugh, I don’t know. Sometimes I think my mom and I have very different ideas of what I should be doing with my time/my life in general
Wolf
Yeah. I get that
Wolf
My parents are kind of like that too
Bluebird
What do you want to do?
Bluebird
Haha that sounds so dumb. Like, “what do you wanna do when you grow up?” But I guess we’re sort of getting to that point, huh?
“You’d better put that phone away before your dad spots you.”
I flinch. “Jeez, Mom, you’re like a freaking ninja.”
“Former ballerina, but I’ll take it,” she says wryly. She plucks my phone from my hand. “I think you’ve done enough damage on this bad boy for one day.”
Fair enough. I could delay my return home with practice and impromptu field trips with Pepper all I wanted, but that did nothing to get me out of a Supreme Dad Lecture of the highest order. The kind where he doesn’t even wait for me to get upstairs to the apartment we live in above the deli, but raises a thumb and jerks it to the booth in the back, which my mom dubbed the “Time-Out Booth” when we were kids. These days it’s more like the break booth, where we’ll scarf sandwiches mid-shift or do our homework during lulls, but every so often it seems to revert back to its original purpose to suit my parents’ needs.
The truly demoralizing thing about it reverting to the Time-Out Booth is that I haven’t done anything worthy of it in ages. And now that I have
, it isn’t over anything edgy, like when our upstairs neighbor Benny hotwired a motorcycle, or when Annie, one of our regulars, got caught with a joint in Roosevelt Park. It was because of a stupid tweet.
“You know we’re not that kind of business.” My dad has so rarely had to discipline me that it’s almost funny, how he’s straightening his back at the worn-out cushions of the booth as though his clothes don’t fit quite right. “I don’t even like that we’re on Twitter and Facebook at all.”
“How else are people going to know about us?” I ask, for about the umpteenth time.
“The same way they always have, for the past sixty years. This is a community, not some … internet clickbait.”
I don’t understand how my dad can look so deceptively young and hip for a dad—all bearded and skinny with a baseball cap that confuses customers into thinking he’s our much older brother—and still be such a bonehead about social media. Honestly, our food is so good it should be in ridiculous Hub Seed roundups and viral food videos. I have watched literal tears form in people’s eyes when they’ve bitten into our sandwiches. The way the cheese in our grilled cheeses peels apart with each bite is near ungodly in nature. With just a few well-lit Instagrams, a few well-executed tweets …
They could be out of the hole they’re in right now, that’s for damn sure.
But I can’t say that to him outright. My parents think Ethan and I don’t know we’re not doing so hot right now, only dealing with the finances in the back office when we’re out of sight—and I’m sure that has every bit as much to do with my dad’s pride as it does with protecting us from it. Trying to push my agenda here will only make things worse.
“And besides,” my dad says, “that tweet was crossing a line.”
“I didn’t think freaking Marigold was gonna retweet it.”