To be fair, when the alarm goes off, there’s barely even any smoke rising out of the oven.
“Um, is the apartment on fire?”
I lower the screen of my laptop down, where my older sister Paige’s now scowling face is taking up half the screen on a Skype call from UPenn. The other half of the screen is currently occupied by the Great Expectations essay I have written and rewritten enough times that Charles Dickens is probably rolling in his grave.
“Nope,” I mutter, crossing the kitchen to shut the oven off, “just my life.”
I pull the oven open, and another whoosh of smoke comes out, revealing some seriously blackened Monster Cake.
“Crap.”
I grab the stepladder from the pantry to shut off the fire alarm, then open all the windows to our twenty-sixth-floor apartment, where the Upper East Side sprawls out beneath my feet—all the scores of towering buildings with their bright lights burning even long after anyone in their right mind should be asleep. I stare at it for a moment, somehow still not quite used to the staggering view even though we’ve been here nearly four years.
“Pepper?”
Right. Paige. I pull up the laptop screen.
“Under control,” I say, giving her a thumbs-up.
She raises a disbelieving eyebrow, then mimes sweeping at her bangs. I raise my hand to touch my own, and end up streaking the Monster Cake batter all the way down them as Paige winces.
“Well, if you do end up calling the fire department, prop me up on the taller counter so I can see the hot firefighters bust in.” Her eyes shift on her screen away from me, no doubt to look at the unfinished post on the baking blog we run together. “I take it we’re not getting any pictures for the entry tonight?”
“I have three other pans of it from earlier I can snap once they’re frosted. I’ll send them later.”
“Yeesh. How much Monster Cake did you make? Is Mom even back from her trip yet?”
I avoid her eyes by looking at the stove top, where my pans are all lined up in a neat row. Paige barely ever asks about Mom these days, so I feel like I have to be extra careful with whatever I say next—more careful than, say, the state of academic distraction that led me to nearly burn the kitchen to the ground.
“She should be back in two days.” And then, because I apparently can’t help myself, I add, “You could come up, if you wanted. We don’t have much going on this weekend.”
Paige wrinkles her nose. “Pass.”
I bite the inside of my cheek. Paige is so stubborn that anything I say to try to bridge the gap between her and Mom will usually just make things worse.
“But you could come down to Penn and visit me,” she offers brightly.
The idea would be tempting if I didn’t have this Great Expectations essay and a whole slew of other great expectations to deal with. An AP Stats test, an AP Bio project, debate club prep, and my first official day of being captain of the girls’ swim team, to name a few—and that’s only the tip of my figurative, ridiculously stressful iceberg.
Whatever face I’m making must say it all for me, because Paige holds her hands up in surrender.
“Sorry,” I say reflexively.
“First off, stop saying sorry,” says Paige, who is now waist-deep in a feminist theory class and embracing it with aggressive enthusiasm. “And second off, what is going on with you, anyway?”
I fan the last of the smoke toward the window. “Going on with me?”
“This whole … weird … Valedictorian Barbie thing you’ve got going on,” she says, gesturing at the screen.
“I care about my grades.”
Paige snorts. “Not back home, you didn’t.”
By “home,” she means Nashville, where we grew up.
“It’s different here.” It’s not like she’d know, considering she never actually had to go to Stone Hall Academy, a private school so elite and competitive that even Blair Waldorf would probably burn within two minutes of crossing its threshold. The year Mom moved us here, Paige was a senior and insisted on going to the local public school, and she already had grades from her old school to buoy her applications. “The grading scale is harder. College admissions are more competitive.”
“But you aren’t.”
Ha. Maybe I wasn’t before she ditched me for Philadelphia. Now my peers know me as the Terminator. Or Two-Shoes, or Preppy Pepper, or whatever moniker Jack Campbell, notorious class clown and the metaphorical thorn in my very irritated side, has decided to grace me with that week.
“Besides, didn’t you apply to Columbia early decision? You think they’re gonna care about a lousy B plus?”
I don’t think they will, I know they will. I overheard some girls in homeroom saying a kid at another school down the block from ours had their Columbia acceptance pulled after a bout of senioritis. But before I can justify hinging my paranoia on this extremely unsubstantiated rumor, the front door opens, followed by the click click click of my mom’s heels on the apartment’s hardwood floors.
“Peace,” says Paige.
She ends the call before I even turn back to the screen.
I sigh, shutting the laptop just before my mom walks into the kitchen, decked out in her usual airport fare: a pair of tight black jeans, a cashmere sweater, and a pair of oversize black sunglasses that, frankly, look ridiculous on her given the late hour. She pulls them off and perches them up on her perfectly coiffed blonde hair to inspect me, and the hurricane that used to be her spotless kitchen.
“You’re back early.”
“And you’re supposed to be in bed.”
She steps forward and pulls me into a hug, and I squeeze her a little tighter than someone covered in cake batter probably should. It’s only been a few days, but it’s lonely when she’s gone. I’m still not used to it being so quiet, without Paige and Dad around.
She holds me there and takes a demonstrative whiff, no doubt inhaling a lungful of burnt baked good, but when she pulls away, she raises the same eyebrow Paige did and doesn’t say anything.
“I have an essay due.”
She glances over at the pans of cake. “It looks like a riveting read,” she says wryly. “Is this the Great Expectations one?”
“The very same.”
“Didn’t you finish that a week ago?”
She has a point. I guess if push really comes to shove, I can pull up one of the old drafts and submit it. But the problem is, the figurative pushing and shoving at Stone Hall Academy is more like maiming and destroying. I’m competing for Ivy League admissions with legacies who probably descended down from the original Yale bulldog. It’s not enough to be good, or even great—you have to crush your peers, or get crushed.
Well, metaphorically, at least. And speaking of metaphors, for some reason, despite having read this book twice and annotating it into oblivion, I’m having some trouble interpreting any of them in a way that wouldn’t put our AP Lit teacher to sleep. Every time I try to write a coherent sentence, all I can think about is tomorrow’s swim practice. It’s my first day as acting captain and I know Pooja went to a conditioning camp over the summer, which means she might be faster than I am now, which means she has every opportunity to undermine my authority and make me look like an idiot in front of everyone and—
“Do you want to stay home from school tomorrow?”
I blink at my mom like she grew an extra head. That’s the last thing I need. Even missing an hour would give everyone around me an edge.
“No. No, I’m good.” I sit up on the counter. “Did you finish up your meetings?”
She’s been so dead set on launching Big League Burger internationally that it’s practically all she ever talks about these days—meetings with investors in Paris, in London, even in Rome, trying to figure out which European city she’ll take it to first.
“Not quite. I’ll have to fly back out. But corporate’s been having a cow over the new menu launches tomorrow, and it just didn’t look good for me to be away in the middle of it.” She smiles. “Also, I missed my mini-me.”
I snort, but only because between her designer digs and my wrinkled pajamas, right now I look like anything but.
“Speaking of the menu launches,” she says, “Taffy says you haven’t been answering her texts.”
I try to keep the twinge of annoyance from my face. “Yeah, well. I gave her some ideas for tweets to queue up, like, weeks ago. And I’ve had a lot of homework.”
“I know you’re busy. But you’re just so good at what you do.” She sets her finger on my nose the way she’s done since I was little, when she and my dad used to laugh at the way I’d go a little cross-eyed staring at it. “And you know how important this is to the family.”
To the family. I know she doesn’t mean for it to, but it rubs the wrong way, considering where we started and where we are now.
“Ah, yeah. I’m sure Dad’s losing all kinds of sleep over our tweets.”
My mom rolls her eyes in that affectionate, exasperated way she reserves solely for Dad. While plenty of things have changed since they divorced a few years back, they still love each other, even if they’re not so much “in” love, as Mom puts it.
The rest of it, though, has been whiplash. She and my dad started Big League Burger as a mom-and-pop shop in Nashville ten years ago, when it was just milkshakes and burgers and we were barely making rent every month to support it. Nobody ever expected it to franchise so successfully that Big League Burger would become the fourth largest fast-food franchise in the country.
I guess I also didn’t expect my parents to get amicably and almost cheerfully divorced, Paige to totally freeze Mom out for being the one to initiate it, or for Mom to one-eighty from a barefoot cowgirl to a fast-food mogul and move us to the Upper East Side of Manhattan either.
Now with Paige in college in Pennsylvania, my dad still living in the Nashville apartment, and my mom’s fingers near surgically attached to her iPhone, the word family is a bit of a stretch for her teenage daughter guilt-trip campaign.
“Explain to me this concept of yours again?” my mom asks.
I hold in a sigh. “Since we’re launching the grilled cheeses first, we’re ‘grilling’ people on Twitter. Anyone who wants to get ‘grilled’ can take a selfie and tweet it at us, and we’ll tweet something sassy at them about it.”
I could go into detail—pull up the mockups we made of potential responses to tweets, remind her of the #GrilledByBLB hashtag we’re going to push, of the puns we’ve come up with based on the ingredients of the three new grilled cheeses—but I’m exhausted.
My mom whistles lowly. “I love it, but Taffy is definitely going to need your help with that.”
I wince. “Yeah.”
Poor Taffy. She’s the mousy, cardigan-wearing twentysomething who runs the Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram pages for Big League Burger. Mom hired her right out of school when we were first starting to franchise, but after we expanded nationwide, the marketing team decided that Big League Burger’s Twitter presence was going to go the way of KFC or Wendy’s—sarcastic, irreverent, fresh. All the things that Taffy, bless her overworked, Powerpuff Girl heart, has no experience with.
Enter me. Apparently in the vast arsenal of useless talents that aren’t going to help me get into college, I am really good at being snarky on Twitter. Even if these days “good at being snarky” generally means photoshopping an image of Big League Burger on the Krusty Krab and Burger King on the Chum Bucket—which happened to be the first one I made, when Taffy took that trip to Disney World with her boyfriend last year and Mom asked me to pitch in. It ended up getting more retweets than anything we’d ever posted. Mom has been pushing me to help Taffy ever since.
I’m about to remind her that Taffy is long overdue for a raise and actual subordinates so she can get some sleep sometime this year, when my mom turns her back to me and squints at the cake in the pan.
“Monster Cake?”
“The one and only.”
“Ugh,” she says, picking at the pan I already sliced from. “You should hide these from me, you know. I can’t stop myself.”
It’s still strange to me, hearing my mom say stuff like that. If she hadn’t been such a proud foodie, she and my dad wouldn’t have opened Big League Burger in the first place. It sometimes doesn’t seem like that long ago I was standing on the porch of the old Nashville apartment with Paige, while our dad crunched numbers and emailed suppliers and my mom made exhaustive lists of bonkers milkshake combinations, reading them all off for our approval.
I don’t think I’ve seen her have more than a few sips of milkshake in half a decade—now she’s way more into the business side of things. And while I’ve leaned into that by helping with the tweets and trying to make New York work, the shift only seemed to make Paige even angrier with her. Half the time I feel like she’s only so committed to our baking blog as some kind of sticking point.
But no matter what else happens, this one thing my mom has always had a weakness for—Monster Cake. A perilous invention from childhood, the day Paige and Mom and I decided to test the limits of our rinky-dink oven with a combination of Funfetti cake mixed with brownie batter, cookie dough, Oreos, Reese’s Cups, and Rolos. The result was so simultaneously hideous and delicious that my mom fashioned googly eyes on it out of frosting, and thus, Monster Cake was born.
She takes a bite of it now and groans. “Okay, okay, get this away from me.”
My phone pings in my pocket. I pull it out and see a notification from the Weazel app.
Wolf
Hey. If you’re reading this, go to bed.
“Is that Paige?”
I bite down the smile on my face. “No, it’s—a friend of mine.” Well, kind of. I don’t actually know his real name. But Mom doesn’t need to know that.
She nods, pulling up some cake residue from the bottom of the pan with her thumbnail. I brace myself—it’s about now that she usually asks what Paige is up to, and yet again I have to play the middleman—but instead, she asks, “Do you know a boy named Landon who goes to your school?”
If I were the kind of girl who was stupid enough to leave diaries laying out in my bedroom, this would be reason enough to tailspin into full-blown panic. But I’m not the kind of girl who is stupid enough to do that, even if Mom were the kind of parent who snoops.
“Yeah. We’re both on the swim team, I guess.” Which is to say—Yeah, I had a massive, irrational crush on him freshman year, when you essentially dropped me off in a lion’s den of rich kids who’ve known each other since birth.
That first day was about as painfully awkward as a day could be. I’d never worn a school uniform before, and everything seemed to itch and not quite tuck in properly. My hair was still the frizzy, unruly mess it had been in middle school. Everyone was already secure in their own little cliques, and none of those cliques seemed to include anyone who had six pairs of cowboy boots and a Kacey Musgraves poster hung up in their closet.
I nearly burst into tears on the spot when I finally got to my English class and realized, to my horror, there had been summer reading—and there was a pop quiz on the first day. I was too terrified to actually say something to the teacher, but Landon had leaned over from his desk, all tanned from the summer with this broad, easy smile, and said, “Hey, don’t worry about it. My older brother says she just does these quizzes to scare us—they don’t actually count.”
I managed a nod. Sometime in the split second it took for him to lean back over to his own desk and look down at his quiz, my stupid fourteen-year-old brain decided I was in love.
Granted, it only lasted a few months, and I’ve spoken to him approximately six times since. But I’ve been way too busy for crushes in the time between then and now, so it’s pretty much the only blueprint I’ve got.
“Good, good. You should get to know him. Invite him over sometime.”
My jaw drops. I know she went to high school in the nineties, but that does not excuse this fundamental misunderstanding of how teenage social interaction works.
“Um, what?”
“His father is considering a massive investment in taking BLB international,” she says. “Anything we can do to make them feel more at ease…”
I try not to squirm. For all the bad poetry and light angsting to Taylor Swift songs that Landon inspired a few years back, I don’t actually know all that much about him, especially since he’s so busy now with some app development internship off campus that I barely even see him in the hallways. Landon’s been too busy being Landon—exceedingly handsome, universally beloved, and probably out of my mortal league.
“Yeah, I mean. We’re not really friends or anything, but…”
“You’re great with people. Always have been.” She reaches forward and tweaks me on the cheek.
Maybe I was, back at my old school. I had so many friends in Nashville, they basically made up half of the original Big League Burger’s revenue, hanging out there after school. But I never had to do anything to make those friends. They were all just there, the same way Paige was. We grew up together, knew everything about each other, and friendship wasn’t some sort of conscious choice so much as it was something we were just born with.
Of course, I didn’t know that until we moved here into this whole new ecosystem of other kids. That first day of school, everyone stared at me as if I were an alien, and compared to my Manhattan-bred peers who were raised on Starbucks and YouTube makeup tutorials, I basically was. That day I came home, took one look at my mom, and started to bawl.
It spurred her into action faster than if I’d come home literally on fire—within the week, I had more makeup products than my bathroom counter could hold, lessons with a stylist about blow-drying, one-on-one private tutoring so I could catch up to the elite curriculum. My mom had put us into this strange new world, and she was determined to make us both fit.
It’s weird, that I kind of look back on that misery with a fondness. These days my mom and I are too busy for much more than this—weird post-midnight encounters in the kitchen, both of us already poised with one foot out the door.
This time I beat her to it. “I’m gonna go to bed.”
My mom nods. “Don’t forget to leave your phone on tomorrow, so Taffy can reach you.”
“Right.”
I should probably be annoyed that she thinks Twitter takes priority over my actual education—especially considering she put me in one of the most competitive schools in the country—but it’s nice, in a way. To have her need me for something.
Back in my room, I lean on the mass of pillows on my bed, pointedly avoiding my laptop and the mountain of work still waiting for me by opening the Weazel app instead and typing a reply.
Bluebird
Well look who it is. Can’t sleep?
I think for a moment Wolf won’t respond, but sure enough, the chat bubble opens again. There’s a certain kind of thrill and an even more certain kind of dread—a hazard of using the Weazel app. The whole thing is anonymous, and supposedly there are only kids from our school on it. You’re assigned a username when you log on for the first time, always some kind of animal, and stay anonymous as long as you’re in the main Hallway Chat that’s open to everyone.
But if you talk with anyone one-on-one on the app, at some point—you never know when—the app reveals your identities to each other. Boom. Secrecy out the window.
So basically, the more I talk to Wolf, the likelier the odds are that the app will out us to each other. In fact, considering some people are randomly revealed to each other within a week or even within a day, it’s kind of a miracle we’ve gone two months like this.
Wolf
Nah. Too busy worrying about you butchering Pip’s narrative.
Maybe that’s why, lately, we’ve started getting a little more personal than usual. Saying things that won’t quite give us away, but aren’t all that subtle either.
Bluebird
You’d think I’d have an advantage. Pip’s whole rags-to-riches thing isn’t so far off my mark
Wolf
Yeah. I’m starting to think we’re the only ones who weren’t born with silver spoons in multiple orifices
I hold my breath, then, as if the app will out us both right there. I want it and I don’t. It’s kind of pathetic, but everyone is so closed off and competitive that Wolf is the closest thing I’ve had to a friend since we moved here. I don’t want anything to change that.
It’s not really that I’m afraid he’d disappoint me. I’m afraid I’d disappoint him.
Wolf
Anyway, milk it for all it’s worth. Especially cuz those assholes probably paid a much smarter person to write their essays for them.
Bluebird
I hate that you’re probably right.
Wolf
Hey. Only 8 more months ’til graduation.
I lie back on my bed, closing my eyes. Sometimes it feels like those eight months can’t go by fast enough.
