Walking over to the Proud Muffin with my sister feels like a parade of two. I’d forgotten how much I like spending time with her. Between her applying to college and leaving for college and all the time I used to dedicate to W, Tess and I haven’t properly hung out in what feels like years. She tells me about her professors. I tell her about Marisol teaching me how to make her favorite piecrust: the secret is lard. She tells me about her roommate, Raina, who’s quickly becoming her best friend.

I tell her about my new friend. Harley.

She gives me a perfectly calibrated sister stare, and I add that I want to make out with Harley. I don’t tell her about the part where I’m not with Harley yet because I’m still cleaning up the catastrophes that rippled out from my last relationship. Tess is too naturally dubious to believe in baking magic.

We could keep walking for hours, filling in the blanks of the past few months, but it’s not far to the bakery. It’s a quiet morning at the Proud Muffin. The little garden tables are empty, the porch dotted with a few people making the most of their morning coffee and freshly baked muffins.

“What are those smells?” Tess asks. “I want to eat those smells.”

“Lemon lavender muffin, marzipan dream muffin, chocolate oatmeal stout muffin,” I say in one long string. I could name every muffin here in my sleep.

It’s a little surreal to walk in as a customer. It’s like I’m floating through the halls at school and everyone else is in class, but for some reason I don’t have to go. Or I’m driving through rush-hour traffic in Austin, but I don’t need to keep my hands on the wheel. I should probably enjoy this sort of freedom, but it just makes my fingers twitchy and my throat tight. I can’t shake the sense that there’s something else I should be doing.

I peek into the kitchen. Marisol is back there, along with another baker, Carlos. Everything looks perfectly fine. Gemma and D.C. are working the counter this morning, along with Lex.

“Can I get a gingerbread latte and, um, whatever my sister wants?”

“On the latte,” Lex says, going to the espresso machine.

“It’s hard to choose . . .” Tess says, facing down rows of muffins. “Now that I live in Chicago, I want to eat everything in Austin. Do you know what they think is delicious in Chicago? Smoked meat. As if they could ever do better than Texas barbeque. How have I only eaten dry rub ribs twice since I got home? That seems like an oversight.”

This is the first time I’ve heard Tess split her allegiances between Austin and the Midwest. Maybe she really does think of this place as home. Or maybe home isn’t just one thing for her.

“Well, we don’t have a smoked meat muffin, per se, though now that I’m thinking about it, that would go over well,” D.C. says. “We do have a few with bacon in them. What kind of flavors do you like?”

“Oh, you know . . .” she says, and proceeds to list every flavor in the universe. We’re alike in that way.

Tess has been in here once or twice before, but I’ve never really brought her in on purpose. Now that I know she might be aroace — and need this community as much as I do — I can’t help picturing a future where she comes in all the time. She’s already hitting it off with Gemma and D.C. Soon they’re cutting a host of muffins into sample squares so she can try them all.

“Wow, okay, this roasted pear and balsamic one is . . .”

“Good, right?” D.C. asks. His usual perkiness is in place, but I swear there’s something buzzing under his voice.

“Hey. Syd.” Gemma pulls me to the side. “I just want to make sure you know what’s going on.”

My head immediately racks up all the things that could go wrong. All the cakes I could have forgotten to bake, the special orders I might have written down wrong. Did something happen with Harley? Did I throw everything off between us, did Harley wake up this morning and feel different about me? Or worse — feel nothing about me? Maybe Harley asked to be switched off my shifts.

Gemma runs a rag over the counter, picking up espresso grit and muffin crumbs. “Vin and Alec called a meeting of kitchen staff and counter managers yesterday. I guess you had to switch out. I just wanted to make sure that you heard . . . that it’s not a surprise the next time you come in . . .”

Gemma tosses the rag in a bucket of cleaner.

A queasy feeling sloshes through me.

“Vin and Alec are breaking up,” Gemma whispers, and I feel like the little kid who missed the family meeting, the one who’s hearing about the divorce secondhand from a neighbor.

“No,” I say. “They’re not.”

“Wait, did you hear that they’re getting back together?” she asks.

I forget my sister and the nice day we were having. I abandon all thoughts of Harley. I march around the counter, straight into the kitchen, and fling open the door to Vin and Alec’s office. It was closed. It’s never closed.

Vin is in there, his fingers sliding through papers. He keeps writing numbers even as he looks up at me, shifting pages like he doesn’t have a second to spare for my splitting, splintering life.

“This isn’t right,” I say.

Vin looks apologetic, wincing behind his reading glasses. He pushes them up onto his forehead. “Close the door, please.”

I click it shut behind me, and as soon as we’re alone in the tiny room, words fly out. “Did you cheat?”

The worry drains out of his face. He goes dangerously quiet. “Did you just ask me that question?”

His fingers are paused, pen still in the air. He’s giving me one chance to take it back. I should take it back.

I stare at him, stubborn as anything.

“Syd, it is none of your business what happened or did not happen in our private life.” I think he’s going to leave it at that. I get ready to keep pushing for a sentence that resembles the truth, even if it hurts. Then Vin sets down his pen, presses his lips together, scrubs a hand over his chin. He looks awful. A restless, gray sort of awful. “There was no cheating. Of any kind.”

Is he lying to me about being wooed? Is he lying to himself? Or did I get it wrong somehow?

“But I heard —”

“No.”

“Then you can’t break up,” I say instantly.

A look rumbles across his face. “Syd. You don’t get to set what happens with our lives like you set the daily special.”

I think about the scones, the clandestine kissing at Barton Springs. “But you love each other.”

“Yes. We do.”

Well, that’s not what I expected.

“Sometimes that’s not what breaks it. You understand?”

“No!” My voice could smash an egg all on its own. “If you both still love each other, you should fight to keep it!”

He laughs gruffly, not a mean laugh but an old and very tired one. For the first time, he genuinely looks like the queer grandpa Marisol and I joked about. “You have so much energy to fight with, Syd. And your fights . . . they’re different. They’re not fake and they’re not unimportant, but they’re not the same as ours. When you grow up, it gets easier in some ways and harder in others.”

The moment slips like a knife that I was holding wrong.

Vin still sees me as a kid. Of course he does.

“What about the Proud Muffin?” I ask.

I hold my breath. This is the question that’s been layered into every one of my fears since the moment I realized what my brownies had done.

“We don’t know yet,” he says blankly. “Alec and I both love this place, but there are a lot of factors.”

Tears storm my face, so I storm out of the office.

I can’t stand here and listen to factors.

In the kitchen, Marisol doesn’t look up from her baking even though I’m being loud as all get out. She’s doing exactly what I would be if I was on shift today — dumping her mind into her work.

I get my face under control, pulling the tears back into it by force. Then I walk out to the front counter and find my sister in a state of complete, muffin-fueled joy.

“This is the best thing I’ve ever put in my mouth,” she says, holding up the remains of the marzipan dream muffin. “Why didn’t I spend more time here when I actually lived in Austin?”

“I don’t know,” I say raggedly. “I told you exactly how great it is.”

For years, I’ve been dedicated to two things: W and the Proud Muffin. I’ve lost one of them.

I’m going to fight for the other.

I put my head down on the table, swamped by cookbooks and defeat.

It’s a good thing I don’t care about looking pathetic in public. Every person in this café can probably hear me whimper while they wait for iced chai and perfectly plated salads and panini neatly charred with thin black lines.

“There’s nothing here,” I mumble. Which is sort of a lie, since there are literally thousands of recipes all around me, and millions more scattered throughout the café.

But I need the perfect recipe. The one that’s going to get Vin and Alec back together — and keep them that way. I still owe Jessalee and Martin and Kit and Aadi their own perfect bakes, but Vin and Alec come first.

I really thought I’d fixed them with the scones, but sometimes a make out — even a full-body, dizzy-making make out — isn’t enough to fix things. I should have known that. I mean, W and I had sex in the middle of our breakup.

Vin and Alec are still attracted to each other. They’re still in love with each other. But they’re stuck in some kind of awful limbo where they believe that nothing they can do will save their relationship.

How am I supposed to bake my way out of this one?

I started with my home cookbook collection and a few dozen internet searches. A restless Sunday turned into three furiously upset days, while Tess alternated between hovering anxiously and getting bored and disappearing for long stretches of time. As soon as I was done with work and school on Thursday I drove downtown to the Cookbook Cafe.

Now it’s half an hour before closing time and I’m surrounded by more than five hundred tomes on the alchemy of food, from an ancient and revered copy of The Joy of Baking to Ottolenghi’s Sweet. The collection spread over wooden tables and shelves was originally owned by Virginia B. Wood, who started out as a pastry chef and went on to become a famous Texas food writer. After she died, her friends decided the café at the new downtown Austin library was the perfect spot to house her books, where everyone could flip through them.

This is usually one of my happy places.

But today, I’m a miserable creature hunched over books in a dark hoodie and stringy cut-offs. My fingers are more papercut than skin. My porcupine of frizz is longer and sharper than ever because I don’t have W to give me a fresh buzz like she’s been doing on a regular basis for the last two years.

I feel an open palm on my back, gentle but with a little pressure to it, and I look up expecting to see some nice employee about to tell me that I’m abusing the very generous cookbook policy and I need to leave, forever.

But it’s Harley.

Hair getting curlier the closer we get to true summer. Smile starting to collapse under the weight of worry.

“Um. Hi.” I push away the cookbooks stacked in front of me, as if that will keep Harley from noticing the damning evidence.

“Hey, Syd.”

I check the pronoun pin — he.

“How did you find me?” I ask.

“Harley!” shouts the barista back at the counter. He runs over to gather a tiny cup of espresso, then drinks it in one swift motion, his body creating a nice long line with his head thrown back.

Okay, maybe coffee isn’t the worst thing.

“Your sister said I should try here,” Harley says on his way back to me. He straddles one of the chairs with a sort of lumbering slowness that I’ve never seen from his usually quick, agile body. It’s possible I’m not the only one who’s had a long night. “Well, either here or passed out in one of the booths at Austin Karaoke.”

“That only happened because she dared me to sing every Queen song in the catalogue and . . . you saw my sister? As in, Tess?”

Harley stares at the brown sludge in his tiny espresso cup, like he might be able to frown until it magically refills. “She was hanging out at the bakery. She seemed pretty convinced you’d be here.”

“Oh,” I say, and guilt cuts me up, a perfect dice, because it’s Tess’s last full day in town and I’m spending it like this.

“Find anything good?” Harley asks.

“There are so many things I want to bake.” Sour cherry slab pies and mango cream tart and, courtesy of Ottolenghi — who started his career as a pastry chef — chocolate, tahini, and halva brownies. They all sound amazing. They all make my mouth water and my stomach get opinionated. “I just don’t know what I need to bake. For Vin and Alec.”

Harley’s face instantly slumps. So he’s heard the news.

“I still don’t know how this works,” I say. “I’ve been baking for so many years, but I’ve only been magical baking for two weeks.” I whisper the word magical like my great-aunt Margo whispers the word gay. Like it’s obviously real in the world but still improbable in her head. “How can I tell which recipe will yield the right results? What feelings do I even want Vin and Alec to feel?”

Harley drums long, overcaffeinated fingertips on the table. “What if they just need time? For things to work themselves out?”

My fears about the Proud Muffin come on as strong and fast as food poisoning. If Vin and Alec don’t get back together quickly enough, the best bakery in the world could be on the line. “I can’t bake them time,” I say, trying to keep the sharpest knives in the drawer out of my voice. “So it’s going to have to be pie.”

“I like pie,” Harley says brightly.

I perk up a little, peeking an inch out of my hood.

“Well, I like piecrust. Actually, I just like rolling out piecrust. Who wants to eat a lump of butter that’s been stretched and touched and, like, turned into a lid? You’re eating butter Tupperware.”

“I don’t have the energy for anti-baking sentiments,” I say, pulling the strings of my hood so tight that my face is basically pinched into a sweatshirt dumpling. “This is all I have going for me, okay?”

Harley grabs my arm and pulls me up, leaving my fallen cookbooks everywhere. I try to run back and take a picture of a stovetop summer berry buckle, but Harley just drags me back toward the library entrance. It doesn’t matter. I’ve already screenshot enough recipes to keep me baking until February.

We walk into the library and start up the ramp, which runs through a big open atrium that connects all the floors. There are a hundred different types of chairs throughout the library — a sort of collection of its own, celebrating different eras and types of design — and Harley seems determined to sit in all of them. I follow his ramblings through the different sections: the YA room that’s just for teenagers, the little tech library where Harley jokingly asks if I want a 3D mold of his hand.

That sounds pretty nice, actually. I like Harley’s hands.

By the time we get to the roof, with its wooden slat tables and potted greenery and incredible views, I’m ready to throw my hood back and let the breeze ruffle my grown-out shave.

“Tell me one thing about you that has nothing to do with baking,” Harley says.

“I don’t have time for this.”

“Okay, now it’s four things.”

“That math doesn’t even make sense!”

“You skulking around the library when it’s a gorgeous afternoon and there’s a bakery to save makes no sense.”

“Fine.” It takes a superpowered effort to come up with four facts that have nothing to do with baking and also nothing to do with W. “I’ve always liked to sing, just in the car and stuff, really loud, mostly to bad pop music. Someday I want to get in my car and drive across the entire country and eat at a really good roadside diner in every state. Without planning stops. Finding the diners is part of it.” It’s been so long since I’ve tapped into these parts of myself, and once I start, there’s momentum — like when I was a little kid, tossing myself down a hill, getting dizzy and liking it. Or when I was riding a bike and really picking up speed, in the days before I canceled bikes. “I used to wish on rocks because I thought wishing on stars was just wishing on rocks that are really far away. I think my parents think I watch queer porn on my computer late at night, but it’s mostly Schitt’s Creek and the She-Ra reboot.”

“Mostly?” Harley asks with a meaningful eyebrow raise. He leans back against the railing, elbows on the wood. “Do you feel better yet? This place always makes me feel better.”

“Really?” All I can see is how much Austin is changing, all the time. There’s so much construction equipment that it looks like they’re trying to graft a whole new city onto one that’s already here. For every building that I recognize, there are four I feel like I’ve never seen before.

“I like maps,” Harley says, breeze lifting up the bottom of his shirt just a hint and messing up his curls in a way that somehow makes them look even better. “When I was little, out in the country, I’d go to a high hill nearby and spend hours drawing everything I could see, and then the next day I’d make it all move a little, so it felt like the map was alive. This is like being inside of a living map of Austin.”

“Living maps sound pretty magical,” I admit. “That’s probably why you’re so good at biking around the city.” Pride flickers around his face. “Hey, maybe you can be the navigator on my road trip.”

Harley ducks his head, grabs the back of his neck, and looks up at me. It’s hopeful and sad at the same time. Like he’s pretty sure we’re never going to do that. And I get mad at him for deciding it. We haven’t even kissed yet, and he’s putting limits on what we could do together, what we could be to each other. There’s nothing stopping us from dreaming and then making those dreams real. Vin and Alec did it. They made the Proud Muffin together. They’re the proof in the legendary pudding.

The bakery is over there, nestled in with the homes and shops and taquerias of South Austin. Even though I can’t see it from here, I know exactly where it is. But I don’t know how to keep it there.

“So what pie are you going to make?” Harley asks, like he can feel my mind circling the problem.

I look out at the city, and for the first time all day, I feel inspired. Not because I’ve figured out what to bake for Vin and Alec, but because I’m not going to let that stop me.

“All of them.”

The next morning, Harley shows up at my house.

When we left the library, I made Harley pack his bike into my trunk and drove us both to HEB for a tornado of a shopping spree, during which I debated the merits of going to the Proud Muffin or invading Harley’s kitchen again before realizing I’d need every one of the dozen pie plates I’ve collected over the years. Mom and Dad made me stop at twelve, arguing that we’d never conceivably need more pies than that, even in the apocalypse. I’d argued that the end of the world called for at least a baker’s dozen pies. But Harley insisted it was too late to start baking, so now it’s morning and he’s at my front door.

“So . . . this is your place,” Harley says.

Maybe this moment was always coming, but that doesn’t mean I’m ready for it.

“It’s boring? Kinda normal. It’s just a house.”

“Okay,” Harley says with a sweet, crumbly short-crust laugh. “Is that a problem?”

“It’s just . . . your house is so much like you.” This house is like my parents. It’s like my sister.

Speaking of sisters, Tess stomps over to us and I can tell that she’s pissed. I know I’ve been spending way too much of her break distracted by this situation. I must feel guilty, because my neck lights up like a red-hot pan. She doesn’t say anything to me. Not a single word. Instead, she focuses on Harley. That’s how I know she’s going to give me hell later.

“Hey,” she says brightly, in a tone that could easily be mistaken for nice. “From the bakery!”

“From the bakery,” he agrees gamely.

“Tess, this is Harley. Harley, this is my older sister, Tess, though I guess you two already met.”

“We are acquainted,” Harley says, offering a handshake like the politely reared southern kid he is.

“I’ve been hanging out at the bakery because I don’t have anything else to do. Even though it’s spring breaaaak.” She says those last two words in a faux-party mode, waving her arms half-heartedly in the air.

I rush into the kitchen and poke my head out of my hoodie.

“Um . . . Syd . . .” Harley says, pointing at my hair.

“You have to take care of that,” Tess finishes for him.

“I don’t have time to shave my head!” I cry. “There are pies to bake!” I touch my hair and it fluffs up in a disturbing way. It must look like the previously mentioned porcupine got electrocuted. “Besides, W used to do it for me,” I mumble. “The one time she was out of town and I tried to do it myself, I had a patch on the back of my head that looked like Australia and nobody told me for two days.”

This is the first time in two years that I haven’t had W here to notice when I went from softly fuzzy to seriously overgrown. She would always take care of it before it could get out of control.

I feel out of control.

I can’t seem to stop my hands from grabbing the balls of pie dough I made last night out of the fridge.

“We’re going to help,” Tess says. “Where are your clippers?”

“In the bathroom,” I say, tossing flour into my bowls.

Tess comes back a minute later, drags me outside, and plugs the clippers in near the front door. From our spot on the front steps, I whirl around to watch Harley through the window, banging a ball of dough with a rolling pin.

“Stay. Very. Still.” Tess pushes the clippers over my head. The rumbling sensation on my scalp is comforting, but I wonder if Tess has any idea what she’s up to.

“Do you even know how to do a fade?” I ask.

In response, she turns the clippers off and snaps on a different plastic guard. “I’m a quick learner.”

Instead of worrying too much about what’s happening on top of my head, I focus on the scene in the kitchen, where Harley is pushing a round of pie dough flatter and flatter, sprinkling it with flour as he works.

“So that’s your bike messenger,” Tess says flatly, daring me to read into it.

“That’s Harley.”

Little bits of fuzzy hair cling to my shoulders, and I bristle until Tess brushes them away.

“It’s nice to see you doing something you care about with someone you like,” she states.

My immediate reflex is to argue that W and I did things I like all the time — but the truth is that we did couples things together. Date-like things. And yes, she was willing to help with events like shaving my head on a regular basis, but mostly because I start to act prickly when I feel like a tumbleweed.

“All right,” Tess says, waving me away. “You’re shorn.”

I run inside to change out of my T-shirt, which is covered in tiny flecks of hair, and when I get back to the kitchen and check how things are going with Harley, he smiles up at me with an earned glow.

“You did a great job with those balls. Dough balls. Pie dough balls. Wow, I’m sorry for saying any of that.”

“What comes next?” Tess asks, hanging around the kitchen island and swiping little bits of pie dough — she really will eat anything in dough form.

Normally, I would let the dough chill a little longer, because Austin, and heat, and I don’t want any of these crusts getting messy and leaking butter while they blind bake. But I’ve wasted too much time already.

Vin and Alec could be splitting up their possessions right now. Figuring out who gets to keep their stoneware bowls, their rainbow whisk. They could be talking about the future of the Proud Muffin, figuring out who gets custody.

Or if no one does — if it’s better to cut their losses.

I glove my hands in flour and then smack them together a few times. “Let’s make some crusts.”

Harley grabs the rolling pin, sprinkles more flour over it, and gets to work on the rest of the dough balls while I settle the finished bottom crusts into pie tins with a level-handed care. Harley eyes the overhanging bits and slices them neatly. He pinches the outside edges of each, a perfect crimp. Then he carefully squares a foursome of bottom crusts in the oven to blind bake. While he waits, Harley works on the top crusts. He even finds cookie cutters in a cupboard and creates little cut-outs of apples to put on the lid of the apple pie.

He lattices.

“Okay,” I say. “That’s impressive. Tess, isn’t that —?”

I look around. My sister’s gone.

I could pretend it’s because there’s no more excess dough to steal, but I know that she vanished for other reasons, too. Quietly, I promise that once the pies are baked, I’ll spend the rest of her last day at home hanging out with her. As a thank-you for giving me a fresh buzz, and alone time with Harley. And for making me feel like I can survive without W.

“You’re good at that,” I say, pointing at Harley’s intricately woven piecrust. He made it on a piece of wax paper for easy transfer once the fillings are done. Speaking of which, I unstack bowls and start throwing together fillings.

Harley shrugs. “I spend so much time braiding Verity’s and Dean’s hair, it’s kind of the same thing.”

By the time we’re done, we have twelve pies: apple, salted caramel apple, blueberry with lime zest, strawberry rhubarb, mocha pecan, sweet potato and buttermilk, lemon chess, blackberry with Italian meringue, old-fashioned chocolate, coconut cream, peach, and peach strawberry basil.

Tess comes back in right around the time that I pull the last pie from the oven. It’s already midafternoon. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been so distracted by Harley’s presence that I nearly dropped a hot pie.

I grab three forks from the drawer. I don’t even know where to start.

“Wow,” Tess says. When I pry my attention away from the pies and look over, I see that she’s packed to head back to school.

“Wait, you’re leaving?” I ask, already missing her. I’ve been running around all week, but I feel closer to my sister than I have in years.

“I should get back,” she says. “Exams to study for.”

I point to the pies cooling on their perches around the kitchen. “At least have a piece before you go.” I’m making a peace offering. I’m also testing out my pies on my sister to see which one will work on Vin and Alec.

Magical multitasking?

There’s a scuffle in the living room, the door flapping open and shut a few times, bags being dumped.

“Hello, hello!” my mom calls.

Harley looks at me, a little wild-eyed.

“Don’t worry,” I say. “They’re nice.” A little too privileged to understand queer culture and a little too busy flirting with each other to notice anybody else, I want to add. But nice.

My parents arrive in the kitchen. Mom looks from Harley to me, then sharply back to him. “Did you two bake together?”

Harley seems unprepared to skip straight to the interrogation. He holds out a hand to shake, walking it back to the simple introduction part. “So nice to meet y’all. I’m Harley. He/they pronouns. He is good right now.”

“Excellent,” Dad says, shaking Harley’s hand.

It’s an awkward thing to say — but parents are awkward people.

And I’ve missed them, so I give Dad a big hug, then Mom.

“Syd, you haven’t let anyone bake with you since you were nine years old,” Mom says, unwilling to let this drop.

I put my hands over my face.

“Is that true?” Harley asks.

“I bake with Marisol every day,” I point out.

“Yeah, for work,” Tess says, piling on.

It’s true — I’ve had company in the kitchen, but I can’t remember the last time I baked with someone. Even as a kid, I would listen to my mom’s list of the kitchen rules: Don’t light your hair on fire! Don’t light the house on fire! Always set an oven timer! And then I would do all the work myself.

When I wanted to make something for W, she would hover in the next room, reading or watching TV, insisting that she’d ruin whatever I was making if she even breathed too close to it. But Harley isn’t afraid of the kitchen. More than that . . .

“Harley isn’t afraid of me,” I say, crossing my arms.

“Should I be?” he asks.

“I’ve been told that I’m formidable when I’m baking.”

“Scary,” Dad says as he moves the bags from their trip to the stairs. “She’s scary when she’s baking.”

Harley looks at me, and I can feel him silently asking if I’ve talked to my family about my gender. Or lack thereof.

I shake my head, certain that nobody else will notice.

Sometimes, I wish they would. But then I’d have to sit down and explain myself on their terms.

I’m worried that Harley will judge me for not being brave enough. But his brown eyes stay soft. It feels like he’s here for me, in a moment that I usually have to get through on my own. And somehow that softens the edges. It makes this one more thing that we share.

I sit down abruptly on a stool as another truth hits me.

Love is about sharing the hard bits. Not just the happiness.

W and I were good at the good. But we mostly ignored the bad, the awkward, the uncomfortable. We just kept moving like nothing would be able to catch up with us. Like if we didn’t look at it directly, it might slink away.

Tess is adding plates and forks to the stack that I brought out for pie testing. My parents are exclaiming over each one in turn. My mom won’t stop talking about Harley’s lattice. My family seems determined to eat, so Tess, Harley, and I load the kitchen island with pies. I figure the more of us are eating, the better chance I have of figuring out what to feed Vin and Alec.

Of course, I’m a little terrified that whatever one my parents are drawn to will just cause them to run away in another sudden fit of getting-it-on. But even though Harley was with me and I was definitely aware of his presence in the kitchen, today felt different. Harley kept me grounded enough to deal with difficult things. Including the fear that Vin and Alec — the couple I’ve always looked up to as the gay dictionary definition of love — might have been drawn to my brownies because they really do need to let go of each other.

Maybe I shouldn’t base whether or not I believe in love on two people whose lives are just as messy as mine. I’m not giving up on them, though. If they’re too tired to keep fighting, I’ll have to do it for them.

“This is quite the thing to come home to,” Dad says, and sticks his fork straight into the chocolate pie, completely forgetting about slices and plates and all of that traditional but technically unnecessary etiquette.

Harley looks briefly scandalized. And then, just as quickly, delighted.

Mom and Tess dig into the same pie. “Wait,” I say. “Don’t you want to try different ones?”

“Oh, we’d hate to take up all of these,” Mom says, waving around, her eyes still glued to the chocolate pie.

It really does look good. All right, I guess we’ll all start there.

Harley clinks his fork with mine.

“I hope I didn’t mess up the magic,” he whispers.

“Oh.” It didn’t really occur to me that Harley could.

In about four minutes, half the pie has been excavated from the pan. Mom is patting her stomach and blinking heavily. Dad is producing elaborate yawn-like noises. Tess is frowning deeply, kicking her duffel bag with a thudding foot. “I don’t think I should drive back tonight,” she says suddenly.

“Ohhh, that’s very smart, and I am very sleepy,” Mom says.

I pull Harley aside and whisper, “I think this one is Tired Pie.”

No matter how much I want to fix things at the Proud Muffin, a part of me is exhausted by this whole mess.

And the part of me that thinks about gender every day — mine and everyone else’s and just in general — could use a break. It took me until middle school to realize that most people don’t think about it every day. Because they don’t have to. Because the world is set up in a way where they just take it for granted.

“This is the best piecrust you’ve ever . . . crusted,” Mom says as she falls into one of the armchairs in the living room.

“That was Harley,” I say, my words slowing to a crawl.

“I like piecrust,” Dad burbles as he heads up the stairs. “I like Harley.”

I look at Harley with a held-in smile. He’s curled up on one end of the couch. He’s made himself smaller than I thought possible, but then suddenly his eyes go wide and he tosses a wild punch into the air, the kind of stretch that randomly bursts out of someone before a long, deep sleep.

“I like Harley, too,” I whisper, because everyone is too much of a tired mess to notice.

As my muscles fill with heavy sand and I rush to throw clean dish towels on top of my pies before I can’t move ever again, a single thought wafts through my mind. How much my family doesn’t notice is a good thing and a bad thing.

My sister is passed out on the kitchen floor. Completely unable to lift her, I grab a knitted blanket from the couch and fling it over her body and dab the chocolate off her nose with a napkin. I had grand plans about getting up and joining Harley on the couch, but I can’t seem to get my muscles back in the game. I close my eyes right there on the floor next to Tess.

When I wake up, it’s morning, and a nightmare of uneaten pies.

Pie, everywhere.

There are eleven of them all over the kitchen counters, which I see as soon as I stand up, because I’ve been on the hard, cold kitchen floor since yesterday afternoon. The lines of the tile are etched into my cheek.

Harley arrives behind me, looking like he just came out of a coma.

I grab a pie server, wielding it like a battle axe. “We have so many things to test before I go to work in —”

“Now,” Harley blurts. “I have work right now.”

He runs for the front door, shoving his feet into his sneakers without socks. The shift I picked up for switching with Carlos doesn’t start until after lunch, but Harley’s delivery shift started half an hour ago. Not to mention that he fell asleep at my house, most likely without telling his mom first.

My parents like Harley, but his parent is definitely not going to be predisposed in my favor.

“Go,” I say.

“Wait, how are you going to test the other pies?” Harley asks, and the fact that he still cares even when he’s got one shoe on and he’s late for a shift and his mom hates me — he really believes I have the ability to fix this.

“I’ll figure it out,” I say.

Harley leaves. My family doesn’t look like they’re waking up any time soon.

My brain does a little spin and lands in a new direction.

I dig up the card Jessalee gave me. Today’s date is written on it. The start time for her meeting — whatever it is — is an hour from now. The restaurant is up near Round Rock, which means I have about four minutes to leave if I want to get there in time.

I dress in a flurry and load pie after pie after pie into my car. They blanket the back seat, they fill a cooler in the trunk. The apple pies ride shotgun. I talk to them as I drive — very slowly, no sudden turns.

“Don’t worry,” I say. “You’re getting eaten. All of you.”

The card Jessalee gave me leads me to a Mexican restaurant with well-priced brunch specials and margaritas that people who are old enough to drink margaritas in public refuse to stop talking about. I’m sure they’re great, but let’s be honest that anything based on a fruit-and-alcohol combo is going to be at least moderately delicious if you add a strategic circle of salt around it.

I go in and don’t see anyone. My hope withers like a week-old party balloon.

I check the card. Did I get the time wrong? Is there another branch of this restaurant somewhere else in Austin — somewhere I couldn’t possibly drive in time?

Then I hear Jessalee’s voice carrying on a sudden curl of wind that moves through the open side door.

I leave the indoor dining room with its marigold booths. The tables and chairs outside are covered in bright chips of tile. Around a long table are about fifteen people, with Jessalee holding court at the far end. Everyone looks older than me, but still young-ish. They’re Latinx and Black and Asian and white and people who are more than one of those things, and they all give off a distinctly queer vibe. They’re digging into conversations and bowls of chips and salsa. I’m still not entirely sure what these people are all doing here, but I know this: they look hungry.

“Syd!” Jessalee says, popping up from her chair the second she sees me. She runs over and gives me a dainty side-hug.

“Hey, Jessalee,” I say, knowing better than to attempt a nickname. The only time I’ve seen someone do that — D.C. tried “JLee” once when he called her drink — I honestly thought she would drop the delicacy and stab him. Or maybe stab him delicately.

“I’m so, so glad you made it,” she says. “There’s an empty chair right by me!”

She points at this chair like it’s the best thing ever. I squish in between her and a stranger, trying to look grateful.

As everyone else attacks the appetizers, I watch Jessalee like a beady-eyed grackle, tracking whether she pays more attention to one particular person or ignores someone ostentatiously. I stay on the lookout for emotionally saturated glances. She just keeps walking around, chatting, giving out more side-hugs like they’re her signature move. Everyone is warmly smiling and sharply dressed. I’m suddenly, absurdly glad that I let Tess and Harley shave my head yesterday.

Jessalee circles all the way back around and sits next to me, propped on top of a folded leg. I look around for her notebooks, pens, laptop, any sign that I’ve crashed a writing group. All I see is a tiny clutch by Jessalee’s place setting with the words ethical slut hand-beaded onto it. “All right,” she says, clinking the side of her mimosa with her fork. “I think we’re all here. Welcome to polyam brunch!”

 

1 open mind

1 breakfast special

2 mimosas (virgin, if you’re under 21)

Get into conversations with people, most of which aren’t even about polyamory.

Learn a few things that you didn’t know before, like the difference between a V and a triad.

Start with your own breakfast special but be open to sharing plates. Realize that this is not a metaphor for anything in particular but a way for everyone to try the restaurant’s seven equally delicious breakfast enchiladas.

Drink a mimosa.

If someone asks, and you feel like doing it, share your own dating history. Admit that you’ve been in a single relationship, and you went into it headfirst when you were in middle school and only recently surfaced.

Drink another mimosa. Realize it’s basically just fizzy orange juice.

Don’t let that stop you from having a good time.