by Emma Lord
“Even if she hadn’t, it was over the line. I don’t want to be provoking other businesses, especially not—” He cuts himself off, shaking his head. “And now it’s gone ‘viral,’” he says, using actual air quotes, “so we can’t even delete it. Especially since they responded.”
“They what?”
I lunge for my phone, my dad already warning me against the impulse to send something back. But why the hell shouldn’t we? A silly Mean Girls quote in response to them literally stealing from our business?
“This is the Twitter equivalent of spitting in Grandma Belly’s face. You’re gonna just take this lying down?”
He presses his face into his hand. “Everything doesn’t have to be so dramatic.”
In all honesty, I’m a little bit stunned. I may be way more of a hothead than he is, but nobody is a fiercer defender of Grandma Belly than my dad. I open my mouth to remind him as much, but he beats me to the punch.
“No more tweeting. The account is off-limits.”
“But Dad—”
“But nothing.” He gets up abruptly and claps a hand on my shoulder. “You’re gonna be running this place someday, Jack. I have to know you’re gonna be able to do that with its best interests in mind.”
My face burns. His back is turned to me, so he misses the wince I don’t manage to swallow down in time—the one that has only gotten more pronounced over the years as his implications that I’m the twin who will stay behind and take charge of the deli have slowly but certainly become less implied and spoken more like facts.
“Anyway, you’re on register in the evenings for the rest of the week.”
“Seriously?”
It’s actually a lot better than I was expecting. It’s the fact that my dad can flip from telling me he expects me to run this place and then treating it like a punishment in the next heartbeat that really gets me. To me, it’s yet another spoken confirmation of an unspoken thing—that Ethan’s the twin destined for greatness, and I’m the one who will stick around and deal with whatever he leaves in his wake.
“Consider yourself lucky. The next time an eighties pop icon retweets you, I’ll make it a month.”
“They ripped us off,” I argue. I know it’s not helping or hurting my case, but I don’t even care about that anymore. The punishment’s been doled out. The anger is still there.
My dad lets out a sigh, then rattles the shoulder he has his hand on and squeezes. He’s making one of those fatherhood is testing me faces he makes when one of us says something he’s not sure how to answer, like asking about the Easter Bunny, or why the college undergrads smell weird when they come in the deli after 4 p.m. on a Wednesday. (Pot, to be clear. It was 800 percent pot.)
“I know, kid. But we’ve still got something they don’t.”
“A ‘secret ingredient’?” I mutter.
“That. And our family.”
I wrinkle my nose.
“Sorry. Had to go full Nick Junior to snap you out of it. Go help your mom.”
Which is how I find myself here, tied to the register, taking the orders of the old ladies who have book club every Monday night, half of a little league soccer team, and a group of giggling middle schoolers who paid in quarters. Living the dream.
Okay, okay—the cliché burden of my dad’s expectations aside, it’s not so bad. I genuinely enjoy being up front. My popularity in high school doesn’t extend more than a few inches beyond the dive team, which I’ve never minded much—probably because here, people know me. If every block in New York had its own block celebrity, I’d probably be ours. Not for any redeeming qualities of mine, but mostly because all the regulars watched me and Ethan grow up, and of the two of us, I am much worse at shutting my trap. I know way too much about the personal lives of the regulars—the frequency of Mrs. Harvel’s dog’s bowel movements, the messy details of Mr. Carmichael’s wedding that led to an even messier divorce, exactly what kind of fruit Annie—who was sixteen when I met her, but is thirty now—is eating so she can “convince her uterus to spit out one of the girl eggs next time.”
And they know me too. An engineer who comes in every Tuesday and Friday for his tuna sandwich melt will always help if I’m stuck on something in a math class. The book club ladies are always sneaking me homemade peanut butter cookies, even though I’m surrounded by a sea of miscellaneous baked goods. Annie’s been giving me unsolicited dating advice since before my voice started cracking.
So it adds yet another layer of confusion when my dad rolls this out as a “punishment,” like he hasn’t been pulling me or Ethan downstairs to run the register every other day since we were small. It’s not like we’re short-staffed or anything—my dad’s just always been into the idea of this being a family business, so participation has been less than optional. As early as six, we were yelling orders to the cooks in the back and wiping down tables, mostly because the regulars found it charming and it kept us occupied in the summers. Now, my parents have us doing everything from register to inventory to sandwich assembly.
Well, by “us” I mostly mean me. I’m the one tapped for random shifts when there’s a need. And I get it—Ethan’s busy with all the student council nonsense and extracurriculars and generally being the prince of our high school. But I resent the assumption that just because I don’t have debate club practices or someone to make out with on the steps of the Met, his time is somehow worth more than mine.
In my parents’ defense, I guess I haven’t told them about moonlighting as a crappy app developer. And in my defense, there’s no way in hell I’m going to tell them about it now that Rucker is on a witch hunt and Dad is more determined to live in the 1960s than ever.
“Something on your mind?” my mom asks, when there isn’t anyone in line at the register.
I lean against the counter and sigh. “Just the infinite, suffocating void of trying to navigate the world without my phone in my pocket.”
My mom rolls her eyes and swats me with the towel she was using to rub down tables—which, gross.
“Who have you been texting so much?” she asks, reminding me that just about nothing gets past her eagle eyes. “Oh, let me guess. You’re talking on that Woozel app.”
“Weazel.”
“Ah, yes, Weazel.”
If Mom’s favorite thing is mocking Rucker’s emails to the parents, then her second favorite thing is pretending to be hip and cool. Something she can do a lot easier than most parents, because our mom actually is cool. She can somehow walk into a PTA meeting full of Upper East Side moms decked out in pearls and giant sunglasses in nothing but her jeans and a Girl Cheesing T-shirt and intimidate the whole room with a look. It’s like cool just oozes out of her skin.
Luckily, the coolness is genetic. Unluckily, Ethan stole it all in utero and left me out to dry.
“Should I be very alarmed? Are you kids using it to plot a school takeover and replace Rucker with someone who wears pants from this century?”
“Now there’s an idea.”
She presses her lips into a smirk. “You’re welcome.”
Sometimes my mom is so antiestablishment that I’m confused about why she insists on us having a private school education in the first place. But I guess it’s more for my grandparents’ sake than ours—the ones on her side, not Grandma Belly’s. They never quite approved of her marrying my dad and co-running a deli, when, as far as I can tell, they had very much primed her to be some hedge fund manager’s trophy wife. I think putting me and Ethan through Stone Hall was a way of saying she hadn’t completely abandoned her roots, the same way my dad’s always been tied to his.
The same way I’m going to be tied to them, I guess.
“As long as you kids are being safe…”
I snort. “Really, Mom, it’s like—dumber than Snapchat. Just people posting pictures of graffiti in the bathroom and making fun of Rucker.”
“So you are on it.”
I roll my eyes. “Everyone is.”
She gives me a look she
rarely has to give, as if she’s lifted some part of me like the hood of a car and is inspecting it for leaks. A stupid part of me wants to tell her right then. I made this, I want to say. I made it without any help, and it’s making people happy. I want to tell her about Mel and Gina making out in the hallway this morning. I want to tell her how someone was having a total meltdown about chem lab in the Hallway Chat the other day, and at least twenty other students sent encouraging messages to calm them down. I want to tell her that in my own weird way, I made something that’s doing good in the world, something that feels as if it matters.
It’s the look. It’s always that damn look. And I start caving and saying all kinds of stuff I shouldn’t.
“But yeah, I’ve been texting a girl from school.”
It’s out of my mouth before I can think the better of it. As much as I try not to wreck this thing with Bluebird by overthinking it, I keep underestimating just how much space she takes in my brain until moments like this—when I’m staring too intently at a classmate on her phone in the hall, or staying awake until some absurd hour trying to come up with an equally witty response to something she’s typed, or apparently about to blurt her entire existence to my mom.
“Aha! Ethan said he spotted you out with a girl.” She sees the indignant look on my face and raises her arms up. “Your dad was looking for you, and you weren’t picking up, so he called Ethan.”
“I’m surprised he came up for air long enough to breathe, let alone pick up his phone,” I mutter. Leave it to Ethan to gossip about me to Mom without saying anything about it to me first. “And it was his fault I was with her in the first place. We were talking about swim and dive stuff.”
“So you’re not dating her?”
“No!”
Mom raises her eyebrows. Okay, that sounded defensive even in my own ears.
“I mean, no. Pepper’s, like—not the kind of girl who’s into dating. More the kind of girl who’s into wrecking the grading curve in AP Gov.”
I’m about to make another quip about her, but for the first time it seems a little unfair. I didn’t hate hanging out with her today. I mostly just offered to go rib Ethan as a joke, to get her to lighten up—I didn’t think she’d actually want to walk around after the politics of swim and dive were all taken care of. Or that she wouldn’t be immediately against the idea of working together. It knocked me so off guard that I actually agreed to take on captaining duties for the rest of the season.
Whoops.
“See? You kids don’t even need your newfangled app to make friends.”
And then the moment is gone—that weird urge to spill the beans to my mom and tell her about Weazel, about the mysterious Bluebird, about what I’ve really been doing when there’s a light under my door past midnight.
The truth is, it feels too much like letting her down. Both of my parents. Like they’re counting on me to be the kid who keeps this place afloat, the kid who stays. I’m almost relieved my mom took my phone away before I had to come up with some kind of answer for Bluebird—the issue isn’t so much what I want to be, but whether or not I can be it without hurting everyone else in the process.
Pepper
When my alarm clock goes off the next morning, it almost feels like a joke. So does the fact that I may be the first person in human history to have a Twitter hangover.
Just as I predicted, the moment I walked in the door, my mom thrust her laptop in my face and asked for help answering more #GrilledByBLB selfies, undeterred by the backlash we’d gotten for our response to that deli that only seemed to be ramping up by the second. Sitting there and getting all the notifications from people tweeting at the corporate account was the internet equivalent of sitting in a dunce chair and having rotten tomatoes chucked at us all night.
I barely even got a chance to text Wolf back, and my AP Calc assignment looks like a drunk person scribbled on graphing paper. I didn’t even get to my college apps. Let that be my mom’s big punishment for dragging me into this—as determined as she’s been to help me blend in here, nothing will look quite as bad as me not getting into a single top-twenty college because she had me tweeting GIFs at strangers all day.
For a moment, I just lie on my pillows and wonder what would happen. We’ve never really talked about it—me getting good grades to get into a good school has always been the expectation. I guess it started around the time she and Paige really started going at it. Mom was so stressed about Paige’s antics, the arguments and the way she refused to make friends with anyone here and was always wandering around the city, pulling the I’m 18 now card like a party trick. But Mom was happy, at least, when I came home with good grades. When teachers were telling her what a delight I was to have in class. When I made varsity swim team.
And when Mom was happy, it was harder for Paige to pick fights—when Mom was happy, it was infectious. I forget, sometimes, that the three of us have good memories in this apartment. That Mom was the one who helped us start our baking blog in the first place. That we watched Gossip Girl reruns and flipped out whenever we recognized an exterior. That every now and then, there was this glimpse of how it could be, instead of how it was.
But then something else would make Paige snap. Dad’s flight to visit us would get canceled for weather, or she’d have a rotten day at her new school. Then she’d do something to get under Mom’s skin, and Mom would push back, and the apartment would go from Hello Kitty to hell on earth in the time it took for me to take out the recycling and come back.
The thing that still doesn’t make sense to me is why Paige even came here in the first place. She could have just stayed in Nashville with Dad, finished senior year with her friends, and avoided this whole mess altogether.
If you can even call it a mess anymore. It’s been so long since Paige started cold-shouldering Mom that it’s more normal than not.
The snooze alarm goes off, ending my pity party. I blearily pull out my phone and see Wolf never got back to me last night. It feels, for an irrational moment, like he knows what I did. Like this is the universe’s way of punishing me for aiding and abetting pettiness on social media. Or maybe he’s just bored of talking to me.
Or worse—maybe I said something specific enough that he knows it’s me, and he’s already disappointed.
I’m being paranoid, and even I know it. He’s probably busy. Doing stuff like AP Calc homework that doesn’t look like it was written while hanging upside down from a ceiling fan. Or whatever it is teenagers do when their parents aren’t dragging them into Twitter wars.
At least the stupid hashtag is over. Or at the very least it should be.
After I finish brushing my teeth, my mom unceremoniously opens the door to the bathroom and shoves her phone screen into my eyeline.
It’s a picture of the new Grandma’s Special grilled cheese in a BLB wrapper, sitting in a puddle on the sidewalk. tell me i’m pretty #GrilledByBLB, the caption reads. It was sent from that deli—Girl Cheesing—just a few minutes before.
“Got a sec?”
Mom’s already decked out in her outfit for the day, a sleek black dress with black tights, and a navy jeweled statement necklace to match her navy boots. Her hair is already blown out, her makeup perfectly applied. Standing next to her in the mirror makes me look like I’ve stumbled out of a crypt.
“Can’t Taffy handle it?”
“Taffy won’t be in until nine, and she wasn’t built for these kinds of tweets anyway. Not like you are.”
I hand her phone back to her, spitting my toothpaste into the sink. “Mom. The recipes are really, really similar.”
“It’s grilled cheese. Don’t be silly.”
But it isn’t silly, really. The recipe alone might have been a coincidence—sourdough bread with muenster, cheddar, apple jam, and honey mustard—but BLB branded it with the exact name as theirs. It’s enough to make any copyright lawyer do a double-take, if we’re unfortunate enough that this deli really does have some kind of legal position to come at us.
“Who even had this idea in the first place? I feel like you should talk to whoever it was.”
She bites the inside of her cheek. “You’re right. And I will. But first, let’s come up with a response to this tweet.”
I shake my head. “The hashtag is over. It was just for the day. It’ll be weird if we keep going now.”
“It’ll take you like two minutes.”
Two minutes to draft it, sure, but then an hour of compulsively checking it to see how it’s being received, and a day of feeling weirdly guilty about it, and by then, she’ll probably ask me to write more tweets that will “take two minutes” and the whole thing will start all over again. A point I have every intention of making to her, except she beats me to the punch.
“And if you see Landon today, could you ask him about dinner? His father and I are scheduling a sit-down here for when he gets back from Japan in a few weeks, and I’d love for him to join us.”
My mouth practically unhinges. “Landon can’t come here.” Not here, with my bright pink Pepto-Bismol bedroom and the watercolors of Big League Burger menu items my mom commissioned and hung on the wall. Not here, where I’d have even more space and time to make an ass of myself in front of Landon than I already do.
“It’ll be good for you. You’ll get a front seat to business negotiations.” She raises her eyebrows at me conspiratorially. “With the kind of jobs you’ll be fielding after college, you’ll need it.”
Before I can protest, her heels are clack-clack-clacking down the hall, her keys are jingling, and she’s out the front door.
I don’t tweet right away. The miniature rebellion doesn’t count for much, but it’s just enough to rub me the wrong way. I take my time getting ready before I send it, so much time that I’m too late to make myself toast and end up digging through the fridge to find my leftover Monster Cake to eat on the way to school.
I notice a bit of it is missing and smile despite myself. Some things, at least, never change.
Pepper