I show her the ice cream shop, the little bookstore, the food cart where I sometimes get coffee even though it drives my dad nuts.
“You’re so popular,” Pepper notes, when the third person waves at me from behind a window or a cash register.
“Hah. No. They’re all just scarred for life from me and Ethan running buck wild around this block as kids.”
“I bet you guys were cute.”
“Yeah, it’s a shame what’s happened since.”
She ribs me, just as Annie, the bookshop owner, pokes her head out and says so loudly half the street can hear, “Jack Campbell, are you on a date?”
I freeze in my tracks, hoping lightning will miraculously strike me down where I stand.
“Let me guess,” says Pepper, without missing a beat. “You bring all the girls to the deli.”
Annie’s grin is merciless. “He woos them with ham slices.”
“Hey!” I protest, finally finding my voice. “I’m so clearly a cheese guy! I’m offended.”
“And I’m intrigued. Come into the store on date two, and I’ll tell you all the embarrassing stories about baby Jack you want to know.”
Pepper laughs, and I’m expecting it to be one of those self-conscious laughs she muffles with her wrist, the kind that ends with, Oh, this isn’t a date. Because it’s not, really. It’s just some pseudo-flirty, post — Twitter war, pre-baking thing I’m not sure how to—
“I’ll swap you for the embarrassing dive team ones,” Pepper promises.
Annie’s eyebrows shoot up. “Ooh, I like her.”
“C’mon, c’mon,” I mutter through a smile, hooking my elbow with Pepper’s and dragging her away as she waves goodbye to Annie.
The deli’s in full Sunday afternoon swing when we arrive, the line not quite out the door but only because people have packed themselves inside to avoid the November cold. The woman who always comes in with her five grandkids waves at me, one of the line cooks who’s on her break tweaks my shoulder when she walks by, an NYU professor who comes in from time to time nods from his coffee cup and turns his attention back to some book about seafaring.
Pepper stops just out of the doorway, staring with an inscrutable look on her face. It didn’t occur to me until this moment to be self-conscious about showing her this place. I’ve never had to give the grand tour of it to someone whose opinion actually matters, because the people who are close to me have known this place as long as or longer than I have.
“What?”
“Nothing.” Then she shakes her head to retract it. “It just reminds me of … well, the first Big League Burger.”
“Oh my god. Are you Patricia?”
A moony-eyed middle schooler has approached, a group of her friends lagging about a foot behind her. They’re all so pint-sized that Pepper and I tower over them, and I have an unfamiliar shift of feeling like — well, like an adult.
“Um, yeah?” says Pepper.
The girl’s face lights up like a Christmas tree. “From the Big League Burger Twitter!”
“No way!” one of her friends crows. They’re looking at me now. “You guys are dating?”
“Would you sign my backpack?”
“Let’s get a picture!”
Pepper and I exchange mutual looks of red-faced bafflement, but end up submitting to the overexcited whims of our apparent fan club. We pose for a picture with them, and sign one of their cell phone cases, and by the time they’re done, my mom is staring at us from her perch behind the counter with an eyebrow cocked like she’s just waiting to make fun of us.
Ethan cuts in before she can.
“If you give her even a bite of our grilled cheese, we’re all disowning you,” he announces from the register, with a salute at Pepper to let her know he’s mostly kidding.
Pepper salutes right back. “I’ll stick to the baked goods.”
“So this is the famous Pepper,” says my mom, leaning in as if to inspect her.
There’s a beat when Pepper freezes — our coloring and the messy hair is so similar on us there’s no mistaking my mom is, well, my mom. She cuts a glance at me and then back at my mom, and only then does it occur to me she’s worried we might also be holding a Pepper’s mom — sized grudge.
My mom softens her eyebrow, makes her voice low and conspiratorial. “So you’re the one I should send the bills to when I have to send my kid to Twitter therapy?”
Pepper eases up, letting out a breath. “He can just push them through the slits of my locker.”
“Hah!” My mom gives Pepper that look she gets when she’s decided she’s sized someone up and is satisfied with what she sees. I don’t realize I’ve been holding my breath too until I’m slouching in relief. “Can do.”
Then she reaches out and nudges me on the shoulder. “Ovens two and four are cleared for teenage shenanigans. Try not to burn the place down, hmm?”
“Are these the Kitchen Sink Macaroons?” Pepper asks, her eyes wide on the display case.
“They sure are,” says my mom, her hands on her hips. “A Campbell classic, according to your father. I whipped up a batch this morning myself.”
I grab tissue paper and pluck one from the display, handing it to Pepper.
“What — are you sure—”
“He owns the place, he’s sure,” says my mom wryly.
I stiffen at the words, but then Pepper takes a hearty bite of it and closes her eyes. “Oh my god. Are there pretzel bits in this?”
“And you and that no-good brother of yours told me I was pushing my luck, adding those in last week,” says my mom, pointing a finger at me.
“Okay, okay, but to be fair, that was right on the heels of the licorice experimentation, and I didn’t want to scar any more customers for life.”
Pepper takes another bite. “This version might actually be better than Monster Cake.”
“Whoa. Don’t get too carried away,” I say, wondering when the tables turned so drastically on us that I’m defending her own food to her.
“Monster Cake?” asks my mom, intrigued.
“We’ll have some ready in an hour,” says Pepper. “It’s an atrocity.”
“A delicious one,” I add.
Pepper beams like I’ve just handed her on Oscar. Then she hikes her backpack off her shoulder, revealing enough junk food and various dessert sauces that it could put Cookie Monster into a coma just by looking at it.
“Well,” I say, “it looks like we’ve got our work cut out for us.”
“Let the ridiculous dessert mash-up games begin.”
Jack
An hour and a half later, we are the proud parents of two massive sheets of Monster Cake, some impressive concoction called Unicorn Ice Cream Bread, three dozen Kitchen Sink Macaroons, peanut-butter-and-jelly cupcakes, a three-layer Paige creation dubbed Sex-Positive Brownies (“Slutty Brownies,” Pepper explained, “but Paige took a course on feminism and sex work, so.”), an ungodly amount of banana pudding, and a bunch of misshapen cake balls we rolled around in melted chocolate and stuck in the fridge.
My mom comes in at some point, lured by the smell. She tries a sliver of the Monster Cake, groans, and says, “Don’t look me in the eye,” as she immediately cuts off a second slice.