Two hours later I feel like my entire body has been whipped. I practice often enough in the off-season that it’s not too much of a shock getting into the swing of things, but nobody’s self-directed workouts can reach even half the intensity of Coach Martin’s. I barely have the energy to drag myself over to the coffee shop, let alone run ridiculous negotiations for a pool we shouldn’t be sharing in the first place.
Even if it weren’t for that, the city just makes me nervous in general. I’ve carved myself a little world here in a neat seven-block radius: the apartment, the school, the pool across the street, the bodega where I get my bagels, the drugstore, the good pizza place and the better taco place, and the salon where my mom gets her blowouts. I don’t like leaving my orbit. I know, on a rational level, this part of the city is on a grid, and in the age of smartphones it’s impossible to get lost. But everything is so cramped here, so dense—I hate that I can turn one corner and see an entire world I don’t recognize, have to navigate a street with a completely different mood than the one a few steps away. I hate that I feel like I have to be a different person to match. Some people can weave in and out of these streets like chameleons, but four years have passed, and I still feel like the same kid who rolled up here in a U-Haul wearing cowboy boots—stubborn and unchanged.
In Nashville, there was order. Or at least it felt that way. There was downtown, with its restaurants and honky-tonks and the massive CMA Fest crowds in the summer. There was East Nashville, all earthy and young and hopeful. There was Bellevue, where we lived in the outskirts of the city in an apartment, just beyond Belle Meade, with all of its absurdly decked-out mansions. And then in the city, in the middle of all of it, Centennial Park with its giant Pantheon replica, which to me seemed like the heart of everything, as though all the roads and tangles of freeways led back to it, pumped people in and out each day on their way to and from work.
I miss that. I miss the transition of knowing this is who I am when I’m downtown and this is who I am when I’m home and this is who I am when I visit the restaurant, the original Big League Burger, which was just a stone’s throw away from all the recording studios and publishing houses lined up on Music Row. I miss being able to prepare for things, and knowing where I fit. Not even knowing, really, because when you grow up somewhere, you don’t have to think about fitting into it. You just do.
When Paige is on break from UPenn and deigns to stay with us for a few days at a time, she forces me out of the orbit. We get ramen in the East Village and window shop in Soho and take dorky historical tours that start in different parks. But since she and my mom don’t really talk, the rest of the year it’s just me, a rat in a seven-block cage, wishing something as stupid as walking into an unfamiliar coffee shop didn’t fill me with dread.
Once I actually get inside, I see someone at a table by the window bent over a cup of coffee, wearing Ethan’s baseball hat and holding Ethan’s backpack, with Ethan’s coat draped over the chair. I walk over to him and put my hands on my hips.
“Are you seriously trying to Parent Trap me?”
Jack looks up, brows puckered with disappointment, like he’s a little kid and I just stuck a pin in his balloon. “What gave it away?”
I gesture in the direction of his lanky frame. “Your general Jack-ness.”
“Jack-ness?”
“Well. That, and you’re a little bit of an ass.”
I smirk—a small peace offering—and he returns it and then some, with another one of those half grins. It’s so unabashed that I straighten up a bit, glancing away.
“So where is your brother? Is he in on this little prank of yours? Because if it’s all the same to you, I want to wrap this up quick.”
Jack cocks his head toward the window. “Ethan is currently preoccupied making out with Stephen Chiu on the steps of the Met.”
“So he sent you?”
Jack shrugs. “My brother’s an important dude, in case you haven’t noticed.”
I have. It’s hard not to. Ethan’s one of those man-of-the-people types—always has something nice to say, an extra few minutes to give someone, some practical solution to a problem. Which is why I had been counting on this meeting being a quick one.
Enter Jack, who seems to have absolutely no qualms with wasting time.
My phone pings in my backpack, and I realize with a lurch I haven’t checked it since I got out of the pool. I drop my bag, tell Jack to keep an eye on it while I go grab a tea, and look down at my phone.
Nine texts. Holy crap.
The most recent ones are from my mom: Where are you?? and Is everything okay? My stomach sinks—I never told her I had practice after school today because I didn’t think she’d be home. But then I scroll down and realize that although she is very much worried about my welfare, she was initially more worried about a “Twitter emergency” that needs attending.
I shoot her a quick text to let her know I’m alive and open the ones from Taffy, who—bless her heart—actually remembered I had practice, and broke down the situation with screenshots.
I’m caught up by the time I reach the cashier. Apparently some tiny little deli in the city is claiming Big League Burger copied their grilled cheese recipe, and the accusation now has ten thousand retweets. A Twitter account dedicated to the welfare of small businesses has even co-opted the #GrilledByBLB hashtag, so #KilledByBLB is trending instead.
Jesus. The internet moves fast.
Your mom wants us to fire a sassy tweet back, Taffy has texted. Which is Taffy code for, I know this is a terrible idea, but your mom is my boss and I’m too scared of her to press the point.
I guess I’ll have to, then. I send my mom what I hope is a pacifying text, telling her we should either just let it go or sit on it for a bit and see if it actually merits some kind of apology. I’m no PR professional, but attacking an itty-bitty deli that can’t rub two Twitter followers together can’t be a good look for a goliath like BLB no matter how you slice it.
By the time the barista puts my tea on the counter, my mom is calling. She starts talking before I can even say hello.
“What do you think our next move is?”
I walk over to the counter, prying off my lid to add sugar and milk. I peer out of the corner of my eye to make sure Jack hasn’t made off with my stuff, but he’s just staring out the window, tapping his foot to the beat of whatever he’s listening to with one earbud in his ear.
“I don’t think we should tweet anything at them. People actually seem kind of mad.”
“Well, let them be mad,” says my mom dismissively. “We’re not going to take this lying down.”
“Okay—but maybe you should—I don’t know, talk to them? Not send a tweet?”
“There’s no point in talking to some sandwich place looking for attention. Give me something to fire back at them. I can’t waste time right now.”
It feels like a gut punch through the phone. I clutch my tea, letting it burn against my palms, waiting for it to anchor me. I want to push back, but I know how this goes—it sounds like the beginning of half of Paige and Mom’s fights. One of them would push, and the other would dig their heels into the cement, and before I knew it Paige would be stalking off into Central Park, and Mom would be on the phone with Dad trying to figure out how to deal with her.
I don’t want to be someone she has to deal with. Things are already weird enough between the four of us without me making waves.
“Just, uh … send that GIF from Harry Potter. The ‘excuse me, but who are you’ one.”
There’s a beat. “You’re in the right direction, but let’s go edgier than that.”
I close my eyes. “Fine. I’ll text you something else.”
I text Taffy and my mom the idea, walking over to the table, where Jack is still so very clearly Jack that it’s ridiculous he tried to pretend otherwise.
I can’t lie—despite his shenanigans, it is kind of fascinating, watching him and his brother. How two people can be so strikingly similar, with the same build and the same open face, the same rhythm in the way they talk, and still present it to the world in such different ways. Where Ethan is almost coolly self-possessed, like some kind of politician, Jack is an open book—his eyes unguarded and unselfconscious, his tall frame always strewn across chairs like he has settled into himself earlier than most people our age, his dark eyebrows so expressive and honest that it’s laughable he even tried to pull one over on me in the first place.
While I’m staring without meaning to, Jack takes a very long slurp of his coffee. “So. This pool thing.”
I lean forward, leveling with him. We are two people at odds—me rigid and immovable, him just as at ease as ever, meeting my stare with faint amusement.
“What exactly did your coach want?”
“Ethan says we’re supposed to do a half hour of lap swimming a day.”
We only have the pool for two hours at a time. Every single year before this one, they’ve taken the area by the diving board, and we’ve taken the lanes. Half of me wonders if this is Coach Thompkins’s way of getting under Coach Martin’s skin—they are notorious for not getting along, especially when it comes to using the swim and dive budgets—but that doesn’t mean we can’t deal with it.
“How’s this: you get the pool for twenty minutes a day,” I propose. “The last twenty minutes we have rented.”
“And where will the swim team go?”
“We’ll do dry land exercises. Push-ups and lunges.”
“And you’re going to lead that?”
“I’ll ask Landon to do it.”
Jack blows out a breath. “Sounds like it’s all settled, then.”
I blink, surprised. I don’t know Jack all that well, but I’m not used to him being so … reasonable.
“Wanna go heckle my brother?”
Ah. There it is.
My phone pings from the table—it’s a text from Taffy, letting me know she’s in a meeting. My mom immediately texts and asks me to pull up the corporate account on my phone and tweet it instead.
I wait for a beat, wondering why I feel a pinch of guilt sending it. This isn’t my business, and it’s not my Twitter account. It ultimately has nothing to do with me at all. I’m just a set of fingers on a keyboard.
I hit tweet and steel myself. Something feels … grimy about the whole thing. Like I’ve done something wrong.
“They’re only, like, three blocks away.”
I put my phone on the table, the screen facing down. “I know where the Met is,” I say, sounding overly defensive even to my own ears.
But Jack doesn’t even seem to notice. “So?” he asks—an invitation.
I feel like I am itching at my seams, compelled to open the phone back up to the corporate account and see what people are saying back to the tweet. It’s strange, how I can’t seem to untangle myself from the company, even though it looks nothing like it did when it first started. When I was little, the whole of the restaurant felt as if it were mine. Paige and I were so defined by it—everyone who worked there knew our names, let us make up ridiculous milkshake combinations, snuck us leftover fries when my parents were in meetings that ran late. The franchise is so corporate that it’s way beyond me and my dessert whims now, but no matter how big we get, I can’t quite squash the part of me that takes it personally.
There’s no way I’m going to be able to focus on anything tonight, not with the stupid notifications piling up. The idea of it is suddenly so suffocating, the last thing I want to do is go home.
“Yeah. Yeah, let’s go.”
Jack blinks. “Yeah?”
“Why not?”
