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, and 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.
“Everything okay, Pep?”
No. And I’m not even really sure why. Only a few days ago I was about as attached to Jack as I am to the guy who delivers our mail.
I tuck my bangs behind my ear. If I get into it like I almost did with Dad, I’ll have to tell her about Jack, and given the circumstances, I don’t especially want her to know. “Yeah, just … doing a post for the blog.”
“Paige is still posting too?”
I bite the inside of my cheek. It’s weird that most of the information Mom gets about Paige these days comes from me or from Dad.
“Yeah.”
She closes the fridge and leans there against the door for a moment, biting her cheek the same way I am. No matter what evolution of my mom I’m looking at—the barefoot, back-porch-singing Nashville one, or the high-heeled, power-walking one—there are always these uncanny moments when we’re both thinking the same thing or feeling the same way, and our bodies seem to mirror each other’s, like two halves of a coin.
She blows out a breath, reopening the fridge to grab the jar of tomatoes she’s always snacking out of, and then props herself on the other kitchen stool. “Taffy had trouble reaching you toward the end of the day.”
“I had practice. And homework.” And apparently two hours of guilt-induced baking, although that goes without saying.
My mom nods. “There are a lot of eyes and ears on that Twitter feed, you know. I know you’re juggling a lot right now, but we could really use your help.”
“I did.” Not necessarily on purpose; after I ghosted on her, Taffy must have sent out the GIF of the cat herself. It had ten thousand retweets last I checked. “And now that the whole thing with that deli is winding down—”
“Winding down?” My mom laughs. “It’s just getting started.”
“What do you mean?”
She pulls out her phone and opens Twitter, where there’s a new tweet from the Girl Cheesing account.
“So? Got any ideas cooking?”
The thing is, I always do. Within seconds, usually. Sometimes before I even finish reading a tweet. But right now, my mind just draws a giant blank. Right now, I’m looking at this tweet, but the only words I’m really hearing are Jack’s on his way out the door: Don’t you dare stand there and tell me it isn’t personal.
“Actually, I was thinking—I had some other ideas for things we could post, memes or some funny quote retweets we could do—”
“Sure, of course, we can do those later. But how are we going to respond to this?”
I’ve been smiling this uneasy smile, but I can feel it starting to tilt on my face. And that’s not the only thing tilting. Something is off here, something I don’t fully understand.
“Should we?” I ask. I keep my voice bright and noncombative. “I mean, they’re such small potatoes. We can do better than that, right? The McDonald’s Twitter account posted some promotion about their new McCafé flavor this morning, and I bet I could—”
“Maybe you could sleep on it? We can loop in Taffy in the morning.”
She pops another tomato into her mouth.
“Actually, Mom, um—I’m really busy this week, and I don’t think I should tweet at that Girl Cheesing account anymore.”
She shrugs. “So give Taffy some jumping-off points.”
I turn my back on her, pretending to wipe some crumbs off the counter so I can pinch my eyes shut for a moment and brace myself. Unlike Paige, I’m not so good on the whole rebellion front.
“What I mean is, I think we should just … full stop. No more tweeting at them at all.”
The tomato crunching stops for a moment. “You can’t just let him win.”
My ears snag on the word, my heart lurching.
“What do you mean ‘him’?”
There’s a beat, and then my mom waves her hand dismissively. “The owner’s probably a he.”
“It’s called Girl Cheesing.”
Not to mention, assuming an owner of a business is a guy is just not my mom’s MO. Long before she dreamed up the idea for Big League Burger and helped build it up to the veritable empire it is today, she was almost too progressive a feminist for a place like Nashville, where she jokingly but not-quite-jokingly would clamp her hands over our ears anytime a line in a country song said something about girls with painted-on jeans or sitting on tailgates, saying it would make us “the complicit kind of cowgirl.”
“You know what I mean.”
But now she’s the one having trouble looking at me.
I could tell her, I suppose. About Jack. But I already know what it’ll look like—that I have a crush on him or something, and I’m backing out of something that matters to her over a dumb boy.
“I’m going to lie down,” says my mom, getting up from the table so suddenly she leaves her briefcase and her sunglasses behind. “There should be leftovers in the fridge if you’re hungry.”
I can’t stand the idea of her being upset with me. I feel it all over again like some phantom force—that tug between her and Paige, except this time, of all people, it’s between her and Jack.
“I’ll queue up some ideas,” I tell her retreating back.
Which isn’t a lie. I will. They just won’t necessarily have anything to do with our Twitter feud. This has to be where it ends. It was embarrassing enough when it was a tiger against an ant; it’s another thing entirely when it’s a tiger attacking a family. And as determined as Jack was not to hear me out, the truth is, I understand that—the pride. The loyalty. The ridiculous lengths you’ll go to when it comes to protecting your own.
We used to have that, once upon a time. Now, I guess, the front lines are just me and 280 characters on a phone screen.
