The Rival

Chapter Four

By Sunday I’m not not panicking about what direction I want to take the first assignment. Between cheering Christina on at her first official race with her favorite MOVE FASTER, BITCH sign, attending a Disney villain–themed party with one of the theater kids on our floor, and the impressive workload from our first week of classes, I haven’t had a solid chunk of time to think about my options.

Hence this long solo walk around campus, during which I’ve decided it’s high time for a long-honored moment of WWJD: What Would Jerry Do? The difference being that this time, I’ll get to do it as me, myself, and (decidedly procrastinating) I.

By the end of the walk I’ve decided that instead of just picking one of the student orgs to cover, I’ll go full immersion and attend one of their events. The Dorm Food-Off run by the Foodie Club seems promising, both for the sake of compelling journalism and the sake of “I might get free food.” I’m about to do my due diligence by finding a bench to jot down potential headlines when I get an incoming FaceTime call from Hadley.

I swipe, and a second later I see the side of my little sister’s wild curls, her hair the same strawberry-blond color as mine.

“Hey, squirt. How’s it shaking?”

Hadley turns toward the screen and my stomach instantly lurches; her eyes are red-rimmed from crying. This is a daily occurrence but still one for concern, because I never know if it’s the nine times out of ten she’s crying over something ridiculous, like an actor she has a crush on dating another actor she doesn’t like, or if it’s the shitty tenth time when someone’s legitimately wronged her.

But then those same eyes widen comically, enough that I figure we’re in the clear.

“I forgot about your haircut,” says Hadley, holding the screen closer to her face as if to get a better look. “Badass.”

I run a hand through the top of it, feeling especially vain since one of our hallmates let me use her fancy hair-drying brush this morning. “Thanks. What are the sad eyes about?”

Hadley bites her lower lip. “I just—was wondering when you’re coming home?”

Gut, meet punch. “Why? What’s wrong?”

She shakes her head. “It’s just—Marley got another parking ticket on Dad’s car and Dad’s losing his marbles over that cat parade and Mom won’t stop Phil Dunphy–ing. I feel like if you were here then maybe it wouldn’t be so—I don’t know.” She pouts into the screen. “We could go get ice cream or something.”

After eighteen years of existing, I have a loose scoring system of Brighton Family Drama in my head. It scales from the range of “one” being “everyone’s finally asleep” to “ten” being “one of these four people I’m related to is about to break the sound barrier and/or get us kicked out of this Taco Bell.” I typically don’t intervene for anything less than a six anymore, and this feels like a four.

But a four feels entirely different from a hundred miles away. I slide my hand out of my hair, which feels strangely heavy again.

“I know,” I tell her. “I wish I could.”

She seizes onto the words so hopefully that it isn’t just a gut punch but a full-body squeeze. “Maybe next weekend?”

I know it’s well within my rights to set a boundary here. That I’m eighteen and entitled to space from my family, especially in the first literal two weeks of school. But there’s no real precedent for this in my family either. Not just for their resident peacekeeper moving away, but anyone moving away. Before Marley bailed on school to start a photography business with her friend, she was taking classes at the local college she had a scholarship for, so she’s never even left home. It only heightens the guilt I have not just for leaving, but the absurd relief of it.

“I have something due,” I say, which isn’t a lie. I have multiple things due. Anyway, time for another classic Brighton Family Conflict Avoidant Strategy, which is a quick pivot. “Are you excited for freshman year?”

Hadley’s eyes well up like I said the precise words to conjure them.

“Oh, Hads.”

She shakes her head, sniffling. “It’s just I got my schedule and I have no classes with any of my friends.”

It’s practically autopilot, the way I iron my voice out, keeping the words low and soothing. I have a different tone for counterbalancing every member of my family, and thankfully Hadley’s is a quiet one. “You hardly get to talk to people in classes anyway. Get people to switch lockers with your buddies so you can hang out with them in between.”

“And all my teachers have either had Marley or you, so they’re going to think I’m, like, a party animal or a total Goody Two-shoes—”

“Hey—”

“—and I don’t even know what I am. Or what to wear. Or how long it’s going to be until someone takes me out for ice cream. So you should come home.”

I take a deep breath, trying to steady my resolve. As if summoned to crack it, I hear my mom yelling in the background, “ Move, I think it’s gained sentience, ” which can only mean that by “Phil Dunphy–ing,” Hadley meant she’s been messing with the knockoff Roomba again. Not a beat later there’s a muffled thunk noise and the sound of Marley snapping, “Are you kidding ? How the hell am I supposed to talk the judge out of this ticket tomorrow with my best jeans covered in cat dander?” Right on cue my dad calls from another room, “It’s not Meowtwo’s fault you keep refusing to learn how to parallel park.”

Hadley just stares at the screen, nostrils flaring but her face otherwise deadpan, her eyes reflecting an unspoken See?

There’s another thunk and the sound of my parents cackling, but Marley’s voice easily drowns them out. “This isn’t funny, you absolute monsters—Dad, if you eat my last pancake I swear I will graffiti ‘adopt me’ all over Meowtwo’s parade float—”

“You’re having pancakes?” I blurt.

Hadley’s brow furrows. “Well, yeah. It’s Sunday.”

My throat is suddenly thick. “Yeah. Of course.” I clear the thickness out and ask, “So Seb’s parents are there?”

“If they’ve survived Doomba’s attack,” she says, eyes cast on the door to her bedroom. The one that, only two weeks ago, I used to share with her. “They got here an hour ago.”

It’s a ridiculous thing to catch me off guard. Our families have been doing Pancake Sunday since before any of us were born, and they must have done it last week when I was gone, too. But there’s something about being on the sidelines of it—something about seeing my empty bed in the background of my screen, surrounded by my bare wall—that makes me suddenly ache for their chaos in a way I didn’t think was possible. I miss their noise, I miss their complete lack of regard for personal space. I miss the way our parents poured rainbow sprinkles all over Seb’s and my pancakes, because they did it the weekend we both turned three and we were so excited they never stopped.

“Want me to pass you around?” Hadley asks.

I consider it for a moment, but I know how it’ll go. If I get passed to one family member I’ll get passed to them all and have to go through variations of this over and over. The excitement and the anxiety of the undone assignment already has me feeling like I’m in a pressure cooker—I can’t be the calm, placating Sadie they need right now.

For a brief moment I consider telling my parents about the zine, like it might relieve some of that pressure, for them to know. But I unconsider it just as fast. They don’t know about Jerry or the comics I wrote or the wry running monologues I’ve had in my head. I have no doubt they’d support me, but no amount of explaining I could do between now and that assignment deadline would make them understand. It could only shake me. Make me feel like more of a fraud than I already do. Seb’s curious words echo in my ear: You barely ever wrote for the paper by the end. Why do you want to do Newsbag ?

I shake my head.

“Nah, I’d better get a move on,” I tell Hadley apologetically. “I’ll call back later tonight. But hey, I bet you could convince Marley to take you thrifting before school starts. And you’re not supposed to know what you are yet. Nobody does. That’s the whole point of high school. You’re gonna be fine.”

Hadley twists her lips to the side, unconvinced, but nods. “Tell Seb I said hi?” she asks. “Maybe he can come back for a visit, too.”

Oof. Hadley may be the entire reason Seb and I even have our second mode for our families in the first place. She glommed onto Seb the moment my mom propped his four-year-old elbow under a pillow and let him hold her for the first time. I’d take it personally, but it’s hard when he has a knack for wrestling a smile out of her even in her most melodramatic “Sadley” moments.

All of which is to say, it would break her heart if she had any idea that Seb and I have been in an all-out academic brawl for most of the time she’s spent on this earth.

“I’ll tell him,” I say, because odds are I’ll run into him sooner than later. “Talk soon, Hads.”

I blow her a kiss, and she blows one back, and I sink into the bench after we hang up, uneasy and unable to fully articulate why.

“Oh, hey, future Newsbag writer.”

Joey plants himself on the bench, yanking off his headphones and keeping a healthy distance because he’s covered in sweat. I must have missed him jogging past.

“Hey,” I say reflexively, and then when I process his words I shake my head. “And we’ll see about that.”

Joey smiles widely. “Eh, I’ve got a good feeling.”

That makes one of us, but I’m not about to go fishing for compliments from someone who’s never even seen my writing.

“Thanks again for that cookie,” I tell him. “I meant to take you up on campus recs, but turns out the first week of college is nuts.”

Joey hikes one of his legs up on the bench with the restless energy of a kid just let out for recess. “No expiration date on that offer.”

“In that case, do you know a good place to get pancakes around here?”

I’m not even sure what possesses me to ask. What am I going to do, sit alone in an IHOP marinating in my weird feelings?

But then Joey narrows his eyes like he’s sizing me up. “Depends. How thick is your skin?”

I raise my eyebrows at him. “If you met my family you wouldn’t be asking me that.”

Joey laughs, then leans in conspiratorially. “Well, in that case, you know the alley off Main Street? The one behind the bookstore?”

I tilt my head. “Are these like, black-market pancakes?”

“No, no, it’s cool.” He seems to ponder his own words for a moment, then adds, “But also, uh, if Betty asks who sent you, I had nothing to do with it.”

Somewhere in the last five seconds this became less about the pancakes and more about the breakfast crime ring I may have just accidentally uncovered. “Who is Betty?”

Joey just shakes his head at me. “It’s best to experience Betty with an open mind. Anyway, follow the alley, and there’s a little place at the end of it with a blue awning that may or may not be open, depending on Betty’s mood.”

I search Joey’s face. Once I’m satisfied there is zero carb-related murderous intent in it, I say, “All right. I trust you. But also if nobody hears from me again, I guess you’ll be the only one who knows what happened.”

Joey pulls himself off the bench. “I’m not worried,” he says, looking pleased with himself. “I’m counting on hearing from you again.”

Joey’s smile gets all close-lipped and shy like it did back at the fair, but he salutes me and takes off before I can read too much into it. A few minutes later I’m off campus and walking on the stretch of the town’s main street just beyond it, where there is a cluster of cafés and local businesses and bars. Today it’s crowded not just with students but families pushing strollers and window-shopping side by side, the noises of campus now cut with the sounds of babies and scurrying feet and parents calling in every direction.

The ache is back then, so pronounced that by the time I reach the little alley off Main Street I am in perilous danger of opening up Christina’s infamous “Feeling Sorry for Myself” Spotify playlist. I force myself to shake it off when I find the blue awning. Or rather, my confusion swallows it. There’s a window with lacy curtains and a door that’s propped open slightly, but I can’t see much of the inside. Only with a fair amount of squinting do I manage to decipher a tiny white sign propped in the corner of the window, which says PANCAKE IT OR LEAVE IT in dainty blue script so small it almost seems like an accident.

Well. Joey’s alive to tell the tale of whatever this is, and no offense to him, but he doesn’t look like he’d make it past the first ten minutes of any blockbuster horror movie. If he can handle it, so can I.

I slide through the open door, relieved that it does appear to be some kind of establishment. The space is small and cozy with a certain retro flair, with a few clusters of empty wooden tables and chairs with little pink-and-blue tufted seat cushions tied to them. By the front door there’s a small grill behind a partition, where a tall, large, and decidedly imposing woman in her forties is standing, her scowl entirely at odds with the bright-pink floral apron that says BETTY in the same neat script as the sign outside.

When she doesn’t so much as look up, I take a curious step forward. The buttery warm smell of cooked pancakes wafts so miraculously in my direction that I have to shut my mouth before I start drooling.

“Hi?” I manage.

Her answer is immediate, her voice low and gruff. “‘Hi’ isn’t on the menu, kid. Say what you want or scram.”

My eyes scan the space until I find a piece of paper taped to the side of the grill. It just says PANCAKES .

“I’ll, uh—have the pancakes?”

Within seconds she has slung four generously sized fresh buttered pancakes onto a plate with one hand while deftly drizzling maple syrup on them with the other. She pushes the plate on the counter in my direction without a word.

I should probably ask how to pay or where I should sit, but instead I blurt out, at my own peril, “Do you have any sprinkles?”

This is what finally makes Betty deign to look at me, only so she can aim the full force of her scowl in my direction. She even sets her spatula down as if she needs full use of her body to absorb my audacity. I should probably be scared—now that she’s lifted her head I can see that her baseball cap literally says MEAN OLD BITCH in embroidered cursive—but the pancakes smell so good I’ve forgotten all my survival instincts.

“The hell is wrong with this year’s new lot?” she demands. “That punk in the back asked the same thing.”

I turn even though there’s no doubt in my mind who a sprinkles-requesting punk might be on this particular day, on this particular campus. Sure enough, there’s Seb, watching me from a back table with a cheeky grin.

“Delicious habits die hard, huh?” he says, using his foot to pull out the chair opposite him.

My cheeks warm at the sight of him. It’s strange to think I was prepared to go weeks without seeing Seb, now that I know how strange it feels not seeing him for a few days at a time.

“I don’t fraternize with the enemy,” I say just the same.

“We’re so fraternized we’re practically Gorilla Glued.” He tilts his head at the seat. “C’mon. It’s tradition.”

I set my pancakes in the empty spot across from him. Once we’re both settled in, we wordlessly lift our forks, me to put one of my pancakes on his plate, him to spoon more syrup onto mine. It’s just for practicality’s sake. It’s been too many years for us not to have each other’s syrup-to-pancake ratios memorized.

“Surprised to see you alone,” I say, tilting my plate to swish the syrup around. “Where are all your fans? You ran out of insufferable charm this early in the semester?”

Seb shrugs, not taking the bait. “I thought I’d do some wandering. Get the lay of the land and all. I stumbled on this place yesterday and wasn’t sure if they’d be open, or I’d have given you a heads-up.”

It’s rare to see Seb anywhere without a cluster of friends, but this also tracks. He’s got this habit of disappearing down rabbit holes and popping back up at random. Our families vacation together every summer, and by now we’re all used to Seb seamlessly inserting himself back into the pack to report on a hole-in-the-wall secondhand bookstore he thinks Marley will like or a hot-dog stand with wacky condiment options we should all go to for lunch.

“No worries. Joey told me.”

I’m mostly saying it to intimidate Seb—he’s not the only one who can chummy up to the other writers at Newsbag —except Seb smirks into the fork aimed at his mouth. “Oh, did he?”

I spear my own pancake with gusto, not even bothering to cut it up before I lean in to bite a piece off. “Is that a trick question?”

Seb shakes his head, watching me go full caveman with amusement. I have no shame, and nor should anyone eating these. They’re melt-in-your mouth delicious, sweet at the tip of your tongue and warm and buttery at the edges, like my mouth just entered a new dimension of pancake existence beyond our mortal realm.

“Holy shit,” I say, my mouth still full. It’s unfortunate for all my future hopes and dreams that achieving them probably won’t stand out in my mind half as vividly as that first bite of pancake just did.

“Damn straight,” Betty agrees from the front.

Seb waits until I’ve finished making a scene, then says, “What I mean is Joey clearly has a little crush.”

I frown. “What would make you think that?”

Seb really does laugh then. “Sadie, for one of the most observant people I’ve ever met, you’re deeply oblivious sometimes.”

My cheeks burn not because of Seb’s words but the way he delivers them. There’s a strange weight in his tone, in the way his eyes linger on mine before he directs his attention back to his plate.

I settle back into my chair and consider this, but my brain has other ideas. That’s the problem with never having been kissed, is it does this unhelpful thing where sometimes in my waking state it just—cuts to commercial. Like it’s advertising different future versions of my life. And in these highly specific commercials, I envision what it might be like to kiss the person I’m thinking about.

So naturally in this particular commercial break, I try to envision kissing Joey. The set isn’t particularly creative. The neuron directing the scenario takes us back to the bench where I was not twenty minutes ago. Instead of getting up, he smiles that bashful close-lipped smile and leans in. He closes his eyes and I close mine. He still smells of salty fresh sweat, his energy eager and kind. There’s a quick flutter under my ribs. A good sign.

But then the commercial abruptly shifts in tone. No cheerful “this prescription will fix one annoying thing and destroy all your other organs” music lightly playing in the background, but heightened perfect silence. He reaches up and cups the back of my neck, his fingers weaving into the thick waves of my new hair, and pulls me in so fiercely that for a moment, both in the commercial and the waking world, I forget to breathe.

But then there’s a playful little scratch on the back of my neck, and I realize it’s not Joey I’m imagining. It’s Seb.

I shake my head abruptly. “No,” I blurt.

Then actual Seb is in front of me again, blinking back at me with the same warm brown eyes that a split second ago were inches from my imaginary face. “Nah. I call them like I see them. Joey’s got it bad.”

I believe him only because by now Seb has enough experience with people crushing on him to get it endorsed as a skill on LinkedIn. “Huh.”

We both busy ourselves with our pancakes then, the conversation hitting a rare dead end. With anyone else I’d feel responsible for filling the silence, but it’s never been that way with Seb. Third mode means there’s no ordinary decorum required, which is why I know he’s actually curious and not just being polite when he speaks up a few minutes later.

“So have you decided the topic of your first piece?”

“Sure have,” I say cheerfully. “You?”

“Same. I was thinking—”

“Whoa, whoa, slow down there, buddy.”

Seb raises his eyebrows at me. I raise mine back.

“It’s bad enough that we have to take each other down all over again.” I point my fork at him. “Don’t go willingly giving me ammo to sabotage you. That’s not how this works.”

Seb rolls his eyes. “We both know you’re not going to sabotage me.”

“Says who?” I ask. I nudge his shin under the table with my sneaker. “Maybe I’ve just spent the last few years lulling you into a false sense of security.”

He nudges right back, only his foot lingers against mine. “Or maybe my ‘insufferable charm’ is finally starting to rub off on you, and you’re starting to hate me a little less.”

My answer is immediate, almost reflexive. “I don’t hate you.”

The words weren’t meant to be particularly profound, but Seb goes very still at them. For a moment Pancake It or Leave It feels even emptier than empty.

“You don’t?” he asks.

There’s something in the way he’s watching me that makes my face warm enough for Betty to use it as a backup grill. “Do you hate me ?”

I’m half joking when I ask it, but suddenly his answer matters to me, too. Thankfully it comes just as fast.

“No,” he says. “Of course not.”

I shift in my seat. “Well, okay.”

And then for the first time I can remember there’s a silence between us that neither of us knows what to do with. Not hating each other doesn’t change our current predicament, which is the same one we’ve had for years: the other one existing.

“Well, then—since we’ve established a mutual unhatred—maybe this time around we don’t worry about taking each other down?” He’s biting down a wry, self-conscious smile, like he’s already prepared for my full-thesis statement on why there’s no way in hell I’ll agree to that. “We just… do our best and have fun with it?”

“Have fun,” I repeat, my voice deadpan.

Seb’s sneakered foot is still resting on mine. He taps it lightly. “Like we did back in the day?”

I open my mouth to protest, because none of this was ever fun. Or at least, the stress of it almost always outweighed the thrill of our little triumphs over each other.

But when I meet Seb’s eyes again they’re missing their usual spark of mischief. There’s something soft in them, almost sad. Something that makes me understand that “back in the day” goes further back than most of them—back to a time when we weren’t just pretending to be friends in front of our classmates but actually, genuinely were. When we pranked each other not for spite but for sport.

We were pint-sized in those days. I shouldn’t be able to remember it so well, but our whole worlds revolved around those little pranks. Our parents were in on it, too, happy to take us to the dollar store every other weekend to stock us up on a whoopee cushion for me to slide under Seb’s living-room couch or a cheap funnel for Seb to replace my toothpaste with cake frosting. I’m not sure how it even started—one of the countless little understandings with Seb I don’t know how to explain, because they were built into me the same way breathing was—but I sure know how it ended.

It was the end-of-the-year talent show in our third-grade class, and what would be our first and last friendly competition. Seb decided to learn a series of “Is this your card?” types of tricks to play on our classmates. He wanted to win like nobody’s business, practicing to the point of obsession, but I felt especially smug because he refused to show anybody aside from me the secrets behind them.

But I was also especially nervous, because after sneak-watching so many live comedy shows while my parents were distracted with the new baby, I’d decided I was going to stage a sketch of my own. I wrote my very first “script” by hand with little jokes I’d come up with in my head. I got my teacher to help me use the hot-glue gun to make sock-puppet characters with googly eyes and felt. I rehearsed it in my room every night for a week. I didn’t care about winning the way Seb did, because even at eight years old, the sketch was rubbing up against something too per sonal for me to worry about prizes. I was just worried about what people would think.

The stakes already felt perilously high for my little-kid brain, but I was calm when I crouched behind the barrier I’d made out of two chairs, my script at my feet. That is, until I lifted my tiny puppeted hands, moved my thumb, and heard a sharp squaaaaawwk.

I frowned. Tried moving the puppet again. Another awful, ridiculous squawk!!! came out of it, and then an identical one out of the puppet in my other hand. Later I would discover Seb had rigged them with his dog’s squeaker toys—which he counted on me being able to feel in the puppets and pull them out right away—but it didn’t matter. Everyone was already laughing, the volume only kicking up every time one of the puppets sounded off. I wasn’t going to be able to tell my jokes. I already was the joke.

I didn’t just cry. I had a full-on snot-rocketing, tail-spinning meltdown. When I didn’t calm down after a half hour the teacher didn’t know what to do except call home. I’ll never forget the way both my parents busted into the front office in complete abject panic, my mom still wearing her “I’m in the coding zone” blue-light glasses and my dad with baby Hadley strapped to his chest. They were so worked up and loud with their concern that half the staff was on their feet before my parents even reached me. It was the first time I remember feeling that itch of discomfort, the awareness of everyone’s eyes on us. Of understanding that my parents weren’t quite like other people’s parents—they were twice as much and twice as unaware of it.

Later they’d make fun of themselves for the commotion. “Sadie was always such a quiet little thing!” my mom would laugh when she recounted the story over dinner with the cousins or the Saturday afternoons we hosted her D&D group. “We figured if the school was getting in touch with us that the sky had fallen down.”

“Only time she ever gave us trouble. Unlike those two,” my dad would joke, pointing at my sisters. “We’ve never had to waste money on a gym membership. They keep us on our toes.”

It was a dynamic that wouldn’t fully cement itself until we were older, but the day of Squawkgate I understood enough to lay the foundation for it: acting out scared my parents. Acting any kind of way other than quiet good little Sadie knocked the whole Brighton family out of orbit. So from that day I was careful to be what my sisters weren’t, to be what my parents expected me to be. No more theatrics. No more commotion.

And absolutely no more games with Seb. Not if he cared about winning more than he cared about me.

The rest of the details are hazy in that little-kid way, where I don’t know how much of it is actual memory and how much of it is the story I started to tell myself about it. I know this much: I ignored him when I came back to class. I stopped helping him with his math homework, and he stopped helping me in gym. Eventually we were both so stubbornly not talking to each other that competing for the same things almost felt like a cheat code: neither of us was conceding, really, because competing meant we had to talk. We had to be on the fringes of each other’s lives.

Somewhere along the way, we adapted. The three modes were created. There was chaos but not without relative order. At least until high school, when the friction was so pronounced that it got personal. Suddenly we didn’t just want to best each other for the sake of making a point but because there were actual goals on the line. Club positions. Grading curves. Maple Ride.

And now Newsbag.

“Hadley misses you,” I say.

Seb looks momentarily disarmed. So am I, really. I think because what I almost said was I miss you. What I almost said was that I’ve missed him for a long time. But that’s ridiculous. He’s sitting right in front of me. He never went anywhere.

He ducks his head, and when he looks back up his smile is soft at the edges. “Yeah. I miss her, too.” And then, after a quick beat, “And a lot of things.”

We both glance down at our pancakes. The ache I felt earlier wasn’t just mine. It feels strangely like it led me here—not to this place, but to someone who felt the same kind of lost I do. The weird limbo of not quite knowing where you’re headed but knowing it’s too early to look back.

“All right,” I agree. “New era uploading. One of mutual unhatred. One where we attempt… fun.”

Seb’s shoulders lift noticeably, blinking the cloudiness out of his eyes. “Perfect. I can finally hit ‘order’ on the matching ‘Seb and Sadie have decided to tolerate each other’ shirts I designed.”

“A trial run for our matching pancake tattoos.”

Seb grins widely. “Don’t tempt me. Betty’s pancakes deserve a whole sleeve.”

“Leave five bucks each on the table,” she says in response, without looking up from the back.

We both lean into the table, muffling our laughter. Our eyes meet and there’s that same crackle from the fair—the same one that’s been quietly humming in me ever since, the volume pitched.

“So later can we run our piece ideas past each other?” Seb asks. “It’d probably help us both. We’re taking them in very different directions anyway.”

He’s not wrong. Seb’s style is far more fact-based and people-oriented than mine. He loves to dig into little stories in broader topics, loves to throw himself into research and interviews and even the occasional peer-reviewed study for context. A blend of analytical and personal.

My writing, on the other hand, can be loosely compared to an unleashed chaos gremlin. No two pieces ever have quite the same format, because most of the time I’ve spent writing was on a whim between classes or late at night when the Brighton family scale was down to a “one.” It’s how I’ve written for so long that I don’t know any other way.

He must be referring to my editing abilities, then. I can be detail-oriented when the situation calls for it—they didn’t put me in charge of the paper for nothing.

“Fair warning that you have no idea what you’re getting yourself into,” I tell him. “Hell, you don’t even know if I can write.”

Seb just leans back in his seat looking somehow, impossibly, even more smug than usual. “Sure I do,” he says. “ Jerry. ”

“What?” I blurt, barely managing not to choke on the last bite of pancake stuffed in my mouth.

“Sadie. C’mon.”

If anything Seb almost seems disappointed I had to ask. I swallow hard, wondering how long he’s known. If he found my notes lying around our house on a Pancake Sunday, or I left something up on the school desktop.

But then he leans in and says, “You write just like you talk.”

My throat is thick then, because we both know that’s not true. Jerry was blunt. Jerry was funny and honest and didn’t care what people thought. Jerry said all the things I didn’t say to anyone else.

Well, anyone aside from Christina and Seb.

“And even if I didn’t figure that out from the first damn column, I overheard a drunk Scar yelling, ‘Move it or lose it, Jerry!’ at a drunk Hades flagging down the bus outside a certain party over the weekend,” Seb adds, a teasing glint in his eyes.

Ah. That would be me and Christina in our makeshift Disney villain finery.

We both pull cash out of our wallets to pay for the pancakes, my face still warm, my body strangely light. A tension and a relief at the same time. The friction of being seen and the comfort of knowing I was recognized not just by anyone but by the person I—however begrudgingly—have always respected most.

But there’s one part of this I need to make explicitly, uncompromisingly understood.

“Hey,” I say on our way out the door. “To be clear, just because we’re playing fair doesn’t mean we’re playing nice. I’m going for this with everything I’ve got.”

Seb leans in so close that I can’t see his slight smirk or the bright mischief in his eyes, but instead hear them in his voice, the soft heat of his breath tickling my ear. “I wouldn’t expect anything less.”