Page 78 of The Getaway List
I follow her to the back room of the shop, where we’re currently setting up for our app’s Saturday-afternoon launch party. Everything is mostly set up, but Luca insisted on pulling out even more stops for the shenanigans by doing an “insurance bake” of extra brownies. This seems overkill, seeing as this party is mostly for a collection of our parents, friends, classmates, and the few investors we’ve managed to snag, but Luca takes his parents’ dessert reputation seriously, even if he doesn’t work here anymore.
“Yeah. But I’m pretty sure all roads would have ended in Tom’s brownie agenda anyway,” I respond.
Mariella blows a stray lock of hair out of her face. “Ain’t that the truth.”
We take a step back and look at our handiwork for the party—the purple and yellow streamers, the array of desserts and mini appetizer bites we used the Brownie Bonanza ovens to heat up, the little framed QR codes that lead people to our website where they can download the app. We’re as ready as we’ll ever be, and quite possibly as tired as we’ve ever been.
Still, when I hold up my hand Mariella high-fives it without breaking her stride and says, “Let’s go kick some technological ass.”
Truth be told, this party is just the tip of our workload iceberg. Setting up a new app with Mariella took a whole lot out of us—on my end it was all the field research and hiring and user-experience testing, and on Mariella’s it was coding and tweaking and debugging for months. No easy feat to balance between my writing classes and shifts at the coffee shop, or for Mariella to balance with helping corun the “Dear, Love” Dispatch with Tom, especially now that they’re starting to test it in two other cities. But after many tireless nights, plenty of dollar slices of pizza, and a lot of blue-light strain on the eyes, our little baby is ready for its debut.
We carry the brownies to the front, where the app’s name is hung on a banner spanning across the room: THE GETAWAY LIST. Mariella elbows me. “Looks pretty snazzy, huh?”
She’s got more license to be excited than I do, maybe, because her last app was soft-launched in the dark and never got the initial fanfare ours is getting. In fact, the only reason we’re getting this much fanfare in the first place is that Tom opted to go public with the “Dear, Love” Dispatch and its creators. When he caught wind of Mariella’s issues with her parents about quitting school to work independently in app development, he figured the best thing he could do for her was make sure she’d be able to put the app on her resume as loudly as possible.
What we weren’t expecting was for investors and advertisers to start scrambling for Tom and Mariella’s attention the minute they went public. At first I was worried they might be overwhelmed—Tom had just started at Columbia, after all, and was loving every minute of it, and Mariella was still deciding on whether or not to commit to school. But it turns out I worried in vain.
“If this isn’t the universe saying ‘fuck that’ to paying another dime of tuition, so be it” was Mariella’s official stance on the matter. Tom was happy to follow her lead, especially since the app’s extra boost in publicity meant they were hiring more dispatchers, enough that all of us working for the app were starting to become a tight-knit unit of our own.
“Yeah,” I agree with her, helping myself to one of the insurance brownies. “Pretty fucking snazzy.”
Jesse swoops in, late as ever—a full year into our time in Manhattan and I’m never not waiting for a call to say he accidentally took the train to Queens when he was supposed to be home at the apartment—and squishes us both into a hug. As appreciated as the gesture is, it is slightly less appreciated that he’s holding two large bags of ice in each hand as he does it.
“So proud. Wish I could stay the whole night. Mostly wish I could drop these before my hands freeze off?” he says.
“Over there,” says Mariella, pointing to the buckets where Tom has artfully arranged a bunch of sodas and seltzers. We don’t really need that much extra ice, but Jesse insisted on being helpful despite the Walking JED doing their first headlining set at the Milkshake Club tonight. At some point we just let him elect himself as the ice guy so he’d feel useful.
Jesse dutifully starts filling the buckets as Mariella and I do another sweep of the place, joined by Luca, who has his arms full of so many things I’d be worried he’s going to tip over if he didn’t have so much experience in food service.
“Oh. Right on time,” says Luca, handing Jesse a smaller pan of brownies. I know from the crispy edges and telltale black and blue sprinkles that it’s made up of the same batter Jesse made for Dai on their first date. “These just finished baking.”
“Bless your brownie-baking soul,” says Jesse, carefully taking it from him. “We’re too busy with gigs to do much for our one-year, so this is perfect.”
Mariella rolls her eyes at the cuteness, despite her and Luca’s official one-year anniversary coming up next week. “We’re not going to be cheesy about it,” she’s told me multiple times. (That said, Luca has written no less than ten drafts of poems for her, and she has been learning to cook his favorite kind of lasagna on and off for the past week, which is both the figurative and literal definition of cheesy.)
I’m not sure what Tom and I are doing. For all I know we’ll bandwagon Luca and Mariella’s plans—something that happens often enough, considering Tom moved in with Luca in a little apartment above Brownie Bonanza a few weeks after he got back to the city last summer. But I’m not worried. These days Tom and I are so busy running around every inch of this city together that it feels like a mini celebration every damn day.
Right on cue, Tom comes in from the back with a few cartons of iced coffee. He gives me a quick kiss on the lips, then looks immediately and hilariously scandalized.
“You told me no brownies until the guests had a chance,” he says, clearly having tasted it on me.
“Did I?” I say, licking my lips. “Sounds irresponsible of me.”
Tom leans in and kisses me again, deeper this time. I can feel his smile against my lips as he skims his tongue over my teeth as if to get a better taste.
“Happy?” I ask him wryly.
Tom nods, cheeks endearingly flushed. “You decided to go with the toffee bits after all, huh?”
Mariella makes a gagging noise and says, “We’re launching an app here, folks, not the world’s most insufferable Hallmark movie.”
Tom obligingly starts setting up the spouts and the cups for the iced coffee, a smirk still playing at the corners of his mouth. I glance around the room, and when I figure there isn’t much else left to be done, lean into him, grounding myself.
Tom presses his chin to the top of my head for a brief moment. “Nice of the shop to give you these for free,” he says about the iced-coffee boxes.
I nod, still lazily using him as a human lamppost. “And very much on theme.”
The thing is, if it weren’t for the coffee shop, I’m not sure if this app would exist in the first place. As it turns out, the shop got a bit of hype when Luca came on board and helped consult on some of the desserts—despite his aversion to sweets, he has an undeniable knack for creating them, and his caramel-gouda-stuffed croissants and chocolate-chili donut holes put us on the map. Before long tourists were making it one of their first stops in the city and then had no idea what else to do in our neighborhood. As a native New Yorker and someone who had recently moved to the city myself, Luca and I became the designated idea generator for these folks, to the point where we started posting handwritten lists of places people could go.
