Tweet Cute

by Emma Lord

  I hit Park Avenue, nodding at the doorman on the way out, and pull the corporate account back up on my phone. It will honestly look stupid for us to respond to this barb. We’re already in hot water for the way we responded to the last one. But it’s either tweet now or get a bunch of semi-terrified texts from Taffy later.

  Big League Burger @B1gLeagueBurger

  Replying to @GCheesing

  OMG! Finally! The public knows the ~secret ingredient~ grandma adds to your grilled cheese. Thanks for the pro tip guys but we’ll pass for now

  7:03 AM · 21 Oct 2020

  I’m still half asleep by the time I get to homeroom, but not half asleep enough I don’t notice Jack and Ethan muttering to each other in heated voices in a corner of the room. I sit at my usual desk, trying to ignore it, but the room is empty enough it’s hard not to hear them.

  “… going to kill me. He thinks I sent that stupid picture.”

  “So what? I’ll tell him it was me. I don’t care. It’s not that big of a deal.”

  “He’s already texted me like seven times. He told us to drop it—”

  “You should have seen the shit people were saying—”

  “I did. I did see it. And then I logged off.”

  I pull up the Weazel app, wondering if it’s something from the Hallway Chat. But the only recent message in there of note is someone roasting the grammatical correctness of the graffiti someone recently scrawled in one of the stalls of the girls’ bathrooms. No pictures that look like they’d set the Campbell twins at each other’s throats, which is a weird enough occurrence in and of itself—I’ve never once seen them fight.

  “Just forget it,” Jack mutters. And then he’s sitting himself right down in the seat next to mine, the same way we were yesterday.

  I don’t know if I’m supposed to say anything or not. There’s no way to pretend I didn’t hear their conversation because the three of us are practically the only people in the room. That is, until Ethan says something under his breath to excuse himself and then ducks out.

  It’s quiet for a moment, then, but knowing Jack, it won’t be for long.

  “Do you have any siblings?” Jack asks.

  He looks antsier than usual, slouching in his seat, his knuckles quietly drumming on the desk.

  “Yeah. An older sister.”

  Jack nods. Opens his mouth as though he’s going to say something else, and then thinks better of it.

  I pull out my Monster Cake, a little squished in its aluminum foil, and break off a piece to offer Jack. His eyebrows lift, and he looks at me in confusion, like I’m trying to hand him a fish.

  “It’s not poisonous.”

  He takes it from me, examining it. A few crumbs end up on his desk. “What is it?”

  I hesitate for a moment. I don’t think I’ve actually discussed this unholy mash-up of desserts with anyone aside from my parents and Paige. I wonder if it’s some kind of betrayal, sharing it with someone outside of the family.

  “Monster Cake.”

  “Monster Cake?”

  His lips quirk in amusement, and then I see it again—another shift, another reconsideration. I decide I don’t mind it this time.

  “It’s pretty much a mash-up of every junk food known to man, baked into a cake. Hence the name.”

  Jack takes a bite. “Holy shit.”

  My face heats up. People are starting to walk into the room just as Jack literally tips back in his seat and moans.

  “Jack,” I hiss.

  “This is the best thing I’ve ever tasted.”

  I can’t tell if he’s making fun of me or not, but either way, he is decidedly making a scene. I wrap up the rest of the cake and shove it into my backpack.

  “I mean, this is obscene. How did you come up with this?”

  “It’s just—I mean, it’s not like I … We were little kids when we made it.”

  Jack literally kisses his fingers. I stare into my lap, my face burning, a reluctant smile blooming. I haven’t had a ton of time to update our blog lately—Paige has been posting on overdrive to make up for it—so I’ve forgotten how it feels, having someone try some weird dessert I made up and enjoy it. Usually it’s just people commenting from some corner of the internet, saying they tried it, or Paige groaning her approval when we meet up and bake together.

  But this is different. This is so … personal, almost. Having someone outside of the family try something I made right in front of me. Maybe I don’t hate it.

  “I feel like you may have flown too close to the dessert sun. I’ve never tasted anything like this, and my parents literally own a—”

  “Mr. Campbell, if you insist on eating in my classroom, at least have the decency not to turn my floor into your personal napkin.”

  I manage to muffle my laugh by turning it into a cough. Just as Mrs. Fairchild turns her attention back to the board, Jack catches my eye and winks.

  I roll my eyes, and then his friend Paul comes in, buzzing about something that happened on the Weazel app. He’s lucky Mrs. Fairchild is either hard of hearing or very committed to pretending she is, or he’d be screwed right now, considering the no-tolerance policy on the app. That aside, there are narcs all over this place—enough of them that I’m never actually stupid enough to pull Weazel up on my phone at school.

  Okay. Maybe sometimes. But I try not to, because whoever Wolf is, he responds so fast during school hours, I’m legitimately worried I’m going to get him in trouble.

  And despite Jack’s suspicion that I was ratting people out to Rucker the other day, that’s pretty much my worst nightmare. If Wolf got in trouble and was kicked off the app, I don’t know what I’d do. It’s almost scary, how fast I went from not having him in my life to feeling like, Paige aside, he may be the best friend I’ve got. We’re just on the same wavelength on everything. Life at Stone Hall, but more importantly, feeling like the odd one out here.

  The likeliest scenario is that Wolf is someone who has a study hall, or a gap in his schedule. Someone like Ethan, who’s constantly in and out for student government stuff. Or someone with one of the senior internships where they get to leave school for two hours a day, like—

  Huh. Someone like Landon.

  By the time homeroom lets out, my stomach is gurgling from lack of breakfast. I pull out the Monster Cake as covertly as I can, planning to shove some in my mouth when I open my locker, but I discover as soon as I unlock it that I have acquired a stray. Somehow Jack has managed to follow me across the length of the entire hallway, his friend Paul in tow.

  “Just one more bite?”

  I grin into my locker door, so he can’t see. “You sound like a junkie.”

  “I might be one now, and it’s kind of your fault. So you have a responsibility to keep supplying. Or I’ll go into withdrawal.”

  “What are you even talking about?” Paul asks, standing on the tips of his toes to look into my locker, even though we’re the exact same height.

  I rip off another piece for Jack, and then, in a moment of Monster Cake benevolence, hand some to Paul too. I might as well stay on good terms with as many members of the dive team as I can, now that we’re apparently sharing lanes.

  “Oh my god. You’re my new favorite person.”

  Jack ribs him. “How easily your loyalties shift.”

  Paul salutes us both. “Gotta head to my internship.”

  I pause mid-chew. So maybe Landon’s not the only person I know who ducks out of school regularly.

  I try to imagine it. Paul awake late at night by the dim light of his phone, texting me terrible puns about Great Expectations, making fun of our chain-smoking PE teacher for her aggressively hypocritical lectures on the dangers of cigarettes. Telling me about his family, listening to my woes about mine.

  “Still on for grabbing some grub after practice?”

  It doesn’t feel quite right, but that’s the problem—I can’t really imagine anyone being Wolf. Like there’s some kind of mental block, every time I try
to give him a face. Sometimes he feels more like some bodiless entity than a person.

  And sometimes—like yesterday, when he was upset about that thing with his parents—he’s so real it’s like we’re huddled in a corner together somewhere, so close I could reach out and touch.

  I blink up at Jack, mentally replaying the last few seconds of whatever he was saying to me. “Huh? Oh. Yeah, I’m good for after practice.”

  “Ethan said your coach sent you a meet calendar, if you want to forward it to me.”

  “Oh, yeah.” I check to make sure the hallway is clear, then pull the attachment up on my phone and hand it to him. “You can airdrop it to yourself.”

  Jack fumbles for a moment, trying to hold both our phones at the same time. “Your screen just went black.”

  My hands are too occupied trying to wrap up the leftover Monster Cake. “The password’s just 1234.” My dad set up our phone codes for us when we all upgraded last month, and the only reason I tell Jack is because I have every intention of changing it when I have time.

  Jack lets out a low whistle. “You realize that’s like the phone equivalent of leaving your keys under your mat.”

  He hands me back my phone, and then the warning bell rings and Jack salutes me, heading off with a Monster Cake–induced skip in his step, and I can’t help the slight skip in my own.

  Pepper

  I spend the next few hours attempting and ultimately failing to ignore the texts coming in from my mom and Taffy. Once the final bell rings, I take a few minutes outside of the locker room to attempt to string together a timeline of Twitter events. It turns out Girl Cheesing’s account—which now has a whopping eleven thousand followers compared to yesterday’s three digits—responded to my tweet from this morning pretty fast.

  Girl Cheesing @GCheesing

  Replying to @B1gLeagueBurger

  still tastes better than unoriginality though amirite

  7:17 AM · 21 Oct 2020

  And maybe that would have been the end of it—nobody asked me to respond to that during school. Odds are my mom might have just let Taffy ignore it, and we all could have moved on with our lives and maybe settled this in small claims court instead of on Twitter, the way I just kind of assumed adults did.

  Enter Jasmine Yang, famous YouTuber and host of the popular vlog “Twitter Gets Petty.” In a three-minute video posted about an hour before school let out, she detailed the few tweets involved in our “feud,” essentially narrating the nightmare of the last twenty-four hours of my life.

  “I think it’s safe to say these two accounts are pretty cheesed with each other. So who’s it gonna be, Petty People?” she says at the end of the video, addressing her followers with a cheeky grin. “Team Girl Cheesing or Team Big League? Let me know in the comments, y’all. I know who’s getting my vote.”

  The video shows a screenshot, then, of her responding to a Big League Burger tweet with the word COPYCAT all in caps, alongside a flood of cat emojis.

  And somehow, in the hour between her posting the video and me getting out of school, the idea has taken off so aggressively that hundreds of Twitter users are doing the same. Every tweet, every Instagram post, every Facebook announcement that BLB has made in the last few months is just a sea of people commenting with the cat emoji.

  It would be funny, if I were literally anyone else on the planet. But I just happen to be the person who is going to be chained to a phone until I find some way to fix it.

  My brain is practically churning by the time practice is over. I’m so preoccupied with what on earth our next tactical move can be I don’t even notice Vice Principal Rucker standing in the lobby of the gym where we hold practices until I hear his unmistakable nasally voice saying, “Excuse me, Miss Singh, but what exactly am I seeing on your phone screen?”

  Pooja’s back is turned to Rucker, but I have a direct view of her face—or, more appropriately, the look of sheer terror that has replaced her face. I know it can only mean one thing.

  “Um—it’s, uh—”

  “No, no, pull it back up. I’d love to see.”

  “Is that the phone Coach Thompkins found on the pool deck?”

  Pooja is holding her breath, staring at me with traffic-light eyes. It takes her a second to catch on, but then she nods.

  “We’re trying to figure out whose it is,” I explain to Rucker. I turn back to Pooja. “Any luck?”

  Pooja hands her phone to me, her face collected but her hands shaking. “Not yet.”

  Rucker eyes the phone in my hands. I try not to move it too much, knowing if the screen lights up that Pooja has a picture of herself posing with a cut-out of Ruth Bader Ginsburg that will give her up in an instant.

  “It looked like it was logged into that Weasel application,” says Rucker.

  “Yeah,” I say quickly, “that’s how we know it’s someone from Stone Hall.”

  Pooja nods. “And we’ll, uh, definitely tell you whose it is when we figure it out.”

  I can feel his eyes on me, and then on Pooja, trying to decide whether or not he trusts us. But his eyes are nothing compared to Pooja’s, who is staring at me like she’s still waiting for me to throw her under the bus. Neither of us really plays dirty—at least not since freshman year—but we haven’t exactly played nice either.

  But as much of a thorn Pooja has been in my side over the years, the last thing I want to do to shift the playing field is let her go down for something as dumb as chatting with people on an app I could just as easily have been caught using, if I’d walked out five seconds before she did. If I beat her at anything, I want the satisfaction of knowing it was fair and square.

  “Thank you, girls, for being vigilant about this. If you hear anything else…”

  I hold back the urge to swallow in relief. “You’ll be the first to know,” I lie through my teeth.

  Rucker nods, and then he’s off, not so subtly trying to infiltrate a group of dive team freshmen who see him coming from a mile off. I turn back to Pooja, whose face looks like there isn’t any blood in it.

  “Thanks,” she breathes.

  I shift my backpack on my shoulder. “No problem.”

  “Seriously … you just saved my ass. And like, a dozen other asses. I’m in the middle of setting up the study group times for the history midterm.”

  “Don’t worry about—wait. You’re Bunny?”

  Pooja nods, almost cautious about it. Then, when I don’t end the conversation the way one of us usually does, she relaxes marginally and says, “I mean, not my first choice, but at least I’m not whoever got saddled with Donkey.”

  Usually I make a point to keep my expression as cool as possible in front of Pooja, but I can’t help but stare at her in disbelief. “You’re the one who’s been setting up all the AP study groups.”

  Pooja shrugs. “Well, yeah. The app makes it super easy. And this year’s got us all whipped.”

  For a moment neither of us says anything, me just staring at her, and Pooja shifting her weight between her feet, like she can’t decide to wait me out or leave.

  Because here’s the thing with Pooja—maybe, for a hot second, we could have been friends. We were grouped together in World History freshman year, when our teacher divvied us up for a graded in-class quiz bowl. It was late September, so just when I was starting to get into the groove of how to make myself fit in, and when I was more committed to making a good impression and the grades to match than ever—the fighting with Mom and Paige had only been escalating, and it felt like succeeding at Stone Hall was the only power I had to stop it.

  At that point I still hadn’t really made any friends, but I’d scouted out some potentials. Mel, who seemed to bake a lot, based on some light Instagram stalking, and Pooja, who I’d overheard in the halls talking about trying to make the 100-yard butterfly her event. When we got put into the same group, I was hoping to talk to her about the school’s swim team before the season started. I was working up the nerve—it was still new to me, the idea of hav
ing to make friends instead of having built-in ones—when immediately I wasn’t nervous at all. Pooja was nice, and funny as hell. She kept writing notes in the margins of her notebook to show the rest of our quiz group, some crack about how the code of Hammurabi would apply to Snapchat, or adding “freshmen at Stone Hall” under the bottom rung of a social hierarchy of Mesopotamia.

  I was laughing at one of her jokes when Mr. Clearburn called on me. “Miss Evans, if you’re not too busy goofing around, maybe you could bother to tell us the modern-day country where most of Ancient Mesopotamia was located?”

  Even if I did know the answer, I was so mortified in that moment, I couldn’t have told him my first name. I sat there with my mouth open until Pooja whispered, “Syria.”

  “Syria,” I blurted.

  “Wrong, and I’m deducting a point from your team for disruptiveness. Miss Singh?”

  Pooja gave her answer to the desk. “Iraq?”

  “Correct.”

  The sting of not just looking bad but letting down the other three people on our quiz team was so searing, it felt like I’d been pushed into the fryer at Big League Burger. I glanced over at Pooja, but she wouldn’t even look at me. It was a hard lesson, but a lesson learned: everyone at Stone Hall is out for themselves.

  The rivalry just kind of grew organically from there. I never forgot what she did, and I certainly didn’t forgive. Every time we’ve come head-to-head since, in class or in swim team or any other school-related thing in between, I’ve held the embarrassment of that with me like a constant throbbing reminder that this isn’t Nashville. That this is a whole new species of human, and its food chain goes so perilously high that there’s always someone at your feet waiting to pull you down.

  But this—this doesn’t add up. Pooja being Bunny, the user on Weazel who’s been reserving library times and hosting coffee shop meetups for all the toughest AP classes. Because if Pooja is Bunny, that means she’s been pulling people up that food chain right along with her.

  Finally I shake my head. “I guess I thought…”

  The sentence hangs there uncomfortably, because we both know what I thought. Pooja shifts her backpack on her shoulders, looking at her shoes before looking back up at me.