Tweet Cute(18)

“A ‘secret ingredient’?” I mutter.

“That. And our family.”

I wrinkle my nose.

“Sorry. Had to go full Nick Junior to snap you out of it. Go help your mom.”

Which is how I find myself here, tied to the register, taking the orders of the old ladies who have book club every Monday night, half of a little league soccer team, and a group of giggling middle schoolers who paid in quarters. Living the dream.

Okay, okay—the cliché burden of my dad’s expectations aside, it’s not so bad. I genuinely enjoy being up front. My popularity in high school doesn’t extend more than a few inches beyond the dive team, which I’ve never minded much—probably because here, people know me. If every block in New York had its own block celebrity, I’d probably be ours. Not for any redeeming qualities of mine, but mostly because all the regulars watched me and Ethan grow up, and of the two of us, I am much worse at shutting my trap. I know way too much about the personal lives of the regulars—the frequency of Mrs. Harvel’s dog’s bowel movements, the messy details of Mr. Carmichael’s wedding that led to an even messier divorce, exactly what kind of fruit Annie—who was sixteen when I met her, but is thirty now—is eating so she can “convince her uterus to spit out one of the girl eggs next time.”

And they know me too. An engineer who comes in every Tuesday and Friday for his tuna sandwich melt will always help if I’m stuck on something in a math class. The book club ladies are always sneaking me homemade peanut butter cookies, even though I’m surrounded by a sea of miscellaneous baked goods. Annie’s been giving me unsolicited dating advice since before my voice started cracking.

So it adds yet another layer of confusion when my dad rolls this out as a “punishment,” like he hasn’t been pulling me or Ethan downstairs to run the register every other day since we were small. It’s not like we’re short-staffed or anything—my dad’s just always been into the idea of this being a family business, so participation has been less than optional. As early as six, we were yelling orders to the cooks in the back and wiping down tables, mostly because the regulars found it charming and it kept us occupied in the summers. Now, my parents have us doing everything from register to inventory to sandwich assembly.

Well, by “us” I mostly mean me. I’m the one tapped for random shifts when there’s a need. And I get it—Ethan’s busy with all the student council nonsense and extracurriculars and generally being the prince of our high school. But I resent the assumption that just because I don’t have debate club practices or someone to make out with on the steps of the Met, his time is somehow worth more than mine.

In my parents’ defense, I guess I haven’t told them about moonlighting as a crappy app developer. And in my defense, there’s no way in hell I’m going to tell them about it now that Rucker is on a witch hunt and Dad is more determined to live in the 1960s than ever.

“Something on your mind?” my mom asks, when there isn’t anyone in line at the register.

I lean against the counter and sigh. “Just the infinite, suffocating void of trying to navigate the world without my phone in my pocket.”

My mom rolls her eyes and swats me with the towel she was using to rub down tables—which, gross.

“Who have you been texting so much?” she asks, reminding me that just about nothing gets past her eagle eyes. “Oh, let me guess. You’re talking on that Woozel app.”

“Weazel.”

“Ah, yes, Weazel.”

If Mom’s favorite thing is mocking Rucker’s emails to the parents, then her second favorite thing is pretending to be hip and cool. Something she can do a lot easier than most parents, because our mom actually is cool. She can somehow walk into a PTA meeting full of Upper East Side moms decked out in pearls and giant sunglasses in nothing but her jeans and a Girl Cheesing T-shirt and intimidate the whole room with a look. It’s like cool just oozes out of her skin.

Luckily, the coolness is genetic. Unluckily, Ethan stole it all in utero and left me out to dry.

“Should I be very alarmed? Are you kids using it to plot a school takeover and replace Rucker with someone who wears pants from this century?”

“Now there’s an idea.”

She presses her lips into a smirk. “You’re welcome.”

Sometimes my mom is so antiestablishment that I’m confused about why she insists on us having a private school education in the first place. But I guess it’s more for my grandparents’ sake than ours—the ones on her side, not Grandma Belly’s. They never quite approved of her marrying my dad and co-running a deli, when, as far as I can tell, they had very much primed her to be some hedge fund manager’s trophy wife. I think putting me and Ethan through Stone Hall was a way of saying she hadn’t completely abandoned her roots, the same way my dad’s always been tied to his.

The same way I’m going to be tied to them, I guess.

“As long as you kids are being safe…”

I snort. “Really, Mom, it’s like—dumber than Snapchat. Just people posting pictures of graffiti in the bathroom and making fun of Rucker.”

“So you are on it.”

I roll my eyes. “Everyone is.”

She gives me a look she rarely has to give, as if she’s lifted some part of me like the hood of a car and is inspecting it for leaks. A stupid part of me wants to tell her right then. I made this, I want to say. I made it without any help, and it’s making people happy. I want to tell her about Mel and Gina making out in the hallway this morning. I want to tell her how someone was having a total meltdown about chem lab in the Hallway Chat the other day, and at least twenty other students sent encouraging messages to calm them down. I want to tell her that in my own weird way, I made something that’s doing good in the world, something that feels as if it matters.