CHAPTERONE
I’m sitting in front of an extra large pepperoni pizza. There’s a flickering tea light in the middle of it floating on a little lake of red grease. I’m supposed to make a wish.
All around me are people singing “Happy Birthday” with varying levels of enthusiasm. To my right is my dad, still wearing his Brook Park Middle School staff polo shirt, warbling away on the high harmonies—a joke he never ceases to find hilarious. On my left is my mom, who is devoting everything she has to maintaining her smile. She’s still not over my tenth birthday, when the photographer caught her midsneeze. Del, a barrel-chested white man whose every bodily cell screams “I. AM. ITALIAN,” is standing behind me. His voice is booming like an Italian opera singer’s as he leads his staff, a beleaguered and disinterested group of cashiers, busers, and kitchen crew.
Hot ’N Crusty is dark, with deep wood paneling and a chocolate-brown tiled floor that is always sticky, even though I see someone dragging a mop across it almost every night. Faux stained-glass light fixtures swing from chains mounted over each table, casting a crimson glow across the dining room. There are only a few windows, so it feels especially cave-like unless they catch the sun just right. The walls are painted a deep red that makes the whole place look half like a pizza parlor, half like a bordello, and the decor can most closely be described as “Italian Travel Book Vomits on Walls.” Curling, yellowed posters of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Trevi Fountain, and the Vatican decorate the walls. There’s even a signed, framed photo of Pope John Paul II by the bathrooms, but I’m almost positive that the handwriting is Del’s. I also sincerely doubt PJP said, “Love the garlic knots!”
The tables are all covered in red-and-white-checked tablecloths that are fraying with age, each old enough to have been the very tablecloth upon which I was born lo these sixteen years ago. But at least I have the comfort of knowing it’s definitely not, because that particular tablecloth—or a four-by-four cutting of it, cleaned, thank god—is framed on the wall with newspaper and magazine clippings heralding the story of my birth.
That particular collage marks the start of my very own personal hall of fame right there on the wall of Hot ’N Crusty. You know how your parents will frame every one of your school pictures and display them climbing up the wall of their staircase or lined up down their hall? And if you walk past at a brisk enough sprint, or take the stairs three at a time, those photos almost become a flip book animation of your entire life? Yeah, I have that, only instead of school pictures there are fifteen years’ worth of photos of me parked in front of a flaming pizza. And it’s in public for the whole world to see, which is super great. In some of the early ones, I’m crying, as babies often do. Later on, in elementary school, there’s a crowd of classmates surrounding me. But as I get older and into middle school, the group dwindles. My best friend, Natalie, is in almost all of them, her white blond hair lighting up the images like a halo. You can see my unfortunate experiment with bangs in the sixth grade, and my even more unfortunate experiment with winged eyeliner in eighth. My braces appear and disappear, and staff members come and go in the background. But in every one, my smiling parents flank me, and Del gazes down proudly over my shoulder like he’s my godfather (a title he was probably lobbying for before discovering my parents aren’t at all religious).
I glance up and see Larry across the table, his enormous camera poised and ready for the big moment. He’s the only photographer left at our local paper, which now only publishes three times a week and once on Sunday, but he’s been there since they published twice a day (as he likes to tell us a lot).
The song reaches a crescendo. Larry’s about to snap the photo to mark my sixteenth birthday, a photo that will soon join all the rest and run in the Sunday paper. I cross my fingers that between now and then whoever spray-painted blobby penises all over the courthouse downtown strikes again so I can avoid making the front page. I almost wish for it, but at the last second, decide to stick with my original wish, the same one I’ve made since my thirteenth birthday.
“Happy birthday, dear Beck…,” the crowd sings. “Happy birthday to youuuuuuuuu.”
There’s a smatter of anemic applause and a shuffling of feet as the employees start to abandon their posts. My dad whistles and cheers as my mom leans in and whispers, “We love you so much, Beck.” I close my eyes tight, lean forward, and just before I blow out that sad little tea light, I send my wish out into the universe.
Next year I want to eat somewhere else.
* * *
“I hope you didn’t wish for a car,” Dad says, reaching for a third slice of pizza.
“Just unfettered access to a sweet 2005 Toyota Corolla with questionable air-conditioning,” I reply. I nibble on another piece of the crust, the cheesy part congealing on the plate in front of me.
“Well, whaddya know, wishes do come true!” Dad replies.
“We’re going on Saturday morning, right?” I ask. I’ve been practicing three-point turns and parallel parking for weeks in preparation for my driver’s test. I may not be getting a car, but I’m definitely getting a license.
“We’ll get there right when it opens, so the examiners will still be in good moods,” he says. “I was thinking maybe we could bring doughnuts, too. You know, grease the wheel.”
“You have that little faith in me?”
“Beck, I love you and think you can do anything you put your mind to,” he says, ruffling my hair like he used to when I was little. “But my Toyota still has a streak of yellow paint on it from where you hit the book return box at the library.”
“That was months ago,” I grumble. I pat my hair into submission, thinking back to one of my first lessons on the open road, when Dad decided we’d return some library books with me at the wheel. I learned a lot that day about how far those side-view mirrors actually stick out. But I haven’t hit anything since, unless you count the curb while trying to parallel park (a skill I definitely won’t need in suburban Brook Park, home of expansive strip mall parking lots). I wouldn’t say I’m an expert driver, but children and stray cats don’t need to run from my headlights.
“It’s too bad Natalie couldn’t make it,” Mom says out of nowhere, and I don’t say anything, because the truth is I didn’t invite her. I knew she had dance class with Tamsin and Cora. And Natalie definitely would have skipped to celebrate with me, but I didn’t want it to be a thing with the other girls. We’re still sort of a new friend group, along with Tamsin’s twin brother and his dude friends. Any chance to avoid reminding them that I’m the Hot ’N Crusty Bathroom Baby is one I’ll take. In a small town, it’s easy to get pegged with an identity early, and mine started as early as they come. Kids were throwing pizza puns at me on the playground before they even knew what puns were. And “Hot ’N Crusty Bathroom Baby” is way too delicious a phrase for kids to ignore. I wish I could say we grew out of it, but no one grows out of anything in a small town. I’ll be the bathroom baby for as long as I live here, which hopefully won’t be that much longer. I’ve spent the last few years trying to distance myself from the whole thing, and I’ve been marginally successful. Sure, it reappears every year on my birthday when the local news revisits the story with the latest birthday photo, but it dies down pretty quickly after that. And in two years I’ll be off to college, where I’ll be celebrating my birthday by studying in the library or dancing on a table at a frat house. Whatever I’m doing, there will be no pizza involved.
“We’re celebrating this weekend,” I tell Mom by way of explanation. Tamsin decided last week that she wanted to plan a “birthday extravaganza” (her words) for Saturday night. And I’m more than happy to go along, even though the idea of an “extravaganza” in my honor makes me break out in cold sweats.
“Who’ll be there?” I can hear in Mom’s voice that she’s trying not to pry, but is also absolutely dying to know.
I begin ticking off names on my fingers. “Natalie, Tamsin, Cora, Tamsin’s twin brother Colin, Cora’s boyfriend Eli, and their friend Mac.” I hope my cheeks aren’t turning red, because my insides are positively on fire at the thought of going anywhere with Mac MacArthur. I still can’t believe it’s a thing that happens on a regular basis.
“That sounds fun,” Mom says, trailing off. The dot dot dot is practically floating above her head as she works hard to poke at her salad. She wants to know more, but isn’t going to ask. That’s what makes her a good mom. But I’m not going to tell her, which is probably what makes me a terrible daughter. I know she’s still sort of weirded out that my group of friends has boys in it now, and boys who she doesn’t know at that. I know that she hates that I don’t tell her everything anymore, but I don’t want to talk to her about how I’ve had an intense crush on Mac for so long that I can’t even remember how it feels to like someone else. I don’t want to tell her that Tamsin scares me a little, or how worried I am that Natalie is only still my best friend out of habit. I know exactly what she’d say.
The thing is, my mom is great at pep talks. In the pep talk Olympics, she’d win a gold medal every time. If she wrote a book of pep talks, it would be an instant New York Times bestseller. She’s the American Idol of pep talks. And in this case, she’d tell me to be myself and that my real friends will stick by me. She’d tell me that anybody who doesn’t get me isn’t a real friend. And let’s be real, she might also give me another deeply uncomfortable talk about sexual health. But I don’t want to hear any of that (especially not another lecture about STDs and condom use, because ick). The truth is, I don’t get me. I don’t exactly know who I am, not even a little bit.
And I don’t know if my mom has a pep talk for that.
I just know that I like who I am when I’m with Natalie, Tamsin, and Cora. I like hanging out with the guys from the baseball team and going to football games and attempting to follow Tamsin’s choreography to whatever song is blasting out of her phone. I want that girl to be me, the girl who can potentially get through the day without a barrage of pizza puns.
Mom neatly stacks her plate, silverware, and napkin for the buser. Then she sighs and leans back in her chair. “I can’t believe it was sixteen years ago that I walked in here for pizza and walked out with you.”
Copyright © 2021 by Lauren Morrill
