Right?
She’s sprawled prone on the sofa, chin resting on a pillow. I’m leaning against the sofa, sitting on the floor. We recorded at her house today, which her parents are cool with since this isn’t just messing around—it’s “a productive endeavor.” And now we each have a slice of pumpkin-manchego pizza. Until this afternoon, we’d somehow missed making a video of what Aneesa calls “our inaugural pizza.” Mrs. Fahim—Sara, I mean—pronounced it “truly amazing” when we offered her a slice. I’m officially expanding my clientele.
“I don’t get this,” Aneesa complains for the fifth time since starting the show. “Why is everything so grainy? Why does he look like that? Those are the worst computer graphics ever.”
“It’s from the 1980s. And Max Headroom isn’t computer-generated. They actually used makeup and prosthetics on the actor to make him look like something computer-generated.”
“It’s not working,” she says drily. “So, wait—why did that other guy’s head explode?”
“Because of the blipverts.”
“The blipverts.”
“Right.”
“Which are…”
“Hypercondensed, subliminal commercials that get beamed directly into your head. They’re killing people by accident, but no one—”
My phone chooses this moment to bleat for attention. Aneesa’s does, too. I pause the video, and we both check our phones.
“We did it!” she shouts an instant before I realize why.
We’ve both received an e-mail from YouTube with our latest stats—we’ve gone over ten thousand subscribers. By exactly one. We have attained the palindromic status of 10,001 subscribers.
“We did it!” she shouts again.
It’s a false milestone—nothing special happens at 10,000 subscribers—but it’s one we’ve been anticipating as our subscriber base has grown. More subscribers mean, ideally, more views. And more views mean that Aneesa’s plan to monetize the channel might actually work.
Almost in spite of myself, I’m obeying Mom’s command to be productive.
“I can’t believe this many people want to watch you eat pizza.”
“They’re watching you make it first, dummy. Don’t you read the comments?”
“Not anymore.” It’s Rule One of survival on the Internet.
“Well, the ones who aren’t jackasses are mostly complimenting you on your mad skills. One guy says he’s a chef at a place in Des Moines and would totally offer you a job.”
I snort. “Ah, yes. Des Moines, Iowa. Renowned as the pizza capital of the world.”
She bats me with a throw pillow, then does it again for good measure. “It’s a compliment, you idiot! Learn to accept it!”
I deflect another blow from the pillow. We’re both breathing hard and now would be a good time, but, no. Why? Because always “but, no,” that’s why.
And because sometimes I catch her looking at me with pity. Sometimes, I catch her looking sad. And I get it, I really do, but I can’t let it happen now, under those circumstances. Not out of pity.
It’s not fair, what she could do to me, or what I could do to her.
“We need another gimmick,” she says for no particular reason.
“Hitting me with pillows, perhaps?”
“No. Too easy.” Punctuating her point, she craftily bonks me atop my head with a stealth swing I don’t see coming. “I’m thinking of something outside the box a little.”
“Outside the pizza box, you mean?”
She groans and feints with the pillow. I flinch. “Who told you you were funny? Who lied to you so viciously? What,” she goes on, “can we do that’s different?”
“I still have ideas for some recipes—”
“That’s not what I mean. Maybe we should try something other than pizza.”
“Pizza’s our schtick,” I argue. “And besides, I don’t really know how to make much of anything else.”
“I just want to keep our numbers growing.”
“I know.”
“I mean, pretend we are a restaurant.” She leans back on the sofa, arms crossed at her belly, hands clasped. She stares at the ceiling. “Say we’re the best pizza restaurant in the world. People love us. We’re packed, lunch and dinner. Our head chef obstinately refuses to cook anything but pizza—”
“Scrupulously refuses.”
“—so we can’t branch out that way. What do we do?”
Gloriously, I know. I know in an instant, I have the answer.
“Breakfast,” I tell her.
She sits up and blinks at me. “Breakfast pizza?”
“Yep. Breakfast pizza. You said our restaurant is full for lunch and dinner. So we do breakfast.”
Her eyes light up. She leans closer to me. “Not just breakfast. The whole deal.”
“We already do lunch and dinner, though.” Now I’m confused.
“We do it all at once.” She hops off the sofa and grabs her laptop. “We do it next week. Right before school starts. An all-day extravaganza. To juice our numbers so that when we drop to a weekly schedule for the school year, we have some padding to lose people. You’ll make pizza for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”
“And dessert,” I tell her. I have to top her.
“Dessert?” she asks. Then: “Dessert!” she chortles and begins pounding at the keyboard.
Evan: Hey theres a guy here whos dad has some yt channel w like a billion followers want me to send him your link?
Me: OK
I type “OK,” but inside I experience a whirlwind.
I never really anticipated the pizza channel accomplishing anything. I never imagined it as an achievement. At first, it was nothing more than a convenient distraction, a way to keep Mom from nagging, an excuse to spend time with Aneesa.
And now it’s like something’s been born. Unintentionally, sure, but good, in its own way.
But holding me back?
Maybe?
I don’t know anymore.
I don’t know anything.
I want to keep baking pizza.
I want to go away.
I want to figure out how Aneesa feels about me.
I want to end it all.
I want.
I want.
I want.
I want too much and I don’t know what I want at all.
It used to be so easy, so clear.
I stay up late. I have to figure out how to make a pizza crust out of cookie dough.
On the last Wednesday before school starts, we do what Aneesa has billed in messages to our subscribers and on social media as “The All-Day Pizza Extravaganza.”
At 8:30, Mom leaves for work. At 8:45, Aneesa arrives. “Are we ready?”
“Yeah.”
First up is breakfast pizza: a layered soft taco shell crust with a black bean sauce topped with scrambled eggs, salsa verde, and crumbled blue corn tortillas. The blue verges to brown in the heat of the oven, so the impact of the blue chips against the yellow eggs and green salsa doesn’t work the way I wanted it to. But when Aneesa takes her on-screen mouthful, she pronounces it “super-amazing,” so I consider the experiment a success.