Tweet Cute(90)

It’s somehow easier and harder to say than anything I have in my whole life, coming out of me too quickly for me to overthink it: “I didn’t want to let you down.”

He puts a hand on my knee. “Of course I’m disappointed you don’t want to stick around here. But only because I don’t think I’ll ever find anyone half as good as you to run this place,” he says. “I’d be much more disappointed if you didn’t go out in the world and do something you loved because you wanted to make me happy.”

I clench and unclench my fingers. “I don’t want to—get away, or anything. I want to be here.” I don’t understand just how much I mean it until I’m saying it. There are all kinds of lives I’ve envisioned for myself beyond the corner office of the deli, but none of them have ever been too far from home—from this city that raised me, from the block that knows me better than I know myself. “I just … want it to be on my terms.”

My dad nods, and it’s an unfamiliar kind of nod. There’s a respect in it beyond the respect of father-and-son; it feels for the first time like he’s looking at me as more than that. As someone who is less of a kid and more of a peer.

“Does this mean the Twitter war is over?”

My dad and I both snap our heads up to Grandma Belly, who is leaning against the very much open door of her bedroom and peering at us critically through the thick lenses of her glasses. We both open our mouths at the same time—me to ask how the heck she knows about the Twitter war I thought I’d gone to great lengths to hide from her, and my dad clearly to ask why she’s up when she should be resting—but she raises her hand to silence us both.

“I’m fine,” she says to my dad. Then she turns to me. “And as for you—I’m old, not dead. I’ve been following this saga since the beginning. Have you and that Patricia girl made out yet or what?”

I somehow manage to choke on oxygen. I lean over to my dad mid-cough, expecting him to say something to stop her, but he’s gone redder than I am and already leapt to his feet.

“Let’s, uh, get you back into bed, Mom.”

“That girl is a hoot and a half. You two got me through an entire two months of waiting for new episodes on my favorite soaps,” says Grandma Belly, with a wink. “You tell her she’s welcome to let that sassy mom of hers copy my recipes any day of the week.”

I wait until she’s safely in her room with her back turned to bury my smirk into the palms of my hands.





Jack


“So.”

“So,” I echo.

We’re walking down the street, just me and Pepper, both of us armed with aluminum foil–wrapped grilled cheeses, plastic cups full of lemonade, and a giant Kitchen Sink Macaroon to split. It was easy enough to be around her for the two or so minutes when my mom was setting us up with the food, insisting on Pepper taking a lunch break, but now that we’re alone, every single one of the wits I used to have has left me.

“I’m sorry,” we both blurt at the same time. We pause, momentarily stricken, and then laugh—hers breathy, and mine an accidental cackle, loud enough people move an extra step out of our way when they pass.

“What are you sorry about?” I demand. “You didn’t do anything.”

“I—I don’t even know, really. I feel like I kind of did. I’m—sorry for thinking you were Landon, first of all.” She takes a long sip of her lemonade, her face scrunching like she’s trying to wash the taste of that thought out of her mouth. “And sorry for—well—thinking the worst of you, a few times, when I didn’t have the full story.”

I wish my hands weren’t occupied with holding my food, so I could shove them into my jacket pockets.

“Well, I’m sorry for real stuff. For lying to you about the Weazel thing, mostly.” I gnaw on my lower lip. “The thing is—I was actually going to tell you that night. I took that picture because I was going to be a smart aleck about it. Send you the picture over the app as Wolf, so then you’d put two and two together and realize it was me.”

The implication, of course, is unspoken—that she’d have the space to put two and two together and pretend she didn’t realize it was me, if she didn’t want it to be. I see I haven’t done anything to fool her because her eyes immediately soften.

“Anyway,” I say, before she can address it, “that obviously backfired when you, uh, threw up instead.”

Pepper snorts. “Yeah. Safe to say, I’m off hot dogs for the foreseeable next hundred years.”

“And then—I was going to tell you when you were here. When we were kissing. And instead, I just kind of shoved my foot in my mouth and wrecked the whole thing.”

Pepper spots a place for us to sit in Washington Square Park, on a bench with a view of the little gated area that makes up the dog park. She sits, watching me studiously as I take the place next to her, with the kind of care I’m still not used to even after all these weeks of being on the other end of it.

“I wouldn’t say wrecked,” she says.

“Yeah. But you’re a meme now. And suspended.”

I don’t know why I’m pointing all of this out to her, except I have to—suddenly it all has to be on the table, every stupid thing we’ve said and done, every mistake we’ve made. She’s still here, and she’s still staring back at me, but I can’t trust it yet.