Tweet Cute(87)

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.