by Emma Lord
I let out a glugging cough of surprise before breaking the surface, just in time to see Pepper scooping the ball out of the water and chucking it to Ethan halfway across the pool in a motion so fluid and seamless I might have dreamed it.
“What—how—”
She swims back over to me, her strokes dainty and smug. “You were saying?”
I set my pointer finger and my thumb on the surface of the water and flick some at her. She responds by full-on splashing me.
“Jack! Oy!”
It’s Paul, being about as subtle as a gun, yelling across the pool to indicate he’s going to pass to me. I kick myself away from Pepper so I might have a Klondike Bar’s chance in hell of actually catching it, but I’m not fast enough—her hand is already resting on my shoulder.
It’s a basic defensive move in water polo, but for one weird, weightless blip, it isn’t. She takes her fingers and squeezes them, tightening them around the muscle of my shoulder, not enough to be aggressive or competitive. Just enough that I’m not sure if my heartbeat is from the adrenaline or something else.
It’s weird—I think, guiltily, of Bluebird. Of the near radio silence between the two of us lately. As soon as we got on the topic of each other’s identities a few weeks ago, I panicked and pulled back—the less we talked, maybe, the less room she’d have to wonder why the app hadn’t revealed our identities to each other.
So I bizarrely feel like I’m cheating on her. With Twitter, not Pepper, of course. But I’d be lying if I said there weren’t a kind of relief to the switch. Pepper, at least, I don’t have to lie to. We do all of the backhanded stuff right out in the open, where everyone can see.
The ball is sailing over the other players, headed straight for me. I pull myself out of Pepper’s grasp, but she’s launching herself out of the water too, using me as leverage again. The ball smacks both of our hands at the same time and then skims right past us, but not before we look at each other in surprise. For a second our faces are alarmingly close, close enough that she gasps and I forget to breathe altogether, and then wham—our foreheads smack right into each other’s.
“Um, ow.”
“Jesus.”
And then, at the same time: “Are you okay?”
There’s a beat where we look at each other, not fully processing what just happened—no doubt courtesy of the mild concussion we might have just given each other—and for a second, I forget where we are entirely.
“Jinx,” I say. Jack Campbell, moment killer.
Pepper laughs, looking relieved. “Oh, good. I was worried I’d killed your last brain cell, but you seem okay.”
“Hey. Jinx means you’re not allowed to talk. Did you have a childhood?”
“I actually came out of the womb a Twitter bot.”
“Must have been one heck of a shock for your parents.”
“Yeah, but at least there weren’t two of me.”
“When you’re this good-looking, it only makes sense to have a spare.”
“Campbell! Evans! Are you going to keep flirting over there or actually make yourselves useful?”
It’s Landon, yelling from the other end of the pool. Pepper immediately takes off, but not before I see that her face has gone so red, it actually looks like a pepper. She all but leaves me in the dust, not even looking back.
“Now?”
I blink. Somehow Paul has swum up right behind me without making a sound and is holding three anxious fingers in front of my face. I check the clock by the pool and see it’s almost 4:15, glance farther up the water and see Pepper and Landon laughing at whatever Ethan just said.
“Yeah. Now’s good.”
And so starts a performance so stilted and awkward that somewhere up the street, our classmates rehearsing for the school’s production of Seussical! just shuddered without knowing why.
“Oh, man. I feel quite ill,” says Paul. Loudly. And in what appears to be a slight British accent.
I hold in a sigh. “Oh no, that sucks. Want me to walk you to the nurse?”
“Yeah. Because I’m sick. Like in a stomach way,” Paul continues.
One of the sophomores on the swim team cringes from behind him, and she and a few of the others swim in the opposite direction. I figure they’ll spread what Paul said fast enough nobody will question us when we get out of the pool and don’t come back for an inordinately long time. Sure enough, the coaches don’t even bat an eye as we get out and Paul makes another declaration about his mysterious illness, which is starting to become a lot more dramatic than originally scripted.
“How’d I do?” he asks excitedly, the moment we make it to the locker rooms.
“Academy Award–worthy,” I deadpan, pausing outside of the girls’ locker room. I knock and crack open the door, calling, “Maintenance,” and waiting a beat.
No answer. Perfect. I find the TEMPORARILY CLOSED FOR CLEANING sign propped against the wall and Velcro it to the door.
“I’ll be right back,” I tell Paul, who salutes me as I take one last glance over our shoulders and sneak into the girls’ locker room.
It doesn’t take long to find Pepper’s backpack in one of the lockers—it may be the same nondescript navy Herschel bag that half the people in our class have, but there’s a tiny little keychain that says “Music City” on her zipper. I find her phone in the front pocket where I always see her sliding it out before and after class and type in 1234, hoping against hope that she never got around to changing it.
Boom. I’m in.
It’s almost too easy.
I pull up the Big League Burger Twitter account, and it occurs to me that I could do some major damage right now. Like, get someone fired kind of damage. Send a tweet that says We confess to ripping off a defenseless old lady’s grilled cheese recipe because we’re all corporate assholes kind of damage.
But even I’m not that much of a tool. I pull up the settings to the account, change the password, and lock her out.
I’m about to quit the app and shove the phone back into her bag when it buzzes in my hand. It’s a text from “Mom.”
Text me when practice is over—that last tweet was good, but I think we can do better
I don’t mean to read it, it’s just there. And very quickly followed up by another one.
Also Taffy’s leaving early tomorrow, do you mind checking the tweets she queued?
My thumb grazes the screen and accidentally taps the text, opening it up to a whole string of them. I move my finger to close out of it, but not before I’ve managed to skim some of the recent messages—Can you just send Taffy a tweet idea real quick if you get a chance? It’s been hours, says one of them.
Paul coughs noisily from the front door.
“Shit.”
My signal to leave. I shove Pepper’s phone back into her backpack and zip it up, then race to the exit on the other side of the girls’ locker room, barely making it out before someone walks in from the original one.
And then that’s it. The deed is done. I slink back into the boys’ locker room, where Paul is already waiting for me, his expression manic and gleeful. He claps me on the back a few too many times, a hyper parody of something the Landons or the Ethans of the world might do. I smile back, but it feels a little less like a victory and a little too much like that moment Pepper stuck her hand on my head and dunked me.
This whole time I’d rolled my eyes about her mom whenever she came up. I didn’t believe a grown adult could be this invested in their kid doing something this objectively dumb—not even my parents, who joke about all the business it brings in, but probably wouldn’t do more than shrug if I swore off it forever.
I feel a weird pinch of guilt as I walk out of the locker room, but not necessarily for locking Pepper out of the account. For the reminder that, fun and games aside, this whole Twitter thing means a lot more than either of us want to admit.
Pepper
“Please don’t make us do this,” Pooja moans.
Landon puts a hand on her
shoulder, jostling it slightly. I still have my eyes peeled on it as he takes the hand away. “Rules are rules,” he says with an easy grin. “And you guys lost fair and square.”
“At least it’s not pool water Kool-Aid this time,” says Ethan.
I glance up the pool deck, toward the locker rooms, not even realizing I’m looking for Jack until I come up empty of him. It’s not like it matters where he is, but I can’t stop myself from compulsively checking, like he’s become some kind of shadow I feel weird without. That, and his team lost—and the terms of this particular water polo war were that everyone on the losing team had to do 100 yards of butterfly, nonstop. There are very few things in this world I would pay good money to see, but watching Jack flounder at the hardest stroke after years of acting all cocky about doing flips into the water is decidedly one of them.
“Ugh. Say nice things at my funeral.”
“C’mon, Pooja,” says Landon, “you could swim this in your sleep.”
I shouldn’t care. And I don’t. Or I wouldn’t, if it weren’t for something I’m getting a little more sure of by the day, something I can’t decide whether I want to be sure of or not.
I might be right about Landon. It all checks out. Him texting during the day, when he would be off-campus. Not texting during the exact same times as swim and dive practice. And there is nothing quite so damning as the app Wolf sent me, the mac-and-cheese locator—Landon’s the only senior this year interning at an app development startup, and the smell of that mac-and-cheese bread bowl he was sporting the other day is so burned into my memory that I’ll probably be telling my grandchildren about it.
I’m going to ask him. Tonight. Point-blank. He’ll already be in our apartment for that dinner with his dad. The second most embarrassing scenario will have already occurred, so I might as well just lean into the first. And if I don’t ask him then, when I actually have him alone for the first time in four years, I don’t think I ever will.
I head into the locker room, overly aware of the fact I’m going to have to hustle home to get my hair and my outfit in working order before Landon and his dad get to our place for dinner. Naturally, by putting a desire into the universe not to waste time, I run smack into Jack.
“Ah. Sorry, Pepperoni,” he says, touching the spot where his shoulder brushed mine. He looks unsettled, his eyes a little wide. “Good luck keeping up with me tonight.”
He moves to walk away from me, but I stop him, grabbing the crook of his arm. For a dive team slacker who probably couldn’t remember the order of strokes in an individual medley to save his life, it’s surprisingly firm.
“If you think I’m out for the count just because it’s Friday…”
Jack takes the hand I have on his arm and presses it between his with mock solemnity. Mine is still wet, so our palms and fingers slick against each other’s in a way that would be weirdly intimate if his grin wasn’t at the exact half tilt it always is before he makes fun of me.
“Oh, don’t worry. I figure you’ll be free as a bird.”
I narrow my eyes. He looks more pleased with himself than usual.
“See you Monday,” he says, letting go of my hand and striding down the pool deck to his brother.
I’m still shaking my head as I walk into the locker room, coming out of the fog of being in the pool and back into the laser focus of everything beyond it. There’s not just the dinner to think about, but homework, and Twitter, and calling Paige back, and that college essay prompt I haven’t even started on—
“What the hell?”
The Big League Burger Twitter account has logged me out. I type in the password, but nothing happens—it just prompts me to type in something else. I’m about to call Taffy and ask if the password has changed, but she beats me to it with a text.
Did you change the twitter password?
Shit. We’ve been hacked.
And the irony is, I don’t even have my own Twitter account to log into so I can see what the person who hacked us is doing to the account.
No. I’ll hit “forgot password” and get us back in. Anyone from the tech team around?
I’ve never met anyone on the tech team, but judging from my mom’s less-than-veiled complaints about them, I’m guessing they’re not going to be very quick about this. Which means whoever out there in the world just turned my Twitter account into their personal tweeting playground might just as easily be able to hack back in and do it again.
I look away from the phone for a moment. My Twitter account?
There are texts from my mom too, that I must have opened without realizing when I tried to get into Twitter. I wonder how many seconds it’s going to take for her to catch wind of this.
And naturally, no texts from Wolf either. Just a whole stream of people in the Hallway Chat bitching about the administration cracking down on Senior Skip Day. I obviously wasn’t going to participate in that anyway—we have weekends to do whatever stupid teenage nonsense we need to do, not to mention an entire summer before college.
And no doubt whatever Ethan and the rest of the kids who usually lead this kind of thing will want to do is downtown, and I, being the loser that I am, have yet to go unchaperoned below Seventy-Fifth.
I have half a mind to post something in the Hallway Chat. Something about needing a good idea for a low-key place to take a date, or maybe something about prom. Some ridiculous thing that Bluebird can post, so Wolf can see it in the open forum and remember I am, in fact, still alive.
Jesus. I’m trying to play head games with someone I haven’t even technically met.
Another text, this one from my mom.
Did you let anyone touch your phone?
“Oh, for god’s sake,” I mutter.
“Everything okay?”
“Yes,” I snap.
Pooja takes a step back, looking stunned, still a little breathless from her swim. I realize half a dozen heads have swiveled to look at us, and my teeth are gritted like an animal poised to attack.
“Sorry—I didn’t mean to butt in,” she says.
“No, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—I’m fine. Sorry.”
Pooja nods and goes back to her locker without saying anything. I change as quickly as I can back into my uniform, desperate to get out of there—but to go where? To the apartment, where I’ll have to sit like an animatronic puppet and smile at Landon’s dad until my cheeks hurt, until I think I might actually explode into molten lava from the embarrassment of what I’m about to ask him?
Maybe I just won’t. Maybe it’s better if I just let the whole thing go, Landon and Wolf with it. Because what’s on the other side of it, if it really is him? If Landon liked me as Pepper, he had plenty of chances to show it in the last few years.
Or he would if I hadn’t avoided him like the plague for the first two of them, afraid of humiliating myself.
But maybe I owe it to that girl—to the freshman me who was too scared to talk to him. There must have been some reason I felt that way, even if it doesn’t quite feel that way now.
I turn to leave and end it right there, but then Pooja walks past.
“I really am sorry,” I say, following her out. “I didn’t mean to snap.”
I’m expecting her to brush it off again, but then she tilts her head at me and says something that stops me in my tracks.
“It’s Jack, isn’t it?”
Something tightens in my chest. “Huh?”
She smiles at me, this guarded little oh, c’mon kind of smile. It’s weird, but I spend so much time deliberately not meeting Pooja’s eye, I’m surprised to see the warmth in them. Surprised, and then profoundly uncomfortable—because I don’t need her being nice to me. I don’t want to owe her anything, don’t want to tip the scale that’s been teetering between us since the great Mesopotamia mishap of freshman year.
But before I can even parse through that, I have to figure out how the hell she found out about Jack. As far as I know, we haven’t spoken a word about the Twitter war to anyo
ne outside of Ethan at this school.
“I mean, you guys are dating, right? Or like … kind of seeing each other?”
My laugh is so sharp, it pierces through the now-emptying locker room. “Dating?” I manage. “Me and Jack?”
Pooja’s expression doesn’t change. “You guys are around each other, like, all the time.”
“Yeah, because—” Because we’re destroying each other in a virtual battlefield armed with memes and snark. “Because he’s helping Ethan with captain stuff. You know how busy he is.”
Pooja shrugs. “Okay.” She adjusts her backpack straps, still staring at me in this way that lets me know she’s not done talking. “I just … well. If you want to talk to someone about it, I’m probably your best bet, all things considered.”
I let out a huff of a laugh before I can think better of it. Pooja’s lips set in this grim line, like I’ve brought something out into the open, something we both know. Which is why I end up asking, “Wait, what do you mean?”
“Oh, please. Everyone knew about my big crush on Ethan two years ago.”
“I didn’t.”
Pooja flushes. “Oh. Well. I made some very public declarations about it, which was pretty stupid of me, because he was out by then. You’d think I’d know him well enough to know that before I decided to have a massive crush on him, but…” She shrugs.
“Oh.” It’s all I can manage. I feel stupid for not having known, but then again, I guess I haven’t exactly been a social butterfly these last few years.
Pooja waves a hand at me. “Water under the bridge. We’re actually good friends now because of it.”
“Well—that’s good.”
I don’t know what else to say. It occurs to me that, Paige’s antics with undergraduates aside, I’ve never really talked about crushes with anyone before. There hasn’t been much to report on my end, and everyone else already had built-in friends to talk to about it with when I got here.