“My parents used to go to church every week,” I tell Aneesa as we look down at the grave. “They stopped.”
Aneesa seems ill at ease here. I can’t tell if it’s the rampant Christianity or the so-brief span of time etched for all eternity into Lola’s headstone. February to June of the same year. Even though I know—even though I did it—I still double-check every time I visit, recalculating in my head. It seems so wrong, so off to have such an abbreviated life chiseled into granite. But it’s right, of course. It’s right and wrong. LOLA MARIE CODY and two dates and the words LOVED FOR A LIFETIME.
Aneesa toys with the tail of her hijab, her face unreadable. “If they stopped going, why did they bury her here?” There’s a hitch—not quite a hiccup—between they and bury. The word isn’t difficult—it’s the thought. A tiny body, barely a body at all, six feet below where we stand, in a coffin the size of a dollhouse. Unthinkable. And too easily imaginable.
“My mom wanted a place, I guess. A place to come to. I think… I think maybe by making it a separate place, she could separate it in her mind as well. She could leave it here and not carry it with her all the time.”
“And what about your dad?”
I flinch at the mention of him. “He just always went along with whatever Mom wanted. For a while. And then he wouldn’t go along with anything. And they argued over everything. Everything. Like, what kind of toothpaste to buy. Screaming matches over junk like that.”
She sighs. “What about you? Does it help for you to have it here? Does it help you not carry it?”
“I told you—I don’t remember any of it. I don’t have anything to leave here.”
“If you could remember—” she begins.
“Please don’t finish that sentence. I’ve heard it my whole life.” If you could remember, you could get past it.
It’s warm, but she shivers. “Do you want to pray? I can pray with you, if you want.”
“No, that’s okay. I don’t know any prayers.”
“Prayers are just talking to God, is all. There’s no right or wrong way.”
I shake my head. “No. I just like being quiet here.”
She nods. We stand in silence. After a little while, she takes my hand.
Less than I want. More than I deserve.
Should have kissed her.
Why didn’t I kiss her?
She took my hand. She made the move. Why didn’t I kiss her?
Because I’m going away.
Am I? Am I still?
I think. I think I need to. I think.
Should have kissed her.
Evan: You there?
Me: Where?
Evan: lol I’m home now. tired. hang tomorrow?
Me: OK
Aneesa: Awake?
Evan: Where/when?
Me: Yeah
Me: sammpark 2?
Aneesa: Can I call or too late?
Evan: k
Me: Sure
Aneesa: Ring ring! lol
“I have an awesome idea,” Aneesa says when I answer.
“I’m sure.” I can hear her tapping a pen against the lid of her laptop, a tic that expresses itself whenever she consults our YouTube analytics page. “What’s wrong with our numbers?”
“Nothing’s wrong with them. I just want to keep it that way. We got a nice bump from the extravaganza, but I’m worried that once we’re only pizza-ing on the weekends, we’ll lose all of our momentum. I think we need one more big push right before school. Something that will get people’s notice and keep them interested. Sort of a ‘wow, who knows what they’ll do next!’ kind of thing. Then we can coast a little.”
Heaving out a sigh, I try to keep a note of whining out of my voice. “I made four pizzas in one day. What else can I do?”
“Livestream.”
“What?”
“Do it live. No recording. No editing. No second takes. We stream it live.”
I have always been confident in my skills, and the summer has honed them and made me even more confident. That’s what making something like a couple dozen different pizzas in a row will do for you. Still, the idea of a livestream just seems to beg for disaster. “I don’t know. What’s the point? It’s the same thing as a regular episode, just live. There’s nothing exciting about it.”
“It’s the unknown factor. People tune in because they think anything could happen.”
“Listen to yourself. It’s pizza, not surgery. What, do they think I’m going to set myself on fire or burn the house down?”
“I don’t know what they think. I don’t care. I just want them to watch. Maybe…” Her voice bursts into a musical giggle for a moment. “Oh, man, I’ve got it! We make it a challenge! People love stuff like that. We make it a thing where people tell you—live—what ingredients to use and you have to come up with a pizza.”
“Ugh. I don’t know.… That doesn’t sound like fun.”
“You don’t have to do it every time, or all the time. Just every now and then. It’ll get lots of attention drawn to you. Lots of views and hits and comments. We could start pulling in some advertising and make money on this. That would pretty amazing, right?”
“Do we have to let them tell me what to make? I sort of have my own ideas about what makes a good pizza. It all sounds a little too Chopped to me.”
She sighs noisily into my ear. “What if we just make it like a Q&A? We’ll let people ask questions. I mean, a lot of our comments are questions about making pizza. You could answer them live.”
“A lot of our comments are sexist and racist and, and, and—”
“The word you’re looking for is Islamophobic.”
“Right. That.”
“But mixed in there are genuine questions.”
Now it’s my turn to sigh. “You want to open the floor to the idiots who troll you in the comments? For every person who asks about kneading dough or preheating a pizza stone, you’re gonna get ten jackasses promising to stuff you like a grape leaf.”
“That’s an image I’d like to scrub from my brain.”
“I’m trying to impress upon you how—”
“Once again, Sebastian, I don’t need you to protect me. You worry about the cooking—let me worry about the comment trolls.”
I surrender. Sometimes I feel like that’s all I do with her.
I meet Evan at SAMMPark in our usual spot, near the statue of Susan Ann Marchetti. He looks the same, dressed too casually in jeans and a T-shirt that individually cost more than everything I’m wearing, yet designed to look as raggedy as my own clothes. Wish someone could explain that to me.
“How was Illuminati Camp?” I ask him, clasping his hand.
“Man, I missed you and not understanding half of what you say.” He reels me in for a one-armed bro-hug, which I reciprocate. It’s good to see him again. Texts and e-mails and Instagrams aren’t the same.
We break our clinch, grinning, and walk into the park. “Half of what I say? On your best day, you get maybe twenty, twenty-five percent of my references. The Illuminati are these guys who are rumored to secretly rule the world. Have since, like, olden times—”
“Oh, those guys.” He waves at the air. “Sure, sure. Dad has them over for poker on the third Saturday of every month.”