I’m really raking in the superlatives. It kicked off with Worst Pseudo Pen Pal on the Planet, veered sharply into Worst Best Friend in the Galaxy, and now, to top it all off, Worst Son/Grandson in the Known Universe and Every Infinite Reality Hereafter.
There are so many people to apologize to, I don’t even know where to start. It feels like there’s a fire in every corner of my brain, and instead of putting any of them out, I’m just frozen and watching it spread across the room.
The mess with Pepper is terrible enough on its own. There are so many things I could have, would have, should have done—like take down that stupid picture when I saw Ethan tweet it—but the moment we heard Grandma Belly fall over in the other room, anything beyond it was out of my mind so quickly and so thoroughly, there wasn’t space for anything other than panic and this gray look on my dad’s face I don’t think I’ll ever forget.
She slipped getting out of a chair and ended up hitting her head, and in the end had a concussion and a few stitches. They released her last night, and she’s back at home and going to be fine. But that first minute when we walked in and saw her on the floor with blood on the carpet, before my dad started shouting for me to get the phone and the commotion stirred her awake, was probably the worst minute of my life.
And while that was by far the worst of it, it turns out it was just the beginning of the long, lingering shitstorm that has since taken over my life.
“I don’t even know what to do with you,” says my dad. It’s bright and early in the morning, a time when he’s usually overseeing things in the kitchen or going over our stock to put in orders to our meat and cheese suppliers, but instead we’re sitting in the Time-Out Booth so the whole world is witness to my humiliation.
Not that my dad can really do anything to me now. I can’t see how he can possibly make me feel any worse than I already do.
In the last twenty-four hours, not only have I let Pepper get turned into the meme of the week, but I’ve basically wrecked Paul’s life too. After I left to help my mom get Grandma Belly out of the hospital, Paul apparently decided to ignore everything I said to him and agreed to meet this Goldfish person on the roof of the school. After about a half hour of waiting last night it started to get dark, and Paul realized not only was he locked up there, but Goldfish had posted a picture of him stuck up there and written, can u believe this guy actually self-described as “hot”? weazel app i want my money back.
Paul didn’t even call me to tell me, and I was too busy at the hospital to be monitoring the Hallway Chat the way I usually do on and off during the afternoons. By the time I saw it, it had a comment thread a mile wide, and multiple unflattering photoshops of Paul with bad captions alluding to him being on the dive team like, dumpster diving? and looks like someone dove in with two (hobbit) feet.
The first thing I did was break my one rule and trace Goldfish back to some girl named Helen, a known bully in the senior class. The second thing I did was email Rucker to turn her in—and myself right with her.
I should have known it would only make things worse. As far as I know, Helen’s off scot-free, Paul’s still embarrassed out of his mind and not talking to me, and not only am I suspended for a week, but—plot twist—Pepper’s suspended for two days for not ratting me out when she had the chance.
The TL;DR: Paul hates me. Pepper hates me. And it’s only a matter of time before it gets around that I made Weazel, and then the whole school will hate me too. There isn’t one corner of my life I haven’t actively sabotaged, and I’m so far past rock bottom, I’m basically in the earth’s molten core.
Hence, the most pointless father-son guilt trip in the whole of human history. My dad could literally start spitting flames right now, and I’d probably just tilt myself over and lean into the blast.
“I’m sorry, Dad.”
And I am. I really am. Just not particularly at him, because it seems like he and Mom are the people least affected by this entire thing. And the people who are most affected, I could be spending this time getting in touch with, instead of being on the receiving end of a lecture within earshot of half of the morning egg-and-cheese-bagel rush.
“What were you thinking?”
I open my mouth to tell him just that, about what Weazel actually is—or was, I guess, since I disabled the whole thing last night. But he doesn’t even let me get a word in edgewise. Instead, he leans farther into the table, propping his elbow above the spot where Ethan carved a Superman logo when we were kids, and lets out a Dad-sized sigh.
“You’re on shift immediately after dive practice and every weekend for the next month,” he says, without even looking at me.
I laugh. On the list of appropriate reactions I could have had, this is so far down that for a moment my dad doesn’t even seem to process it, looking over at me, temporarily stunned out of his anger.
“Jack.”
The laugh has now dissolved into an undignified snort, and before I know it, I’m saying, “Honestly, Dad, if that’s ‘punishment,’ looks like I’m grounded for life, huh?”
My dad raises his eyebrows at me, warning and curious. He doesn’t say anything, giving me the space to keep going, which judging by the sudden heat of what seems to be about a decade’s worth of repressed insecurity bubbling to the surface right now, he probably shouldn’t.
I jam my finger down into the Time-Out Booth. “I’m already here every day. After school. On the weekends. My whole life is here, and you’ve made damn well sure of it.”
My dad closes his eyes for a brief moment, so wearily I’m not even sure if he’s hearing half of what I’m saying. It’s the wrong time and the wrong way and most definitely the wrong place, but it feels like if I don’t say it now, I might never get another chance.
“Jack—”
“You know, I’ve always wondered why you pushed me instead of Ethan to be the one who takes over this place. Because it’s always been that way. And at first, I didn’t get it.”
My dad is too stunned to say anything back, so I just keep going like a derailed subway car.
“But I caught on. Ethan’s the golden twin, the better one, the one who gets to go off and take over the world, or whatever. Because lucky for you, you made a spare, stupider twin to keep this place running.”
“What on earth makes you think working in this place makes you any less? Jesus, if that school is putting ideas in your head that working here is some kind of—”
“You just called it a punishment yourself! Which is stupid, by the way, because if that’s what this is, you’ve been punishing me for years!”
My voice is loud enough the egg-and-cheese crowd is staring at us like we’re some kind of side show. If we’ve stopped New Yorkers long enough for them to pull out their earbuds, we must really be a sight.
When I finally look over at him, my dad’s eyes are hot with the kind of fury I have never seen in them before. “Go upstairs.”
And just like that the anger that did such an annoyingly good job of grounding me a moment before is gone, crumbling out from under me so fast, I can’t latch onto anything else to replace it. It’s like I’m six years old again, senseless and stupid and running in and out of this conversation with no strategy at all, aside from saying things at him until I’ve finally run out of things I need to say.
“You don’t even care that I—that I did something cool. That I made something, something that actually helped people before it…” I’m floundering, my face burning, my voice starting to shift dangerously toward something close to a whine. “Dad, I’m good at this. The app thing. Good enough that it might be something I want to do with my life.”
He’s not even looking at me anymore. “Go. Upstairs.”
Now that I’ve dug myself so far into this hole, I’m so unsure of what to do with myself, I’m almost grateful for an instruction. I pull myself out of the booth, avoiding the curious stares of people waiting for their food, and duck back out into the cold air to let myself in the apartment.
My mom’s in Grandma Belly’s room, the two of them watching something in there with the volume down low enough they definitely hear me come in, but nobody says anything. I beeline straight for my room before they can, and the click of the door shutting behind me is the permission I didn’t realize I was waiting for to immediately start crying, the stupid, angry, little-kid kind of tears I haven’t cried in so long that for a few moments I’m too overwhelmed to even let it properly happen.
I remember myself just enough to lock the door. I don’t even make it to the bed, sitting on the floor for no real reason, really, except the bed seems too comfortable, and I don’t deserve to ride this misery out in any kind of comfort. I end up grabbing the first thing I can find on the floor to muffle my face into, and only after I’ve snotted it up and ridden out the worst of the crying do I realize it’s my apron from the deli, the one my dad got me a few years ago with the Girl Cheesing logo and my name sewn into it.
I crumple it into a ball and toss it across the room.
He probably hates me now. My whole life I’ve been working nonstop at the deli so he wouldn’t hate me, and now I’ve gone and blown the whole thing up so fast and so effectively, I honestly should win some kind of Olympic medal for wrecking things. I want more than anything to be able to blink and undo the last twenty-four hours, or maybe the last month, or the last year—stop myself from making Weazel, from posting from the deli’s Twitter account, from doing all the things that led to the veritable disasters and me spewing at my dad like an angsty teenage volcano in full view of half the East Village.
But I guess if none of that happened, I wouldn’t have Pepper in my life.
Well, wouldn’t have had Pepper. Who even knows what our deal is now.
I blink, and for a moment the tears stop entirely. It’s the thought of Pepper that snaps me out of myself just enough it reminds me that, of all the times in the world, this is probably the least convenient for me to be emoting above the deli. I may resent the hell out of being down there right now, but the fact of the matter is, someone has to run that show and someone has to be up here with Grandma Belly, meaning we’re down a pair of hands.
I swipe at my eyes and take a quick glance at myself in the mirror. My eyes are so red, I look like Ethan that time he snuck home after getting high. I splash water on my face and run my fingers through my hair, attempting something close to decent, and once I look somewhat like a person who hasn’t been crying on the floor for an hour, I head back down the stairs.
I pause at the door to the deli, making sure there aren’t any customers still lingering who witnessed my one-man shitshow, and bracing myself to face my dad. But it’s not my dad at the register, or even my mom—it’s Pepper.
At first I am so certain I am dreaming that I stand there like a goon for a solid five seconds, blocking the door so nobody can get in or out. Someone has outfitted Pepper with a purple Girl Cheesing hat and apron, and she’s squinting down at someone’s order and the price cheat sheet taped under the register and talking to one of our regulars. Her hair is tucked into a low bun, and she’s smiling this bright, practiced customer service kind of smile, looking so in her element but also so unlike any Pepper I ever imagined that even after those five seconds pass and someone on the street nudges my shoulder to get past me, the image refuses to make sense in my head.
It takes Pepper a few moments to spot me when I walk in. Her cheeks immediately flush, but she finishes the transaction without missing a beat. I walk up to the register, so unused to being on the other side of it that it adds yet another layer of disconnect.
“What’re you…”
It’s all I can manage.
“I figured I could, uh, lend a hand today,” says Pepper. “If that’s okay.”
It feels like my face is going to crack right down the middle. Just like that, my throat is swollen again, like I didn’t spend a good hour crying already. “Yeah.”
Pepper’s eyes flit away for a moment, and then I realize whatever has happened to my throat must also be playing out on my face. Before I can panic and say or do something awkward, my mom swoops in from the back, takes one look at me, and says, “Hey, kiddo. We’ve got everything handled down here. Why don’t you go sit with your grandma for a little while?”
I stare at her dumbly. She must have ducked down here at some point while I was in my room, but I didn’t even hear the door.
“Yeah. Yeah, I’ll go do that.” I turn to Pepper. There are probably half a dozen things I need to say to her, but all that comes out is a thick, “Thanks.”
I turn back around before she can answer, mostly because I don’t trust my face to keep what little amount of composure it has left in it. I climb back up the stairs and let myself into the apartment, my blood rushing in my ears, my eyes still blinking like they made Pepper up. I’m so distracted, it doesn’t occur to me until I’m opening the front door that if my mom is downstairs, it can only mean my dad is up here.
I full-body flinch at the sight of my dad sitting on the couch in the living room, which somehow feels more jarring than what’s happening downstairs. And maybe it is—I’m so used to my parents being down in the deli during daylight hours, it seems strange to see him up here right now, in the middle of a day when he would usually be in the corner office in the back and I’d be sitting behind a desk. It feels like we’re looking at each other through a different lens, on unfamiliar ground, even though this is the place we call home.
My dad’s eyes lift to meet mine, and I brace myself all over again. I almost want him to yell at me, just to have the relief of it being over, but he doesn’t seem angry. He seems like something I don’t know how to navigate, something soft in the eyes and hard in the mouth that makes me waffle at the door like I came in here by mistake.
“How’s Grandma Belly?” I finally ask.
My dad nods toward her room. “Taking a nap.”
I nod back. An excruciating quiet settles between us, and I’m already counting the seconds it will take for me to get to my room and close the door on him when my dad says, “Why don’t you sit down?”
He motions to the space next to him on the couch. I walk over and take it, even though the middle cushion is Ethan’s spot, not mine. I look at my lap for a beat, resenting that even in a moment like this, I can’t think for myself without making space for him too.
“When you were little, you hated this apartment. You told me you wanted to live under the table in the Time-Out Booth.”
“I did?”
My dad’s lip quirks.
“We might have let you too, if we didn’t catch you trying to peel used gum off the bottom of it.”
It cuts through just enough of the tension that I stop waiting for some other shoe to drop. “Well, that explains a lot.”
He lets out a breath, leaning in a little closer. “What I’m trying to say is—you loved the deli. Right from the start. Loved being down there, and getting to hit buttons on the register, and nipping at the heels of everyone in the kitchen.”
He doesn’t speak for a moment, like he’s giving me space to cut in. But I am suddenly too desperate to know what’s on the other side of those words to say anything myself.
“I don’t want you to think I pushed you into it because I thought any less of you,” says my dad, lowering his voice. “If anything, it’s the opposite. I guess I pushed it because—well, your brother and your mom, they’re so alike in a lot of ways. And I’ve always—maybe it’s selfish, but I’ve always seen a lot of myself in you.”
The words feel like they burn on the way down. “Well, not so much anymore, I guess, huh?”
“No. The way you step up for this family—not just with this silly Twitter thing,” he says off my look, “but every day. You’re here. You show up. Without being asked.” He runs a hand through his hair, staring at Grandma Belly’s door. “Even I wasn’t half as dedicated to this place growing up, and your grandma can speak to that. You’ve always been above and beyond. More than we could have ever asked for from a kid. And I’m sorry if I ever made you feel less than for it.”
The words settle in between us, my dad gruff but earnest, me near paralyzed. I have this sudden feeling of wanting to grab the words from the air, put them somewhere permanent in me, like they can anchor me in a way nothing else has. I want to remember this feeling—the strange, happy crush of it in my lungs, the pride, the relief, even the mingling guilt.
“And for what it’s worth—your mom had an eerily similar talk with Ethan earlier today.”
I find this hard to believe. So much so that I almost snort. “She did?”
“He was all bent out of shape. Seemed to think you were the—how’d you put it?—golden twin. That we trusted you over him, with everything to do with the shop and Twitter and everything else.” My dad’s voice is wry, but also a little bittersweet. “If that helps you … put things into perspective at all. I think maybe you both need to understand that you’re good at different things, and stop beating yourselves up about what you think you’re not good at.”
I cringe, unsure if it’s for my sake or for Ethan’s. It’s always been like this—even at my most embarrassed, I’m never quite sure what part of it ends in me and begins in him. Even knowing that, I didn’t think it extended this far.
But maybe it makes sense, even if I don’t want it to. The way Ethan was so touchy about the Twitter page. That weird, unresolved fight we had outside of the community center after Pepper hacked the account. I was so wrapped up in how I thought of Ethan that it never once occurred to me what he thinks of himself.
We’ll talk about it, someday, maybe. For now I know what will happen: my dad will tell my mom about this conversation the way they tell each other everything, and she’ll tell Ethan, and the two of us will quietly know what we know and feel how we feel until it either goes away or doesn’t. But right now, having this long overdue conversation with my dad, is the first time I’ve ever been confident that someday it will.
“He’s sorry about that tweet he sent. And he called Pepper this morning to say so. He was just upset about the timing of it with what happened to your grandma, and … I think he was trying to be helpful. More like you.”
This time I really do snort. My dad nudges my shoulder with his.
“Truth is, you’re both pieces of work.” He pauses, a wince starting to take shape on his face. “But since we’re on the topic of that … Twitter thing.”
Oh, man.
“I don’t know what is or isn’t going on between you and Pepper, but since it is or isn’t happening, I feel like I owe you a bit of an explanation. And from the looks of things, Pepper’s mom might owe her one too.”
I nod. “You guys know each other.”
“Yeah, well. That, and … we dated, briefly.”
My eyes widen to the approximate diameter of those useless dollar coins the MTA card machines are always spitting out. “Oh.”
My dad raises his hands up in defense of himself. “A long, long time ago. Like, long.”
I try to picture my dad and Pepper’s mom in this “long, long” time ago, but my imagination refuses to de-age them. My dad is just my dad, the way he is right now, and Pepper’s mom is—well, terrifying. But also such an unknown quantity to me, it’s hard to imagine anything about her at all.
“How long is long?”
He has to think for a moment. We both raise our hands to scratch the backs of our necks, and I hide a smile at my shoes and stop myself just in time.
“It was—well, it was just before I met your mother.”
I raise my eyebrows. “Did you dump Pepper’s mom for our mom?”
My dad stares at the coffee table.
“It didn’t—happen—exactly like that.”
Which is to say, from the rueful look he is not doing a very good job of suppressing, that’s exactly how it happened.
“Dad.”
“She was just here for the summer before heading back to Nashville. It was never meant to be anything serious. Not that—okay, that’s enough, that’s all you’re getting from me on it,” says my dad, pointing a finger at me. “No smirking.”
It’s so rare I ever get to hear about my parents’ pre–Jack and Ethan days that I can’t help myself. “You scoundrel.”
My dad shakes his head. “I fell in love with your mom within a minute of meeting her. Nothing in the world was gonna stop it.”
Then all at once he gets misty-eyed the way he does sometimes when he talks about Mom. This time, I don’t feel the usual rush of secondhand embarrassment. This, maybe, is the real anchor, the one that’s always been there—knowing I have parents who love each other so much it was never a matter of if, but always a matter of when.
“But you pissed off—Ronnie, was it?”
My dad presses his lips into an exasperated line. “Yeah. I got a few angry phone calls. She, uh—she was working at the deli that summer. Trying to learn the ropes because she wanted to open her own place. That’s how we met. We hadn’t quite called it off when she went back to school in Nashville, so things were a little … tangled in that regard.”
My dad’s eyes aren’t fully with me when he says it, so I know there must be more to the story than that—but whatever it is, he doesn’t offer it up.
“So rather than working it out, you just waited until your kids were old enough to duke it out on Twitter instead?” I ask.
“Hardly,” says my dad. “That’s why I didn’t want you on it at all. That whole Grandma’s Special stunt at Big League Burger had Ronnie written all over it, and if I’d had my way, we would have just ignored it altogether.”
I feel a pang of remorse. “Well.”
My dad nudges his shoulder into mine. “But then it got half the city buying our sandwiches. I’m not going to lie—we were in a tight spot a few months ago. All this Twitter insanity … it’s made a huge difference to our bottom line.”
For a moment I almost pretend this is a surprise to me, but we both know I’m way too invested in the deli and its goings-on not to know we were in the red. I nod quietly, and my dad cuts his gaze to his lap, obviously not expecting it. I can feel the slight puncture to his pride so immediately that it feels like my own.
“So all this was thanks to your spurned college ex, huh?” I ask, to take some weight off of the silence.
“No. All this was thanks to my very clever son, who is nothing if not loyal to this family. And would probably make an excellent social media manager one day, if he wanted to be.”
I open my mouth, but it’s suddenly drier than it was after trying to eat the stale rye loaves my mom used to make our lunch sandwiches from when we were kids. But I can’t chicken out now. It’s my opening. I know it’s not now or never, but it’s now or some other less appropriate moment when I don’t have my dad’s full attention.
“I know this whole Weazel thing kind of blew up in my face, but—I think that’s what I want to do. Develop apps, I mean.”
My dad considers this. “I really didn’t have any idea you were even into that,” he says, leaning forward and propping his elbows on his knees.
I pick at a loose seam on my jeans. Years and years of work—of teaching myself to code, of stumbling through online tutorials, of watching the weird things I’ve envisioned come to life on screens—and now that the moment has come to justify all of it, to explain how much it means to me, I’m at a complete and utter loss for how to do it.
“I’m—it’s something I think … I could be good at,” I say.
The words aren’t right, maybe, but the understanding must be. My dad breathes out a sigh that is just as much in resignation as it is pride.
“I believe you, if those screenshots your vice principal sent me are any indication.” There’s a subtle edge in his voice to let me know I’m nowhere near off the hook for that, but it doesn’t do anything to dampen my relief. “I just wish you’d told us.”
It’s somehow easier and harder to say than anything I have in my whole life, coming out of me too quickly for me to overthink it: “I didn’t want to let you down.”
He puts a hand on my knee. “Of course I’m disappointed you don’t want to stick around here. But only because I don’t think I’ll ever find anyone half as good as you to run this place,” he says. “I’d be much more disappointed if you didn’t go out in the world and do something you loved because you wanted to make me happy.”
I clench and unclench my fingers. “I don’t want to—get away, or anything. I want to be here.” I don’t understand just how much I mean it until I’m saying it. There are all kinds of lives I’ve envisioned for myself beyond the corner office of the deli, but none of them have ever been too far from home—from this city that raised me, from the block that knows me better than I know myself. “I just … want it to be on my terms.”
My dad nods, and it’s an unfamiliar kind of nod. There’s a respect in it beyond the respect of father-and-son; it feels for the first time like he’s looking at me as more than that. As someone who is less of a kid and more of a peer.
“Does this mean the Twitter war is over?”
My dad and I both snap our heads up to Grandma Belly, who is leaning against the very much open door of her bedroom and peering at us critically through the thick lenses of her glasses. We both open our mouths at the same time—me to ask how the heck she knows about the Twitter war I thought I’d gone to great lengths to hide from her, and my dad clearly to ask why she’s up when she should be resting—but she raises her hand to silence us both.
“I’m fine,” she says to my dad. Then she turns to me. “And as for you—I’m old, not dead. I’ve been following this saga since the beginning. Have you and that Patricia girl made out yet or what?”
I somehow manage to choke on oxygen. I lean over to my dad mid-cough, expecting him to say something to stop her, but he’s gone redder than I am and already leapt to his feet.
“Let’s, uh, get you back into bed, Mom.”
“That girl is a hoot and a half. You two got me through an entire two months of waiting for new episodes on my favorite soaps,” says Grandma Belly, with a wink. “You tell her she’s welcome to let that sassy mom of hers copy my recipes any day of the week.”
I wait until she’s safely in her room with her back turned to bury my smirk into the palms of my hands.
