My mom whistles lowly. “I love it, but Taffy is definitely going to need your help with that.”

I wince. “Yeah.”

Poor Taffy. She’s the mousy, cardigan-wearing twentysomething who runs the Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram pages for Big League Burger. Mom hired her right out of school when we were first starting to franchise, but after we expanded nationwide, the marketing team decided that Big League Burger’s Twitter presence was going to go the way of KFC or Wendy’s—sarcastic, irreverent, fresh. All the things that Taffy, bless her overworked, Powerpuff Girl heart, has no experience with.

Enter me. Apparently in the vast arsenal of useless talents that aren’t going to help me get into college, I am really good at being snarky on Twitter. Even if these days “good at being snarky” generally means photoshopping an image of Big League Burger on the Krusty Krab and Burger King on the Chum Bucket—which happened to be the first one I made, when Taffy took that trip to Disney World with her boyfriend last year and Mom asked me to pitch in. It ended up getting more retweets than anything we’d ever posted. Mom has been pushing me to help Taffy ever since.

I’m about to remind her that Taffy is long overdue for a raise and actual subordinates so she can get some sleep sometime this year, when my mom turns her back to me and squints at the cake in the pan.

“Monster Cake?”

“The one and only.”

“Ugh,” she says, picking at the pan I already sliced from. “You should hide these from me, you know. I can’t stop myself.”

It’s still strange to me, hearing my mom say stuff like that. If she hadn’t been such a proud foodie, she and my dad wouldn’t have opened Big League Burger in the first place. It sometimes doesn’t seem like that long ago I was standing on the porch of the old Nashville apartment with Paige, while our dad crunched numbers and emailed suppliers and my mom made exhaustive lists of bonkers milkshake combinations, reading them all off for our approval.

I don’t think I’ve seen her have more than a few sips of milkshake in half a decade—now she’s way more into the business side of things. And while I’ve leaned into that by helping with the tweets and trying to make New York work, the shift only seemed to make Paige even angrier with her. Half the time I feel like she’s only so committed to our baking blog as some kind of sticking point.

But no matter what else happens, this one thing my mom has always had a weakness for—Monster Cake. A perilous invention from childhood, the day Paige and Mom and I decided to test the limits of our rinky-dink oven with a combination of Funfetti cake mixed with brownie batter, cookie dough, Oreos, Reese’s Cups, and Rolos. The result was so simultaneously hideous and delicious that my mom fashioned googly eyes on it out of frosting, and thus, Monster Cake was born.

She takes a bite of it now and groans. “Okay, okay, get this away from me.”

My phone pings in my pocket. I pull it out and see a notification from the Weazel app.

Wolf

Hey. If you’re reading this, go to bed.

“Is that Paige?”

I bite down the smile on my face. “No, it’s—a friend of mine.” Well, kind of. I don’t actually know his real name. But Mom doesn’t need to know that.

She nods, pulling up some cake residue from the bottom of the pan with her thumbnail. I brace myself—it’s about now that she usually asks what Paige is up to, and yet again I have to play the middleman—but instead, she asks, “Do you know a boy named Landon who goes to your school?”

If I were the kind of girl who was stupid enough to leave diaries laying out in my bedroom, this would be reason enough to tailspin into full-blown panic. But I’m not the kind of girl who is stupid enough to do that, even if Mom were the kind of parent who snoops.

“Yeah. We’re both on the swim team, I guess.” Which is to say—Yeah, I had a massive, irrational crush on him freshman year, when you essentially dropped me off in a lion’s den of rich kids who’ve known each other since birth.

That first day was about as painfully awkward as a day could be. I’d never worn a school uniform before, and everything seemed to itch and not quite tuck in properly. My hair was still the frizzy, unruly mess it had been in middle school. Everyone was already secure in their own little cliques, and none of those cliques seemed to include anyone who had six pairs of cowboy boots and a Kacey Musgraves poster hung up in their closet.

I nearly burst into tears on the spot when I finally got to my English class and realized, to my horror, there had been summer reading—and there was a pop quiz on the first day. I was too terrified to actually say something to the teacher, but Landon had leaned over from his desk, all tanned from the summer with this broad, easy smile, and said, “Hey, don’t worry about it. My older brother says she just does these quizzes to scare us—they don’t actually count.”

I managed a nod. Sometime in the split second it took for him to lean back over to his own desk and look down at his quiz, my stupid fourteen-year-old brain decided I was in love.

Granted, it only lasted a few months, and I’ve spoken to him approximately six times since. But I’ve been way too busy for crushes in the time between then and now, so it’s pretty much the only blueprint I’ve got.

“Good, good. You should get to know him. Invite him over sometime.”