Tweet Cute

by Emma Lord

  Well when you put it THAT way

  Does tomorrow afternoon work for you?

  See ya then pepperoni

  As it turns out, Pepper was not kidding about her lack of subway experience. The next day she calls me around three in the afternoon outside of the Eighty-Sixth Street subway station, where I talk her through using the spare change in her purse to get a one-way MetroCard, swipe, and find the platform for the 6 train that goes to Brooklyn Bridge. I get a few nervous texts from her—If I’m at 23rd, I haven’t passed you yet, right?—but she makes it to Astor Place without getting kidnapped or stuck on a train going express and emerges blinking out at the new skyline like she just teleported to another world.

  She pulls out her phone to text me, and I let out a loud whistle, raising my hand to get her attention. Her head snaps up, and her face bursts into this wide, blinding kind of grin, the same one that nearly knocked the air out of me when she jumped off the high dive for the first time.

  “Hi,” she says, running up to me. And then we’re hugging, because I guess that’s just a thing we do now, and it’s great and it’s awkward, but it’s terrible because as soon as it happens, I don’t want to let her go.

  “You did it!” I say, at the same time she says, “You’re here.”

  I shrug, glad it’s cold enough now that my cheeks are already red from the wind. “I figured I’d give you a quick walking tour of the ’hood.”

  It’s strange, seeing her in her everyday clothes instead of her uniform or her swimsuit. I mean, I guess I did on Friday, but the upchucking distracted from it pretty fast. We’re both in jeans and coats, her hair tucked up into a bun with loose ends all sticking out of it, and the whole thing is just so relaxed and normal, it’s like the usual thirty seconds or so it takes for us to fall into a groove together just falls away.

  She sticks close to me on the short walk to the deli, close enough our hands brush a few times, and I have to fight the impulse to take it. It’s weird—unlike Ethan, I’ve never actually dated anyone beyond the occasional awkward kiss with girls in our class at school dances. I always thought the motions of it would be so strange, like something that had to be learned and practiced. But it’s the opposite of that—it would be too easy to grab her hand, to reach up and tuck her bangs behind her ear, to stop and stare at her and see if that moment from the pool was just a moment or something that led to a much bigger one.

  I show her the ice cream shop, the little bookstore, the food cart where I sometimes get coffee even though it drives my dad nuts.

  “You’re so popular,” Pepper notes, when the third person waves at me from behind a window or a cash register.

  “Hah. No. They’re all just scarred for life from me and Ethan running buck wild around this block as kids.”

  “I bet you guys were cute.”

  “Yeah, it’s a shame what’s happened since.”

  She ribs me, just as Annie, the bookshop owner, pokes her head out and says so loudly half the street can hear, “Jack Campbell, are you on a date?”

  I freeze in my tracks, hoping lightning will miraculously strike me down where I stand.

  “Let me guess,” says Pepper, without missing a beat. “You bring all the girls to the deli.”

  Annie’s grin is merciless. “He woos them with ham slices.”

  “Hey!” I protest, finally finding my voice. “I’m so clearly a cheese guy! I’m offended.”

  “And I’m intrigued. Come into the store on date two, and I’ll tell you all the embarrassing stories about baby Jack you want to know.”

  Pepper laughs, and I’m expecting it to be one of those self-conscious laughs she muffles with her wrist, the kind that ends with, Oh, this isn’t a date. Because it’s not, really. It’s just some pseudo-flirty, post–Twitter war, pre-baking thing I’m not sure how to—

  “I’ll swap you for the embarrassing dive team ones,” Pepper promises.

  Annie’s eyebrows shoot up. “Ooh, I like her.”

  “C’mon, c’mon,” I mutter through a smile, hooking my elbow with Pepper’s and dragging her away as she waves goodbye to Annie.

  The deli’s in full Sunday afternoon swing when we arrive, the line not quite out the door but only because people have packed themselves inside to avoid the November cold. The woman who always comes in with her five grandkids waves at me, one of the line cooks who’s on her break tweaks my shoulder when she walks by, an NYU professor who comes in from time to time nods from his coffee cup and turns his attention back to some book about seafaring.

  Pepper stops just out of the doorway, staring with an inscrutable look on her face. It didn’t occur to me until this moment to be self-conscious about showing her this place. I’ve never had to give the grand tour of it to someone whose opinion actually matters, because the people who are close to me have known this place as long as or longer than I have.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” Then she shakes her head to retract it. “It just reminds me of … well, the first Big League Burger.”

  “Oh my god. Are you Patricia?”

  A moony-eyed middle schooler has approached, a group of her friends lagging about a foot behind her. They’re all so pint-sized that Pepper and I tower over them, and I have an unfamiliar shift of feeling like—well, like an adult.

  “Um, yeah?” says Pepper.

  The girl’s face lights up like a Christmas tree. “From the Big League Burger Twitter!”

  “No way!” one of her friends crows. They’re looking at me now. “You guys are dating?”

  “Would you sign my backpack?”

  “Let’s get a picture!”

  Pepper and I exchange mutual looks of red-faced bafflement, but end up submitting to the overexcited whims of our apparent fan club. We pose for a picture with them, and sign one of their cell phone cases, and by the time they’re done, my mom is staring at us from her perch behind the counter with an eyebrow cocked like she’s just waiting to make fun of us.

  Ethan cuts in before she can.

  “If you give her even a bite of our grilled cheese, we’re all disowning you,” he announces from the register, with a salute at Pepper to let her know he’s mostly kidding.

  Pepper salutes right back. “I’ll stick to the baked goods.”

  “So this is the famous Pepper,” says my mom, leaning in as if to inspect her.

  There’s a beat when Pepper freezes—our coloring and the messy hair is so similar on us there’s no mistaking my mom is, well, my mom. She cuts a glance at me and then back at my mom, and only then does it occur to me she’s worried we might also be holding a Pepper’s mom–sized grudge.

  My mom softens her eyebrow, makes her voice low and conspiratorial. “So you’re the one I should send the bills to when I have to send my kid to Twitter therapy?”

  Pepper eases up, letting out a breath. “He can just push them through the slits of my locker.”

  “Hah!” My mom gives Pepper that look she gets when she’s decided she’s sized someone up and is satisfied with what she sees. I don’t realize I’ve been holding my breath too until I’m slouching in relief. “Can do.”

  Then she reaches out and nudges me on the shoulder. “Ovens two and four are cleared for teenage shenanigans. Try not to burn the place down, hmm?”

  “Are these the Kitchen Sink Macaroons?” Pepper asks, her eyes wide on the display case.

  “They sure are,” says my mom, her hands on her hips. “A Campbell classic, according to your father. I whipped up a batch this morning myself.”

  I grab tissue paper and pluck one from the display, handing it to Pepper.

  “What—are you sure—”

  “He owns the place, he’s sure,” says my mom wryly.

  I stiffen at the words, but then Pepper takes a hearty bite of it and closes her eyes. “Oh my god. Are there pretzel bits in this?”

  “And you and that no-good brother of yours told me I was pushing my luck, adding those in last week,” says my mom, pointing a
finger at me.

  “Okay, okay, but to be fair, that was right on the heels of the licorice experimentation, and I didn’t want to scar any more customers for life.”

  Pepper takes another bite. “This version might actually be better than Monster Cake.”

  “Whoa. Don’t get too carried away,” I say, wondering when the tables turned so drastically on us that I’m defending her own food to her.

  “Monster Cake?” asks my mom, intrigued.

  “We’ll have some ready in an hour,” says Pepper. “It’s an atrocity.”

  “A delicious one,” I add.

  Pepper beams like I’ve just handed her on Oscar. Then she hikes her backpack off her shoulder, revealing enough junk food and various dessert sauces that it could put Cookie Monster into a coma just by looking at it.

  “Well,” I say, “it looks like we’ve got our work cut out for us.”

  “Let the ridiculous dessert mash-up games begin.”

  Jack

  An hour and a half later, we are the proud parents of two massive sheets of Monster Cake, some impressive concoction called Unicorn Ice Cream Bread, three dozen Kitchen Sink Macaroons, peanut-butter-and-jelly cupcakes, a three-layer Paige creation dubbed Sex-Positive Brownies (“Slutty Brownies,” Pepper explained, “but Paige took a course on feminism and sex work, so.”), an ungodly amount of banana pudding, and a bunch of misshapen cake balls we rolled around in melted chocolate and stuck in the fridge.

  My mom comes in at some point, lured by the smell. She tries a sliver of the Monster Cake, groans, and says, “Don’t look me in the eye,” as she immediately cuts off a second slice.

  “We actually need that for school,” I remind her, as Pepper blushes furiously next to me, looking pleased with herself.

  My mom holds up a finger. “Hush. I’m having a moment over here.” Pepper snorts as my mom finishes having said moment, and then turns to Pepper, her fingers still sticky with cake, and says, “You are welcome to this kitchen any day of the week for the rest of your damn life.” Before Pepper can respond, she turns to me and says, “But if you don’t clean up this disaster, yours, my dear, is over.”

  By the time we finish scrubbing all the pots and pans, Pepper’s cheek is dusted with flour, and a strand of her hair has come loose and somehow ended up streaked with melted chocolate. I reach up without thinking and run my fingers through it, trying to get it out. Her eyes dart over to mine, but not in alarm—in this hopeful, surprised kind of way that suddenly gives meaning to something I thought in the moment was meaningless, that makes me second-guess myself.

  “Chocolate,” I say dumbly, pulling my hand away to show her.

  She rolls her eyes at herself. “Typical.”

  I shift my weight onto the foot that’s farther from her. “We could, uh—chill at our place, while we’re waiting for everything to cool down?” I point upward. “We live right upstairs, if you want to stay for dinner.”

  “Are you sure?”

  I sweep my hand over to the other side of the kitchen, which is stacked to the gills with meats, cheeses, breads, and every weird sandwich accoutrement known to humankind. “If you can dream it, you can make it.”

  We both avoid grilled cheese, since the whole debacle is still a little too fresh. I make myself a pastrami on rye, and Pepper uses the bread ends of a baguette to fashion a swiss cheese, ham, and butter sandwich. I pull out the cranberry relish, and she mutters the word “genius” at me before adding it to hers, and I can still feel it inflating my chest five minutes later when we take our spoils back up to the apartment.

  I’m expecting to see Grandma Belly in her chair when we walk in, but she must be napping. Instead, it’s just me and Pepper and suddenly a little more of myself than I counted on Pepper seeing, from the cheesy photos of me and Ethan hung up on the fridge, to the door to my room that is very much wide open, leaving an old Super Smash Bros. poster I forgot was even on the wall in plain view.

  Suddenly I am so at a loss for what to do, I actually find myself wishing a parent would come in and interrupt.

  “We could, uh, watch a movie?” I suggest.

  “Yeah, sure.”

  I glance at the shelf, weighing our options, and turn to Pepper with a smirk. “Mean Girls?”

  Pepper meets my eye like she suspects I’m kidding. “Don’t laugh, but I’m obsessed.”

  I’m already walking over to pluck it from the collection. “Yeah, I know. You reference Mean Girls on the Big League Burger account more than you actually talk about burgers.”

  “I’m not a regular social media manager. I’m a cool social media manager,” says Pepper, plopping on the couch with her sandwich as I queue up the DVD.

  “You think that’s what you wanna do? When we’re finally freed from the prisonscape of Stone Hall?”

  Pepper has already taken an absurdly large bite of her sandwich, but she wrinkles her nose in response. “No. God. What a nightmare.”

  “Eh, we had some good times.”

  I sit next to her, a little closer than I meant to, but she doesn’t scoot away and neither do I.

  “Are we going to wax poetic someday about the good old days on Twitter?” Pepper asks. “Has this been our heyday the whole time?”

  We both lean back into the couch, and she turns her head toward me, waiting for an answer that for some reason it takes me a moment to give.

  I make a decision, right then—close a door I’ve been tiptoeing around now for months. I decide not to tell Pepper about any of it. About Weazel, about Bluebird and Wolf, about the tangled web of our friendship that is secretly more complicated than she could ever have guessed.

  Because this, right here—whatever this is—has a strange kind of magic I feel as if I could accidentally breathe right out of the air if I say the wrong thing and puncture it. Pepper’s eyes are on mine, and it’s kind of scary, but it’s also just so simple. Usually at least half my brain is preoccupied with self-doubt and second-guessing and my Olympic-sized twin complex, but right now everything is quiet. Just Pepper and sticky sandwich fingers and little smirks, and the feeling that whatever we’re sharing between us right now adds up to something bigger than the sum of what we were by ourselves.

  It’s the talk about the future, maybe. Pepper using the word someday. Suddenly there is a someday, and that one spoken word seems to imply so many other unspoken ones—that we mean more to each other now than the people we were a month ago, who might have briefly nodded to each other at the all-night grad party in the spring and never seen each other again.

  Not telling Pepper is easier than telling her, sure—but it’s more than that now. I want to hold on to what’s taking shape here. I don’t want to compromise that someday by telling her something that doesn’t even matter anymore.

  “Nah,” I say after a moment. “This was just the beginning. We’ll go to war on Snapchat next.”

  She ribs me with her elbow and doesn’t move her arm back, so it’s just tucked into my side. I watch the movie without really watching it, the two of us eating our sandwiches, Pepper saying her favorite lines with the characters often enough that it’s clear in the first five minutes she has the entire film memorized down to the exact degree of exasperation in Tina Fey’s face before she speaks. Still, she laughs like she hasn’t seen it more times than she can count, hard enough I can feel the vibration of it through her arm and into my ribs like she’s sharing it with me.

  Just as Cady is about to throw up on Aaron Samuels’s shoes, the DVD starts to skip, and then pauses.

  “Oh, man. It does this sometimes,” I mutter. “It’ll start itself back up in a sec.”

  “I haven’t had to deal with this in a while. DVD players—so retro.”

  I turn to her, somehow surprised by how close her face is to mine even though I’ve been fully and excruciatingly aware of all of her for over an hour. “Well, the East Village has to keep its hipster cred somehow.”

  “I guess that rep is more important ever now that we’re
famous, huh?”

  I laugh, accidentally leaning in closer—or maybe she’s the one leaning. “Those kids today—how freaking weird have our lives gotten?”

  “I feel like I hallucinated that. Like I hallucinated the entire comments section of that Hub Seed article too.”

  “Jactricia,” I snicker, before I even realize what I’m saying—and then we’re both red in the face, because it’s the first time we’ve mutually acknowledged the extreme awkwardness that is strangers actually, legitimately shipping us online.

  Pepper clears her throat. “Well, obviously we need to petition for a better ship name.”

  Some of the awkwardness diffuses, but the tension is still there, tight like a coil between us.

  “Jepper? Pack?”

  “Pass,” she says, nudging me with her elbow again—and then something shifts. The apartment is eerily still, with the same kind of quiet there was in the pool the other day, where you’re not sure if it’s actually quiet or if the rest of the world’s sounds just don’t apply to you anymore.

  “Maybe just Jack and Pepper, then,” I concede.

  There’s a ghost of a smirk on Pepper’s face, but she’s so close, I can hear it more than I can see it. “Pepper and Jack,” she corrects me. Then her eyes light up. “Pepperjack.”

  It’s ridiculous, but the word is like a key turning into a lock. And then impossibly, even though some part of me knew it would happen the moment I saw Pepper walk out of the subway, we lean in and our lips touch and we’re kissing on my couch.

  It is awkward, and messy, and perfect. We’re so bad at it, but even in the first few seconds I can feel us getting better, her hand hesitant and then sure as she sets it on my shoulder, our lips giving way to each other’s, this self-conscious, giddy little laugh escaping Pepper and humming in my teeth.

  “Wait.”

  The laugh is already dissolving out of her face when I pull away, and crap, I don’t know what I’m doing or why I’m doing it now, but I was wrong. I can’t lie to her. I can’t start something that feels this big built on what still feels like a lie. I just didn’t understand how big it was until it was already happening.