Tweet Cute

by Emma Lord

  “I’m sure this will all blow over in a—”

  “I have voicemails on my personal cell phone from national publications requesting comments, Mom. This isn’t blowing anywhere.”

  There’s a beat, the wobbly kind where it seems anything could happen. We are still so unused to fighting that there’s no script to follow, no obvious move to anticipate next. But the last thing I’m expecting is for her to stand abruptly to leave the room.

  “Where are you going?”

  She pauses in the doorway, her back to me and her head turned just enough for me to see some of her chin. “To talk to your principal and straighten this suspension out before it goes on your permanent record.”

  “But, Mom—”

  “And when I get back, and I’ve sorted through what on earth is going on here … we need to have a talk.”

  She turns fully then, stiff in that distinct way she always is when she’s dealing with Paige. It stings more than anything she could say to me.

  “Yeah. Let’s talk, Ronnie.”

  It is somehow the worst but most effective hit I could aim in that moment. My mom is unflappable enough that I’ve seen her nearly get clipped by taxis and not so much as flinch, but the nickname seems to hit her in the one place she didn’t think to protect.

  She sweeps out the door before I can see just how lasting the blow is, leaving me there with my bedhead and my laptop and an infinite void of pictures of me throwing up into various pop culture phenomena.

  For a good ten minutes or so, I’m too stunned to move. There’s no distraction from the itch, the hurt, the anger—I can’t call Paige. I can’t even go to school. There’s no place to shake it off, nowhere to go.

  And suddenly I need somewhere to go.

  I kick off the covers, my eyes stinging, my face overheating. I grab an old pair of jeans, a T-shirt covered in cartoon doughnuts that I stole from Paige, a ratty old pair of sneakers, and yank my hair into a ponytail. I slip myself back into the me I once was, and for a few moments, in my old clothes and my old shoes and my old state of mind, I can let it go: the endless homework, the college applications, the Twitter notifications, the stupid meme.

  What I can’t let go of is the way I tried just now to tell my mom my world was falling apart, and she left.

  Well, if she’s allowed to leave, then so am I. I grab my wallet, my keys, the MetroCard Jack talked me through buying the other day. There’s only one place I want to go, and it’s the last place I should be.

  Jack

  I’m really raking in the superlatives. It kicked off with Worst Pseudo Pen Pal on the Planet, veered sharply into Worst Best Friend in the Galaxy, and now, to top it all off, Worst Son/Grandson in the Known Universe and Every Infinite Reality Hereafter.

  There are so many people to apologize to, I don’t even know where to start. It feels like there’s a fire in every corner of my brain, and instead of putting any of them out, I’m just frozen and watching it spread across the room.

  The mess with Pepper is terrible enough on its own. There are so many things I could have, would have, should have done—like take down that stupid picture when I saw Ethan tweet it—but the moment we heard Grandma Belly fall over in the other room, anything beyond it was out of my mind so quickly and so thoroughly, there wasn’t space for anything other than panic and this gray look on my dad’s face I don’t think I’ll ever forget.

  She slipped getting out of a chair and ended up hitting her head, and in the end had a concussion and a few stitches. They released her last night, and she’s back at home and going to be fine. But that first minute when we walked in and saw her on the floor with blood on the carpet, before my dad started shouting for me to get the phone and the commotion stirred her awake, was probably the worst minute of my life.

  And while that was by far the worst of it, it turns out it was just the beginning of the long, lingering shitstorm that has since taken over my life.

  “I don’t even know what to do with you,” says my dad. It’s bright and early in the morning, a time when he’s usually overseeing things in the kitchen or going over our stock to put in orders to our meat and cheese suppliers, but instead we’re sitting in the Time-Out Booth so the whole world is witness to my humiliation.

  Not that my dad can really do anything to me now. I can’t see how he can possibly make me feel any worse than I already do.

  In the last twenty-four hours, not only have I let Pepper get turned into the meme of the week, but I’ve basically wrecked Paul’s life too. After I left to help my mom get Grandma Belly out of the hospital, Paul apparently decided to ignore everything I said to him and agreed to meet this Goldfish person on the roof of the school. After about a half hour of waiting last night it started to get dark, and Paul realized not only was he locked up there, but Goldfish had posted a picture of him stuck up there and written, can u believe this guy actually self-described as “hot”? weazel app i want my money back.

  Paul didn’t even call me to tell me, and I was too busy at the hospital to be monitoring the Hallway Chat the way I usually do on and off during the afternoons. By the time I saw it, it had a comment thread a mile wide, and multiple unflattering photoshops of Paul with bad captions alluding to him being on the dive team like, dumpster diving? and looks like someone dove in with two (hobbit) feet.

  The first thing I did was break my one rule and trace Goldfish back to some girl named Helen, a known bully in the senior class. The second thing I did was email Rucker to turn her in—and myself right with her.

  I should have known it would only make things worse. As far as I know, Helen’s off scot-free, Paul’s still embarrassed out of his mind and not talking to me, and not only am I suspended for a week, but—plot twist—Pepper’s suspended for two days for not ratting me out when she had the chance.

  The TL;DR: Paul hates me. Pepper hates me. And it’s only a matter of time before it gets around that I made Weazel, and then the whole school will hate me too. There isn’t one corner of my life I haven’t actively sabotaged, and I’m so far past rock bottom, I’m basically in the earth’s molten core.

  Hence, the most pointless father-son guilt trip in the whole of human history. My dad could literally start spitting flames right now, and I’d probably just tilt myself over and lean into the blast.

  “I’m sorry, Dad.”

  And I am. I really am. Just not particularly at him, because it seems like he and Mom are the people least affected by this entire thing. And the people who are most affected, I could be spending this time getting in touch with, instead of being on the receiving end of a lecture within earshot of half of the morning egg-and-cheese-bagel rush.

  “What were you thinking?”

  I open my mouth to tell him just that, about what Weazel actually is—or was, I guess, since I disabled the whole thing last night. But he doesn’t even let me get a word in edgewise. Instead, he leans farther into the table, propping his elbow above the spot where Ethan carved a Superman logo when we were kids, and lets out a Dad-sized sigh.

  “You’re on shift immediately after dive practice and every weekend for the next month,” he says, without even looking at me.

  I laugh. On the list of appropriate reactions I could have had, this is so far down that for a moment my dad doesn’t even seem to process it, looking over at me, temporarily stunned out of his anger.

  “Jack.”

  The laugh has now dissolved into an undignified snort, and before I know it, I’m saying, “Honestly, Dad, if that’s ‘punishment,’ looks like I’m grounded for life, huh?”

  My dad raises his eyebrows at me, warning and curious. He doesn’t say anything, giving me the space to keep going, which judging by the sudden heat of what seems to be about a decade’s worth of repressed insecurity bubbling to the surface right now, he probably shouldn’t.

  I jam my finger down into the Time-Out Booth. “I’m already here every day. After school. On the weekends. My whole life is here, and you’ve made damn well sur
e of it.”

  My dad closes his eyes for a brief moment, so wearily I’m not even sure if he’s hearing half of what I’m saying. It’s the wrong time and the wrong way and most definitely the wrong place, but it feels like if I don’t say it now, I might never get another chance.

  “Jack—”

  “You know, I’ve always wondered why you pushed me instead of Ethan to be the one who takes over this place. Because it’s always been that way. And at first, I didn’t get it.”

  My dad is too stunned to say anything back, so I just keep going like a derailed subway car.

  “But I caught on. Ethan’s the golden twin, the better one, the one who gets to go off and take over the world, or whatever. Because lucky for you, you made a spare, stupider twin to keep this place running.”

  “What on earth makes you think working in this place makes you any less? Jesus, if that school is putting ideas in your head that working here is some kind of—”

  “You just called it a punishment yourself! Which is stupid, by the way, because if that’s what this is, you’ve been punishing me for years!”

  My voice is loud enough the egg-and-cheese crowd is staring at us like we’re some kind of side show. If we’ve stopped New Yorkers long enough for them to pull out their earbuds, we must really be a sight.

  When I finally look over at him, my dad’s eyes are hot with the kind of fury I have never seen in them before. “Go upstairs.”

  And just like that the anger that did such an annoyingly good job of grounding me a moment before is gone, crumbling out from under me so fast, I can’t latch onto anything else to replace it. It’s like I’m six years old again, senseless and stupid and running in and out of this conversation with no strategy at all, aside from saying things at him until I’ve finally run out of things I need to say.

  “You don’t even care that I—that I did something cool. That I made something, something that actually helped people before it…” I’m floundering, my face burning, my voice starting to shift dangerously toward something close to a whine. “Dad, I’m good at this. The app thing. Good enough that it might be something I want to do with my life.”

  He’s not even looking at me anymore. “Go. Upstairs.”

  Now that I’ve dug myself so far into this hole, I’m so unsure of what to do with myself, I’m almost grateful for an instruction. I pull myself out of the booth, avoiding the curious stares of people waiting for their food, and duck back out into the cold air to let myself in the apartment.

  My mom’s in Grandma Belly’s room, the two of them watching something in there with the volume down low enough they definitely hear me come in, but nobody says anything. I beeline straight for my room before they can, and the click of the door shutting behind me is the permission I didn’t realize I was waiting for to immediately start crying, the stupid, angry, little-kid kind of tears I haven’t cried in so long that for a few moments I’m too overwhelmed to even let it properly happen.

  I remember myself just enough to lock the door. I don’t even make it to the bed, sitting on the floor for no real reason, really, except the bed seems too comfortable, and I don’t deserve to ride this misery out in any kind of comfort. I end up grabbing the first thing I can find on the floor to muffle my face into, and only after I’ve snotted it up and ridden out the worst of the crying do I realize it’s my apron from the deli, the one my dad got me a few years ago with the Girl Cheesing logo and my name sewn into it.

  I crumple it into a ball and toss it across the room.

  He probably hates me now. My whole life I’ve been working nonstop at the deli so he wouldn’t hate me, and now I’ve gone and blown the whole thing up so fast and so effectively, I honestly should win some kind of Olympic medal for wrecking things. I want more than anything to be able to blink and undo the last twenty-four hours, or maybe the last month, or the last year—stop myself from making Weazel, from posting from the deli’s Twitter account, from doing all the things that led to the veritable disasters and me spewing at my dad like an angsty teenage volcano in full view of half the East Village.

  But I guess if none of that happened, I wouldn’t have Pepper in my life.

  Well, wouldn’t have had Pepper. Who even knows what our deal is now.

  I blink, and for a moment the tears stop entirely. It’s the thought of Pepper that snaps me out of myself just enough it reminds me that, of all the times in the world, this is probably the least convenient for me to be emoting above the deli. I may resent the hell out of being down there right now, but the fact of the matter is, someone has to run that show and someone has to be up here with Grandma Belly, meaning we’re down a pair of hands.

  I swipe at my eyes and take a quick glance at myself in the mirror. My eyes are so red, I look like Ethan that time he snuck home after getting high. I splash water on my face and run my fingers through my hair, attempting something close to decent, and once I look somewhat like a person who hasn’t been crying on the floor for an hour, I head back down the stairs.

  I pause at the door to the deli, making sure there aren’t any customers still lingering who witnessed my one-man shitshow, and bracing myself to face my dad. But it’s not my dad at the register, or even my mom—it’s Pepper.

  At first I am so certain I am dreaming that I stand there like a goon for a solid five seconds, blocking the door so nobody can get in or out. Someone has outfitted Pepper with a purple Girl Cheesing hat and apron, and she’s squinting down at someone’s order and the price cheat sheet taped under the register and talking to one of our regulars. Her hair is tucked into a low bun, and she’s smiling this bright, practiced customer service kind of smile, looking so in her element but also so unlike any Pepper I ever imagined that even after those five seconds pass and someone on the street nudges my shoulder to get past me, the image refuses to make sense in my head.

  It takes Pepper a few moments to spot me when I walk in. Her cheeks immediately flush, but she finishes the transaction without missing a beat. I walk up to the register, so unused to being on the other side of it that it adds yet another layer of disconnect.

  “What’re you…”

  It’s all I can manage.

  “I figured I could, uh, lend a hand today,” says Pepper. “If that’s okay.”

  It feels like my face is going to crack right down the middle. Just like that, my throat is swollen again, like I didn’t spend a good hour crying already. “Yeah.”

  Pepper’s eyes flit away for a moment, and then I realize whatever has happened to my throat must also be playing out on my face. Before I can panic and say or do something awkward, my mom swoops in from the back, takes one look at me, and says, “Hey, kiddo. We’ve got everything handled down here. Why don’t you go sit with your grandma for a little while?”

  I stare at her dumbly. She must have ducked down here at some point while I was in my room, but I didn’t even hear the door.

  “Yeah. Yeah, I’ll go do that.” I turn to Pepper. There are probably half a dozen things I need to say to her, but all that comes out is a thick, “Thanks.”

  I turn back around before she can answer, mostly because I don’t trust my face to keep what little amount of composure it has left in it. I climb back up the stairs and let myself into the apartment, my blood rushing in my ears, my eyes still blinking like they made Pepper up. I’m so distracted, it doesn’t occur to me until I’m opening the front door that if my mom is downstairs, it can only mean my dad is up here.

  I full-body flinch at the sight of my dad sitting on the couch in the living room, which somehow feels more jarring than what’s happening downstairs. And maybe it is—I’m so used to my parents being down in the deli during daylight hours, it seems strange to see him up here right now, in the middle of a day when he would usually be in the corner office in the back and I’d be sitting behind a desk. It feels like we’re looking at each other through a different lens, on unfamiliar ground, even though this is the place we call home.

  My dad’s
eyes lift to meet mine, and I brace myself all over again. I almost want him to yell at me, just to have the relief of it being over, but he doesn’t seem angry. He seems like something I don’t know how to navigate, something soft in the eyes and hard in the mouth that makes me waffle at the door like I came in here by mistake.

  “How’s Grandma Belly?” I finally ask.

  My dad nods toward her room. “Taking a nap.”

  I nod back. An excruciating quiet settles between us, and I’m already counting the seconds it will take for me to get to my room and close the door on him when my dad says, “Why don’t you sit down?”

  He motions to the space next to him on the couch. I walk over and take it, even though the middle cushion is Ethan’s spot, not mine. I look at my lap for a beat, resenting that even in a moment like this, I can’t think for myself without making space for him too.

  “When you were little, you hated this apartment. You told me you wanted to live under the table in the Time-Out Booth.”

  “I did?”

  My dad’s lip quirks.

  “We might have let you too, if we didn’t catch you trying to peel used gum off the bottom of it.”

  It cuts through just enough of the tension that I stop waiting for some other shoe to drop. “Well, that explains a lot.”

  He lets out a breath, leaning in a little closer. “What I’m trying to say is—you loved the deli. Right from the start. Loved being down there, and getting to hit buttons on the register, and nipping at the heels of everyone in the kitchen.”

  He doesn’t speak for a moment, like he’s giving me space to cut in. But I am suddenly too desperate to know what’s on the other side of those words to say anything myself.

  “I don’t want you to think I pushed you into it because I thought any less of you,” says my dad, lowering his voice. “If anything, it’s the opposite. I guess I pushed it because—well, your brother and your mom, they’re so alike in a lot of ways. And I’ve always—maybe it’s selfish, but I’ve always seen a lot of myself in you.”