“Okay—but maybe you should—I don’t know, talk to them? Not send a tweet?”

“There’s no point in talking to some sandwich place looking for attention. Give me something to fire back at them. I can’t waste time right now.”

It feels like a gut punch through the phone. I clutch my tea, letting it burn against my palms, waiting for it to anchor me. I want to push back, but I know how this goes—it sounds like the beginning of half of Paige and Mom’s fights. One of them would push, and the other would dig their heels into the cement, and before I knew it Paige would be stalking off into Central Park, and Mom would be on the phone with Dad trying to figure out how to deal with her.

I don’t want to be someone she has to deal with. Things are already weird enough between the four of us without me making waves.

“Just, uh … send that GIF from Harry Potter. The ‘excuse me, but who are you’ one.”

There’s a beat. “You’re in the right direction, but let’s go edgier than that.”

I close my eyes. “Fine. I’ll text you something else.”

I text Taffy and my mom the idea, walking over to the table, where Jack is still so very clearly Jack that it’s ridiculous he tried to pretend otherwise.

I can’t lie—despite his shenanigans, it is kind of fascinating, watching him and his brother. How two people can be so strikingly similar, with the same build and the same open face, the same rhythm in the way they talk, and still present it to the world in such different ways. Where Ethan is almost coolly self-possessed, like some kind of politician, Jack is an open book—his eyes unguarded and unselfconscious, his tall frame always strewn across chairs like he has settled into himself earlier than most people our age, his dark eyebrows so expressive and honest that it’s laughable he even tried to pull one over on me in the first place.

While I’m staring without meaning to, Jack takes a very long slurp of his coffee. “So. This pool thing.”

I lean forward, leveling with him. We are two people at odds—me rigid and immovable, him just as at ease as ever, meeting my stare with faint amusement.

“What exactly did your coach want?”

“Ethan says we’re supposed to do a half hour of lap swimming a day.”

We only have the pool for two hours at a time. Every single year before this one, they’ve taken the area by the diving board, and we’ve taken the lanes. Half of me wonders if this is Coach Thompkins’s way of getting under Coach Martin’s skin—they are notorious for not getting along, especially when it comes to using the swim and dive budgets—but that doesn’t mean we can’t deal with it.

“How’s this: you get the pool for twenty minutes a day,” I propose. “The last twenty minutes we have rented.”

“And where will the swim team go?”

“We’ll do dry land exercises. Push-ups and lunges.”

“And you’re going to lead that?”

“I’ll ask Landon to do it.”

Jack blows out a breath. “Sounds like it’s all settled, then.”

I blink, surprised. I don’t know Jack all that well, but I’m not used to him being so … reasonable.

“Wanna go heckle my brother?”

Ah. There it is.

My phone pings from the table—it’s a text from Taffy, letting me know she’s in a meeting. My mom immediately texts and asks me to pull up the corporate account on my phone and tweet it instead.

I wait for a beat, wondering why I feel a pinch of guilt sending it. This isn’t my business, and it’s not my Twitter account. It ultimately has nothing to do with me at all. I’m just a set of fingers on a keyboard.

Big League Burger @B1gLeagueBurger

Replying to @GCheesing

extremely ms. norbury voice

do you even go to this school? go home

4:47 PM · 20 Oct 2020

I hit tweet and steel myself. Something feels … grimy about the whole thing. Like I’ve done something wrong.

“They’re only, like, three blocks away.”

I put my phone on the table, the screen facing down. “I know where the Met is,” I say, sounding overly defensive even to my own ears.

But Jack doesn’t even seem to notice. “So?” he asks—an invitation.

I feel like I am itching at my seams, compelled to open the phone back up to the corporate account and see what people are saying back to the tweet. It’s strange, how I can’t seem to untangle myself from the company, even though it looks nothing like it did when it first started. When I was little, the whole of the restaurant felt as if it were mine. Paige and I were so defined by it—everyone who worked there knew our names, let us make up ridiculous milkshake combinations, snuck us leftover fries when my parents were in meetings that ran late. The franchise is so corporate that it’s way beyond me and my dessert whims now, but no matter how big we get, I can’t quite squash the part of me that takes it personally.

There’s no way I’m going to be able to focus on anything tonight, not with the stupid notifications piling up. The idea of it is suddenly so suffocating, the last thing I want to do is go home.

“Yeah. Yeah, let’s go.”

Jack blinks. “Yeah?”

“Why not?”