Wolf
Do you ever just do something really, really stupid
Bluebird
No, actually. I’m perfect and I’ve never done a single stupid thing in my life
Bluebird
But actually all the time, always. You good?
Wolf
I mean, my parents are less than pleased with me right now. Well, my dad’s not pleased. I think my mom secretly is, but is trying to do that whole solidarity thing
Bluebird
So what did you get busted for?
Wolf
The usual. Selling hard drugs. Joining a cult. Starting an underground fight club for teens, except the one rule is you HAVE to talk about it. Don’t know why my parents won’t just get off my back
Bluebird
Seriously. Cults are a big commitment. They should have more respect.
Bluebird
But I feel you. Also experiencing some not so great parental pressure
Wolf
College stuff?
Bluebird
Hah. I wish
Wolf
Would joining a fight club help?
Bluebird
Now that you mention it …
Bluebird
Ugh, I don’t know. Sometimes I think my mom and I have very different ideas of what I should be doing with my time/my life in general
Wolf
Yeah. I get that
Wolf
My parents are kind of like that too
Bluebird
What do you want to do?
Bluebird
Haha that sounds so dumb. Like, “what do you wanna do when you grow up?” But I guess we’re sort of getting to that point, huh?
“You’d better put that phone away before your dad spots you.”
I flinch. “Jeez, Mom, you’re like a freaking ninja.”
“Former ballerina, but I’ll take it,” she says wryly. She plucks my phone from my hand. “I think you’ve done enough damage on this bad boy for one day.”
Fair enough. I could delay my return home with practice and impromptu field trips with Pepper all I wanted, but that did nothing to get me out of a Supreme Dad Lecture of the highest order. The kind where he doesn’t even wait for me to get upstairs to the apartment we live in above the deli, but raises a thumb and jerks it to the booth in the back, which my mom dubbed the “Time-Out Booth” when we were kids. These days it’s more like the break booth, where we’ll scarf sandwiches mid-shift or do our homework during lulls, but every so often it seems to revert back to its original purpose to suit my parents’ needs.
The truly demoralizing thing about it reverting to the Time-Out Booth is that I haven’t done anything worthy of it in ages. And now that I have, it isn’t over anything edgy, like when our upstairs neighbor Benny hotwired a motorcycle, or when Annie, one of our regulars, got caught with a joint in Roosevelt Park. It was because of a stupid tweet.
“You know we’re not that kind of business.” My dad has so rarely had to discipline me that it’s almost funny, how he’s straightening his back at the worn-out cushions of the booth as though his clothes don’t fit quite right. “I don’t even like that we’re on Twitter and Facebook at all.”
“How else are people going to know about us?” I ask, for about the umpteenth time.
“The same way they always have, for the past sixty years. This is a community, not some … internet clickbait.”
I don’t understand how my dad can look so deceptively young and hip for a dad—all bearded and skinny with a baseball cap that confuses customers into thinking he’s our much older brother—and still be such a bonehead about social media. Honestly, our food is so good it should be in ridiculous Hub Seed roundups and viral food videos. I have watched literal tears form in people’s eyes when they’ve bitten into our sandwiches. The way the cheese in our grilled cheeses peels apart with each bite is near ungodly in nature. With just a few well-lit Instagrams, a few well-executed tweets …
They could be out of the hole they’re in right now, that’s for damn sure.
But I can’t say that to him outright. My parents think Ethan and I don’t know we’re not doing so hot right now, only dealing with the finances in the back office when we’re out of sight—and I’m sure that has every bit as much to do with my dad’s pride as it does with protecting us from it. Trying to push my agenda here will only make things worse.
“And besides,” my dad says, “that tweet was crossing a line.”
“I didn’t think freaking Marigold was gonna retweet it.”
“Even if she hadn’t, it was over the line. I don’t want to be provoking other businesses, especially not—” He cuts himself off, shaking his head. “And now it’s gone ‘viral,’” he says, using actual air quotes, “so we can’t even delete it. Especially since they responded.”
“They what?”
I lunge for my phone, my dad already warning me against the impulse to send something back. But why the hell shouldn’t we? A silly Mean Girls quote in response to them literally stealing from our business?
“This is the Twitter equivalent of spitting in Grandma Belly’s face. You’re gonna just take this lying down?”
He presses his face into his hand. “Everything doesn’t have to be so dramatic.”
In all honesty, I’m a little bit stunned. I may be way more of a hothead than he is, but nobody is a fiercer defender of Grandma Belly than my dad. I open my mouth to remind him as much, but he beats me to the punch.
“No more tweeting. The account is off-limits.”
“But Dad—”
“But nothing.” He gets up abruptly and claps a hand on my shoulder. “You’re gonna be running this place someday, Jack. I have to know you’re gonna be able to do that with its best interests in mind.”
My face burns. His back is turned to me, so he misses the wince I don’t manage to swallow down in time—the one that has only gotten more pronounced over the years as his implications that I’m the twin who will stay behind and take charge of the deli have slowly but certainly become less implied and spoken more like facts.
“Anyway, you’re on register in the evenings for the rest of the week.”
“Seriously?”
It’s actually a lot better than I was expecting. It’s the fact that my dad can flip from telling me he expects me to run this place and then treating it like a punishment in the next heartbeat that really gets me. To me, it’s yet another spoken confirmation of an unspoken thing—that Ethan’s the twin destined for greatness, and I’m the one who will stick around and deal with whatever he leaves in his wake.
“Consider yourself lucky. The next time an eighties pop icon retweets you, I’ll make it a month.”
“They ripped us off,” I argue. I know it’s not helping or hurting my case, but I don’t even care about that anymore. The punishment’s been doled out. The anger is still there.
My dad lets out a sigh, then rattles the shoulder he has his hand on and squeezes. He’s making one of those fatherhood is testing me faces he makes when one of us says something he’s not sure how to answer, like asking about the Easter Bunny, or why the college undergrads smell weird when they come in the deli after 4 p.m. on a Wednesday. (Pot, to be clear. It was 800 percent pot.)
“I know, kid. But we’ve still got something they don’t.”
“A ‘secret ingredient’?” I mutter.
“That. And our family.”
I wrinkle my nose.
“Sorry. Had to go full Nick Junior to snap you out of it. Go help your mom.”
Which is how I find myself here, tied to the register, taking the orders of the old ladies who have book club every Monday night, half of a little league soccer team, and a group of giggling middle schoolers who paid in quarters. Living the dream.
Okay, okay—the cliché burden of my dad’s expectations aside, it’s not so bad. I genuinely enjoy being up front. My popularity in high school doesn’t extend more than a few inches beyond the dive team, which I’ve never minded much—probably because here, people know me. If every block in New York had its own block celebrity, I’d probably be ours. Not for any redeeming qualities of mine, but mostly because all the regulars watched me and Ethan grow up, and of the two of us, I am much worse at shutting my trap. I know way too much about the personal lives of the regulars—the frequency of Mrs. Harvel’s dog’s bowel movements, the messy details of Mr. Carmichael’s wedding that led to an even messier divorce, exactly what kind of fruit Annie—who was sixteen when I met her, but is thirty now—is eating so she can “convince her uterus to spit out one of the girl eggs next time.”
And they know me too. An engineer who comes in every Tuesday and Friday for his tuna sandwich melt will always help if I’m stuck on something in a math class. The book club ladies are always sneaking me homemade peanut butter cookies, even though I’m surrounded by a sea of miscellaneous baked goods. Annie’s been giving me unsolicited dating advice since before my voice started cracking.
So it adds yet another layer of confusion when my dad rolls this out as a “punishment,” like he hasn’t been pulling me or Ethan downstairs to run the register every other day since we were small. It’s not like we’re short-staffed or anything—my dad’s just always been into the idea of this being a family business, so participation has been less than optional. As early as six, we were yelling orders to the cooks in the back and wiping down tables, mostly because the regulars found it charming and it kept us occupied in the summers. Now, my parents have us doing everything from register to inventory to sandwich assembly.
Well, by “us” I mostly mean me. I’m the one tapped for random shifts when there’s a need. And I get it—Ethan’s busy with all the student council nonsense and extracurriculars and generally being the prince of our high school. But I resent the assumption that just because I don’t have debate club practices or someone to make out with on the steps of the Met, his time is somehow worth more than mine.
In my parents’ defense, I guess I haven’t told them about moonlighting as a crappy app developer. And in my defense, there’s no way in hell I’m going to tell them about it now that Rucker is on a witch hunt and Dad is more determined to live in the 1960s than ever.
“Something on your mind?” my mom asks, when there isn’t anyone in line at the register.
I lean against the counter and sigh. “Just the infinite, suffocating void of trying to navigate the world without my phone in my pocket.”
My mom rolls her eyes and swats me with the towel she was using to rub down tables—which, gross.
“Who have you been texting so much?” she asks, reminding me that just about nothing gets past her eagle eyes. “Oh, let me guess. You’re talking on that Woozel app.”
“Weazel.”
“Ah, yes, Weazel.”
If Mom’s favorite thing is mocking Rucker’s emails to the parents, then her second favorite thing is pretending to be hip and cool. Something she can do a lot easier than most parents, because our mom actually is cool. She can somehow walk into a PTA meeting full of Upper East Side moms decked out in pearls and giant sunglasses in nothing but her jeans and a Girl Cheesing T-shirt and intimidate the whole room with a look. It’s like cool just oozes out of her skin.
Luckily, the coolness is genetic. Unluckily, Ethan stole it all in utero and left me out to dry.
“Should I be very alarmed? Are you kids using it to plot a school takeover and replace Rucker with someone who wears pants from this century?”
“Now there’s an idea.”
She presses her lips into a smirk. “You’re welcome.”
Sometimes my mom is so antiestablishment that I’m confused about why she insists on us having a private school education in the first place. But I guess it’s more for my grandparents’ sake than ours—the ones on her side, not Grandma Belly’s. They never quite approved of her marrying my dad and co-running a deli, when, as far as I can tell, they had very much primed her to be some hedge fund manager’s trophy wife. I think putting me and Ethan through Stone Hall was a way of saying she hadn’t completely abandoned her roots, the same way my dad’s always been tied to his.
The same way I’m going to be tied to them, I guess.
“As long as you kids are being safe…”
I snort. “Really, Mom, it’s like—dumber than Snapchat. Just people posting pictures of graffiti in the bathroom and making fun of Rucker.”
“So you are on it.”
I roll my eyes. “Everyone is.”
She gives me a look she rarely has to give, as if she’s lifted some part of me like the hood of a car and is inspecting it for leaks. A stupid part of me wants to tell her right then. I made this, I want to say. I made it without any help, and it’s making people happy. I want to tell her about Mel and Gina making out in the hallway this morning. I want to tell her how someone was having a total meltdown about chem lab in the Hallway Chat the other day, and at least twenty other students sent encouraging messages to calm them down. I want to tell her that in my own weird way, I made something that’s doing good in the world, something that feels as if it matters.
It’s the look. It’s always that damn look. And I start caving and saying all kinds of stuff I shouldn’t.
“But yeah, I’ve been texting a girl from school.”
It’s out of my mouth before I can think the better of it. As much as I try not to wreck this thing with Bluebird by overthinking it, I keep underestimating just how much space she takes in my brain until moments like this—when I’m staring too intently at a classmate on her phone in the hall, or staying awake until some absurd hour trying to come up with an equally witty response to something she’s typed, or apparently about to blurt her entire existence to my mom.
“Aha! Ethan said he spotted you out with a girl.” She sees the indignant look on my face and raises her arms up. “Your dad was looking for you, and you weren’t picking up, so he called Ethan.”
“I’m surprised he came up for air long enough to breathe, let alone pick up his phone,” I mutter. Leave it to Ethan to gossip about me to Mom without saying anything about it to me first. “And it was his fault I was with her in the first place. We were talking about swim and dive stuff.”
“So you’re not dating her?”
“No!”
Mom raises her eyebrows. Okay, that sounded defensive even in my own ears.
“I mean, no. Pepper’s, like—not the kind of girl who’s into dating. More the kind of girl who’s into wrecking the grading curve in AP Gov.”
I’m about to make another quip about her, but for the first time it seems a little unfair. I didn’t hate hanging out with her today. I mostly just offered to go rib Ethan as a joke, to get her to lighten up—I didn’t think she’d actually want to walk around after the politics of swim and dive were all taken care of. Or that she wouldn’t be immediately against the idea of working together. It knocked me so off guard that I actually agreed to take on captaining duties for the rest of the season.
Whoops.
“See? You kids don’t even need your newfangled app to make friends.”
And then the moment is gone—that weird urge to spill the beans to my mom and tell her about Weazel, about the mysterious Bluebird, about what I’ve really been doing when there’s a light under my door past midnight.
The truth is, it feels too much like letting her down. Both of my parents. Like they’re counting on me to be the kid who keeps this place afloat, the kid who stays. I’m almost relieved my mom took my phone away before I had to come up with some kind of answer for Bluebird—the issue isn’t so much what I want to be, but whether or not I can be it without hurting everyone else in the process.
