by Emma Lord
Not that I’m not grateful and all—Ethan and I may have both worked our asses off to get into Stone Hall, but my parents continue working their asses off to pay for it. My mom went there when she was a kid, and even though she has adjusted to the rest of it—the whole comedown from “uptown princess” to “wife of a deli owner” that must have been some hell of a whirlwind romance before Ethan and I existed—she has always been adamant about our education, and my dad has always been adamant on backing her up on it.
Which is why I find myself on a Monday morning, walking up the steps of a school that looks like it fell out of Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame and nodding at kids whose bank accounts are hefty enough to buy the Starbucks down the street for kicks.
And so commences my least favorite part of every day—the part where people’s eyes graze my face, light up hopefully, and then immediately dim when they realize I am not, in fact, their treasured Ethan, but still just regular me. No amount of letting my hair grow out slightly longer and messier than his or switching up my backpack and shoes or generally walking around with my head in my phone screen has done anything to prevent it.
What I really need is a new face. But since I’m actually partial to it, I’ll settle for waiting for Ethan to blow the Popsicle stand that is Manhattan and go to some yuppie university far away from here.
“Yo. Yo.”
I glance up from my locker to find Paul, who is all of five-foot-five and basically what would happen if the Energizer Bunny and the leprechaun from Lucky Charms had a very ginger, very excitable baby.
“Did you see? Mel and Gina were like, necking in the hallway,” he informs me, his eyes shining with glee.
I pull out my history textbook and shut the locker. “In 1954? Because I’m pretty sure we call it making out now.”
Paul frantically pats my arm. “So here’s what happened,” he says, with the urgency of an intern reporting something to their boss on the way into work. “They were chatting on the Weazel app, and, y’know, flirting and stuff, and then the app revealed their names to each other and now they are dating.”
Paul is grinning one of those manic grins, and for once, I find myself grinning manically back. To be honest, this has been the coolest part of Weazel—people actually connecting on it. Like, the Hallway Chat is sometimes just people shitposting for kicks, but sometimes it gets real. People talking about how freaked out they are about college admissions, or their parents putting pressure on them. People cracking jokes about a test we all failed to lighten the mood. All the tiny little cracks in our armor that we never actually show each other in person, because sometimes this place feels more like a watering hole where we all have to establish ourselves as predator and prey than an actual institution of learning.
But this—this is the stuff that makes all those hours monitoring the app worth it. When people connect with each other on the one-on-one chats. Mel and Gina aren’t the first people to either start dating or strike up a friendship because of it. In fact, so many people were bitching about our calculus midterm that there’s a full-on study group that meets twice a week in the library now.
We round the corner and there, sure enough, are Mel and Gina, going at it so enthusiastically that it is a genuine miracle neither of them has gotten detention yet. It almost makes me worry that something has happened to our dear old friend Vice Principal Rucker, whose sonar for teenage affection usually rivals bomb-sniffing dogs.
“Hot, right?”
I put a hand on Paul’s shoulder, knowing full well it will do nothing to calm his seismic level of excitement, and also knowing full well that he’s only calling it “hot” because he thinks he’s supposed to.
“You’re going full Hefner,” I say, because we’ve talked about this kind of thing before. “Dial it down.”
“Yeah, right, right.”
If there is one person in this school I feel more sorry for than myself, it’s Paul—who, despite having all the trappings of a filthy-rich Stone Hall legacy, is basically what would happen if a Nick Jr. cartoon became three-dimensional. I think if it weren’t for the diving team being so fiercely protective of their own, this place might have eaten him alive.
“Let’s get to homeroom.”
I’m still kind of high on the buzz of my own inflated sense of ego as I sit, itching to check my phone, to see if there’s another message from Bluebird. I’m suddenly bursting to tell someone—I made this happen. I was a small part of something cool. And of all the people in my world, weirdly, it’s the person whose face I don’t even know that I want to tell most.
Well, that’s the other weird thing. I do know her face, whoever she is. I know everyone in our year. It could be Carter, who’s highlighting a set of notes in the front row, or Abby, who’s blowing an impressively large bubble gum bubble, or Hailey or Minae, whose heads are ducked down in a heated discussion about what definitely sounds like Riverdale fan fiction. In some ways, it’s like Bluebird is nobody and everybody at the same time—like every time someone looks up and notices me glancing at them, I could be looking right at her.
Or worse—she could be looking right at me.
Jack
Once the final morning bell rings, I find out pretty fast why Rucker wasn’t around to hit lovesick teens with his metaphorical broomstick.
“Good morning, eager beavers of Stone Hall,” says the nasally voice that probably haunts at least half the school’s dreams over the intercom. “By now you have seen the schoolwide email warning about the ‘Weasel’ app, and disciplinary action that will be taken for any student caught using it. Students are encouraged to report to any faculty members if they observe any of their peers communicating on the app.”
Yikes. The thing Rucker is most notorious for—aside from sporting a collection of patterned pants that even the local Goodwill would burn upon sight—is his loyal little rat pack of students. I don’t know any names for certain, but I have suspicions—namely Pooja Singh and Pepper Evans, two fellow seniors who seem to be in some kind of silent authority-figure-pleasing competition at all times, and some of the kids on the golf team, who seem to be otherwise overlooked because … well … golf. I don’t know if he’s offering them extra credit or college recs or what, but he seems to have at least three narcs in every year who are all too willing to sell the rest of us out. Ethan has taken to calling them Rucker’s “little birds” like that dude in Game of Thrones, but honestly, “complete assholes” suits them just fine.
Paul leans over. “Okay, that’s 1984 as heck.”
I try not to look over at him too obviously. Our homeroom teacher, Mrs. Fairchild, is a big fan of silence. I personally suspect it’s because she is nursing a hangover most of the time, which, respect. If I had to deal with hormonal teenagers who carry black AmEx cards, I’d probably be buying out the Trader Joe’s wine store in Union Square too.
“No kidding.”
Then the door swings open, and in comes Pepper Evans herself. The only reason I’m not entirely sure that Pepper isn’t a robot is that she’s captain of the swim team, and I haven’t seen any circuits actively frying when she gets into the pool. All the other evidence decidedly points toward her being SkyNet material. She’s top of the class, has a GPA that makes mere mortals weep, and is never, ever late.
Which means that if she’s walking in five minutes after the bell, it can only be for one reason.
“So?” I ask, as she slides herself into the seat right next to mine. She either doesn’t hear me or pretends not to. “How many?”
Pepper barely turns to acknowledge me, her face flushed under her freckles and her eyes trained on the chalkboard, where Mrs. Fairchild is half-heartedly writing some reminders about volunteer hours being due by the end of the week.
“How many what?” she mutters, tucking her overgrown bangs behind her ear. Within a second, they’re fanning back over her face, a blonde curtain that, unlike the rest of her, she can never quite seem to tame.
“How many people did
you rat out to Rucker?”
She scowls that uneven scowl of hers, one of her eyebrows creasing just a bit more than the other. It is bizarrely satisfying, getting any kind of reaction out of her—like when the machine at Chuck E. Cheese in Harlem used to malfunction and spit out a few extra tickets. I lean forward in my desk, forgetting for a moment about Mrs. Fairchild’s wrath.
“What’d he offer you?” I ask. “A’s on all of your midterms?”
Pepper’s lips thin into her teeth, but her body stays very still. She has this uncanny ability to sit like a statue. I wouldn’t be surprised if pigeons have landed on her in the park.
“Unlike you,” she says, the words perfectly clear even though her mouth hardly moves, “I don’t need any help with my grades.”
I put a hand on my heart, wounded. “You think I’m dumb?”
“Last year I watched you put Kool-Aid mix in pool water and drink it. I know you’re dumb.”
“It was for a bet.”
She arches one perfectly groomed eyebrow before devoting her full attention back to her notebook. I grin and shake my head, turning back to the front. Truth is, I actually don’t mind Pepper. She’s one of the few people who knows, sometimes without even glancing up from her textbook, that I’m me and not my brother.
Which, to be fair, is probably a lot easier for a robot.
Still, it’s kind of unnerving. Even people who’ve known us since kindergarten get tripped up, and she came in out of nowhere and seemed to have me sized up the moment she got to Stone Hall. Sometimes freshman year, I’d notice her staring—not just at me, but at everyone. At that point we were all in that bumbling part of puberty where we were pretending not to notice each other, but Pepper was actively and unabashedly observing everyone, like she was trying to figure out the whole of us before trying to make herself fit.
I still can’t quite figure out what was so weird about it—Pepper specifically, with the keen blue of her eyes on me, or just the fact of feeling seen at all. But I missed the weirdness of it when it was over, when within the month, she was just like everyone else here, so tunnel-visioned about her grades and her SATs that she couldn’t see past her nose, let alone see anyone else.
It’s probably why I rib her, in particular, more than the other Goody Two-shoes in our class—the nicknames, the teasing, the occasional foot-tapping on the back of her chair. Because I miss that strange, undivided attention. Because I know she wasn’t always like this. Once, she was every bit as out of place here as I feel every day.
Homeroom only lasts for thirty minutes, but as usual, Mrs. Fairchild manages to make them as excruciatingly boring as possible. All around me, I can see students with varying degrees of subtlety pulling out their phones and texting—from my desk alone, I can see at least three people on Weazel. I scan the room, looking to see if I can find any more. Then I notice Pepper bent over slightly, her perfect posture just a degree off.
“Are you texting?” I hiss.
She jumps. Literally jumps up in her seat, getting an impressive inch of air.
“None of your business.”
“Are you on Weazel?”
Her eyes are hard. “You saw Rucker’s email. I wouldn’t be caught dead on that app.”
Um, ouch.
She settles her fingers back on her phone screen and types without breaking eye contact with the whiteboard, which even I have to admit is impressive.
“This is a place of learning, Pepperoni.”
She rolls her eyes and shoves her phone into her open backpack. I wonder if she really thinks I was going to bust her for texting in class. The idea of that is oddly more insulting than the whole “I watched you drink Kool-Aid” bit (which, in all fairness, was among the most disgusting things I have ever done because of peer pressure).
I’m about to say something conciliatory, but just then I see Paul’s mouth drop open out of the corner of my eye. Not that I need any peripheral vision to see it—about half the class does, because Paul’s emotional states are generally so demonstrative that I’m pretty sure people in Brooklyn can lick their pointer fingers, hold them to the wind, and know exactly what kind of state Paul is in at any given moment. But as soon as he looks up and his eyes meet mine, I know that whatever it is that has him worked up, it does not bode well for me.
He sucks in a breath to say something, and then, mercifully, the bell rings before he can blurt whatever it is out into the open. Instead, he scrambles out of his desk so fast his bony knees almost knock it over, and yanks on the sleeve of my uniform.
“Did you see?”
I glance to my right—Pepper’s already halfway out the door.
“See what?”
Paul’s hands are shaking as he shoves his phone into my line of vision—an impressively stupid move, all things considered. Weazel aside, we’re not allowed to have our phones out during school hours. But I see the familiar Twitter handle for Girl Cheesing and all of my concerns about future detentions fly out the window.
“Oh my god.”
“Right? This is amazing.”
“Amazing?” I grab his phone from him, holding it up to my face and blinking at it as if I can blink away the literal three thousand retweets and the ungodly number of likes on the tweet I sent from the deli’s account this morning. “My parents are going to gut me like a fucking fish.”
“Language,” Mrs. Fairchild mutters, evidently not even caring about the contraband in my hands.
My heart is halfway up my throat, beating in my skull. My dad doesn’t even like that we’re on Twitter, let alone going viral on it. “How the hell did this happen?”
We have 645 followers. The fact that I know the exact amount is a testament to how very rarely that number changes. Up until now, the most engagement we’ve ever gotten from a tweet on the deli’s account was a meme about early dive team practices that Ethan accidentally posted and a bot retweeted before he realized what he’d done.
“Marigold retweeted it,” says Paul.
My throat feels like sandpaper. Marigold, as in the eighties pop star my mom is obsessed with, who still comes into the deli every now and then.
Marigold, as in the eighties pop star who just unwittingly got me grounded into next year. It was one thing when I thought I might take some heat for tweeting it in the first place—now I’m going to be working unpaid shifts at the deli and smelling like turkey until Christmas.
Because Marigold, as it turns out, has a whopping 12.5 million followers. I don’t need to be coasting in AP Calc to know that translates to roughly a bajillion retweets every time she breathes. And it looks like she only just retweeted us—in the time I’ve stood here staring at Paul’s phone with my mouth unhinged, it’s gotten another 250 retweets.
I tap on her profile and see there’s another tweet she sent herself, right after her retweet. “Shame on Big League Burger!” it reads. “Girl Cheesing perfected Grandma’s Special before that punk was even born.”
By “that punk,” I assume she is referencing the Big League Burger mascot, a cartoon of a chubby-faced, freckled little boy in a baseball cap with a melting ice cream cone in his hands. In commercials he’s always hamming it up to the camera, getting into some kind of annoying shenanigans and saying, “Welcome to the big leagues!” The commercial ends before anyone bothers disciplining him for anything. I better figure out what the secret to that is, and fast, because my parents are going to be none too pleased when I get home.
“You’re famous,” says Paul, elated.
“I’m doomed.”
I hand him back his phone, scanning the hallway for Ethan, wondering if he’s seen. Not that it matters—nothing is going to get me out of what is sure to be another long lecture in our dad’s roster of them. I’m thinking this one will be in the patience is a virtue variety, subsection you need to think before you act. And admittedly, I do have a slight habit of opening my mouth before my brain fully filters what is and isn’t appropriate to say (or, y’know, tweet).
But if
I’m bad, our mom is way worse. She once scared a guy with a literal knife trying to hold up the deli by throwing a ham and screaming at him. It’s not like my hotheadedness is some kind of anomaly.
Still, this is one of those moments I wish I’d taken Dad’s advice. It’ll be a miracle if I get out of this unscathed—thanks to Marigold, I’m about to be the level of grounded that will make me flinch at every “Best of the ’80s” playlist for the rest of my life.
Pepper
Wolf
Haven’t heard from you all day, so I’m going to assume you’re among the chosen few and Rucker confiscated your phone. Godspeed, soldier.
I press my forehead to the locker of the changing room. The final bell rang ten minutes ago, and by then Taffy had texted me a whopping total of thirty-two times.
What about this one? reads her latest message. I squint at the screenshot of a tweet she’s sent me. It’s a selfie of a guy holding up a full McDonald’s bag, his mouth crammed with fries, captioned grill this, bitch. It’s one of a few thousand tweets we’ve gotten, tagged to the corporate account for the #GrilledByBLB initiative, but we’re trying to respond to at least two hundred of them with funny comebacks today.
And by “we” I really mean me, because Taffy does not have a sarcastic bone in her entire body.
I draft a tweet and send it to her so fast that I don’t even have to break my stride: it’s illegal to burn trash.
Taffy has it up within the minute, which means it’s going to be another five minutes before she finds another contender, and another ten minutes after that for her to give up on thinking about a tweet on her own and text me. By then, though, I’ll be in the pool—something I’m actually looking forward to for once, since it is the only definitive way to make myself unavailable these days.