by Emma Lord
Jack moves forward with his fist cocked, looking like a cartoon character. I yank him back by his elbow, and he’s surprisingly easy to pull, all momentum and lanky limbs.
“She’s not drunk, you dick.”
“Jack, it’s fine,” I mutter, pulling him back a little farther so he’s next to me. He gives in to the tug like a very angry noodle, but doesn’t look at me.
Landon’s expression can’t quite settle on irritated or amused. “Hey, man, chill out.”
“Seriously, Jack,” says Ethan, who has walked over to the commotion.
Jack scowls. “Really, Ethan?”
Ethan gestures vaguely, like he wants to apologize but his body doesn’t know how to commit to it.
“Nice,” Jack mutters.
Ethan sighs. “Shouldn’t someone get her home?”
“On it,” says Pooja. She hooks her arm into mine, and I feel a rush of gratitude so intense that for once, it doesn’t make me ache for my own sister—for once it feels like I have someone as unquestionably on my team as a person can get. She steers us away, flanking one side of me with Jack on the other, who is hovering like he walked into the wrong reality and needs directions to get back.
“Are you okay?” Jack asks.
“Yeah. I weirdly feel better now.”
“It was definitely that shady hot dog,” Pooja concurs.
“In that case, I hope Landon starts chucking some up soon too.”
“Why?”
Jack is in full Jack mode, his body like a live wire as he follows us.
“Jack, you don’t have to—I mean, I live like six blocks away.” I nod my head back at the edge of the park. “You can go hang out with the others.”
Jack hesitates. Out of the corner of my eye I can see his arm lift, can see him scratch the back of his neck the way he always does when he’s put on the spot. “Actually, I came to see you.”
Pooja ducks her head in an ineffective attempt to hide her smirk.
“Oh.” Something lifts in my chest. Thankfully this time it isn’t dinner. “Sorry to be a buzzkill.”
“Eh, I’ve seen worse,” says Jack.
I look over at him and he’s got this doofy kind of smile on his face, the kind that tricks me into thinking I look okay right now instead of the sweaty-browed, post-throw-up mess of a human I absolutely am. It’s stupid how relieved I am to see him, how glad I am he’s here. That he’s talking to me. That he crossed the whole length of this overcrowded island to do it.
Pooja and Jack drop me off at the lobby of the building, Pooja hugging me and rattling off instructions to stay hydrated. Jack leans in unexpectedly and hugs me too, like it’s the most natural thing in the world, and just like that it is. I hug him back, squeezing him for an extra beat, accidentally scrunching some of his jacket in my fist.
“Feel better,” he says, his cheeks bright red.
I do. So much better, I forget to respond, until the doorman of the building clears his throat and Pooja’s eyebrows go up as if to say, Girl.
“Yeah—you too.” Shit. “I mean—well—”
Jack laughs, backing up and nearly stumbling into someone on the sidewalk. “Later, Pepperoni.”
Pepper
For someone who has had the kind of day that ended in literal vomit, I have no right to be full-on grinning in the elevator. But I am, and it’s wild, like there’s something bubbling in me, pooling at the base of me and making me feel so light I feel as if I should tether myself to the railing. I let myself imagine things I never let myself imagine: what it would feel like to grab Jack by the sleeve of his coat and pull him close. What it would feel like to run my hand through his wet, messy, post-dive hair. What it would feel like to cross the distance to him in the pool yesterday, close my eyes, and kiss him.
I’m still dizzy in my own imagination when I open the door, completely miss my mom’s suitcases lined up by the doorway, and walk straight into her poised on the couch with an expression that slams into my daydreams like an oncoming truck.
“Uh.”
My mom raises her eyebrows at me. “Sit.”
I consider my other options, which are limited to running away and seeing how far the five dollars in my purse will take me. Pooja told me the other day the Q train goes straight to Coney Island.
Too bad it doesn’t go to Mars.
So I sit. Mom turns to me, her expression unreadable—I can’t tell if she’s mad or concerned, but she’s definitely some kind of upset. “We have several things we need to discuss.”
I wonder if it’s too late to pull the I just vomited in a public park card, but it feels too risky.
“Okay?”
She pulls out her phone, and I can feel the anger inflating in me like a balloon. If she pulls up the Twitter page, I will explode. I will go full Paige Evans with a metaphorical baseball bat and yell until the neighbors think she’s back from college. I may even lean fully into the teenage cliché of slamming and locking the bedroom door.
She passes it to me. It’s not the Twitter page. It’s my … midterm grades.
And they’re not stellar.
“Oh.”
I mean, it’s not like they’re terrible. But by Pepper standards, they are pretty bad. I feel an unfamiliar kind of swoop in my stomach, something I’m so unused to, I don’t even recognize it for a moment: failure.
If this were Nashville, I could shrug and say, Okay, so I have a couple of B’s. So what? But this isn’t Nashville. And here, a B in the final stretch of college admissions is the equivalent of rolling over and playing dead.
“I didn’t realize…”
My mom leans in, pulling the phone away. “What’s going on, Pepper? This isn’t like you.”
Of course it isn’t. I’ve run on a steady diet of five hours of sleep on weekdays for four years now. How could anything be like me? How am I supposed to know exactly what I’m like anymore?
And the past few weeks have dialed it up to eleven. There’s no time, and this whole “war” with Girl Cheesing has stolen what little of it I have, carved it up, and chopped it into stupid tweets. I know it’s not going to fly as an excuse, but it’s the truth.
“The Twitter thing. It’s taking up my study time.”
“You send like two tweets a day. It’s not exactly a full-time job.”
I feel a twinge of sympathy for Taffy that is far from the first and certainly won’t be the last. “It is exactly like a full-time job, Mom. It takes time to come up with those tweets, to figure out how to respond, to gauge the audience reaction to them—”
“I worry what’s taking up most of your time is flirting with this boy.”
And there it is. I sit very still, like an animal with the viewfinder of a gun targeted on its back, waiting to see where exactly she’s planning to take aim.
“I finally read that article on Hub Seed,” says my mom. “I didn’t realize you were going toe-to-toe with your classmate. Or that you wanted this attached to your name on the internet forever.”
My face is burning. “I had nothing to do with that. I didn’t ask or want Taffy to put my name on anything.”
I worry she’s not going to believe me, but she’s moved on too fast for it to matter. “And this Jack?’
It feels important to protect him. I didn’t realize how intentionally I’d kept his existence from her until now. “He goes to my school.”
The deflection is about as effective as hiding behind the couch cushions. In fact, my mom doesn’t even seem surprised. “And he has nothing to do with these grades, or you ignoring Taffy’s texts?”
“I stopped answering because we’re done with this. The retweet war on the Hub settled it.”
Her jaw tightens. “I can only assume that boy pulled one over on you with that picture.”
“It wasn’t his fault, it was—”
“A lesson learned. You shouldn’t trust the competition.”
It stings unexpectedly, hearing this right on the heels of my talk with Pooja. I bite the ins
ide of my cheek. I’m not gonna say it, I’m not gonna say it, I’m not—
“Yeah, well, you shouldn’t put your teenage daughter in charge of a massive corporate Twitter account.”
My mom purses her lips. “You are plenty qualified,” she says. “I wouldn’t put you in charge of it if you weren’t. But I’m less concerned about that than I am about the grades. Colleges still check first semester of senior year.”
If that’s true, she has a funny way of showing it. But instead of saying that, I say something that stuns us both.
“Who says I even want to go to college?”
My mom’s elbow is propped on the couch, like she anticipated she’d be using her hand to hold up her forehead sooner or later in this conversation. Sure enough, she leans into it with a weary sigh.
“Pepper…”
“No, seriously.” My heart is hammering in my chest like it’s suddenly twice as thick as it usually is. I stare my mom down, not even sure where I’m going with this until it’s coming out of me, pushed from some depth I haven’t even acknowledged myself: “Maybe I—maybe I want to take a gap year. Or go back home for a little while. Or—or open my own business, like a bakery or something.”
That last one takes me by surprise, enough that I clamp my mouth shut as soon as I finish saying it, but my mom is oddly unfazed.
“Pepper, you’re a smart girl. A driven one. If you know what you want, then take it.”
I open my mouth. I don’t know what I want.
“I thought…”
She actually looks amused, her face softening.
“What?” She waits for me to finish, and then I remember the thing New York sometimes makes it so easy to forget—she’s on my side. We’re on the same team, even if the team is considerably smaller than it used to be. “Pepper, I didn’t finish college. Your dad and I made our own way in the world. You and Paige are both too stubborn and too smart not to be able to do the same.”
I sit there for a moment, the anger so stunned out of me, I don’t know what to do with myself. I unclench my fists and spread my fingers out on my legs, staring down at them, feeling more lost than ever—all this time I thought I was doing this to make her happy, or to beat Pooja, or to fit in. All the unhappiness or loneliness I ever felt, I was so prepared to pin on someone else. Only in this moment is it clear that it was nobody’s fault but my own.
And more than that realization is the bottomless kind of panic that comes with it. I’ve just assumed there were certain directions my life was going to take. The safe kind. The kind everyone else was taking, and I plowed through with a vengeance. It hasn’t been easy, but it hasn’t been brave either. The idea of actually straying from it is either thrilling or terrifying, the two feelings swallowing each other and spitting each other back out before I can settle on one.
Then, suddenly, I can picture it: the thing Paige and I dreamed about as kids and joked about as teenagers and let fade into the periphery. A bakery tucked into the corner of some street, with a blue-and-white striped awning, with Monster Cake and Rainy Day Pudding in the window, with mismatched mugs and sticky-fingered kids and a little spot in the back kitchen that’s all my own to make whatever it is I want to make.
I can see it so clearly, I feel like I just breathed it into existence.
“As long as you don’t let some teenage boy stand in the way of it.”
I should be more indignant on Jack’s behalf, but I’m still reeling. “He would never.”
“Well, those grades speak for themselves,” says my mom. “You don’t have to go to college, but you’re in the endgame now. Finish strong and keep your options open.”
I nod.
“And stay away from that Jack.”
My mouth unhinges, and then I laugh. My mom doesn’t. She stares me down like we’re in a bad made-for-TV movie of a modern Romeo and Juliet, like she can actually forbid me from associating with a boy who goes to my school.
“Stay away from Jack?”
“He’s clearly not a good influence.” She stands, a clear bookend to this conversation. “And I don’t see what the problem is anyway. It’s not as if you actually like him.”
She’s testing me. He’s my friend, I want to say, but even that’s a trap—if I admit that, it’s as good as admitting he’s the reason why I’ve quit tweeting. But if I’m defensive, either swearing I don’t like him—or worse, admitting I do—the whole thing blows up even further into my face.
In the end, I settle for none of the above, letting the verdict roll over me like some kind of wave I am willingly letting myself drown in.
“And Taffy and I will take over the Twitter until you get your grades back up.”
She slips out of the living room, then, and the dust settles on the not-quite-fight before I can tell which one of us has won.
Jack
How to Suck at Confessing to the Girl You Like that You’ve Secretly Been Messaging Her on a Platform You Created, Then Convince Her It’s Not as Shady as It Sounds: a terrible novel, written by me.
The first attempt to tell Pepper the truth was noble enough—I begged off the end of my shift on Friday and took the 6 train uptown to where the Senior Skip Day shenanigans were going down, all inflated with this confidence and bravado, ready to lay everything out on the line. I was even going to be cheeky about it—sneak up and take a picture of her from behind, then message it to her on the app so when she turned around, she’d see me there, with a cupcake I’d brought from the deli.
I imagined Pepper would be surprised, and maybe angry, and then eventually hear me out. I imagined every possible scenario after that, from ones as ridiculous as her shoving me into the lake, as hopeful as her maybe even being into our whole accidental secret pals thing, and as realistic as her just plain being disappointed I wasn’t Landon.
Of all these imagined scenarios, though, the one that did not come up was the one that ended with Pepper vomiting up some impressive chunks of a partially digested hot dog.
The second attempt goes about as well as the first. It’s never hard to spot Pepper during a swim meet, especially now that she’s the team captain—she runs warm-ups, harasses the freshmen boys who are dicking around when their heats are coming up, confiscates the chocolate espresso beans one of the junior girls started passing around to give everyone an “extra edge” on their relay race (only at Stone Hall). No, spotting her isn’t the issue—it’s getting her alone that proves to be impossible.
Especially because she seems very, very intent on avoiding me. Like, book-it-across-the-pool-deck-like-her-butt’s-on-fire level of intent.
I finally manage to corner her after she pulls herself out of the pool from the 50-yard butterfly, headed for her towel in a cluster of other senior girls.
“Yo, Pepperoni, I was wondering—”
“Check your texts.”
She says it out of the corner of her mouth, and so fast that it takes me a few seconds after she’s passed me to rewind it in my head enough times to make sense of it. I hustle up to the bleachers and zip my phone out of my bag, where sure enough, there’s a text from Pepper.
This is super dumb, but my mom is here and she doesn’t want me talking to you. She’s touchy about the Hub Seed article.
I glance up in alarm, like someone just told me a panther was let loose in the building. I don’t look up with the intention of finding Pepper’s mom, but in an instant I lock eyes with a woman sitting with the parents on the other end of the pool who can only be her—she has the same blonde hair, the same keenness in her eyes, and the exact same pinched look on her face Pepper used to get whenever I said something she didn’t like.
Except the full force of that expression on Pepper’s face isn’t half as terrifying as it is coming from a woman dressed in a power suit in the middle of a pool deck. If it were possible for her to shank me with her eyes, I think she just might.
I look away, shoving my phone back into my bag, paranoid she somehow read Pepper’s warning to me from across th
e pool. I don’t bother trying to talk to her again for the rest of the night. I barely talk to anyone for the rest of the night. It’s awkward enough that Pepper’s mom clearly hates me—it skips past awkward and goes straight to eerie when, throughout the next few hours, I feel her mom’s eyes watching me every now and then, as critical as they were the first time. It’s jarring enough I even screw up one of my dives, landing with enough of a plunk in the water it’s all Paul will talk about for the rest of the meet.
I wait until I’m home to text her back.
Today 9:14 PM
So … your mom is terrifying?
Which is to say, I kind of get your whole “my mom made me do it” thing with Twitter now.
Hoooly shit did she TALK to you?
Tell me she didn’t talk to you
No, no, she just pierced me with the kind of stare that makes human souls shrivel
Oh man
She doesn’t usually come to meets but we were hanging out all day and she’s been out of town for a while so
YIKES
No it’s fine I’m a new yorker. i’m used to people giving me the stink eye for no reason
Well, I guess technically she has reason
Speaking of my mom I have noooo idea where she stands re: using the oven tomorrow for the bake sale
The ban is still in place?
If it is joke’s on her I’ll just go hide in the big league burger kitchen down the street
I mean we have like five ovens. Come use one of ours
She doesn’t answer right away. She’s all the way uptown, but I can still feel her overthinking like she’s sitting right next to me.
Today 9:27 PM
The 6 train isn’t that scary. Call me and I’ll talk you through it
Ha ha
For real. Worst that can happen is you end up in brooklyn, get kidnapped by hipsters, and your mom strangles me in broad daylight. What’ve you got to lose