by Emma Lord
But all I can think of to say is, “The bake sale. We need to figure out which time block we’re using so we can book it with Rucker.”
Jack’s shoulders give way to a sigh. “Let’s say Monday. Then everyone has the weekend to bake.”
“Right. Smart.” I bite my lip. Think of something else. But Jack is already pulling himself out of the water, turning and giving me a close-lipped smile and a tight wave before heading into the locker room and leaving me treading water alone in the pool with a disappointment I can’t name.
Jack
My mom sets a large piece of day-old cherry strudel in front of me.
“What’s got you in a funk?”
I know she actually means it because she’s offering me food at the register, which is a huge no-no in my dad’s book. My mom’s all about breaking tiny rules, though. I consider the strudel for a moment, and how I can’t remember a single time I’ve actually had a dessert at this place the day it was made. Maybe Pepper’s not even that good of a baker. Maybe it’s just that her stuff is actually fresh.
Ugh. The taste of her Midterm Moon Pies from before the baking ban are still so fresh in my mind, I can’t even lie to myself about it.
“I’m not in a funk.”
“You are. Did uptown funk you up?”
“Mom.”
She nudges my shoulder with hers, which is no easy feat, seeing that Ethan and I dwarf her now.
“C’mon. Is it school?”
“No.”
“Dive team?”
“No.”
“Those big, scary college admissions interviews?”
I roll my eyes. “Definitely not.”
She hums in agreement. “You’re already locked and loaded after college, anyway. Who needs those stupid brand-name schools?” she asks, as if she didn’t go to Stanford.
I can tell she’s trying to be a Cool Mom, trying to take the pressure off me, but if anything, it makes it worse. It’s enough of a shift that, for the first time since I left Pepper on the pool deck, she and stupid Landon are not the most aggressive things on my mind.
“Do you ever regret that?” I ask.
I’ve caught her off guard. “Regret what?”
“Going to school. The big brand-name kind. And then ending up here.”
“I didn’t end up here, kiddo. I chose to be here.”
“But if you hadn’t met Dad…”
I’m expecting her to be defensive. In all the times I imagined asking her about this, it never ended well. But instead, she smiles and tilts her head at me.
“I’d probably be working at some law firm here or in DC or some other big city, married to some other guy, with completely different kids.”
I blink at her. “Oh.”
She leans forward into the register, musing so casually, I might have asked her if she thinks it’s going to rain tomorrow. “I knew that then, and I know it now. That’s the thing, though—I love your father. I love this deli. And you two punks, even if your antics have probably taken a dozen years off my life.” She puts a hand on my back. “I knew I’d never regret it. And you know what?”
I raise my eyebrows at her. “What?”
“I was right.”
I should choose my next words carefully, but I’ve never been very good at that. “Even though it made Gran and Gramps mad?”
She clearly already knew this question was coming because she doesn’t flinch. “They came around. It was my life, not theirs. I knew what I wanted. And that’s lucky enough by itself—not a lot of people do.”
I open my mouth and almost say it right then: I don’t want this. But the problem is I do, and I don’t, and my feelings are still way too tangled for me to be able to say I don’t want to spend my whole future in this place when I also can’t imagine a future without it. It’s dumb, but I wish for a stupid, childish second I could just stay like this forever, with Mom and Dad running things so I can still love this place without feeling responsible for it. So I can still let it define me without letting it own me.
But then another swell of customers comes in five minutes to close, and we’re all back in a flurry, the conversation over and the strudel long forgotten.
Jack
Later that night, I’m sitting on the couch with Ethan, both of us on our laptops. The fight we were in about the Twitter picture kind of ended by default, the way they always just seem to have expiration dates more than resolutions—when you’re packed in quarters as close as ours and working together in a deli, staying mad at each other is just plain impractical.
A ping comes in from Weazel.
Bluebird
So. We still on for tomorrow?
I can’t decide if whatever is churning in my stomach is relief or dread. Ever since this afternoon I’ve avoided getting on Weazel, even thinking about it. Usually I make a few sweeps during the day to make sure everything is kosher and to deal with any suspicious behavior the safeties in the app have flagged, but after that whole Pepper and Landon thing, I just want to wash my hands of it.
It’s just—I don’t know. It seemed like maybe we were having a moment. Like maybe we’d had a bunch of them, and they all kind of snuck up on me until they were right in front of my face, until she was popping out of the water with that full-wattage, ridiculous smile that made it feel like my blood changed its composition in my veins.
And weirdly, throughout this whole thing, Pepper and I have been … well, friends seems like a stupid word now. Like that doesn’t quite cover it. I’ve told her things I’ve never said to Paul, not even to Ethan—heck, not even to Bluebird, who until now was the only person I could come close to saying anything honest to. Close enough I can still practically see her texts to me about Ethan the other night like my brain has screenshotted them—close enough that she managed to call me out for things I haven’t fully understood myself.
She accused me of hiding. One straw short of accusing me of self-sabotaging. Well, then, this is the icing on the cake—I made this stupid app, and now this stupid app is the reason Landon and Pepper are going to ride off into the sunset.
I turn back to Weazel, to this weird beast of mine. I’ve never once regretted making it. With the exception of people occasionally being dicks the way dicks are prone to be, it’s helped set up study groups, and given people a place to vent, and accidentally started friendships—relationships, even. Gina and Mel. Pepper and Landon.
Maybe even me and Bluebird.
Wolf
Yeah. But first—
Wolf
Emergency Cupcake Locator
It takes her a full minute to answer. I spend the first bit wondering if I’ve freaked her out, if the gesture wasn’t funny or it was too personal or if this is going to put a weird pressure on something that, in some ways, hasn’t even started yet.
But then, somehow, my thoughts slide right back to Pepper. I bet Landon doesn’t even end up at the group thing. He’ll say he is, maybe, and then oh-so-conveniently text her the wrong place for the meetup. Or maybe he’ll wait until afterward—“Hey, want to grab some ice cream?”—and maybe Pepper will even take him to a Big League Burger, just to be funny about it, and pull out whatever ridiculous emergency dessert condiment she happens to have in her bag, and Landon will laugh and tell her it’s cute, and her cheeks will get all red under her freckles and—
Bluebird
Oh my god. YOU DIDN’T.
Bluebird
YOU MADE A CUPCAKE VERSION?!?!
I finally let myself smile, easing into the couch cushions and tilting my phone away from Ethan, who is raising his eyebrows at me. It took the better part of all my free time this week, but I used the same map formatting I based the mac-and-cheese locator app on for a new one, one that lit up 450 different places selling cupcakes in Manhattan.
Wolf
Well, mac and cheese and cupcakes ARE the two most essential food groups
Bluebird
I might actually be crying?????
Wolf
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Your dentist will be, that’s for sure
Wolf
Anyway, glad to know you weren’t kidding about that cupcake obsession
Bluebird
Not at all. You don’t even know how on brand this is for me
Bluebird
Okay, so you showed me your big secret project. But I held out on you
Wolf
Well now you’re obligated to unhold out. What’s yours?
Bluebird
It’s super dorky so you have to brace yourself
Wolf
Consider me braced
Bluebird
ppbake.com
Bluebird
It’s a blog. For baking
Bluebird
It’s live and all, my sister and I run it together, but it’s anonymous
Bluebird
And the stuff we make has ridiculous names because we basically bake like we’re five, so
I tap the link, and it opens up a bright, cheery, robin’s-egg blue web page. P&P Bake, it’s called. It’s clearly one of those WordPress blogs converted into a website, but that doesn’t make it any less captivating—the pictures on the posts are so vivid, I can practically taste them through the screen.
I scroll down, glancing at the dessert names, lingering on the pictures. The most recent is Tailgate Trash Twinkies, which are apparently a homemade cake roll infused with PBR; I scroll down and see A-Plus Angel Cake, and Butter Luck Next Time Butter Cookies, and then—
And then, on Halloween, there’s an entry for Monster Cake.
My breath stops before it can leave my chest, my entire body stiffening on the couch like a corpse. There’s no mistaking it. I may have a bad habit of eating Pepper’s baked goods so fast, it threatens the time-space continuum, but the bright colors and gooey mess of that cake are so distinct in my mind and in my taste buds, I could see it in another life and immediately identify it.
Yet my brain still refuses to process it, and I’m still scrolling as if I’ll blink and it will disappear, a vivid, sleep-deprived teenage hallucination.
But the further I scroll the worse it gets. The So Sorry Blondies. The Pop Quiz Cake Pops she and Pooja were eating the other day. A few things I’ve never heard of before, with irreverent, silly names, some of which must be Paige’s, but others that are so distinctly Pepper it stings to read.
I drop my phone.
“What?” asks Ethan, barely looking up from his screen.
Pepper is Bluebird. Bluebird is Pepper.
I can’t decide what to think, what to feel, but my body seems to decide it for me, my heart beating all over my body and my chest suddenly so full of air, I’m not sure whether to use it to breathe or yell “PEPPER IS BLUEBIRD!” at the top of my apparently very melodramatic lungs.
“Is it Pepper again?”
If there was any blood left in my body, I’m sure it would drain from my face. “What?”
“Did she tweet something?”
Right. Twitter. My head must make some kind of involuntary nod.
“So much for her being done,” says Ethan, rolling his eyes.
My mom walks in from Grandma Belly’s room, holding a mug full of tea. “Pepper? Isn’t that the name of the girl you were hanging out with the other day?”
The other day feels like a year ago. I try to think back on the last few weeks, the last few months, of talking to Bluebird and talking to Pepper, scrambling to untangle them in my head. What have I told Bluebird? What have I told Pepper?
“Yeah, that one,” Ethan confirms.
And more important, what is Pepper going to think? How many things did she say to me on the app that she wouldn’t want Jack Campbell, Twitter adversary and senior class disappointment, to know?
My mom beams. “And she saw that write-up of you on Hub Seed and asked you out, hmm?”
By some short-lived miracle, I finally find my voice. “Not exactly—”
“Pepper’s the one tweeting from the Big League Burger account,” says Ethan.
“Wait, what?”
I didn’t even realize my dad was in the kitchen, just out of earshot, until suddenly he’s standing in the doorway with a pan and a dishrag in his hands. He looks at me and then at Ethan, like he’s not sure where to aim the question.
“Pepper Evans,” says Ethan dismissively. “Goes to school with us. Her family owns the whole Big League Burger operation.”
My mom frowns. “I thought it was some girl named Patricia?”
“Her real name’s Pepper,” I say. “No, her real name is Patricia, but her name is Pepper.” Or Bluebird. Or Girl Who Is About To Be Pissed Off At Jack All Over Again. Take your pick.
“That woman.”
If I hadn’t watched my dad’s mouth moving, I might have convinced myself I imagined him saying it. A shadow of an expression crosses his face; he lowers his head to look down at the pan so I won’t see, but it’s too late. I glance over at my mom, expecting her to look as dumbfounded as I do, but she’s heaving in the kind of breath that can only give way to a sigh.
“What woman?” Ethan asks. Whatever is on his laptop screen has been thoroughly forgotten. When neither of them answers, he adds, “Are we … missing something here?”
My dad looks back up, his lips in a tight line. “No. Just … we put the Twitter thing to rest, right?”
“Right,” I say dumbly.
He nods. “Let’s keep it that way.”
And then, in that eerie, psychic parent way, my parents wordlessly shift from what they’re doing and head toward their bedroom. They don’t shut the door—they never do when they’re just talking—but it’s only slightly ajar, their voices too low for us to hear anything.
My phone lights up in my hand.
Bluebird
So, what about tomorrow, bakery maestro?
Tomorrow. Senior Skip Day.
Whatever small, naive, truly embarrassing sliver of excitement pushed its way through the panic is immediately crushed.
Landon.
Maybe she does, and maybe she doesn’t—but I don’t think I imagined the look on her face in the pool earlier today, or the stammer in her words. She thinks Wolf is Landon.
No. She wants Wolf to be Landon.
“What the hell?” Ethan murmurs.
I look over at him, into the sometimes frustrating sameness of his eyes. Usually in moments like this, they are more alike than ever, the same furrow, the same confused squint. My ally. My brother. The other half of a rebellious split egg. But right now I’m so far past the weirdness of our parents, they could come back out speaking German and I’d still be rooted to this spot, sinking into what is about to prove to be a very self-indulgent, pitiful hole.
“Yo,” says Ethan. He doesn’t ask what’s wrong, but the tone of the yo does, and so does the way his eyes blink out of his confusion and focus on mine.
And just like that, there’s this ache in my chest, this almost irresistible urge to tell him everything. About Weazel, about Pepper, about the future and all the parts of it I equally dread and doubt. No matter how I try to outrun Ethan’s shadow, it is the shadow that understands mine best. No matter how I try to resent Ethan for the problems I’ve brought on myself, he is still and will always be my first and best friend.
It’s not because I don’t trust Ethan that I don’t tell him. It’s because I don’t even want to accept it myself. Putting it out into the open would cement the humiliation of it, give it a permanence I’m just not ready to face.
I gather up my laptop and my phone. “I gotta catch up on sleep,” I mumble.
“Yeah?”
Another opening. Ethan holds my gaze, and for a moment, it’s just us. No school, no friends, no customers or straphangers or strangers in the way. The way it was when we were little, before the rest of the world wedged its way between us. Before Ethan became every bit as much a measuring stick as he is my brother.
I swallow hard. “Yeah.”
I get to my room and kick off my shoe
s and fall into my bed face-first, shoving my head into my pillow. I need to sleep on this. For a night or for a lifetime, maybe. But my eyes are closed and my body is sagging into the mattress, and I am still equal parts aching and wildly self-pitying and indignant, like taking a shot of coffee from the espresso machine downstairs and then promptly getting smacked upside the head.
My phone buzzes again. I ignore it. It’ll be Bluebird—no, Pepper—and still I don’t know what to say, don’t know what to do. I want time to stop passing. I don’t want to have to make a decision about this. But that’s the thing—whether I respond or I don’t, a decision is made. A domino is knocked over that in turn knocks down a bunch of other dominoes in its path.
I’m just going to be a bystander in their cross fire.
But then the phone buzzes again, and again. I blearily pull my face out of my pillow and glare at the screen, but it’s only Paul. Honestly, I should have recognized it from the rapid-fire nature of the texts; he’s never been able to condense any thoughts into just one.
Today 9:32 PM
dude. DUDE. dude dude dude dude
you have to tell me who goldfish is on weazel
i think? she is my soulmate????
or just like trigger the app to tell us both. you can do that right
I rub my palms over my eyes, scowling into the screen.
Today 9:34 PM
No. I’m not doing that
but you CAN
right???
I put down the phone again, hooking it up to the charger and setting my alarm for the morning, determined to cope with this influx of information the only way my body knows how: going the hell to sleep. Just as I turn off the light, the phone buzzes again.
Jaaaaaaaaaaaaaacckkkk
And then, finally, whatever it is I’m feeling finds a point of focus, finds a place to funnel itself.
NO. Stop asking. It’s not fair to the other people on the app and I’m not gonna be a dick just so you can cheat it
I set the phone back down with unnecessary force and flick off the light. The phone doesn’t buzz for the rest of the night.
Pepper