1 Chapter 1

1

Alexi carefully arranged the banana slices around the edges of the glass bowl. There wasn’t much time before the ice cream started dripping, but they had to get this right. Once they were satisfied, they added the drizzle of hot fudge sauce and a delicate sprinkling of chopped nuts. It took another fifteen seconds that dragged on like five minutes to get their creation into proper lighting in the back room. Then they pulled out their phone, angled it to seem like they were sitting at a table casually snapping a pic, and took half a dozen shots, each slightly different from the rest.

“Is it safe to move around now?” Ivan asked.

“Yes, I’m not gonna go Christian Bale on you for messing up my lights,” Alexi said, plopping down into the chair and stabbing a spoon into the scoop of Peanut Butter Cup ice cream. “Thank you for your cooperation.”

Ivan rolled his eyes. “You’ve got to at least put a sign up if you’re gonna do your obsessive food-Instagraming thing,” he said. “The rest of us have to work too.”

Alexi had no plans to make that big of a deal about what they were doing. They scrolled back and forth between the pictures they had taken until they decided on the best one. “There’s no customers and I’m on my break. I can do what I want. That includes fussing over making the perfect BanaNut Bowl.”

“As much as my dad appreciates your attention to detail and your dedication to the craft, I think this is taking it too far.” Ivan’s dad was Hank Duckworth, owner and operator of Duckworth’s Ice Cream Parlor in Hawley, Pennsylvania. Alexi had been working there for years, first as a side job while they were in high school, then full-time after they graduated. It was a family-run store, but Hank knew and trusted Alexi enough to promote them to a management position a couple years ago. Ivan, who was working here while he was out of college for the summer, constantly tried to act like Alexi’s boss just because it was his family’s shop. Alexi wasn’t one to get riled so easily though.

“Again, this is on my personal time.” They took a bite of their ice cream, making sure to get a little of all the toppings on it. “Gimme twenty minutes and I’ll go back to being a more mediocre professional.”

Ivan rolled his eyes again. “Whatever, I’m busy.”

Alexi resisted the urge to childishly stick their tongue out at him. They licked the fudge sauce off their spoon instead and scooped up a bite of the Chocolate Peanut Butter Swirl ice cream this time. With Ivan gone, they went back to uploading their new post to Foodspotting. It was a sort of secret project they had been working on for the past couple months. They had been using the app ever since the Android version came out, but it had only occurred to them to use it for advertising purposes this spring.

Foodspotting was essentially a crowd-sourced picture menu and review app. Users posted photos of food they ordered, listed where they had gotten it, and tagged what kind of food it was so others could find it. In this case, anyone coming to Lake Wallenpaupack, or even just traveling through as they explored the Poconos, could type in that they were looking for ice cream and Alexi’s pictures would pop right up, along with pictures from other people who had eaten at Duckworth’s. It wasn’t the most well-known app, since more people used Yelp instead, but if it could bring in customers then Alexi was willing to try it.

However, Alexi didn’t want Hank finding out about this. Hank was always so proud of the reputation the parlor had on its own, based on the work he had put into it and his father before him and so on. He barely even maintained the shop’s Facebook page. It had their hours and location on it and a few pictures of him and his kids posing by the storefront, but if Tiffany, his older daughter, tried to set up online coupons or anything else he considered “gimmicky” then Alexi would have to put up with Hank’s grumbling and griping for at least a week. Alexi wouldn’t hear the end of it if anyone found out this wasn’t for their Instagram and word got back to Hank. There was nothing stopping customers from posting pictures though, and Alexi’s Foodspotting account was, like half their social media accounts, under the name they considered going by if they ever wanted to transition and try to pass as a girl, Cassandra.

To seem less suspicious, Alexi never made two posts about Duckworth’s back-to-back. Their previous posts were from a restaurant they ate at a few nights ago and the café that added some new items to their menu for the first wave of tourists that were flocking in. Even so, the app remembered all the information about Duckworth’s and the tags Alexi had used before. Ice cream, dessert, sundae, ice cream sundae, treat.