I check my phone under the table throughout dinner. For the most part, I get away with it, because Mom is busy gril ing Eve about her schoolwork.
“Are you looking for internships?” she asks.
I could’ve sworn they talked about internships last night. Judging from the pinched look on Eve’s face, they’ve been over this several times already. I check my TikTok again while Eve reminds Mom that they’ve talked about this before.
“I’m just worried, honey,” Mom goes on as she scoops some mashed potatoes onto her plate and passes the bowl to me. “It’s not too late to look at more practical options. Comedy isn’t, wel , serious.”
I take a mechanical bite of potato as Eve revs up on her in-defense-of-comedy rant again, barely listening. I can see her trying to catch my eye as she starts talking about her writing, but I’m too busy refreshing my TikTok profile to meet her gaze.
Dinner ends, and my video stil has absolutely no likes.
By the time I wake up the next morning, I’ve accrued an astounding three likes. No comments at al , which makes them feel like pity likes at that.
Precious few views. There’s no way Alyssa wil ever see this. I don’t even want her to. Even without comparing it to her coming-out video, it’s a huge failure.
I run my hands through my hair, tangled after a night of restlessness. Al I want is for Alyssa to see that I can be as funny as she is, that I can be worthy of her.
Trouble is, I’m not.
But someone else in this house is.
—
“So you do have a crush,” Eve says with a smirk.
Smush saves me from responding by dashing to the windows lining the wal in the living room. His paws skitter against the floor, but I can barely hear even that over the deafening roar of his bark. A squirrel has just dashed through the yard, and we’l al be hearing about it for the next half hour.
“Quiet, Smush,” I shout. It’s hopeless, he hasn’t internalized that command yet, but it saves me from looking at Eve’s teasing grin.
It does nothing to protect me from her teasing jab in my side. I slap her fingers away.
“It is not a crush, it is soul-crushing, heartbreaking, earth-shattering unrequited love, thank you very much,” I say, thinking of the way she could make the whole class light up with one of her jokes.
“Why do you need me?” Eve asks. “Aren’t you supposed to be yourself?”
I bite my lip. That’s the traditional advice, but when humor is social currency, and I’m simply not that funny, what am I supposed to do?
“I just need help making some TikTok videos,” I say. “I don’t have any good ideas, and I need to go viral so I can end up on her page.”
“Can’t you just text her and ask her if she wants to FaceTime or something?” Eve asks, raising her voice above Smush’s fresh round of screaming, this time at a little bird that has apparently posed a life-or-death threat to the perimeter of the house.
I groan. “She’s one of the funniest people I know—”
“Ouch.”
“I said one of.” I give Eve my sternest look. “She’s too good for me.”
Eve reaches over to ruffle my hair, mouth open with what is sure to be a patronizing speech about how untrue that is, so I duck away from her hand.
“Please,” I say. “Put that comedy degree to use.”
Eve glances over at Smush, who’s now clawing at the window in a desperate attempt to hunt down the chipmunk that lives under the stone wal that lines our yard, his one true nemesis.
“You said she likes animals?” she asks.
One TikTok tutorial later, Eve has Smush framed in her phone lens as he runs from one end of the window to the other, tiny tail wagging with urgency as his bark peaks into a high-pitched whine. When she’s done narrating his thoughts—Smush apparently knows a lot of swear words—we go outside to track down the chipmunk and get some shots of him poking his head out from between the rocks. Eve isn’t satisfied until she films a squirrel scuttle from tree to tree, almost taunting Smush as he weaves in and out of sight.
The end result is hilarious. Eve narrates Smush’s thoughts as he tracks down the squirrel, his nemesis for constantly attempting to invade the yard with his army of smal birds. I can’t help laughing as I watch the video, even though it also makes heat flush into my cheeks. Why couldn’t I put together something like this?
I post “this chipmunk is my nemesis” to my account. When I check it again, five minutes later, I almost drop my phone.
It’s already hit thousands of likes. More pour in every time I refresh the page.
“Eve,” I scream, even though she’s only a few feet away from me, her legs propped up on the end of the couch. “Eve, you did it.”
I toss her my phone, and she smiles so wide, I’m worried her lips wil crack. “Wow, this is actual y doing wel .”
She reaches over to give me a high five, and I slap her hand even though I did nothing.
Half an hour later, my phone pings, and my heart seizes when Alyssa’s name flashes onto the screen.
your dog is the cutest
I bite my lip, but nothing can stop the smile from spreading across my face. I snap a picture of Smush, who’s busy lying mournful y by his empty food bowl, and send it to her.
His life is quite tragic at the moment, so he appreciates your support
My phone starts vibrating, and I nearly drop it. Alyssa’s responding to my text with a ful -blown FaceTime cal . I take a deep breath and run a hand through my stick-straight brown hair, doing nothing to fix the lack of volume, and accept the cal .
“Please show me this sweet boy’s face,” Alyssa says as soon as her face fil s my screen.
I hold my phone up to get a good angle, tilting it so that she can’t see the massive pimple on my cheek.
“I don’t know what you speak of, there are no sweet boys here. Only tiny demons who finished the last of my chocolate cake and had to be rushed to the pet hospital in the middle of the night.”
That was a week ago, and Mom stil brings it up every time Smush crosses her path.
Alyssa laughs, and my stomach tightens. It truly is the prettiest sound in the world.
“Show me this sweet boy with excel ent taste in dessert.”
I hop off the couch, crossing to the kitchen where Smush lies. He looks up at me hopeful y, as though I’m here to share more of my cereal, but instead I switch the video so that Alyssa can get a ful shot of his tragic expression.
“Hi, sweet boy,” she coos. “I heard your mom doesn’t want to share her chocolate with you.”
I flip the camera back. “Hey. Whose side are you on here?”
“Oh, Smush’s,” she says immediately. “Always.”
I shake my head at her. “Traitor.”
She grins back at me, sparking the same warmth in my chest she always does in bio. But there, we’re mandated by the Marinwood Public School District to hang out for forty-five minutes a day. Mr. Ray is there to fil lul s in the conversation with his lecturing. His nonsensical lab instructions are always there to fuel more conversations as we try to decipher how he wants us to handle the microscope.
Here, the brief lul feels like an endless silence. It’s just us, on our phone screens, with nothing to distract from the fact that neither of us is talking. She
fidgets on my screen for a moment, her bright eyes darting to the side. Say something, I plead with myself, but every thought that flashes through my brain feels horribly stupid, unbearably cringey.
If I stay on the cal too long, she’l realize I’m not as funny as the TikTok video Eve made for me. My personality is about as great as my first attempt at a video, which is to say it should be deleted as quickly as possible before anyone sees that it only got four likes.
“I have to go,” I say quickly. “I, um, I have to help my mom with dinner.”
“Oh, yeah,” Alyssa says. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to cal and disrupt your day. I—”
“No, no, I’m g
lad you got to see firsthand what a bad dog Smush is,” I say, my shoulders curling inward as I say goodbye and hang up the cal , awkwardness seeping out of my pores. I shudder as my screen goes dark.
Why am I like this?
I pocket my phone and spin on my heel. “Eve!”
She bursts out of her bedroom, almost tripping down the stairs as she runs in her socks to me. “What’s wrong? Oh god, did Smush eat the chocolate chips? I knew he’d figure out how to jump on the counter eventual y. I’l cal the poison control hotline, don’t worry, it’l be fine, you get his travel bag so we can take him to the vet.”
“No, no,” I say, but I pick up the bag of chocolate chips and stow them safely back in the pantry. She has a point. “It’s not him. Alyssa cal ed.”
She stares at me. “Good lord, Harp, the amount of pain in your voice. I thought at the very least, the house was on fire.”
She drops into one of the stools that line the kitchen island, breathing hard. I grimace.
“Sorry. But my metaphorical house is burned to the ground.”
She gives me a look that would be sympathetic if it didn’t make it clear she was annoyed. “What happened?”
I slink onto the stool next to her, scooping up Smush on my way. He wriggles into a comfy position on my lap and goes back to his nap.
“She wanted to see Smush, and then I didn’t know what to say.”
Eve twists her hair into a braid as she squints at me. She got lucky, in that she got Mom’s hair—blond and wavy and always shiny even though she barely uses conditioner half the time. “You could’ve said anything. If she cal ed you, she obviously wants to talk to you.”
“Only because she thinks I’m the mastermind of the TikTok video,” I say.
“Wel , if she cal ed you and you ended the conversation, the bal ’s in your court now,” Eve says.
I grit my teeth. “No thank you, I don’t want it.”
Eve shakes her head at me with a teasing smile, but it drops off her face when she sees the puppy-dog eyes I’m making at her.
“No,” she says before I can get the words out.
“Please,” I say, widening my eyes as much as I can. I probably look more like a bug-eyed ogre than a puppy at this point, but I’m desperate. “You have to help me talk to her. Please. Pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease.”
Eve gives a long-suffering sigh. “Give me your phone.”
I give a whoop of victory and thumb the touchpad to unlock it before handing it over. Eve swipes to my texts and types quickly. She turns the phone back over to me and lets me read the message she’s put together.
Smush wanted me to tel you that he thinks you’re cute too, even if you did not bring him any snack offerings
I yelp and snatch the phone out of her hand before she can hit send.
“You can’t say that,” I screech as I delete the whole thing, careful not to send it by accident as I do.
Eve folds her arms. “Why not? It’s fun and flirty. You have to put your feelings out there at some point.”
“Because,” I say, my face growing hot. “It’s just too much. Tone it down.”
Rol ing her eyes, Eve takes the phone back. “I thought the point was to help you.” But she dutiful y types out another message, holding out the phone for my approval.
Smush is mad you didn’t bring him any snacks.
I hit send, my stomach clenching as I do. At least there are no embarrassing references to how cute I think she is. Even if Eve did use Smush as a shield, there’s no way I can just put myself out there like that. The thought of it makes me want to fold myself up into a dark corner where no one can see my red face.
Sadly that isn’t possible, though, so I settle for ducking my head so Eve can’t meet my eye.
“Tel me when she answers,” Eve says as she saunters back to her room.
“She’s typing,” I yel after her before she reaches the stairs. “Where are you going?”
Eve pauses to give me a look, one foot on the stairs. “I have finals, Harp.”
Panic shoots through my veins. I have no idea what Alyssa’s about to say.
What if she tel s me she never wants to talk to me again? What if she tries to flirt?
I have no idea which one terrifies me more.
“Please,” I say, my voice cracking.
Eve’s lips are pursed so tight, I can barely see them as she makes her way back over to me. “What did she say?”
She leans across the kitchen island so that we’re huddled together over my phone.
please tel him I’m very sorry
I bite my lip. “What can we do with that?”
Eve stares at me, sighing. “Wel , if you’d actual y flirt—”
“Absolutely not.”
“Fine. Send her a picture of him with his dopey face, then.”
I grimace as I type, but Eve nods approvingly as she reads over my shoulder. I breathe a sigh of relief as I hit send on the photo, a perfect joke to go along with it, and give Eve a grateful smile.
—
Every time I see the bouncing el ipsis that means Alyssa’s typing, I run down the hal to Eve’s room. She’s working on her final project for one of her classes, a short film script, so she’s up even when I kick down her door at 2:14
a.m.
She is not, however, happy to see me.
“Please go to bed.”
I hand her my phone instead. She sighs, shaking her head at me as she takes it, scrol ing through our chat history. We’ve spent the past hours talking about Alyssa’s favorite sitcom, which Eve knew al about because she’s writing a spec script episode of the show for one of her classes. I’m struggling to keep up with the conversation, since I’ve only watched a handful of episodes with Eve. I like it wel enough, but I can’t talk about it the way Eve can, the way she can get right to the heart of the story while making jokes so funny they could’ve been lifted right from the actors’ mouths.
From there, we moved on to talking about our favorite snack foods, where I barely needed Eve’s help at al , and have now looped around to talking about TikTok again. I peer at our text chain over Eve’s shoulder.
Your video was so clever
She responds instantly.
Thanks!! I was real y nervous. Making jokes about it after helped a lot.
Eve meets my eye. “Just talk to her, Harp.”
“I am,” I protest. It’s not my fault that hitting send makes my heartbeat throb in my fingertips and my head spin with nausea as the fear of sounding stupid floods my veins.
Eve types out a message and turns back to her work. I drop my gaze to my phone, and a horrible swooping feeling tears through my gut.
want to talk about it?
I’ve barely processed the words and their implication when my screen comes to life with a FaceTime cal request from Alyssa. My throat seizes, and I hit Eve’s shoulder.
She doesn’t look up at me. “You better go back to your room and take that.”
“I hate you,” I huff before spinning on my heel and tearing down the hal .
I take a deep breath as I shut my bedroom door, but no amount of oxygen could calm my trembling insides. I arrange myself cross-legged on the bed. There’s no way to get out of this, not now, not after what Eve said.
I hit accept.
“Hey,” I say, forcing a smile when Alyssa’s face fil s my screen. Too much. I look like an alien with a toothache. Tone it down.
“Hey,” Alyssa says back. Her smile is perfectly normal. No, better than normal—it’s like a piece of sunshine has lit up my room, even though it’s the middle of the night. “It’s nice to have someone to talk to at”—she pauses
—“at two-thirty-one in the morning.”
I laugh. “My new routine of waking up extremely late and funneling as much junk food into my mouth as I can does not lead to a normal bedtime.”
It’s al I can do not to close my eyes and shrivel under my bed frame as soon as the words leave my mouth. Funneling junk f
ood into my mouth is not a cute image.
Alyssa laughs, though, which is nice of her.
“Same,” she says. “Plus the three bottles of Coke I had at nine probably don’t help.”
“Three? You have a problem.” I try to sound teasing, but I probably come off condescending.
She laughs again, though. “Oh, that was just after dinner. You should see my recycling bin. It’s not pretty.”
“Mr. Ray would be so disappointed in you,” I say, thinking about the lab he made us do on soda and disintegration after we spent half a class period complaining about the school taking away the vending machines.
“Mr. Ray is wrong on that and many other counts,” Alyssa says.
I raise my free hand in surrender. “Can’t argue with that.”
“Anyway, thanks for being so nice about the whole me-coming-out thing,” Alyssa goes on. “My parents have always been super understanding about things—”
“Yeah, they seemed like it on the video,” I blurt before I can stop myself.
Alyssa grins. “Yeah. I can’t believe they agreed to do that. But it was stil scary, you know? Like, being vulnerable like that.”
“Definitely,” I say. “It was the same for me. I knew my parents would be supportive, but…I was so anxious the whole week leading up to when I decided to do it.”
“When did you?” she asks.
I tel her the story, how I wanted to be cool and casual but ended up crying at the dinner table last year, confessing my crush on Madison Hartley.
Mom thought the whole thing was hilarious, and she made a celebratory cake.
When I’m done, and grateful that the dimness of my room hides the redness of my cheeks (why did I have to tel her the bit about the crying?), Alyssa tel s me how she convinced her parents to do the TikTok video by making them bribery banana bread. This inspires me to share a history of my baking fails, for some reason, and Alyssa laughs as I describe the time I almost set the kitchen on fire before trying to top it with her own story about coating the bottom of her oven in melted chocolate.
Eventual y, she glances to the side, and gasps. “It’s three-thirty in the morning.”
My eyes widen. “Oh.”
“I should probably get to sleep,” she says. “But this was fun.”
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