"I'm going to have to call you Pippi Longstocking now," my mom slid a pancake onto my plate. "Who would have thought you'd look good as a redhead?"
"The preferred term is ginger." I went heavy with the maple syrup. There's nothing quite like extra-syrupy pancakes for dinner, I can tell you.
"Aren't you shocked, Vinnie?" My mom called over to my dad in the living room. My dad was too busy with 'important school district matters' to eat with us. He had what looked like a filing cabinet worth of papers spread out across the sofa and the coffee table and the floor. Why was he working in the living room and not his study? Simple. Some dopey stage show was having a special on PBS. I could hear their rendition of "My Favorite Things" from the kitchen. Show tunes are right up there with Taylor Swift in my dad's esteem. I don't know why my mom tried to engage him in conversation. He couldn't hear her with all the crisp apple strudels and schnitzels with noodles around him. What a goof.
"Christ," My mom muttered when my dad failed to respond. Her gaze fell onto me. I still poured maple syrup in a puddle beside my pancakes. "Jesus, Valerie, that's enough!" She reached across the table and took the syrup dispenser from me.
"Aw come on, Ma," I protested.
"I've looked at the ingredient list in that Aunt Jemima garbage your dad buys," she snapped shut the dispenser and set it out of my grabbing distance. "It's all corn syrup. None of that came out of a maple tree."
"Sugar is sugar," I shrugged.
"Corn syrup is empty calories," my mom cut into her pancakes somewhat aggressively. "If we had real maple syrup, fine, or how about this-" she lifted up a jar of her beloved Manuka honey, "this is packed with antioxidants that help prevent cancer, remember?"
"Yeah, yeah," I didn't want to remember cancer while at the dinner table. Plus, who eats pancakes with honey? I mean, except for my mom. It's not even a Puerto Rican thing, like plantains. She invented it on her own.
"Here, why don't you try it?" She handed me the jar. "This kind is locally produced."
I examined the label. A low quality illustration of a Manuka flower, and a cartoon bee. At the top: PENNUKA FARMS in all caps. At the bottom: PENNSYLVANIA PRODUCED MANUKA HONEY.
"Read the back," my mom ordered.
I turned the jar over in my hands. Oh Lordy, there was a lot of words:
How can we produce Manuka honey in chilly Pennsylvania Dutch country? It's not easy beeing green, that's for sure. Our family-run, multi-acre greenhouse is filled with Manuka trees (Leptospermum scoparium). It takes a lot of work to mimic the dry, temperate climate of New Zealand, but with a little love and a lot of energy, we manuke-it-work. Our friendly honey bees (Apis mellifera) collect only the best Manuka pollen for their honey, and we only send the best of their honey to your local grocery. So you can bee certain, Pennuka Honey is the best choice for locally-sourced, environmentally-friendly sweetness!
"Interesting, right?" My mom took the jar from me and spooned some onto her pancake.
"It sounds like bullshit." I stabbed a piece of pancake with my fork. "How could a multi-acre greenhouse, which requires 'a lot of energy,' be more environmentally-friendly than just importing Manuka honey from New Zealand?"
"Do you know how bad jet fuel is for the planet?" My mom asked.
"I know it can't melt steel beams," I dipped my pancake piece into my syrup puddle. "Does this greenhouse even exist?"
"The Wegmans wouldn't sell imported Manuka with a fake label slapped on it," my mom seemed to take my skepticism of her favorite honey personally.
"Are we sure?" I pulled my phone out of my shorts pocket and googled Pennuka Farms. I clicked on the first result. Pennuka Farms' website loaded. Lo and behold, there was a huge picture of a greenhouse as the top banner. In the foreground of that photo was a distance marker: 4 miles to Intercourse, PA.
"Well, I'll be damned," I muttered.
"Speaking of Wegmans," my mom tapped on the table to catch my attention. I put away my phone. "Guess who I ran into today."
Could be anybody. Wegmans is the Roman forum of our times. When Stevie and I loiter in the upstairs café, we sometimes have a competition as to who will see somebody we recognize first.
"Ms. Larson."
My English teacher last semester. She made us read Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar. On the day we discussed it, she wore a cardboard oven over her head. It was funny, but not nearly as funny as she thought it was.
"She walked up to me in cheese section and told me how brave she thought you were," my mom took a sip of her orange juice. "It was weird."
Uh-oh. My fibromyalgia lie might not be as contained as I thought it was. I tried to come up with a strategy should my mom spring the Worst Possible Case Scenario on me, i.e., that she knew about my forgery. I lied because I'm starved for attention? No, that'll put me in therapy. I don't want to have to talk to Ms. Gabel every week with Stevie, that's for sure. I genuinely believe I have fibromyalgia? No, Mom's a pediatrician. She'd be able to tell I'm not really in pain. Or, if I managed somehow to convince her that I was in constant pain and grinning through it, I'd be in for a PET scan and every available blood test. Definitely don't want to do any of that again.
"She's a weird lady." I said, and hoped that would end the conversation. "You know how English teachers are. You married one." I gestured to the living room. My dad was now singing along to "Edelweiss." Off key, obviously. He's a DiPaolo, after all.
"That's a good point," my mom looked down at her pancakes. "He's one weird dude."
Pffft. I exhaled. Topic was now changed. I was in the clear.
I stood up to get a celebratory pancake from the oven, where Mom had stacked them to keep warm, when I heard a familiar flute solo coming from the living room. Then a tenor began to sing. I had this jolty mental image of Sam Mullingar. In fact, I became certain the singer in question was Sam Mullingar. I ran over to the living room and BAM. Stevie's number one guy was on the screen, with a group of similarly dressed twenty-and-thirty-something men. Sam was clearly the most attractive. He was for sure the group's Justin Timberlake, or the Victoria Beckham, or the Harry Styles.
"GAH!" I squealed, in the process startling my dad. "Stevie's obsessed with this guy!"
"They do a mean version of 'Edelweiss,'" he collected the papers he had been reading into a stack. "Apparently, they'll be giving a concert in the Valley on October 13th. At the Steel Stage."
"You're kidding?" I opened up Snapchat and filmed a shot of Sam hitting Danny Boy's closing notes. I sent it to Stevie, with the caption: ASDFGHJKL. Stevie would love to go to their concert, I'm sure. But October 13th happens to be the same day as our homecoming game, and if you miss a football game without a doctor's excuse, Lang knocks you down a whole letter grade for the quarter. Like I said, band is serious business. Stevie wouldn't go for that. Pharmacology school weighs too heavily on her mind. Gotta keep up that 4.4 GPA, come hell, high water, boring Friday nights, or predictable Monday mornings.
"I considered donating a fifty to our local PBS station to get tickets, but then I remembered your mother hates good music, so," my dad shook his hand, "it stays in my bank account."
I grinned as the opened receipt popped up under my snap. First the conversation with Jesse this morning, and now the televised Gaelic Lightning concert this evening? Stevie's gonna lose her damn mind. What a time to be alive.
***
"I'm losing my mind," Stevie's shoulders dropped. "This doesn't happen to me. He was still messaging me when you sent the snap of the Gaelic Lightning concert."
"See," I pulled Gus into our usual spot in the alley behind the stadium, "now you can thank Seventeen magazine."
"I might have to order a subscription," Stevie reached for her book bag and trombone in the back seat.
I grabbed my clarinet and my backpack and we hopped out of Gus and started for the commons building and early morning band. But before I could ask Stevie more about her emotions re: the conversation she had with Jesse (I already knew what they talked about, she sent me screenshots. Who knew the boy was such an 80s movie fan?), we were greeted by the man of the hour himself.
"Woah! Valerie?" Jesse slammed the driver side door of his blue Ford Focus, parked about three spaces left of Gus. He jumped over the curb and ran up to Stevie and me where we stood on the sidewalk. "I can hardly recognize you."
I caught my reflection in Gus's hood and remembered that no one at school had yet seen my new hair color.
"Oh yeah," I shrugged, "I'm a ginger now."
"I like it," Jesse shook his head and blinked, the way theatrical people do when they see something they can't believe. Jesse didn't previously strike me as particularly theatrical. I wondered about his heterosexuality.
"It was Stevie's idea," I pointed at Stevie with my thumb. Gotta inject her into this convo, I thought, not that she needs my help anymore. "She dared me."
Jesse noticed Stevie, who sucked her lips into her mouth in some weird Irish face/awkward-smile combo. I considered yanking her topknot but decided that behavior might be difficult to explain in front of her beloved.
"Stevie's got excellent taste," Jesse tapped Stevie with his elbow, in what some might consider a flirtatious gesture. "We're similar, in a lot of ways."
YES, I thought, HE IS CLEARLY A HETEROSEXUAL. ALL MY PLANS ARE COMING TOGETHER.
"We are," Stevie looked like she was gonna vom. But she didn't reflexively reach for the phone half-sticking out of her back pocket, so we're making some progress here. HUZZAH, HUZZAH!
"We have many feelings about Rick Moranis," Jesse said.
"He's criminally underrated," Stevie agreed, "both as a comic actor and just a human being." She maintained eye contact with Jesse. She didn't stutter, she didn't mumble. Her voice was neither too quiet nor too loud. My chest ached with pride. Timothy, I thought, their first born child should be named Timothy.
"I am the Keymaster!" Jesse said.
"You will perish in flame, you and all your kind!" Stevie replied.
Sharing movie quotes? I was almost third-wheeling already. If I could have, I would have wiped a happy tear from my eye. And with that, we walked to the commons building together, Jesse and Stevie and I. I was as pleased as punch.
"Hey, so," Jesse stepped in front of us before I could reach for the purple doors of the common building's back entrance (the one closest to the band room), "you said you liked old school Weezer, Stevie?"
"Yeah," Stevie said. She reminded me of a frightened housecat, testing one paw outside the front door.
"You like Weezer too?" Jesse asked me.
"Not particularly." Classic rock, soul, even funk, sure, but 90s pop punk? Ehhh. Truth be told, I'm eclectic with my musical taste, but I wanted to emphasize Stevie and Jesse's similarities. I didn't even know myself that Stevie was into Weezer. Judging by the apprehensive expression I glimpsed on her face, there might be a good chance she wasn't. Oh well, she was now.
"I was going to mention that if you did like Weezer," Jesse squinted up at the sky, "and even if you don't, my band Velociraptor is going to be doing a show at the Secret Art Space this Saturday." He paused, then pointed an index finger at me. "You've heard us play before. At the coffee house?"
"Oh, right," I said. That was true. I forgot about that. Jesse's band sounded decent at the coffee house (but then again, they only did acoustic covers of old Radiohead songs. Hard to gage talent on that).
"We'll be better Saturday," Jesse lifted his hands up, like he was trying to convince us of something. "We'll have the amps and all our instruments, not just the guitar and uke, so you'll get a good listen to our sound, which is kind of noodlely math rock."
I glanced over at Stevie. You could see the star dust in her eyes. Her pupils were SUPER dilated. Her irises were practically enveloped in black.
"I'm just saying," Jesse scratched his ankle with one of his Toms. The boy wears Toms. Of course Stevie's in love with him. "It would be awesome if you girls could come check us out."
Little did he know that Stevie was already checking him out. And had been checking him out for the past three years.
"What say you, Steven?" I suppressed a giggle. "Think we could swing Saturday night?"
I could tell Stevie wasn't expecting me to throw her into the conversation right then, but she did okay. She managed to nod her head with notable enthusiasm.
"Yeah, sure," she swallowed.
"I'll add it to my calendar," I said.
Jesse punched the air in triumph.
***
A/N: Thanks for reading, voting, commenting! Next Update, Tuesday! <3