We may have been voted Most Likely to Succeed in high school, but our paths diverged dramatically when we went to college.
Obviously. The man is in Forbes, and I’m in SpongeBob sleep shorts. I’m not sure what’s more annoying—his latest accolade or the fact that he’s still smoking hot.
“Good for him,” I say in a tone that clearly conveys fuck that guy, if Mom’s arched eyebrows are any indication. I toss the magazine at Thomas, smiling triumphantly when it hits him in the face.
Thomas’s snort echoes as I drop a kiss on Dad’s sandpaper cheek to thank him for the meal.
I hightail it out of there, using the fumes of my annoyance to speed out to the backyard. Specifically, to the hammock in the far corner, where I can dive into comments without interruption.
Forgetting Theo, his perfect face, and his Midas existence, I pull up the app.
In the grand scheme of things, none of this matters. I had the perfect childhood. I had parents and grandparents who loved me, who showed up to my millions of extracurriculars, who thought the sun rose and set on my and Thomas’s existence, along with our cousins. Grandpa Joe was a sweet man with a booming laugh who used to tug on my bottom lip when I was pouting just to get me smiling again. Gram being in love with another man when she was young doesn’t change anything about my life.
But now that she’s gone, I’m desperate to know this story. She clearly found her way to ultimate happiness. How?
I don’t know what my ultimate happiness looks like or how to get it. If it even exists. Without Gram here to tell me it’ll be okay, and after the missteps that have moved me further from my Most Likely to Succeed path, I’m not confident I’ll ever find it. I wish she could tell me something.
There are nearly two thousand comments, but the most popular ones are at the top. My eyes scan the first five, almost desperately, like I’m looking for a life-or-death test result.
Two things happen.
The first: my breath catches as I see a comment, three words long.
And the second: Thomas pops out of nowhere, yelling, “GOTCHA!”
I jerk violently, screaming as the hammock swings and dumps me onto the grass below.
But I saw the comment before I tipped over, and it made my stomach drop harder than falling.
User34035872: that’s my grandfather.
Two
You really made this?”
I settle next to Thomas on the edge of my bed. After our tangle outside, he demanded to know what was up. We brought the party upstairs so I could walk him through everything privately. Now, I’ve got the stack of pictures in my hand, and Paul’s letter is unfolded on my duvet.
“Yes, for the fifth time, I did.”
Thomas looks up from my phone, his eyebrows raised high. “First of all, the production value is incredible.”
I sigh.
He reaches over to adjust the frozen peas I’m holding against my head. “Seriously, this is great, Beans. That company did you a favor laying you off.” He tilts his head, tapping the phone screen. “But we already know you’re not utilizing your true talents.”
I smack his hand away, ignoring his well-meaning jab. Photography is on the back burner indefinitely. “Few people’s true talents lie in basic data entry. And if my talents did lie there, I’d ask you to go back in time to when you nearly drowned me in Gram’s pool and finish the job.”
“I was seven,” he responds defensively. “It was an accident.”
“Anything can be on purpose if you try hard enough.”
“Okay, let’s focus here.” He absently fiddles with the thin gold hoop in his nose. “Gram really had a side dude?”
“He wasn’t a side dude. She must have dated him before Grandpa, and he was clearly very important to her. They were going to elope, for god’s sake. That letter makes it seem like she was the love of his life!”
Thomas grabs the letter from me, scanning it, then thumbs through the pictures. I watch how his expression changes carefully, from curiosity to surprise to something heavier. His thumb moves over Gram’s smiling face, and he swallows as he sets it down, then picks up the letter again. “Where’d you find all this?”
“It was in one of the boxes in Gram’s garage. Dad brought a bunch of them over, remember?”
“Ah, right, the boxes you’ve been raccooning through.”
I elbow him hard. He elbows me harder, sending the peas flying out of my hand.
He’s not far off, though. I’ve spent the past couple months picking through the boxes Dad brought home when he and my three uncles cleared Gram’s house out. He came back from the task red-eyed and quiet, put the boxes in the garage, and hasn’t touched them since.
Besides his assertion that Grandpa Joe was Gram’s one and only, it’s how I know he’s never seen any of this. The letter and photos were stuffed at the bottom of a box in a big manila envelope. A sealed envelope. I mean, hello, suspicious. I get my insatiable curiosity from him.
Or maybe we both get it from Gram. Our Tell Me a Secret game started when I was old enough to have any. We traded secrets like currency, always an even-steven deal. Mine started out small and inconsequential, growing as I grew, too. I talked to her about relationships, anxiety, school woes, and, later, my struggle to adjust to the disorienting letdown of adulthood. She ended up knowing everything—she was my secret-keeper, my living diary.
Given how our game deepened once I was an adult, Paul should’ve come up in conversation. I’m still the only one who knows she and Grandpa Joe went through a rough patch in the eighties, that the “errands” they’d sometimes sneak off for were actually an excuse to get it on in the car. She knew every juicy detail about my relationships. Why didn’t I know this man existed? Did she not want to tell me specifically, or was it something about the story itself that kept her silent? Either way, it stings. It’s a small betrayal to the rules of our game.
If there’s a reason she held back, I need to know.
I take my phone from Thomas, scrolling down to the comment that still has my heart racing like a hummingbird’s wings.
that’s my grandfather.
Dozens of responses cascade below it, a waterfall of OMGs and Y’ALL IT’S HAPPENINGs.
The million-dollar question is what, exactly, is happening? This person could be lying. They could be telling the truth, but Paul could refuse to speak to me. He may not remember anything. User34035872 could have difficulty distinguishing between past and present tense, and Paul could actually be dead.
Thomas rests his chin on my shoulder. “What are you going to do?”
His voice is knowing, though, because he knows me. It’s what he’d do, too. We’re nearly identical, save for his irritatingly beautiful eyes and his propensity to be a shithead. We have a mile-wide impulsive streak, a competitive spirit bordering on homicidal, and a dedicated it’s fine! optimism that gets us through when hasty decisions go south.
I touch the username, which brings me to a blank profile. No posts, no followers.
“Kinda sus,” Thomas murmurs.
I pull up the send message function anyway, feeling a sense of purpose for the first time in months.
And I type out a message to Paul’s alleged grandkid.
* * *