I sigh, shutting the laptop just before my mom walks into the kitchen, decked out in her usual airport fare: a pair of tight black jeans, a cashmere sweater, and a pair of oversize black sunglasses that, frankly, look ridiculous on her given the late hour. She pulls them off and perches them up on her perfectly coiffed blonde hair to inspect me, and the hurricane that used to be her spotless kitchen.

“You’re back early.”

“And you’re supposed to be in bed.”

She steps forward and pulls me into a hug, and I squeeze her a little tighter than someone covered in cake batter probably should. It’s only been a few days, but it’s lonely when she’s gone. I’m still not used to it being so quiet, without Paige and Dad around.

She holds me there and takes a demonstrative whiff, no doubt inhaling a lungful of burnt baked good, but when she pulls away, she raises the same eyebrow Paige did and doesn’t say anything.

“I have an essay due.”

She glances over at the pans of cake. “It looks like a riveting read,” she says wryly. “Is this the Great Expectations one?”

“The very same.”

“Didn’t you finish that a week ago?”

She has a point. I guess if push really comes to shove, I can pull up one of the old drafts and submit it. But the problem is, the figurative pushing and shoving at Stone Hall Academy is more like maiming and destroying. I’m competing for Ivy League admissions with legacies who probably descended down from the original Yale bulldog. It’s not enough to be good, or even great—you have to crush your peers, or get crushed.

Well, metaphorically, at least. And speaking of metaphors, for some reason, despite having read this book twice and annotating it into oblivion, I’m having some trouble interpreting any of them in a way that wouldn’t put our AP Lit teacher to sleep. Every time I try to write a coherent sentence, all I can think about is tomorrow’s swim practice. It’s my first day as acting captain and I know Pooja went to a conditioning camp over the summer, which means she might be faster than I am now, which means she has every opportunity to undermine my authority and make me look like an idiot in front of everyone and—

“Do you want to stay home from school tomorrow?”

I blink at my mom like she grew an extra head. That’s the last thing I need. Even missing an hour would give everyone around me an edge.

“No. No, I’m good.” I sit up on the counter. “Did you finish up your meetings?”

She’s been so dead set on launching Big League Burger internationally that it’s practically all she ever talks about these days—meetings with investors in Paris, in London, even in Rome, trying to figure out which European city she’ll take it to first.

“Not quite. I’ll have to fly back out. But corporate’s been having a cow over the new menu launches tomorrow, and it just didn’t look good for me to be away in the middle of it.” She smiles. “Also, I missed my mini-me.”

I snort, but only because between her designer digs and my wrinkled pajamas, right now I look like anything but.

“Speaking of the menu launches,” she says, “Taffy says you haven’t been answering her texts.”

I try to keep the twinge of annoyance from my face. “Yeah, well. I gave her some ideas for tweets to queue up, like, weeks ago. And I’ve had a lot of homework.”

“I know you’re busy. But you’re just so good at what you do.” She sets her finger on my nose the way she’s done since I was little, when she and my dad used to laugh at the way I’d go a little cross-eyed staring at it. “And you know how important this is to the family.”

To the family. I know she doesn’t mean for it to, but it rubs the wrong way, considering where we started and where we are now.

“Ah, yeah. I’m sure Dad’s losing all kinds of sleep over our tweets.”

My mom rolls her eyes in that affectionate, exasperated way she reserves solely for Dad. While plenty of things have changed since they divorced a few years back, they still love each other, even if they’re not so much “in” love, as Mom puts it.

The rest of it, though, has been whiplash. She and my dad started Big League Burger as a mom-and-pop shop in Nashville ten years ago, when it was just milkshakes and burgers and we were barely making rent every month to support it. Nobody ever expected it to franchise so successfully that Big League Burger would become the fourth largest fast-food franchise in the country.

I guess I also didn’t expect my parents to get amicably and almost cheerfully divorced, Paige to totally freeze Mom out for being the one to initiate it, or for Mom to one-eighty from a barefoot cowgirl to a fast-food mogul and move us to the Upper East Side of Manhattan either.

Now with Paige in college in Pennsylvania, my dad still living in the Nashville apartment, and my mom’s fingers near surgically attached to her iPhone, the word family is a bit of a stretch for her teenage daughter guilt-trip campaign.

“Explain to me this concept of yours again?” my mom asks.

I hold in a sigh. “Since we’re launching the grilled cheeses first, we’re ‘grilling’ people on Twitter. Anyone who wants to get ‘grilled’ can take a selfie and tweet it at us, and we’ll tweet something sassy at them about it.”

I could go into detail—pull up the mockups we made of potential responses to tweets, remind her of the #GrilledByBLB hashtag we’re going to push, of the puns we’ve come up with based on the ingredients of the three new grilled cheeses—but I’m exhausted.