I hang up the phone, Ethan’s piss-poor excuses still ringing in my ear as I look up and see Pepper, standing there like a deer in headlights, looking like she wants to disappear.
No, worse. Looking like she feels sorry for me. Like the gears are turning in her head, and she’s trying to think of the right thing to say to make me feel better—the second twin. The lesser one. The one everyone only bothers to talk to when they’re trying to get to the other.
I was worried when I saw that stupid picture that she was going to be furious. That it would wreck this shaky friendship we had now, and the even shakier something else—that weird current between us on the bus when she ribbed me, or the way she almost seemed paralyzed in the moment after I said her full name.
It’s worse. Anger, I can handle. Pity, I really can’t. Especially not over this.
“Jack—”
“There’s a bus stop across the street. It’s another straight shot back to Stone Hall.”
Pepper takes a cautious step toward me. “Are you okay?”
I keep my eyes trained on the cement. “I’m sorry about the tweet.”
“It doesn’t sound like it was your fault,” she says, her voice low.
So she did hear everything. Of course.
“Your brother’s just being an ass.”
“Don’t,” I snap. “Don’t talk about my brother.”
I’m waiting for her to rile in that way she usually does, waiting for her to rise up to meet me. But she’s too steady, standing on the sidewalk with a mortifying kind of empathy.
“I have to go home.”
She nods. Tilts her head toward the bus stop across the street. “Just over there?” she asks.
“Yeah.”
She waits for a beat, like she thinks I’m going to say something else, but there’s nothing in me. I know it’s ridiculous to be this upset over a stupid picture, but it’s not a picture. It’s the tip of the goddamn iceberg. It’s every sport Ethan had to beat me at, every stupid project of ours he’d be so excited to start and leave me to finish, every afternoon he left me alone in the deli to live his stupid perfect Ethan life with his perfect Ethan friends and make me lie to our parents’ faces about the times he wasn’t doing any of that, and smoking stupid pot—
It’s like I’ve been watching the shadow of some moon cross over me my whole life, and now it’s just a full eclipse.
Pepper walks toward the intersection to get to the bus stop, and without consciously deciding to, I follow her.
She slows her pace down so we’re walking side by side, not saying anything, letting me brew in whatever this is. I don’t know how it’s possible to want to get the hell away from someone and actively follow them like they’re a magnet at the same time, but Pepper seems to take it in stride, glancing over at me every now and then as she comes to a stop in front of the bus stop.
“I’ll be fine to get back,” she says.
“You’re sure?”
She nods. “I’ll get you back your MetroCard on Monday.”
I rock on my heels, not quite leaving and not quite not leaving. We both spot the bus coming down the street, and it makes the decision for me.
“You’re super sure?” I ask, just in case.
“Yeah,” says Pepper. “And—thanks again.”
I don’t say anything, just watch her get on, watch the bus pull away and her with it. I suddenly feel like an asshole up here in Morningside Heights, in my spiffy school uniform, my hair still slicked back in the style my mom made me brush it into on my way out the door. The style that screamed Ethan so much, it couldn’t not feel like a total kick in the pants when I looked at the end result in the mirror.
I shake it out of my hair now and walk over to a 1 train stop. I hope the walk across town to the east side when I get off the subway will do something to calm me, but if anything, I’m even more aggravated by the time I get to the deli—the weather’s nice for November and the streets are full, and I’m just the kind of invisible on my own that nobody thinks twice before nearly barreling into me.
Once I actually get home, the deli is packed. Ethan is manning the register. Through the window I can see him taking a selfie with a group of giggling junior high girls. My mom is fluttering around the floor, restocking the napkins and the condiments and the straws, which can only mean my dad is in the back helping out with the cooks or in the office making calls.
Basically, nobody has the time to listen to me bitch.
I do something then that I’ve never done in my whole life—walk away from the packed deli and head straight up the stairs to the apartment instead. I shut the door, and it feels like a vacuum, the noise of the deli and the street and the cars whooshing out of my ears.
“How was the interview?”
I startle at Grandma Belly, who’s in her usual chair, her laptop propped on her lap and a game of solitaire pulled up on the screen. She looks close to winning it. One of my favorite things as a kid was to watch that flip flip flip flip flip of the animated cards cascading whenever she won; even now she’ll call me into the living room to see, will even let me click the last card to win it.
“Okay,” I say, shrugging off my backpack and dumping it on the couch in the way my dad hates. “How was your morning?”
She gestures out the window. “Good. It’s nice, hearing all that racket from downstairs.”
I smile despite myself. “Yeah, it’s pretty crowded down there.”
“And yet you’re up here with me.”
Her eyes are more teasing than scolding.
“I could take you down, if you want.”
She likes sitting in the booth right by the window. All the regulars know her, obviously. She’s something of an icon in the East Village—she’s been in business here longer than a lot of people have been alive. But ever since she’s been slowing down, she gets too tired to stay down for long and doesn’t want to go unless she’s got someone else in the family sitting with her.
But she shakes her head and pats the arm of the couch next to her chair for me to sit. “I’ve got plenty of good company right here.”
I take a seat, flopping onto the couch, knowing what’s about to come before it does. Nothing gets past Grandma Belly.
“What’s on your mind, small fry?”
I’m not going to tell her. It’s not like I’m lying to her about the whole Twitter thing—she doesn’t understand or care about the social media accounts, so really, there’s been nothing to tell. And there’s no point in stressing her out about this.
“Oh, come on. You walked in here looking like you dropped an ice cream cone on the sidewalk.”
I snort. “Nah.”
She raises her eyebrows at me.
“It’s stupid,” I mumble.
Her eyes are just as steady on me as ever, only seeming to get sharper with each passing year. “I’ll be the judge of that.”
I glance behind me, as if Mom or Dad or Ethan are going to come out of nowhere and stick a pin in this whole conversation. It’s nothing I could ever say in front of any of them. Nothing I even want to admit to myself.
Grandma Belly is still fixing me with one of those looks of hers when I turn back; it’s impossible not to spill the beans.
“I just … sometimes…” There’s no way to say it without sounding like a total ass. “Sometimes it feels like I’m—not as—I don’t know.” It’s hard to admit to myself, and harder to articulate. “You know, it’s like, everyone goes nuts over Ethan. At school. At the deli. He just…” I gesture vaguely, as if I can fit seventeen years of mild inadequacy into the air in front of me.
“Honey, I don’t know how to break this to you, but the two of you have the exact same face.”
That face almost crumbles when she says that, because that is the crux of the whole thing. I can’t blame it on anything. I can’t say it’s because he’s taller, or better-looking, or older, or any of the other things a brother could say when one outshines the other. We got all the same tools. He’s just better than I am at using them.
Grandma Belly seems to see it written all over me. She reaches forward, toward my head, and I duck down to let her mess up my hair. Even after all this time, it’s weird to me that I’m this much taller than her, even though it’s never felt weird with anyone else.
“Don’t you worry about what Ethan’s up to,” she says. “You are going to come into your own in a big way. When you get out of this place.”
I blink at her in surprise. “Grandma Belly, I think we both know I’m not getting out of this place.”
She smiles at me. “You’re a homebody. You might stick around for a bit. But you’ve never been the kind of person who can stay in one place for too long, not since you started to crawl.”
I look across the living room, at the shelves crammed with video games and DVDs and the seashell collection Mom keeps adding to every time we go to Coney Island. At the old rug still stained from Ethan’s Hawaiian Punch he spilled ten years ago, at the pictures of me and Ethan my dad takes every summer and hangs sequentially on the walls, at the basket where Grandma Belly keeps her knitting needles, making little hats for the babies of regulars.
I look everywhere except at Grandma Belly, because these are the things that tether me, the things I’ve always been and just assumed would always be. What she’s saying right now feels a lot like permission to leave it behind, and it scares me every bit as much as it relieves me.
But we both know it’s not her permission to give.
“I don’t know if my parents think that.”
Which is to say, I know they don’t. The assumption that I’ll stay behind and help run this place, that I’ll eventually take it over, is so ingrained in them, we’ve never actually talked about it. It just is. Like it was set in stone before I even knew how to read the words.
She pats my knee. “You should talk to them about it. Graduation will come faster than you think.” She rests her hand there for a moment and says, “I love the hell out of that deli and everyone in it. I hope whoever runs it someday loves it that much too. But, small fry, it doesn’t have to be you.”
I’m not used to having serious conversations. Not with Grandma Belly, or with anyone, really. At least not the kinds of conversations that have so much riding on them like this. It suddenly feels like I skipped ahead ten years, like I’m talking for myself and whoever I’m supposed to be on the other end of it.
Still, the words come out in barely more than a mumble. “I don’t want to let them down.”
Grandma Belly tilts her head at me and narrows her eyes, her classic no-nonsense look. The problem is she always looks slightly ridiculous doing it, so it’s hard to clamp down a smile, even now.
“You could never.”
It still helps to hear, even if I’m not sure if it makes it true.
