I consider for a moment not telling him. There’s this strange tug pulling me back, some misplaced loyalty to Pepper that I guess even finding out the truth about her didn’t quite knock out of me.
But even if I wanted to keep this to myself, I couldn’t. Not with Pepper as captain of the swim team. Whether I keep doing Ethan’s captain duties or not, one of us will be dealing with her until the end of the season, and I can’t just send him in blind.
“Big League Burger — Pepper’s parents are in charge of it.”
It takes Ethan a moment to place her, and for some reason I feel a flash of annoyance. “Pepper Evans?”
I nod. “And … it looks like Pepper is running their Twitter. Or at least, it looks like she’s a big part of running it.”
Ethan’s eyes widen in the same dumbfounded way I know mine must have three hours ago. “That’s — there’s no way.”
“That’s what I thought. I only found out this afternoon.”
“The world can’t be that small.”
I prop my elbows on the table and lean my head into my hands, suddenly feeling like I haven’t slept in years. I’m past surprise, past disappointment. I just want to throw my body onto my bed and sleep until the end of time.
“Apparently it is,” I mutter.
Ethan lowers his voice. “Are you gonna be able to keep at it? I mean — you’re friends, right?”
“No.” Ethan pulls back, and I realize I’ve said it through my teeth. I sag forward, sinking deeper into my hands, my elbows aching against the table. “At least not anymore, we’re not.”
Ethan levels with me for a moment, and then nods. “Maybe it’ll all just … blow over after this.” He knocks his knuckles on the table as he gets up. “Anyway, let me know if you need any help.”
I wait for a few seconds after everyone’s left to reach into my back pocket and grab my phone. Three messages from Bluebird, but no more texts from Pepper. Somehow I already know what I’m going to see before I open Twitter, but I can’t stop myself — and there, sure enough, is a tweet from Big League Burger. The stupid cat GIF, with its sunglasses and its grilled cheese. I don’t know what part is more stupid — being disappointed about a GIF of a cat, or that there was even a tiny part of me that thought she might not post it at all.
Pepper
Bluebird
So you never told me what it is you want to do with your life.
Bluebird
I mean, no pressure or anything, it’s just the rest of forever
Bluebird
It’s okay if you want to be Rucker’s protege. I mean, I’d stop being friends with you, but who needs friends when you have a 401k and 16 pairs of patterned pants
Great. That makes six unanswered texts to Jack, three unanswered texts to Wolf, and several SOS texts to Paige, who I know is either in class or sucking face with a fellow coed. I hope it’s the former, because I’m really not up to getting a play-by-play right now.
In fact, I’m probably not up to any kind of play right now. My mom’s going to be home any minute, and the kitchen looks like Keebler elves threw a rave in it.
I didn’t mean for it to escalate to the extent it has — a pot of browned butter remnants on the stove, cocoa powder on the marble counter, leftover dark chocolate sauce congealing in a bowl in the sink. After the incident with Jack, I’d walked straight home, reeling from the surprise of it all, the complete absurdity, and convinced myself I could take my mind off it if I just pulled out my AP Gov textbook and buried myself in it.
It turns out no amount of learning about the ins and outs of federalism is enough to distract me from the gnawing guilt, or the unwelcome weight in my chest every time I think of Jack’s face just before he walked out of the bakery’s front doors.
If I couldn’t escape the guilt, there was nothing left to do but lean into it. And leaning into it is what led me to grabbing the forty dollars my mom leaves out in the front to order food if I ever need it, schlepping miserably down to the bodega, and collecting everything I needed to make Paige’s infamous So Sorry Blondies from the summer before she left for college.
I pull them out of the oven now, the smell wafting through the kitchen — the brown sugar and butter and toffee against the richness of the dark chocolate chips and pockets of dark chocolate caramel sauce. A little bitter and a little sweet. I set them on the stove to cool and lean back on the counter, looking at the horror I have wrought upon my mom’s spotless kitchen.
I whip out my phone (no texts from Jack; just a few from my dad, asking which pies to preorder for Thanksgiving) so I can take a few pictures of it for the blog. Paige and I have been playing phone tag all week, but that hasn’t stopped her from nagging me to update. To be fair, she’s had the last three posts, with impressive pictures of Rainy Day Pudding, Unicorn Ice Cream Bread, and a recent addition I’m too scared to ask about called Help Me Hangover Cookies. Meanwhile, I haven’t posted since I made our Trash Talk Tarts in September — courtesy of the thinly veiled comment I found in the Hallway Chat on Weazel, where someone bitched about a “certain blonde android making the rest of the AP Chem class look bad.” While we’re all too stressed out and busy to bully each other beyond the occasional snide remark, I don’t think it’s too presumptuous to assume they meant me.
Just then my phone rings, and my dad’s face dressed up as the Big League Burger mascot for Halloween pops up on the screen.
“What’s up?”
“Pies,” says my dad. I can recognize the background noise from our old favorite bakery in Nashville — the bells on the door, the chime of the register. The place is always packed. “Your mom says apple. Paige says pecan. If you have a third one in mind, open your pie hole and speak now.”
My mouth waters just at the thought of those pies. Ever since we moved here, we always do major holidays in Nashville, since all the grandparents are out there. Sometimes I see old friends. Mostly I just hang out with Paige and tear up Dad’s kitchen the way I tear up Mom’s.
And, of course, run point with Dad to do everything and anything we can to keep Paige and Mom from going at it — which is easier to do these days, since during the holidays they seem to barely talk at all.
“Chocolate,” I tell him. “The pudding one.”
“Chocolate it is,” he says, just as the oven timer goes off on my end. He must hear it, because he says, “Does this mean P&P Bake is getting an update today?”
“If I manage not to burn these blondies like I did with last week’s cake.”
“So Sorry Blondies?” my dad asks. He’s not a big worrier — he’s one of those parents who is more into listening than prying — but even he knows these particular blondies have notorious origins.
The way my parents’ divorce happened was … anticlimactic. They sat us down one day over dinner and told us it was mutual. That they loved each other, but thought they were better off as friends. And as stunned as Paige and I were, it didn’t really rock anyone’s worlds. We were still in Nashville. We all still lived in the same place. My dad just started sleeping in the guest room, and that was that.
Or at least, it was for a few months. It was around that time that Big League Burger was getting too big for them to manage alone. The options were to sell parts of the franchise, or fully take the reins of the whole thing. My dad waffled — his heart was always in the original location, not the others that followed — but my mom didn’t hesitate. She loved every part of it, big and small, and didn’t want someone outside of the family in charge. If he didn’t want to take those reins, she would. And she’d head to New York and open the corporate office there to do it.