by Barry Lyga
Which is what I wanted.
Right?
She’s sprawled prone on the sofa, chin resting on a pillow. I’m leaning against the sofa, sitting on the floor. We recorded at her house today, which her parents are cool with since this isn’t just messing around—it’s “a productive endeavor.” And now we each have a slice of pumpkin-manchego pizza. Until this afternoon, we’d somehow missed making a video of what Aneesa calls “our inaugural pizza.” Mrs. Fahim—Sara, I mean—pronounced it “truly amazing” when we offered her a slice. I’m officially expanding my clientele.
“I don’t get this,” Aneesa complains for the fifth time since starting the show. “Why is everything so grainy? Why does he look like that? Those are the worst computer graphics ever.”
“It’s from the 1980s. And Max Headroom isn’t computer-generated. They actually used makeup and prosthetics on the actor to make him look like something computer-generated.”
“It’s not working,” she says drily. “So, wait—why did that other guy’s head explode?”
“Because of the blipverts.”
“The blipverts.”
“Right.”
“Which are…”
“Hypercondensed, subliminal commercials that get beamed directly into your head. They’re killing people by accident, but no one—”
My phone chooses this moment to bleat for attention. Aneesa’s does, too. I pause the video, and we both check our phones.
“We did it!” she shouts an instant before I realize why.
We’ve both received an e-mail from YouTube with our latest stats—we’ve gone over ten thousand subscribers. By exactly one. We have attained the palindromic status of 10,001 subscribers.
“We did it!” she shouts again.
It’s a false milestone—nothing special happens at 10,000 subscribers—but it’s one we’ve been anticipating as our subscriber base has grown. More subscribers mean, ideally, more views. And more views mean that Aneesa’s plan to monetize the channel might actually work.
Almost in spite of myself, I’m obeying Mom’s command to be productive.
“I can’t believe this many people want to watch you eat pizza.”
“They’re watching you make it first, dummy. Don’t you read the comments?”
“Not anymore.” It’s Rule One of survival on the Internet.
“Well, the ones who aren’t jackasses are mostly complimenting you on your mad skills. One guy says he’s a chef at a place in Des Moines and would totally offer you a job.”
I snort. “Ah, yes. Des Moines, Iowa. Renowned as the pizza capital of the world.”
She bats me with a throw pillow, then does it again for good measure. “It’s a compliment, you idiot! Learn to accept it!”
I deflect another blow from the pillow. We’re both breathing hard and now would be a good time, but, no. Why? Because always “but, no,” that’s why.
And because sometimes I catch her looking at me with pity. Sometimes, I catch her looking sad. And I get it, I really do, but I can’t let it happen now, under those circumstances. Not out of pity.
It’s not fair, what she could do to me, or what I could do to her.
“We need another gimmick,” she says for no particular reason.
“Hitting me with pillows, perhaps?”
“No. Too easy.” Punctuating her point, she craftily bonks me atop my head with a stealth swing I don’t see coming. “I’m thinking of something outside the box a little.”
“Outside the pizza box, you mean?”
She groans and feints with the pillow. I flinch. “Who told you you were funny? Who lied to you so viciously? What,” she goes on, “can we do that’s different?”
“I still have ideas for some recipes—”
“That’s not what I mean. Maybe we should try something other than pizza.”
“Pizza’s our schtick,” I argue. “And besides, I don’t really know how to make much of anything else.”
“I just want to keep our numbers growing.”
“I know.”
“I mean, pretend we are a restaurant.” She leans back on the sofa, arms crossed at her belly, hands clasped. She stares at the ceiling. “Say we’re the best pizza restaurant in the world. People love us. We’re packed, lunch and dinner. Our head chef obstinately refuses to cook anything but pizza—”
“Scrupulously refuses.”
“—so we can’t branch out that way. What do we do?”
Gloriously, I know. I know in an instant, I have the answer.
“Breakfast,” I tell her.
She sits up and blinks at me. “Breakfast pizza?”
“Yep. Breakfast pizza. You said our restaurant is full for lunch and dinner. So we do breakfast.”
Her eyes light up. She leans closer to me. “Not just breakfast. The whole deal.”
“We already do lunch and dinner, though.” Now I’m confused.
“We do it all at once.” She hops off the sofa and grabs her laptop. “We do it next week. Right before school starts. An all-day extravaganza. To juice our numbers so that when we drop to a weekly schedule for the school year, we have some padding to lose people. You’ll make pizza for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”
“And dessert,” I tell her. I have to top her.
“Dessert?” she asks. Then: “Dessert!” she chortles and begins pounding at the keyboard.
Evan: Hey theres a guy here whos dad has some yt channel w like a billion followers want me to send him your link?
Me: OK
I type “OK,” but inside I experience a whirlwind.
I never really anticipated the pizza channel accomplishing anything. I never imagined it as an achievement. At first, it was nothing more than a convenient distraction, a way to keep Mom from nagging, an excuse to spend time with Aneesa.
And now it’s like something’s been born. Unintentionally, sure, but good, in its own way.
But holding me back?
Maybe?
I don’t know anymore.
I don’t know anything.
I want to keep baking pizza.
I want to go away.
I want to figure out how Aneesa feels about me.
I want to end it all.
I want.
I want.
I want.
I want too much and I don’t know what I want at all.
It used to be so easy, so clear.
I stay up late. I have to figure out how to make a pizza crust out of cookie dough.
On the last Wednesday before school starts, we do what Aneesa has billed in messages to our subscribers and on social media as “The All-Day Pizza Extravaganza.”
At 8:30, Mom leaves for work. At 8:45, Aneesa arrives. “Are we ready?”
“Yeah.”
First up is breakfast pizza: a layered soft taco shell crust with a black bean sauce topped with scrambled eggs, salsa verde, and crumbled blue corn tortillas. The blue verges to brown in the heat of the oven, so the impact of the blue chips against the yellow eggs and green salsa doesn’t work the way I wanted it to. But when Aneesa takes her on-screen mouthful, she pronounces it “super-amazing,” so I consider the experiment a success.
We enjoy the pizza, toasting with virgin mimosas, congratulating ourselves on a job well done. By the time we’ve eaten, then edited and posted the video, it’s time to start lunch.
I had considered a peanut-butter-and-jelly pizza—somehow—to tie into classic lunch fare. But I couldn’t wrap my brain around the hows of it. And, honestly, there’s no way to improve on the sandwich.
Instead, I reach back to another lunchtime favorite from my childhood—tuna.
Beginning with a whole-wheat crust, I slather on a layer of mild chipotle sauce, then top it with wilted spinach, coarsely grated cheddar, and chunks cut from a gorgeously grilled tuna steak. The result, according to Aneesa, is “the best tuna melt you unlucky sods out there in YouTube land have never tasted.”
Edited. Posted. Move on to din
ner. No rest, not today.
Unable to help ourselves, we devour each pizza in its entirety.
I prep dinner, which is a super-thin whole-wheat crust with a light oil sparingly applied, really just painted on. I top this with thinly sliced pears and sautéed onions, then add crumbled goat cheese. The goat cheese bubbles and browns as Aneesa breathlessly narrates, her camera zooming in on the glass oven door. I’m sweating so much that I think I might pass out. I reveal the day’s third pie.
“I think I hate pizza now,” Aneesa jokes. “I’m going to excuse myself to the bathroom and stick my finger down my throat.”
“Vomiting up the meal is considered an insult to the chef.”
“Then I’ll make it my middle finger, to be doubly insulting.”
We each eat a tiny wedge. It’s so delicious that we agree we each want more, but it’s been too much pizza for one day, despite the desires of our taste buds.
“I can’t believe I survived this,” she moans, slumped over the table.
“You haven’t survived anything yet,” I remind her. From the fridge, I produce the cookie crust I spent yesterday baking so that it would be ready for this moment.
“For the first time in the history of me,” she says, “I don’t want dessert.”
“Well, our website says ‘Muslim girl eats pizza.’ You got another Muslim girl lurking around?”
She thumps her head against the table. “I hate myself. I hate myself. I hate myself.”
“But you’re gonna love dessert.”
“I hate dessert. I hate dessert. I hate dessert.”
Mom gets home just as I’m prepping for the dessert pizza. She notices the pear-and-goat-cheese pie, the still-on oven, and arches an eyebrow.
“We left it for you,” I tell her. She grimaces, but once she takes her first bite, her expression softens.
“You already cooked. Why is the oven still on?”
“Something new.” I show her the cookie crust and her eyes light up.
“Really?”
“Really.”
Mom glances at Aneesa, who is trying to remain upright in her chair. “Was this your idea?”
“Sort of. It’s all his execution, though.”
“Let’s see how it goes, then.”
The pizza stone is still hot after a day’s use, but I can’t simply lay my cookie crust on it—it would absorb the savory oils from the other pizzas and ruin its own sweetness. So I commit a sin against the culinary gods of pizza and lay parchment paper on the stone, moving quickly lest I burn myself.
Paper in place, I prep the crust, topping it with a layer of pasty fudge, then a drizzle of caramel, followed by sliced banana, a sprinkle of chopped walnuts, and a ribbon of more fudge.
Into the oven it goes, for just a few minutes. Just long enough to make the fudge gooey and to slightly caramelize the banana slices.
When I remove it from the oven—with a motion I feel I’ve repeated a thousand times today—Mom actually gasps and applauds. Aneesa, despite herself, grins broadly and joins in the applause.
“Not done yet,” I warn them.
I spend a couple of minutes hand-whipping some whipped cream and float stiff arches of it over the pizza. When I’m done, it looks like shredded clouds drifting over a delicious, edible field.
I cut small slices, bearing in mind how sick and tired of pizza Aneesa and I are.
We each eat two of them.
Later, I lie in bed in the early stages of a sugar coma, combined with a general food coma. I am brain dead on carbohydrates and complex sugars, unable to move, capable only of staring up at the ceiling. Evan’s bedroom ceiling hosts a complicated, meticulous glow-in-the-dark decal replica of the night sky, with a particular focus on the Big Dipper. Mine features a pebbly popcorn texture and a small crescent of water damage in one corner from when a pipe in the ceiling froze and cracked one winter.
A knock at the door. As per usual, Mom stands in the doorway, not entering.
“Good job today, Sebastian.”
I struggle into a sitting position. “With what?”
“With everything.”
“Oh.”
She sighs and smiles at me. “I’m really proud of you. I told you to do something productive with your summer, and you have. I check your page, you know.”
“Please tell me you don’t read the comments.”
She grins. “I’m old, not stupid. Look, I’ve been watching your views climb. You’re in some pretty impressive territory.”
“It’s nothing compared to—”
“Stop it.” She holds out a hand, like a crossing guard of language making certain no stray words are hit by an oncoming linguistic semitruck. “Stop it, Sebastian. Stop putting yourself down. You’ve built something. You’ve applied yourself. And I want you to know that I’m so proud of you.”
She bites her lip. “Look, I know we don’t always… I know we don’t always talk… about the things we need to talk about. And I’m sorry for that. I just…”
I can’t stand to hear her apologize to me. And it’s been a day. I’m stuffed and logy. “It’s okay, Mom.”
She beckons. Despite the pizza I’ve stuffed into my gut over the course of the day, I swing my legs out of bed, give myself a moment to catch my breath, and then go to her.
She takes my face in her hands and gazes into my eyes. There is something in there—words, I think—that she struggles with. I don’t know if she’s struggling to withhold them or to say them. But after a too-long moment, nothing issues forth. She tilts my head down, kisses my forehead gently, and whispers, “Good night.”
And with that, we’ve recorded our last daily episode for the time being. “Our big season finale,” Aneesa calls it.
We still have the rest of the week. I take Aneesa on a tour of the last few places worth visiting in Brookdale. And then, on a whim on Friday night, just as the sun is setting, I take her to Lola.
There are four graveyards in Brookdale that I know of. My sister rests in the one behind the South Brook Episcopal Church.
“My parents used to go to church every week,” I tell Aneesa as we look down at the grave. “They stopped.”
Aneesa seems ill at ease here. I can’t tell if it’s the rampant Christianity or the so-brief span of time etched for all eternity into Lola’s headstone. February to June of the same year. Even though I know—even though I did it—I still double-check every time I visit, recalculating in my head. It seems so wrong, so off to have such an abbreviated life chiseled into granite. But it’s right, of course. It’s right and wrong. LOLA MARIE CODY and two dates and the words LOVED FOR A LIFETIME.
Aneesa toys with the tail of her hijab, her face unreadable. “If they stopped going, why did they bury her here?” There’s a hitch—not quite a hiccup—between they and bury. The word isn’t difficult—it’s the thought. A tiny body, barely a body at all, six feet below where we stand, in a coffin the size of a dollhouse. Unthinkable. And too easily imaginable.
“My mom wanted a place, I guess. A place to come to. I think… I think maybe by making it a separate place, she could separate it in her mind as well. She could leave it here and not carry it with her all the time.”
“And what about your dad?”
I flinch at the mention of him. “He just always went along with whatever Mom wanted. For a while. And then he wouldn’t go along with anything. And they argued over everything. Everything. Like, what kind of toothpaste to buy. Screaming matches over junk like that.”
She sighs. “What about you? Does it help for you to have it here? Does it help you not carry it?”
“I told you—I don’t remember any of it. I don’t have anything to leave here.”
“If you could remember—” she begins.
“Please don’t finish that sentence. I’ve heard it my whole life.” If you could remember, you could get past it.
It’s warm, but she shivers. “Do you want to pray? I can pray with you, if you want.”
“
No, that’s okay. I don’t know any prayers.”
“Prayers are just talking to God, is all. There’s no right or wrong way.”
I shake my head. “No. I just like being quiet here.”
She nods. We stand in silence. After a little while, she takes my hand.
Less than I want. More than I deserve.
Should have kissed her.
Why didn’t I kiss her?
She took my hand. She made the move. Why didn’t I kiss her?
Because I’m going away.
Am I? Am I still?
I think. I think I need to. I think.
Should have kissed her.
Evan: You there?
Me: Where?
Evan: lol I’m home now. tired. hang tomorrow?
Me: OK
Aneesa: Awake?
Evan: Where/when?
Me: Yeah
Me: sammpark 2?
Aneesa: Can I call or too late?
Evan: k
Me: Sure
Aneesa: Ring ring! lol
“I have an awesome idea,” Aneesa says when I answer.
“I’m sure.” I can hear her tapping a pen against the lid of her laptop, a tic that expresses itself whenever she consults our YouTube analytics page. “What’s wrong with our numbers?”
“Nothing’s wrong with them. I just want to keep it that way. We got a nice bump from the extravaganza, but I’m worried that once we’re only pizza-ing on the weekends, we’ll lose all of our momentum. I think we need one more big push right before school. Something that will get people’s notice and keep them interested. Sort of a ‘wow, who knows what they’ll do next!’ kind of thing. Then we can coast a little.”
Heaving out a sigh, I try to keep a note of whining out of my voice. “I made four pizzas in one day. What else can I do?”
“Livestream.”
“What?”
“Do it live. No recording. No editing. No second takes. We stream it live.”
