Chapter One
Jamie
“Oranges don’t have nipples,” says Sophie.
I park our cart by the display pyramid, pointedly ignoring her. You could say there’s a part of me that doesn’t want to discuss nipples with my twelve-year-old sister in the Target produce section. And that part of me. Is all of me.
“They’re tangelos,” Sophie adds. “Tangelos have—”
“Good for tangelos.” I tear a plastic bag off the roll. “Look. The sooner we get everything, the sooner we can leave.”
Which isn’t a diss on Target. No way. Target’s the best. It’s kind of my personal wonderland. But it’s hard to catch that anything-could-happen, big-box-general-merchandise vibe when I’m here as my cousin’s errand boy. Gabe is the assistant campaign manager for a special election in our district, and he never seems to run out of random jobs for Sophie and me. This morning he texted us a snack list for his volunteers: oranges, grapes, chocolate, pizza bagels, Nutri-Grain bars, water bottles. NO APPLES. NO PRETZELS. All caps, in true Gabe fashion. Apparently, crunchy foods and political phone banking don’t mix.
“Still think they look nipply,” Sophie mutters as I reach for a few tangelos near the top of the pyramid. I like the ones that are so bright, they look photoshopped, as if someone cranked up the color saturation. I grab a few more, because Gabe’s expecting at least ten volunteers tonight.
“Why does he even want oranges?” Sophie asks. “Like, why pick the messiest fruit?”
“Scurvy prevention,” I start to say—but two girls step through the automatic doors, and I lose my train of thought completely.
Listen, I’m not the guy who can’t function when a cute girl walks by. I’m really not. For one thing, that would imply I was a functional person to begin with. Also, the issue isn’t that they’re cute.
I mean. They are cute. Around my age, dressed for Georgia summer air-conditioning in zipped-up hoodies and jeans. The shorter one—white, with square-framed glasses and brown spiral curls—gestures emphatically with both hands as they approach the carts. But it’s her friend who keeps catching my eye. She’s South Asian, I think, with wide brown eyes and wavy dark hair. She nods and grins at something her friend says.
There’s just something so familiar about her. I swear, we’ve met before.
She looks up, suddenly, like she senses me staring.
And my brain stalls out.
Yup. Yup. Okay. She’s definitely looking at me.
My friend Drew would know what to do here. Eye contact with a cute girl. A girl I’m pretty sure I know from somewhere, which means there’s a built-in conversation topic. And we’re in Target, the definition of my comfort zone. If there’s even such a thing as a comfort zone when cute girls are involved.
Dude, just talk to her. I swear to God, it’s not that deep. I wonder how many times Drew’s said that to me. Eye contact. Chin up. Smile. Walk over.
“Okay, Mr. Heart Eyes.” Sophie nudges me. “I can’t tell which girl you’re looking at.”
I turn quickly back to the tangelo display, cheeks burning as I grab one from the bottom of the pyramid.
And everything comes crashing down.
First the pyramid trembles—followed by the thwack thwack thwack of oranges raining to the floor. I turn to Sophie, who claps both hands over her mouth and stares back at me. Everyone’s staring at me. A mom pushing her baby in a cart. The guy manning the bakery. A kid, pausing mid-tantrum near the packaged cookie display.
Of course, the two girls are front and center. They stand frozen by their cart, with matching uh-oh expressions.
Thwack thwack thwack. And again. Without pause.
And.
Thwack.
The last tangelo falls.
“I’m—”
“A cartoon character,” Sophie finishes.
“Okay. Yeah. I can fix this.” I squat down right where I’m standing, and start passing tangelos up to Sophie. “You take these.”
I tuck a few more into the crook of my arm and attempt to stand, but I drop a bunch of them before I’m even upright. “Crap.” I bend to grab them, which sends a few more tumbling down, rolling toward the apple display—which you’d think wouldn’t happen with tangelos. Shouldn’t the nipples keep them from rolling? I scoot on my knees toward the apple display, hoping nothing slid too far under, when someone clears his throat loudly.
“Okeydokey, my dude, let’s keep you away from the apples.”
I look up to find a clean-cut guy in a red polo shirt and a Target name tag. Kevin.
I scramble up, immediately squishing a tangelo beneath my sneaker. “Sorry! I’m sorry.”
“Hey,” Sophie says. “Jamie, look at me.” She’s holding her phone up.
“Are you filming me?”
“Just a little Boomerang,” she says. She turns to Kevin, the employee. “Meet my brother, Butterfingers von Klutzowitz.”
“I’ll help you clean this,” I say quickly.
“Nah, you’re totally fine. I got this,” says Kevin.
Sophie peers down at her phone. “How do you send stuff to BuzzFeed?”
Out of the corner of my eye, a flicker of movement: the girls in hoodies veering quickly down a side aisle.
Getting the hell away from me, I guess.
I don’t blame them one bit.
Twenty minutes later, Sophie and I park at the Jordan Rossum state senate campaign satellite headquarters—technically the side annex of Fawkes and Horntail, a new-age bookstore on Roswell Road. Not exactly the Georgia State Capitol building, or even the Coverdell Building across the street, where Mom works for State Senator Jim Mathews from the Thirty-Third District. The whole state capitol complex looks plucked from DC, with its columns and balconies and giant arched windows. They’ve got security teams at the entrances, like an airport, and once you’re in, it’s all heavy wooden doors and people in suits and fidgety groups of kids on field trips.
And those bright, gleaming Coverdell Building bathrooms.
I know all about those bathrooms.
No suits or security teams at Fawkes and Horntail. I cut straight to the side-access door, hoisting two dozen bottles of water, while Sophie trails behind me balancing the snack bags. We’re here so much, we don’t even bother knocking.
“Hey, bagels,” greets Hannah, the assistant field coordinator. She means us, not the snacks. There’s a bagel chain in Atlanta called Goldberg’s, and since we’re Jamie and Sophie Goldberg, people sometimes . . . yeah. But Hannah’s cool, so I don’t mind it. She’s a rising junior at Spelman, but she’s staying with her mom in the suburbs this summer, just to be near the campaign office.
She looks up from her desk, which is stacked high with canvassing flyers—the ones Gabe calls walk pieces. “Is this for the phone bankers tonight? Y’all are the best snack team ever.”
“It was mostly me,” Sophie says, handing her the snack bags. “I’m like the snack team captain.”
Hannah, halfway across the room with the snacks, looks back over her shoulder and laughs.
“Except I drove,” I mutter. “I pushed the cart, carried all the water—”
“But it was my idea.” Sophie jabs me with her elbow and smiles brightly.