by Emma Lord
“Where are you?”
“Down the street, why?”
The words come out in a rush, as if I’ve been running. And granted, I have basically been power walking like I’m on fire, but it’s more than that—I’m terrified in that moment that the shoe we’ve been ignoring just dropped. That something happened to Grandma Belly, and not only was I not there, but I was cavorting with the enemy when it happened.
“Get here. Now.”
Okay, scratch that. I’m just in a volcanic amount of trouble. And the only thing worse than my dad being upset with me is my mom being upset with me.
I’m about to open my mouth and tattle on Ethan like the total yellowbelly I apparently am, but my mom beats me to the punch.
“The place is packed. We have customers out the door and not enough hands in the world to serve them. Wherever you are, Jack, RUN.”
For a moment I’m certain it’s a prank. And then I round the corner and see it with my own eyes: a sea of people, so far down the block they’re waiting past the old bookstore, past the bodega and the locksmith and the hole-in-the-wall sex toy shop that doesn’t open until eight o’clock. People of all ages, with backpacks and briefcases and strollers, all of them craning to get a glimpse at the door and how many people are in front of them.
I haven’t seen this many people clustered outside of a shop since the damn cronut.
I take off at a sprint, the anger completely stunned out of me. Some people grumble about me cutting the line—“I work here,” I mutter, which perks a few impatient customers up—and by the time I get up to the counter, I see my mom beaming an almost-manic grin at the register, and we’ve even opened the second one, which is something I don’t think we ever do outside of big events like Pride spilling in more customers, or that summer a Groupon tour ended on our block.
“What happened?” I demand, diving for an extra apron. If Ethan and Mom are already up front, that means I’ll be joining Dad in the back for prep. Thank god this insanity will spare me from parental wrath for at least as long as it takes to get all these people fed.
“Ethan’s tweets!” Mom chirps. Before I even feel my face start to pinch, she adds quickly, “Both of your tweets. After they went viral, I guess…”
I blink. “Wait, so—I do one shady tweet and get in trouble, and Ethan tweets a whole bunch of wildly rude things and—”
My mom leans forward, grabs my chin, and steps on her tiptoes to kiss me on the cheek. “We’ll talk disciplining later. Sandwiches now. Go, go, go.”
For the next three hours until closing, I am barely able to come up for air. I can make any of our sandwiches with my eyes closed, and by the time eight o’clock finally rolls around, I practically am. The line only seems to get longer, and the shenanigans more absurd—there are bloggers taking pictures, a man dressed in a shirt with printed grilled cheeses on it who calls himself a “grilled cheese authority,” teens much trendier than I am taking side-by-side pictures of our Grandma’s Special with Big League Burger’s for their Instagram stories.
And more importantly, a shit ton of cash going into the register.
At the end of the day, when we finally close the door on the last customer and lock it, we all collapse in the Time-Out Booth, wheezing as though we’ve just run the New York marathon.
“I can’t feel my feet,” my mom groans.
I lay my head down on the table. “My entire body is covered in brie and honey mustard.”
I can hear the smirk in Ethan’s voice even with my arm covering my eyes. “Two girls asked for my number.”
“You already have a boyfriend,” I remind him, poking one eye out to glare.
“And I told them that.”
“But you didn’t think to mention you have an identical twin?”
“Okay, we need to strategize,” says my dad, clapping his hands together. “If the rest of the week is going to be anything like this, we need to have all hands on deck. Hannah, if you want to check on stock, I’ll start calling all the day shifters to see if anyone wants overtime. Boys, if you could scrub down and close up shop for the night—”
“Wait. That’s it?”
My dad pauses, halfway up from his seat. “What’s it?”
My face is volcanically warm. I’m not a narc. I’m really not. If I were, Ethan’s golden-child status would have been knocked down more than a few notches years ago—he’s been sneaking beer out with friends in the park and even smoking the occasional joint since we were fourteen.
But the double standard has never been more unfair than it is right now.
My mom gets it before my dad does because she is all too aware of the quiet way I keep score. She puts a hand on my shoulder and squeezes. “Your father already had a talking-to with Ethan before the huge rush of people. No more tweeting. At least, no more like the ones you sent today.”
I have to bite my cheek to stop myself from saying anything else.
“Agreed,” says my dad. He hovers at the edge of the table, for some reason fixing a look at me instead of Ethan. After a moment, he sighs. “You have my permission to tweet from the account again. But I need it reined in. Ethan, if you’re going to tweet from it, you have to run it past Jack first. Understand?”
I blink up at him, not sure I’ve heard correctly.
“Run it past Jack?” Ethan protests.
“Jack managed to keep it somewhat tone-appropriate. Besides, he’s on the Twitter account more than you and spends more time on the floor. I trust his judgment.”
Dad claps me on the back as he walks away, and Mom smirks as she gets up to follow him. I can’t help but feel a little smug about the whole thing—at least until I look up and see Ethan’s face, and the flicker of hurt on it that passes so fast, I almost miss it.
“Okay, then,” he says, holding up his hands in surrender. “It’s all you, bro.”
I lean back in the booth, trying to dial down my satisfaction.
“We’ll do it together,” I offer.
Ethan shakes his head. “You heard Dad. You’re the one they trust.” He says the words like they’re only the edge of something he really wants to say. But before I can press him, he says, “Just make sure to give ’em hell.”
And then, like someone dropping a hammer into my stomach, the afternoon comes rushing back. “About that.”
Ethan leans forward. “What is it?”
Ethan’s my brother and I love him and all, but we don’t have one of those psychic twin vibes. When he sprains his ankle in soccer practice, I don’t feel some phantom twinge across the field, and when one of us is upset about something, the other one usually doesn’t notice until we say something point-blank. Which is how I know my face must look like a real mess if Ethan’s asking me that.
I consider for a moment not telling him. There’s this strange tug pulling me back, some misplaced loyalty to Pepper that I guess even finding out the truth about her didn’t quite knock out of me.
But even if I wanted to keep this to myself, I couldn’t. Not with Pepper as captain of the swim team. Whether I keep doing Ethan’s captain duties or not, one of us will be dealing with her until the end of the season, and I can’t just send him in blind.
“Big League Burger—Pepper’s parents are in charge of it.”
It takes Ethan a moment to place her, and for some reason I feel a flash of annoyance. “Pepper Evans?”
I nod. “And … it looks like Pepper is running their Twitter. Or at least, it looks like she’s a big part of running it.”
Ethan’s eyes widen in the same dumbfounded way I know mine must have three hours ago. “That’s—there’s no way.”
“That’s what I thought. I only found out this afternoon.”
“The world can’t be that small.”
I prop my elbows on the table and lean my head into my hands, suddenly feeling like I haven’t slept in years. I’m past surprise, past disappointment. I just want to throw my body onto my bed and sleep until the end of time.
“Apparently it is,” I mutter.
Ethan lowers his voice. “Are you gonna be able to keep at it? I mean—you’re friends, right?”
“No.” Ethan pulls back, and I realize I’ve said it through my teeth. I sag forward, sinking deeper into my hands, my elbows aching against the table. “At least not anymore, we’re not.”
Ethan levels with me for a moment, and then nods. “Maybe it’ll all just … blow over after this.” He knocks his knuckles on the table as he gets up. “Anyway, let me know if you need any help.”
I wait for a few seconds after everyone’s left to reach into my back pocket and grab my phone. Three messages from Bluebird, but no more texts from Pepper. Somehow I already know what I’m going to see before I open Twitter, but I can’t stop myself—and there, sure enough, is a tweet from Big League Burger. The stupid cat GIF, with its sunglasses and its grilled cheese. I don’t know what part is more stupid—being disappointed about a GIF of a cat, or that there was even a tiny part of me that thought she might not post it at all.
Pepper
Bluebird
So you never told me what it is you want to do with your life.
Bluebird
I mean, no pressure or anything, it’s just the rest of forever
Bluebird
It’s okay if you want to be Rucker’s protege. I mean, I’d stop being friends with you, but who needs friends when you have a 401k and 16 pairs of patterned pants
Great. That makes six unanswered texts to Jack, three unanswered texts to Wolf, and several SOS texts to Paige, who I know is either in class or sucking face with a fellow coed. I hope it’s the former, because I’m really not up to getting a play-by-play right now.
In fact, I’m probably not up to any kind of play right now. My mom’s going to be home any minute, and the kitchen looks like Keebler elves threw a rave in it.
I didn’t mean for it to escalate to the extent it has—a pot of browned butter remnants on the stove, cocoa powder on the marble counter, leftover dark chocolate sauce congealing in a bowl in the sink. After the incident with Jack, I’d walked straight home, reeling from the surprise of it all, the complete absurdity, and convinced myself I could take my mind off it if I just pulled out my AP Gov textbook and buried myself in it.
It turns out no amount of learning about the ins and outs of federalism is enough to distract me from the gnawing guilt, or the unwelcome weight in my chest every time I think of Jack’s face just before he walked out of the bakery’s front doors.
If I couldn’t escape the guilt, there was nothing left to do but lean into it. And leaning into it is what led me to grabbing the forty dollars my mom leaves out in the front to order food if I ever need it, schlepping miserably down to the bodega, and collecting everything I needed to make Paige’s infamous So Sorry Blondies from the summer before she left for college.
I pull them out of the oven now, the smell wafting through the kitchen—the brown sugar and butter and toffee against the richness of the dark chocolate chips and pockets of dark chocolate caramel sauce. A little bitter and a little sweet. I set them on the stove to cool and lean back on the counter, looking at the horror I have wrought upon my mom’s spotless kitchen.
I whip out my phone (no texts from Jack; just a few from my dad, asking which pies to preorder for Thanksgiving) so I can take a few pictures of it for the blog. Paige and I have been playing phone tag all week, but that hasn’t stopped her from nagging me to update. To be fair, she’s had the last three posts, with impressive pictures of Rainy Day Pudding, Unicorn Ice Cream Bread, and a recent addition I’m too scared to ask about called Help Me Hangover Cookies. Meanwhile, I haven’t posted since I made our Trash Talk Tarts in September—courtesy of the thinly veiled comment I found in the Hallway Chat on Weazel, where someone bitched about a “certain blonde android making the rest of the AP Chem class look bad.” While we’re all too stressed out and busy to bully each other beyond the occasional snide remark, I don’t think it’s too presumptuous to assume they meant me.
Just then my phone rings, and my dad’s face dressed up as the Big League Burger mascot for Halloween pops up on the screen.
“What’s up?”
“Pies,” says my dad. I can recognize the background noise from our old favorite bakery in Nashville—the bells on the door, the chime of the register. The place is always packed. “Your mom says apple. Paige says pecan. If you have a third one in mind, open your pie hole and speak now.”
My mouth waters just at the thought of those pies. Ever since we moved here, we always do major holidays in Nashville, since all the grandparents are out there. Sometimes I see old friends. Mostly I just hang out with Paige and tear up Dad’s kitchen the way I tear up Mom’s.
And, of course, run point with Dad to do everything and anything we can to keep Paige and Mom from going at it—which is easier to do these days, since during the holidays they seem to barely talk at all.
“Chocolate,” I tell him. “The pudding one.”
“Chocolate it is,” he says, just as the oven timer goes off on my end. He must hear it, because he says, “Does this mean P&P Bake is getting an update today?”
“If I manage not to burn these blondies like I did with last week’s cake.”
“So Sorry Blondies?” my dad asks. He’s not a big worrier—he’s one of those parents who is more into listening than prying—but even he knows these particular blondies have notorious origins.
The way my parents’ divorce happened was … anticlimactic. They sat us down one day over dinner and told us it was mutual. That they loved each other, but thought they were better off as friends. And as stunned as Paige and I were, it didn’t really rock anyone’s worlds. We were still in Nashville. We all still lived in the same place. My dad just started sleeping in the guest room, and that was that.
Or at least, it was for a few months. It was around that time that Big League Burger was getting too big for them to manage alone. The options were to sell parts of the franchise, or fully take the reins of the whole thing. My dad waffled—his heart was always in the original location, not the others that followed—but my mom didn’t hesitate. She loved every part of it, big and small, and didn’t want someone outside of the family in charge. If he didn’t want to take those reins, she would. And she’d head to New York and open the corporate office there to do it.
Even though our dad was in full support of the idea, it was around then, I think, that Paige conflated everything that happened with BLB with the divorce and started blaming Mom. And for a little while, when Paige wanted me to be on her side about that, I wondered if I should too. After all, she seemed to be the one in motion, instigating the change.
But it wasn’t her so much as it was BLB itself. I think it honestly shocked my dad, how fast we grew. Mom embraced it, pushing outward to the wind, and Dad seemed to cave in on it, becoming more and more invested in the goings-on of our original locations, as if he could just put up blinders and pretend the world ended right there.
So really, it’s not fair to blame one of them. I think, in the end, it punctuated something they knew all along, but the day-to-day of our old lives always shielded them from. Mom is someone who likes adventure, and taking chances, and asking questions. Dad is someone who is perfectly content with what he has and where he is, and doesn’t especially love change. And Big League Burger was nothing if not changing.
And so were we. Mom asked me to come to New York with her, and I couldn’t imagine saying no. I was always her mini-me, always nipping at her heels. She made it sound like an adventure—and maybe it would have been, if Paige hadn’t decided at the last minute that she was coming too.
Enter the So Sorry Blondies. It was a few weeks after we’d moved here, and the first of Paige’s many blowups with Mom, accusing her of all kinds of things—saying she didn’t love Dad at all, that she’d ruined everything, yelling loud enough that it’s a miracle our neighbors’ ears didn’t bleed. Once it was over, Mom left to run in the park, an
d Paige left to go to the grocery store down the street, and I stayed in the too-big, too-unfamiliar apartment, wrestling with the strange feeling I had to take sides and not knowing which side to take.
Once she’d calmed down, Paige employed my help in making the So Sorry Blondies. We even Skyped in Dad, who didn’t have very strong dessert opinions, other than to make sure the edges were crispy. Mom accepted them with a conciliatory smile, and that night, we all ate them for dinner. It was one of those bright spots that punctuated a grim year; a weird little pocket in the timestream I remember with an equal amount of affection and regret. It hurts to remember, but sometimes I have to, or I’ll forget the way we used to be all together. Like the blondies themselves—the bitter and the sweet.
All this is to say, I know these blondies aren’t magic. It’s not going to make some bridge between me and Jack for all the water to go under. But I can’t think of anything else I can do.
“They’re for—a classmate,” I tell him, just barely stopping myself from saying they’re for a boy.
Mom’s key turns in the door.
“A classmate, huh?” my dad asks. I can hear the relief in his voice. The last thing either of us wants is another family feud. “What kind of teenage drama merits the full blondie?”
Mom waves as she comes in, dropping her briefcase on one of the kitchen stools and offering me a weary smile as she pulls off her sunglasses.
“It’s Dad,” I tell her.
She perks up. “Ask him how the new menu has been doing.” Even though we’re sprouting new locations every other week, she still loves to hear Dad’s day-to-day at the original spot.
“Tell her it’s going well,” says Dad, hearing her from the other end. “The Twitter, though—well, I’m at the front of the line, so I gotta order now. I’ll call you both back in a jif.”
“Chocolate pudding,” I remind him.
“On it, hon. Love you.”
“Love you too.”
I hang up and see my mom looking at the So Sorry Blondies, a wistful expression on her face. It makes my throat ache, like the space in the room where Paige should be has never been quite as big.
