by Emma Lord
“You should come, you know.” The words are hesitant, like she means them but isn’t sure how I’ll take them. “I mean—not that you need it. But I’m sure it would help some of the others.”
I’m so stunned by the offer that I forget I’m supposed to answer.
“Anyway, my brother’s waiting for me out front, so…” She waves awkwardly. “Thanks again.”
“Yeah.”
And then she’s off—Pooja, Bunny, or whoever she really is—leaving me torn with a new kind of uncertainty in her wake.
Pepper
Once Pooja clears the lobby, my phone pings in my pocket, pulling me out of my confusion and right back into the Twitter maelstrom. I pull out my phone, already bracing myself for the notifications, swiping through them one by one—
And realize there aren’t any from Wolf. That there weren’t any yesterday around this time either. That for the first time in our correspondence, neither of us has said anything between the hours of three and five, which is our usual peak time for bitching about whatever assignments we got earlier in the day.
Okay. I’m not stupid enough to think that Landon is Wolf just because he happens to not be texting on Weazel during the same times as swim and dive practice. By that merit, any member of the swim team, the dive team, the basketball team, the golf team, or the indoor track and soccer teams could be him too. If anything, this has only widened the ridiculously large pool of people he could be.
But it’s just one more thing in a list of already uncanny things that makes me think that maybe, just maybe, it is him after all. That fourteen-year-old Pepper’s crush was fast, but maybe not baseless. That maybe there really was something then, the way there certainly seems to be something with Wolf now.
Another ping comes in, this time from Taffy. U out of practice yet?
I sigh, shaking myself out of my head, and start walking to the bakery where Jack proposed we meet, while attempting to diffuse the Twitter situation on the way. I call Taffy first, an idea forming in my head as I walk down the street, the thousands of cat emojis still swimming in my vision.
“Is anyone from the design team in today?”
Taffy’s voice is approximately an octave higher than usual. “Yeah, Carmen’s here.”
“Okay. Get her to find, like, a stock photo of a cat.”
“Any cat?”
“A cute one, I guess. Yeah, any cat.”
My life gets more ridiculous by the second.
I wait for the light to change at Eighty-Ninth Street as she writes it down on one of the unicorn-shaped Post-it pads she keeps at her desk. We’re so in sync by now, I can sense the exact moment she lifts the pencil from the paper through the phone.
“Then do one of those, like, really corny photoshop jobs so it’s holding a Big League Burger grilled cheese. Like so bad that it’s funny.”
“Got it, got it…”
“Then have her do an animation of sunglasses dropping down on it.”
“I know that one!” says Taffy excitedly, as if she was not hired for the exact purpose of knowing about memes on the internet.
“Okay, those sunglasses. But no text,” I instruct her, feeling like a schoolteacher. “Just the sunglasses dropping down.”
There’s murmuring on the other end. “She’ll have it ready in a half hour.” The murmuring becomes decidedly more distinct, then, and I hear what can only be my mom cutting in, the low, authoritative tone of her voice unmistakable. “… She’ll have it ready in less than five,” Taffy amends.
I’m outside of the bakery, then, and see Jack has already found a table and is quite literally taking a baguette to the face. He looks like the picture of contentment, his hair still damp from the pool and curling at the edges, ripping off the end of the baguette with his teeth in that unselfconscious hungry teenage boy way. I stop for a moment just to watch him, feeling strangely charmed by the whole thing.
He spots me the moment the door opens, waving so I know where he is. I hold up a finger and stand in line to get a cup of tea. At the last moment I peer down at the counter and ask for one of the massive apple pastries, the ones I’ve passed in this window countless times but always have been too busy to stop and get by myself.
My phone hums in my hand. The GIF of the cat is in, just the way I asked for it. I save it to my drive and pull up the corporate Twitter, hating myself for it but also wanting to get it over with as soon as I possibly can.
“Trade you some baguette for some of whatever that is,” Jack offers.
“Deal.” I drop off my backpack and my swim bag at the table. “Just one sec.”
I wince when I see there are over a hundred notifications piled up on BLB’s Twitter, knowing every single one of them is cat-related or worse. I pull up a tweet draft, taking a sip of my tea, as if I can burn the wrongness of it down my throat.
Yuck. I forgot to put sugar in it. I glance around to look for the coffee counter, getting up from my chair and bumping into someone who was coming at me from the left. My tea sloshes onto my shirt, and I back into the table, dropping my phone on it.
“Sorry, sorry—”
“Pepper?”
I blink up into the ice blue of Landon’s eyes, so close I can see the distinctive little freckle just above one of them that I memorized my freshman year like his face was some kind of constellation. He cracks a smile just as I swallow down a grimace.
“Sorry,” I mutter again, ducking my head down. There’s a bread bowl full of mac and cheese on a tray in his hands, the cheese still bubbling. The views are both so overwhelming that I’m not sure which to settle on, the cheese or his face.
“Hey, Ethan—”
“Jack,” the two of us correct him at the same time. Jack turns his attention back to his baguette, but not before I see the sliver of a smile on his face.
When I look back at Landon, he is still momentarily disarmed, blinking before the easy smile is back on his face again. “Well, then. My bad. Fancy running into you guys here.”
My throat feels dry. I am staring at Landon’s uncannily symmetrical face and thinking, of all things, of my mother.
“Yeah,” I half croak. “Was just … sorry. I was going to put sugar in my tea, and…” Am now narrating every pedantic detail of my life to you for no reason.
I beeline for the coffee counter, painfully aware that Landon is falling into step next to me. This is it, then—the universe giving me the opportunity I completely missed during practice today. As if it practically is shining a neon light on my mom’s ridiculous request.
I steel my entire body like a truck is coming at me. It’s a letdown, almost, that I have spent the last four years at Stone Hall trying to be worthy of the Landons of the world—the people who just fit here, the way I used to just fit back in Nashville—but even after all this time, I can’t look at him without feeling like the clueless little freshman I was when we first met.
Eventually I force the words out of my mouth.
“So—are you … um, my mom says your dad is coming to dinner at our place?”
Landon takes a step ahead of me and grabs me a sugar packet from one of the little containers on the counter. It’s the wrong kind, one of the fake ones without any calories in it that make your tongue shrivel, but I’m too busy focusing on not tripping again to care.
“Oh, wow, yeah. My dad mentioned something. Didn’t realize it was your place.”
I nod, way too vigorously than the situation merits. “Yep, um, yeah. My place.” This is social suicide, but somehow still not as bad as letting down my mom. “You should come.”
There’s a half second where he’s still trying to catch up to what I said that I think I may die right there in the middle of the bakery, just lie down on the tiles and let the elements take me.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Landon nods. “Yeah, yeah, I’m—that sounds cool. I’ve got some deadlines for my internship, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be out of the weeds soon.”
/> I better win some kind of Daughter of the Year award for this. “Maybe I’ll see you then.”
Jack
The really stupid part about the whole thing is, right before it all blows up in my face, I decide I like Pepper. Well, not decide, really—it just kind of sneaks up on me. One second I’m tearing through a baguette, relieved my mom is nowhere within a three-mile radius (consuming bread from other establishments is treason in the Campbell family), and the next I’m looking up, seeing this wry look on Pepper’s face as she’s standing in line for her tea—the kind of look you give someone you don’t just tolerate, but maybe care about. The difference between exasperation and mild amusement, that line of what on earth is that guy doing and what on earth is my friend doing.
And yeah, maybe it was kind of happening before that. Ethan asked me to meet up with Pepper the first time, but I kind of hijacked it after that. Ethan doesn’t even know Pepper and I are meeting to go over swim and dive stuff—not that he’d mind, since the organization of the dive team can roughly be described as “extremely hot mess” and his captainship was more of a formality than anything. He’ll still slap it on his resume and call it a day.
He has kind of a bad habit of doing that—overcommitting and pushing stuff onto me. Saying he’ll bring day-old stuff from the deli for a fundraising thing at school, and then asking me to do it when his schedule gets too thin. Promising Mom he’ll pick up Grandma Belly’s prescription, then calling me in a panic when he realizes his student council meeting is running too long for the pharmacy’s hours. I know he doesn’t mean to do it, but he has a tendency to bite off more than he can chew—and then remember, thanks to me, he has a second mouth.
Funny, though, that as strapped for time as Ethan is, he sure found some to tweet from the Girl Cheesing account this morning and do the one thing our dad told us not to do.
But for once, I really don’t mind picking up Ethan’s slack. I like spending time with Pepper, with her Monster Cake and the unexpected blunt funniness of her and the way she’s always trying to tuck her bangs behind her ear even though they’re too short. I like her enough that I don’t even hesitate to ask if she wants to swap bites of baked goods. I like her enough that, for the first time in months, I’m not glancing at the phone my mom liberated after last night’s shift, waiting to see if Bluebird has responded to my last message.
I like her enough that the minute she bumps into Landon, something unfamiliar and hot coils in my stomach, something that makes me irritated with Landon even though he’s done literally nothing to wrong me in his life.
Something happens to Pepper too. Her cheeks are all red, and I can tell she’s stammering even with her back turned, even from halfway across the café. I squish the piece of pastry she gave me between my fingers, making a gooey apple-y mess.
I pull my eyes away from them, and that’s when it happens. That’s when everything goes to shit in one fell swoop. Her phone is on the table. I don’t even mean to look. I’m a New Yorker; I pride myself in my ability to mind my own damn business. But there’s something moving on the screen, some ridiculous-looking cat GIF, and like a raccoon looking at a shiny thing, I can’t tear my eyes away from it.
Then, as I’m leaning back, I take in the rest of the screen. I notice the blue checkmark first. The GIF is part of a drafted tweet. For a second I’m even amused—is Pepper verified on Twitter? Was she secretly in some kind of sports league or singing in a country band back in Nashville?
But the account doesn’t belong to Pepper. It belongs to Big League Burger.
My brain doesn’t quite know how to communicate the information to my body, so I just laugh. I laugh so hard, the woman attempting to eat a scone at the table next to me looks up in alarm, even though she has noise-filtering headphones on. But it’s like something laughs out of me, then, something heavy that comes loose in my chest and lodges in my stomach and instantly starts to calcify.
Pepper comes back, all red-cheeked and wide-eyed, practically stumbling into her seat as if she’s forgotten what it’s there for. When her eyes finally meet mine, she blinks, snapping out of it so fast, I can only imagine I am projecting every inch of the horror I’m feeling on my face.
“What?”
My mouth opens. Closes. Opens again.
“You have a drafted tweet from the Big League Burger account on your phone.”
I don’t sound angry. Am I angry? It feels like being a little kid again, practicing tricks on the diving board; like all those first few times I tried to jackknife and ended up belly-flopping into the pool. How the sting of it just stuns you for a few beats before the pain hits; the strange whiplash of how water can be so slippery and welcoming in one second and nearly knock the freaking wind out of you in the next.
“Oh.” Pepper grabs her phone, and now her cheeks aren’t just tinged, but a bright, flaming red that creeps up her neck and into her cheeks. “Sorry, didn’t mean to leave my phone here.”
Maybe I shouldn’t say anything. In fact, I absolutely shouldn’t. I feel like every possible appropriate response I could make just shoved its way into a blender, and whatever comes out now is going to come out all wrong.
Pepper fidgets under my stare, reaching for her bangs again. “It’s dumb. My mom—well, my parents founded Big League Burger.” She says it with her shoulders hunched, with her eyes flitting between me and the table. “They have me send tweets from the account sometimes.”
“Like tweets at Girl Cheesing?”
There’s that familiar crease between her brows. “You know about that?”
The baguette feels like it’s sloshing in my stomach. I manage to nod.
Pepper shrugs. “It’s dumb,” she mumbles, picking at the lid of her tea. “The whole thing is…”
“It’s not dumb.”
I don’t mean for it to come out the way it does. Even I’m surprised by the sound of myself. Her eyes snap up to meet mine, wide and wary.
I stand from my chair, grabbing my backpack, my coffee, the ridiculously large baguette.
“Wait—are you leaving?” There’s an edge of panic in her voice, a kind of insecurity I didn’t think someone like Pepper was capable of feeling. “Are you mad or something? They’re just some stupid tweets.”
I round on her, forgetting how tall I am compared to her until she has to jerk her neck up to meet my eye. I take a step back. “Yeah? Well, that’s my family you’re sending those stupid tweets to, that’s my grandma you stole from.”
Pepper’s lips part, a little “oh” of surprise breathing out of her. I watch, my fingers curling and my nails cutting into my palms, as she follows my words through to their meaning and her entire body goes rigid.
It takes her a moment to speak. I want to storm out, want to be anywhere other than this stupid bakery that seems to get smaller by the second, but I’m rooted to the spot, rooted by the way she’s looking at me. She always seems to have a comeback at the ready, some kind of answer prepared. Right now, she just looks lost.
“Your family owns Girl Cheesing?”
“Since 1963. Which is how long Grandma’s Special has been on the menu, by the way.”
Pepper shakes her head. “I didn’t … I had no idea you—”
“Can you imagine what it was like for her? Starting up a business with my grandpa when they didn’t have a penny to their name? Coming up with all of those recipes herself and working sixteen hours a damn day for over half of her life to serve them?”
Something flickers in Pepper’s eyes. It’s not remorse. It’s more like understanding.
I don’t want it. I’m so angry that anything she projects just seems to slide right off me, into a puddle on the floor.
“It’s not—my mom just makes me do it. It’s not anything personal.”
“First of all, your mom didn’t make you do anything.” I glance to my left and see there’s a clear path to the door, but I’m not done yet. I pull out my phone and open the Twitter app to the Girl Cheesing account, shoving the
tweet with the crack about the secret ingredient from this morning under Pepper’s nose. “And that’s my grandma’s legacy. That’s my entire family’s livelihood. Don’t you dare stand there and tell me it isn’t personal.”
“Jack, wait—”
“Do whatever you want with the stupid fundraising. I’m sure you’ll have no problem coming up with ideas because you can always just rip off someone else’s.”
Jack
I find out approximately two seconds later that it is very difficult to commit to a heated storm out of a bakery with a giant baguette in your hand. I stalk toward the Eighty-Sixth Street subway station anyway, people looking up at me with alarm that instantly shifts into amusement. I slow my roll just long enough to spot a homeless person who could actually use the baguette I’m wielding, and hand it to him—only to look up and see we’re standing just outside, of all things, of a freaking Big League Burger.
I catch sight of my reflection in the window, my hair all whipped from the wind, my face contorted. I don’t even have the dignity of being able to look angry. Like Ethan and my dad, I’ve been cursed with angry expressions that only extend as far as “mildly confused puppy.” The worst part is, I’ve seen my own face on Ethan’s enough times to know it’s ridiculous.
I’m grateful, suddenly, Ethan busted into the account and kept ribbing Big League Burger all day. So grateful I’m willing to skip into the deli and take the blame with a big fat smile on my face. It’ll be worth it. Hell, I’ll keep on doing it. Just one more thing to tack to the laundry list of things Ethan has started that I’ve had to finish.
There are at least six texts from Pepper by the time I emerge out of the subway, and another few from my dad and from Ethan that I’ve also pointedly ignored. I’m turning the corner when my phone starts to buzz in my pocket—my mom’s calling. I brace myself. I can ignore 99 percent of the people who have my phone number, but I can’t ignore her.