by Emma Lord
Enter: one very skittish-looking Paul. Emphasis on skittish, because Paul is already baseline about as nervous as a chihuahua at any given time. He walks into homeroom and slides into the desk next to mine, leaning in close and talking out of the corner of his mouth.
“Is it you?” he asks.
“You’re gonna have to be more specific.”
He glances up at the front to make sure Mrs. Fairchild is still absorbed in the Fiber One bar she’s consuming, then slides his phone screen over to me. I skim the text, my stomach dropping a little more with each line of the email.
Dear eager beavers of Stone Hall,
After an investigation into the “Weasel” app, it has come to the attention of the school that its creator has limited access to the app to student email addresses at Stone Hall, and that the app originated under one of those addresses. We have concluded that the creator and distributor of this app is a student. I urge anybody with information about the app’s origins to come forward, so we may have a reasonable discussion with that person about next steps.
Vice Principal Rucker
“It’s not dangerous,” I say through my teeth. “That’s bullshit. Literally last week a whole bunch of people made plans in the Hallway Chat to put all those nice Post-it notes on people’s lockers. What the hell?”
“So … it was you?”
I unclench my jaw. Paul’s eyes are wide, as if he has just become the unwitting accomplice to murder.
“What makes you say that?” I ask carefully.
“Uh, the ten other work-in-progress apps you’ve talked about on and off for the last few years?”
Well, he’s got me there. Paul is one of the very few people who even knows I’ve been messing around with app development—mostly because at some point or another, Paul has been the reason for them. I once made an app whose sole purpose was to send him a random GIF of someone sneezing every time the pollen count hit a certain threshold, so he’d remember to take his allergy meds before class.
“Look, man, it’s not like I’m gonna rat you out.” There is something close to a whine in the back of his throat, the way it was when we were kids and he suspected he was getting left out of something (which, to be fair, he usually was). “You can tell me.”
It’s not that I don’t trust Paul. It’s just that I don’t want anyone knowing. The whole magic of the app is its anonymity, the safe space it’s created to just be. In a way, if I tell Paul I made it, I’m taking that away from him too.
But then enough seconds pass and Paul starts to deflate, looking even more like a kicked puppy than usual.
“Fine. Okay. I made it.”
“I knew it!”
“For all of a few minutes, yeah,” I grumble, making note of the time stamp on the email.
“This is so cool, Jack.”
“Keep your voice down,” I remind him, shooting a cautionary glance around the room. “Nobody knows about this.”
“Not even Ethan?”
I barely suppress an eye roll. “Especially not Ethan.”
Paul sits in his chair for a moment with his eyes all glassy, like he’s absorbing something too profound for his brain to accept. “Wow. You’re basically like—the secret god of Stone Hall.”
My face goes hot. “I just made some stupid app. All I do is make sure people aren’t being dicks.”
“Do you talk to people on it?” Paul asks. “Do you control when people get outed to each other? Do you know everyone’s aliases?”
“No, no, and absolutely not.”
Well, that’s a lie and a half, but I’m sticking to it. I don’t want him fishing around the aliases in the Hallway Chat and trying to guess which one is me. Or worse—ask me to out someone else.
“Oh, come on. You can’t check?”
And whoop, there it is. “No,” I say, firmly enough that Paul flinches a little bit. I try to relax, try to level with him so he’ll get it. “It’s—that’s the whole point of it. You know? Everyone’s anonymous. Everyone can feel comfortable. So no, I don’t check. I don’t even know if my own twin is on it.”
Paul considers this. “Shit. That’s hardcore.”
I shift uncomfortably in my seat. “Yeah. I guess it is.”
The warning bell rings, and in comes Pepper. If I’m expecting any kind of reference to my handiwork on Friday, she makes it immediately clear I’m going to be disappointed. She lifts her hand and wiggles her fingers to wave at me, with a sly expression on her face. I know her well enough by now to properly dread whatever is on the other end of it.
But the rest of the day is eerily quiet. The only tweets that come out of the Big League Burger account are about a charity they partnered with and a stop-motion GIF of a hamburger doing a little dance. The only other notifications on my phone are from Bluebird, making some crack about the pattern of birds embroidered on Rucker’s pants today.
It’s a relief, having her back, just as much as it was a relief not to be talking to her.
I know at some point or another I’m going to have to come clean. We can’t exist in the bubble of Weazel forever. But for now—for now, it’s nice to have someone who isn’t tied up in the rest of the mess that is my life. Someone who isn’t either waiting for me to tweet or ready to jump the second I do. Someone who doesn’t think of me as Ethan’s brother before they think of me for me.
It’s different, in a way, now that someone knows. Maybe even more traitorous, now that I’ve told Paul and not the person I’ve been talking to on it for months now. It also takes away my coward’s way out—just triggering the app to reveal ourselves to each other, and never telling her I was the one who created the app. Now Paul knows. And the only thing bigger than Paul’s heart is his mouth.
Maybe it was meant to happen like this all along. Maybe there was no scenario where I didn’t get in trouble for it. Maybe this is just one of a slew of countless things I have managed to sabotage right from the get-go—only this time, I can’t even blame the Ethan-shaped chip on my shoulder. I did this all on my own.
It’s weird, the way the guilt of it follows me around, but doesn’t quite hit me. I still haven’t done a good job of narrowing her down. Presumably she is not lactose intolerant and isn’t absent today. She seems not to come from a super wealthy family either, but it’s hard to tell who falls into that category anyway since we all wear the same school uniforms. Maybe if I were on Instagram, I could rule the richer kids out, but it seems creepy to obsess too much.
So instead, I just walk around feeling vaguely apologetic at every girl I pass in the hallway, making way more eye contact than I intend to, until the female half of the school probably thinks I need glasses.
Pepper, on the other hand, doesn’t even acknowledge me on the pool deck, but the ghost of that smirk of hers seems to be on her face whenever I’m within ten feet of her. It isn’t until I’m walking out of the locker room after practice that I know why.
“Dude. I thought you said you were on top of this.”
I scowl at Ethan, who has shoved a screen with the Big League Burger Twitter page so close to my nose, he nearly squashes it.
“Who says I’m not?” I ask. “Besides, shouldn’t you be frenching on some concrete steps about now?”
“I would be if it weren’t for this.”
I sigh, taking the phone from Ethan’s hand. “What could possibly be so—”
Oh. As it turns out, it’s not Big League Burger’s page I’m looking at. It’s Big League Burger’s branding on the header image, and a picture of Big League Burger’s “Grandma’s Special” on the profile avatar, but it is very much the Girl Cheesing Twitter handle. Well, what’s left of it—the name on the page has been changed to #1 BLB Stan.
“Pepper.”
“You better fix this before Dad sees.”
My fingers clench around his phone. “It’s not like we’re locked out of the account. You could have just fixed it yourself.”
“This is your job, remember? I’m not supposed to
touch the precious account without your permission.”
And then, just like that, a table I never thought was capable of turning has shifted. Ethan’s not angry because of Pepper’s little prank. Ethan’s been angry.
It should probably strike some sort of empathetic chord in me, but it doesn’t. For seventeen years now, I have stepped to the side for him and never once made him feel bad about it. I can’t believe he won’t do the same for me over something this stupid.
“What’s your problem?”
Ethan’s nostrils flare. “I don’t have a problem,” he says, with an edge that says he very much does.
The irritation surges up in me like a live wire, like something I have spent too much time trying not to ignite. “You’re really this pissed off because for once Mom and Dad are counting on me for something instead of you?”
That stuns the anger right out of him. His mouth drops open. “Are you kidding?”
There are people walking past us. Classmates, probably. But if Ethan isn’t going to budge, then neither am I. “You can’t stand it, can you? That for once, you’re not the golden child.”
Only after I say it do I realize I’ve been waiting to say it—not just since this whole Twitter thing started, but for years. Years of Ethan and his academic awards and his student government nominations and being surrounded by friends on all sides, years that pushed the two of us to where we are now: Ethan, poised to leave the nest, and me, tethered to it with a rope.
Especially because this Twitter war ultimately means the same thing it always has: my parents still have way more faith in Ethan than in me. The only reason I’m the one running the account is because we all know I’m the kid who’s going to get left with the deli while Ethan takes over the world.
But then his anger is right back, twisting into something ugly in his face, something more immediate and deeper than I ever expected. “You think I’m the golden child?”
I don’t think he is, I know he is. I open my mouth, but suddenly my throat is too tight to say any of it—all the things that have been brimming under the surface are all coming up at once, fighting each other on the way out.
In my head I’ve had this conversation with Ethan a thousand times. In my head I’ve been angry, indignant, and firm. In my head I’ve rehearsed it so many times that I should be more prepared to defend myself than I have for anything in my life.
But of all the things imaginary Ethan said to me, it was never that. And of all the times imaginary Jack confronted him, I never felt as conflicted as I do right now.
In the end, I swallow it all down. I don’t understand the look on his face, and I don’t want to. My own hurt is too much to take on his too. So I hand him back his phone, with a little more force than necessary. “Don’t worry about it. It’s under control.”
Ethan lets out a snort and stays rooted to the sidewalk, looking at me like he’s waiting for one of us to take one last shot. After a moment we both turn away at the same time, with identical scowls, stalking off in opposite directions. But I’m still seeing his twisted expression long after he walks away—not just because I’ve never seen it on his face like that before, but because I think I saw more of myself in it than I ever have.
Jack
I assume I won’t get to see Pepper gloating about her handiwork until tomorrow morning, but when I walk out of the community center, there she is, leaning against the wall and oh-so-casually drinking from an enormous Big League Milkshake Mash. She turns her head so slowly to look at me that for a moment I am stricken with the weird unfamiliarity of being seen—no, not seen. Recognized. It’s rare enough someone knows I’m me and not Ethan without getting a good look at me. It’s straight up weird when someone can tell without fully turning around. The only person I know who can do that is Grandma Belly—my parents still mix us up so frequently that there’s about a 50 percent chance I am Ethan, and someone switched us along the way.
In any case, her swivel of a stare hits its mark with an impressive landing, her eyebrows raised just so and the straw still puckered between her lips. The effect of it is absurd enough that it pierces through my bubble of self-pity.
“Did you—did you sprint to the Big League Burger on Eighty-Eighth and come back, just so you could wait for me here with that?”
She answers by lifting her other hand, which has another massive milkshake in it. “Cookies and cream?”
I’m starving, but I have principles. “How’d you do it, Pepperoni?”
She takes a noisy slurp of her shake. “Do what?”
I walk over and lean on the wall next to her, kicking my foot onto the brick with the same faux-casual pose. “You know what.”
She presses the milkshake into my hand, and I take it on reflex. “Same way you did.”
“You took my phone.”
That wipes the smug look off her face. “So you did steal mine.”
“Uh—wait, what? No.”
Pepper narrows her eyes at me.
“For like, a second,” I concede.
I didn’t know it was possible for someone to angrily sip a milkshake, but then again, making the impossible possible is kind of Pepper’s MO. “What the hell, Campbell?”
It would be easier to take her seriously if there weren’t ice cream on her upper lip. My hand flinches just before I realize I’m lifting it like I’m going to wipe it away or something.
“That’s crossing a line. I wouldn’t go into your phone.”
If we’re talking about line-crossing, I could argue that she had me squarely beat on that the moment Big League Burger ripped off my grandmother. But she had nothing to do with that. I may not have fully believed her two weeks ago, but I do now.
“Sorry.”
She lifts her eyebrows in surprise, then sucks on the inside of her cheek and stares out at the traffic like she’s trying to decide whether or not to accept the apology. “Well, I get it. It’s hard keeping up with me. You clearly needed the break.”
I let out a huff of a laugh, my chest untightening. “Please. I’m tweeting circles around you.”
“Then why don’t we up the stakes?”
“What, you want this war to bleed into Instagram?”
Pepper snorts. “Please. I have no interest in embarrassing you that thoroughly.”
“Embarrassing me, huh?”
Somehow in this back-and-forth snark we’ve gravitated so close to each other that my shoulder is grazing hers. Her eyes flicker to it for a moment, but neither of us moves.
“My staged food pictures put Martha Stewart to shame.”
“Yeah? Well, people are too busy actually eating our food to ’gram it, so.”
She responds with another slow slurp of milkshake, not breaking eye contact.
“Okay, fine. How do we up the stakes?”
I hear the smirk in her voice before it fully curls on her face. “Sudden death. Retweet war. We both tweet pictures of our grilled cheeses at the same time, and whoever has more retweets by the end of the week wins.”
I’m dismissing this before she even finishes the sentence. “You have way more followers than we do.”
“And you have way more engagement per follower than we do,” says Pepper, with the bored air of someone who is anticipating this argument, of someone who has done their research and then some. “But I have a solution. We get a neutral third party involved.”
“Is there anyone in the world who doesn’t have an opinion on our grilled cheeses right now?”
“Unlikely. Which is why I think we should approach an outlet. Isn’t one of the cofounders of Hub Seed a Stone Hall alum?”
“You think you can get the Hub involved in this?”
Pepper shrugs. “They’ve already reached out to Taffy about writing an article on the Twitter spat between the brands. I’m guessing if your parents have checked the deli’s email lately, they’ve gotten one too.”
It’s a true testament to how deep we’ve sunk into this that I not only know who Taffy is, but that
she and her dog have been popping into my “suggest following” so much on Twitter, I know which sparkly outfit she dressed Snuffles in yesterday.
“So … what? We ask them to tweet images of both of our grilled cheeses?”
She nods. But she’s dreaming. The Hub might be interested in our shenanigans for a quick one-off story, but they’ve got over five million followers on Twitter. That’s the kind of social media real estate you don’t waste on two teens in a grilled cheese fight.
“I’ll propose it to them over email. They’ll send a tweet explaining the stakes and tweet two pictures: yours and mine.” She pauses for a moment, raising her brows. “And to really make it fair—we’ll ask them not to say which grilled cheese is which.”
“Won’t it be obvious when yours looks like flash-frozen garbage someone stuck in the microwave?”
Pepper doesn’t bat an eye. “So, are you in or what?”
I slump back farther on the wall, making myself her height so our eyes are level. Up this close, I can see the faint spray of freckles on her nose that must be more visible in the summer.
“Depends. What happens if I win?”
As usual, Pepper is all too prepared with an answer. “Loser concedes to the other from their account. A humble tweet of acknowledgment, once the people have spoken.”
“You seem eerily confident for someone who’s about to go down.”
“So you’re game?”
I consider her for a moment, with her tangled, wet bangs fringing her face and her eyes so steady on mine, and suddenly I can’t resist.
“Let’s sweeten the deal.”
“What are you thinking?”
“If you lose, you have to jump off the high dive.”
I’m expecting Pepper to freeze, or at least have a reaction half as visceral as the last time I brought up that little incident in freshman year when she scrambled off the high dive so fast her butt might have been on fire. Instead, she doesn’t break eye contact with me for even a millisecond as she gives me a nonchalant shrug.