“Do you want to stay home from school tomorrow?”
I blink at my mom like she grew an extra head. That’s the last thing I need. Even missing an hour would give everyone around me an edge.
“No. No, I’m good.” I sit up on the counter. “Did you finish up your meetings?”
She’s been so dead set on launching Big League Burger internationally that it’s practically all she ever talks about these days — meetings with investors in Paris, in London, even in Rome, trying to figure out which European city she’ll take it to first.
“Not quite. I’ll have to fly back out. But corporate’s been having a cow over the new menu launches tomorrow, and it just didn’t look good for me to be away in the middle of it.” She smiles. “Also, I missed my mini-me.”
I snort, but only because between her designer digs and my wrinkled pajamas, right now I look like anything but.
“Speaking of the menu launches,” she says, “Taffy says you haven’t been answering her texts.”
I try to keep the twinge of annoyance from my face. “Yeah, well. I gave her some ideas for tweets to queue up, like, weeks ago. And I’ve had a lot of homework.”
“I know you’re busy. But you’re just so good at what you do.” She sets her finger on my nose the way she’s done since I was little, when she and my dad used to laugh at the way I’d go a little cross-eyed staring at it. “And you know how important this is to the family.”
To the family. I know she doesn’t mean for it to, but it rubs the wrong way, considering where we started and where we are now.
“Ah, yeah. I’m sure Dad’s losing all kinds of sleep over our tweets.”
My mom rolls her eyes in that affectionate, exasperated way she reserves solely for Dad. While plenty of things have changed since they divorced a few years back, they still love each other, even if they’re not so much “in” love, as Mom puts it.
The rest of it, though, has been whiplash. She and my dad started Big League Burger as a mom-and-pop shop in Nashville ten years ago, when it was just milkshakes and burgers and we were barely making rent every month to support it. Nobody ever expected it to franchise so successfully that Big League Burger would become the fourth largest fast-food franchise in the country.
I guess I also didn’t expect my parents to get amicably and almost cheerfully divorced, Paige to totally freeze Mom out for being the one to initiate it, or for Mom to one-eighty from a barefoot cowgirl to a fast-food mogul and move us to the Upper East Side of Manhattan either.
Now with Paige in college in Pennsylvania, my dad still living in the Nashville apartment, and my mom’s fingers near surgically attached to her iPhone, the word family is a bit of a stretch for her teenage daughter guilt-trip campaign.
“Explain to me this concept of yours again?” my mom asks.
I hold in a sigh. “Since we’re launching the grilled cheeses first, we’re ‘grilling’ people on Twitter. Anyone who wants to get ‘grilled’ can take a selfie and tweet it at us, and we’ll tweet something sassy at them about it.”
I could go into detail — pull up the mockups we made of potential responses to tweets, remind her of the #GrilledByBLB hashtag we’re going to push, of the puns we’ve come up with based on the ingredients of the three new grilled cheeses — but I’m exhausted.
My mom whistles lowly. “I love it, but Taffy is definitely going to need your help with that.”
I wince. “Yeah.”
Poor Taffy. She’s the mousy, cardigan-wearing twentysomething who runs the Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram pages for Big League Burger. Mom hired her right out of school when we were first starting to franchise, but after we expanded nationwide, the marketing team decided that Big League Burger’s Twitter presence was going to go the way of KFC or Wendy’s — sarcastic, irreverent, fresh. All the things that Taffy, bless her overworked, Powerpuff Girl heart, has no experience with.
Enter me. Apparently in the vast arsenal of useless talents that aren’t going to help me get into college, I am really good at being snarky on Twitter. Even if these days “good at being snarky” generally means photoshopping an image of Big League Burger on the Krusty Krab and Burger King on the Chum Bucket — which happened to be the first one I made, when Taffy took that trip to Disney World with her boyfriend last year and Mom asked me to pitch in. It ended up getting more retweets than anything we’d ever posted. Mom has been pushing me to help Taffy ever since.
I’m about to remind her that Taffy is long overdue for a raise and actual subordinates so she can get some sleep sometime this year, when my mom turns her back to me and squints at the cake in the pan.
“Monster Cake?”
“The one and only.”
“Ugh,” she says, picking at the pan I already sliced from. “You should hide these from me, you know. I can’t stop myself.”
It’s still strange to me, hearing my mom say stuff like that. If she hadn’t been such a proud foodie, she and my dad wouldn’t have opened Big League Burger in the first place. It sometimes doesn’t seem like that long ago I was standing on the porch of the old Nashville apartment with Paige, while our dad crunched numbers and emailed suppliers and my mom made exhaustive lists of bonkers milkshake combinations, reading them all off for our approval.
I don’t think I’ve seen her have more than a few sips of milkshake in half a decade — now she’s way more into the business side of things. And while I’ve leaned into that by helping with the tweets and trying to make New York work, the shift only seemed to make Paige even angrier with her. Half the time I feel like she’s only so committed to our baking blog as some kind of sticking point.
But no matter what else happens, this one thing my mom has always had a weakness for — Monster Cake. A perilous invention from childhood, the day Paige and Mom and I decided to test the limits of our rinky-dink oven with a combination of Funfetti cake mixed with brownie batter, cookie dough, Oreos, Reese’s Cups, and Rolos. The result was so simultaneously hideous and delicious that my mom fashioned googly eyes on it out of frosting, and thus, Monster Cake was born.
She takes a bite of it now and groans. “Okay, okay, get this away from me.”
My phone pings in my pocket. I pull it out and see a notification from the Weazel app.
Wolf
Hey. If you’re reading this, go to bed.
“Is that Paige?”
I bite down the smile on my face. “No, it’s — a friend of mine.” Well, kind of. I don’t actually know his real name. But Mom doesn’t need to know that.
She nods, pulling up some cake residue from the bottom of the pan with her thumbnail. I brace myself — it’s about now that she usually asks what Paige is up to, and yet again I have to play the middleman — but instead, she asks, “Do you know a boy named Landon who goes to your school?”
If I were the kind of girl who was stupid enough to leave diaries laying out in my bedroom, this would be reason enough to tailspin into full-blown panic. But I’m not the kind of girl who is stupid enough to do that, even if Mom were the kind of parent who snoops.
“Yeah. We’re both on the swim team, I guess.” Which is to say—Yeah, I had a massive, irrational crush on him freshman year, when you essentially dropped me off in a lion’s den of rich kids who’ve known each other since birth.
That first day was about as painfully awkward as a day could be. I’d never worn a school uniform before, and everything seemed to itch and not quite tuck in properly. My hair was still the frizzy, unruly mess it had been in middle school. Everyone was already secure in their own little cliques, and none of those cliques seemed to include anyone who had six pairs of cowboy boots and a Kacey Musgraves poster hung up in their closet.