That night, Mom knocks on my door. She doesn’t actually come in, but rather leans against the frame. I realize that I can’t remember the last time she came into my room.
I’m on the bed, flipping through a copy of Replay, a book from 1986 that I reread at least once a year. It’s about a man who dies and wakes up to discover he’s in his own past, able to live his life again. I consider it the me-equivalent of the Bible—most likely full of nonsense, but comforting to fantasize about.
“You can do it,” Mom says.
It takes me a moment to connect her words to Sebastian’s Pies.
“Are you serious?”
“I think you should change the URL or the name of the… it’s not really a company, is it?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Well, you should change it. But go ahead, Sebastian. Do it.” She grimaces for just a moment. “But you really need to commit to this. This isn’t just a hobby now, or something you do when you’re hungry or bored. You need to commit.”
“Got it.”
She nods. “It’s good to see you smiling.”
I hadn’t realized I was. I widen it a little, just to see how it feels. Then I grab my phone to text Aneesa, but an idea occurs to me. Before Mom can get away, I make her stand in the doorway, and I record her saying, “Hello, Aneesa. That was a very persuasive presentation. I hope you and Sebastian enjoy your little venture.” She’s a good sport about it and says it with more enthusiasm than I believe she actually feels.
It takes a couple of minutes for the video to shoot over to Aneesa, but then I get back a flurry of emoji, one of which is a pair of kissing lips, and I think, Really? Maybe?
And that night, I don’t bother asking the voice if it’s time yet. Because for the first time that I can remember, I don’t want to know.
We figure we’ll do a video each week, which seems manageable.
Right. The first week on YouTube is something of a disaster.
Our first pizza—a pesto sauce with homemade whole wheat crust infused with basil—is a massive success. Our first video, less so.
Other than shooting short blurts of video to send to friends and family, neither Aneesa nor I have ever recorded anything of any substantial length. We quickly realize that we need to learn how to edit, not merely for length, but also for pacing and clarity. Aneesa finds an online tutorial (on YouTube, of course) about editing video and stays up late figuring it out.
By mutual agreement, we change the name of our channel to “Sebastian Cooks,” both to avoid the spying connotation and to make it sound more active, more urgent. I also insist that we not show my face—there’s no point to it. The focus is supposed to be on the pizza, so we show only my hands as I go about prepping and cooking. Besides, this way, whenever I fumble in my improvisational recitation of my process, it’s easy to lay in a new soundtrack in editing.
Aneesa reluctantly agrees and takes long, lingering shots of the ingredients, as well as dropping in the occasional slo-mo of my hands kneading the dough.
“It’s called ‘food porn’ for a reason,” she points out.
Week two’s video is much better. Our second pizza is a cornmeal crust with pepper jack, grilled jalape?os, and onions; a real mouth-burner. In one week, Aneesa has mastered the camera and the software, and the video looks great. We post it and get precisely zero views, despite sending out the link on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
“We need velocity,” Aneesa says. We’re sprawled on the floor of her living room, laptop open before us to the Sebastian Cooks page. It’s been a couple of days since we posted the second video, and a whole lot of nothing has transpired. She idly taps REFRESH over and over, hoping to see the view count increment. No luck. “John and Hank Green posted videos every single day when they started Brotherhood 2.0.”
“I can do every day,” I tell her.
She shakes her head. “There are only so many combinations of ingredients. I don’t want you to burn through your repertoire before we get any traction.”
“It’s pizza. There’s an infinite number of things you can do with it. Don’t worry about that. But look—school starts in, like, a month. We’ll have to cut back on this then. Now’s the time to go nuts, right? So let’s do a pizza a day.”
She clucks her tongue, deep in thought. Her brows come together like two waves cresting at each other, or like the top half of a heart.
“Will your mom be okay with pizza every day?”
I shrug. Mom’s paying for the ingredients, so technically I guess she has to okay it. “If you look at it a certain way, this was all her idea. She’s the one who wanted me to do something with my time this summer. Besides, who could get sick of pizza?”
And so we begin cranking out pizzas and videos every day. Despite my confidence in the unlimited variety of pizza permutations, I am—inside—a bit worried that my pizza-crafting mojo might falter or wane as time goes on. In order to pace myself, I alternate inventive—white pizza with roasted artichokes, sun-dried tomatoes, and Bella Vita cheese on parsley-infused crust—with faithful standards—mozzarella and pepperoni with margherita, the pepperonis cut into wedge shapes to make them stand out from the usual.
I narrate each step as I go along, and Aneesa inserts herself and her phone into my workspace to catch the close-up details. We still have some difficulties to overcome—I’m not used to someone in my space while I cook, and she isn’t sure how to capture everything without interfering. But by our fifth video—a white pizza with sliced summer squash, arugula, chiles, and fontina cheese over a basic Neapolitan crust—we have a system down that works for us, with Aneesa devising an on-the-fly series of taps on my side to indicate if I should slow down, speed up, or do something again.
Our follower and viewer counts begin to grow the tiniest bit, but nothing beyond low double digits. Each night, I sink into bed and into a confusion of emotions. Baking new pizzas every day is tiring but energizing at the same time. Working with Aneesa is intoxicating (or so I assume, having never been intoxicated), but the lack of attention paid to Sebastian Cooks frustrates me. If I’m going to do this, I want to do it well. And I want people to acknowledge that.
It’s all just a distraction, says the voice one night.
It catches me off guard. I’d almost forgotten the voice. Is it speaking the truth? Is this all just a distraction? A pleasant diversion before the gruesome finale, what they call in opera the Grand Guignol?
Just a distraction.
But a good one.
At the beginning of the third week of our endeavor, Aneesa comes over early, a very grave, worried expression on her face.
“What’s wrong?” I guide her into the living room.
“Don’t be mad,” she says, plopping her laptop down on the coffee table.
“I’m not mad.”
“Don’t get mad, is what I mean.”
“Why would I get mad?”
“Promise.”