Tweet Cute

by Emma Lord

  “You’re right,” Pepper blurts, a mile ahead of me. “I mean, we’re just—I don’t know. My mom, and the whole thing, and I…”

  “No, not—I don’t care about that.”

  She looks equal parts panicked and exasperated. “You were the one who said wait.”

  “It’s just that there’s something I need to tell you.”

  “Oh.”

  Her eyes are already starting to dim, and my brain is scrambling for the words I need to recover when, without warning, the front door cracks open and a woman says, “Pepper Marie Evans, what on earth do you think you’re doing?”

  Pepper snaps herself away from me so fast, I might have burned her. My back is turned to the front door, but judging from the sheer horror in Pepper’s eyes, I don’t need to fully turn around to know it can only be her mother.

  What I’m not expecting to see when I finally turn is my dad walking in right behind her, looking both exasperated and furious. It isn’t until his eyes meet mine that I realize the fury is reserved for none other than me.

  “Mom?” Pepper bleats. “How did you—what did you—”

  “What, you didn’t think I’d see this plastered all over the internet?” says Pepper’s mom, walking into our apartment without even a beat of hesitation, as if her name is on the lease. She shoves a phone in Pepper’s face, pointedly ignoring me. Pepper tilts the screen so I can see it too—the picture of the two of us with the middle schoolers has already accumulated four hundred retweets, with both the Big League Burger and Girl Cheesing accounts tagged.

  I gulp. Literally gulp, like I’m in some bad sitcom, or maybe just a really off-the-wall dream that I’m going to wake up from any moment now. But it only gets weirder from there.

  “Ronnie,” says my dad under his breath, “there’s no reason to—”

  “I rarely, if ever, have set rules for you, Pepper.” By now she is towering over the both of us, and we’re sitting on the couch utterly paralyzed. “But I told you very specifically to stay away from that boy.”

  She says “that boy” as if I’m not even here, but I can’t even let that demoralizing fact wrap around my brain—Pepper and I are both staring at each other, my dad’s “Ronnie” still an open question dangling in the air between us.

  “I—I needed to use the oven.” Pepper is redder than I’ve ever seen her, and I can tell it’s every bit on my behalf as it is for hers. “There’s a bake sale tomorrow, and I know you didn’t want me to bake, so—”

  “Get your things. We are leaving, and having a very long discussion about the appropriate punishment on the taxi ride home.”

  Pepper reaches for her backpack, shoving her phone into it and zipping it up with shaking hands. She looks back at me, her eyes searing with a desperate kind of apology in them. I’m too stunned to react, my mouth hanging open, still buzzing from a kiss that feels like it happened in some other lifetime.

  In her panic, Pepper reaches for the half of a Kitchen Sink Macaroon she hadn’t finished yet. Her mom reaches her hand forward and picks it up first, holding it up and scrutinizing it. Out of context, I would have laughed—I’ve never seen a grown woman look so inexplicably furious at a dessert before.

  “Figures,” she mutters to herself. Then, for some reason, she turns to my dad. She opens her mouth to say something, and he tilts his head sharply—not quite shaking his head, but making enough of a movement there’s no mistaking its intention.

  She lets out whatever breath she was going to use to say something to him, sets a hand on Pepper’s shoulder, and guides her out of the room. Then they’re gone, the apartment door slamming behind them, leaving me and my dad in total silence.

  I’m not sure what to say or if I should even speak. The air in the room is so thick, it feels like it’s slowing down time. I glance over at my dad, cautious at first, but he’s not even looking at me. He’s leaning on the kitchen counter and scowling at his knuckles.

  “Dad?”

  He blinks, looking over at me. I’m expecting some kind of punishment of my own. A Time-Out Booth–level lecture, maybe. Something on par with whatever the hell just happened here.

  But he seems so distracted that even when he does get around to the whole disciplining thing, it seems like more of an afterthought than anything else.

  “You shouldn’t be bringing a date into this apartment without supervision.”

  “It wasn’t…”

  Well. It kind of was. But it’s not like Mom didn’t know we were up here. And Grandma Belly is technically home.

  But my dad’s already pacing out of the kitchen, heading for his bedroom. He’s not even waiting for me to apologize. And he’s certainly not waiting for me to ask the dozens of questions on the tip of my tongue, chasing Pepper and her mom out the door.

  “Sorry,” I say—partially because I am, for Pepper’s sake, and because I want him to stop for a second, so I can figure out what to ask and how to ask it.

  My dad just nods.

  So that’s it. I’ve gotten away with … whatever it is I got away with, I guess. I’m still puzzling out what exactly that is, but my dad’s Ronnie and Pepper’s mom’s Figures and the absurdly weighted look between the two of them just before they booked it out of here is still rattling around in my head like a pinball in a machine.

  And then there’s a thud from the other room, and both my dad and I stop in our tracks, everything else forgotten faster than it takes for us to get to Grandma Belly’s door.

  Pepper

  Approximately eighteen hours after my kiss with Jack Campbell—my kiss with Jack Campbell—I am sitting at a card table with Pooja in the front entrance of the school behind our veritable army of baked goods, overanalyzing the situation to such an absurd degree, it is now less of a kiss and more of an FBI investigation.

  Pooja, however, isn’t having it.

  “He likes you. You like him,” says Pooja. “Honestly, it’s old news. Even preteens in Iowa on the Hub realized it before you.”

  “But last night…”

  “Talk to him.”

  “I’ve tried.” It’s a humiliating thing to confess, but Pooja needs context if I’m going to get any advice: “He hasn’t texted back.”

  In fact, Jack has all but turned into a ghost. He mysteriously did not show up for homeroom. I only know he’s here today because I saw him in the cafeteria at lunch, but he was way across the room and had slipped into his calc class before I could catch up to him. And now he’s conspicuously absent from the bake sale too—the only reason we even have the baked goods is because Ethan, in a rare moment of actually participating in his dive captain duties, dropped them off at the front office for us.

  Granted, he is most likely making out with Stephen under the stairwell by the gym while we hawk all these goods, but at least he kind of tried.

  “Well, he can’t hide forever. So I guess you’ll get your answers soon enough.” Pooja leans back and props her foot on the chair that was supposed to be occupied with Jack. “Maybe he’s just embarrassed, after the whole thing with your mom.”

  “Yeah, maybe.” I shake my head. “His dad called Mom Ronnie. My dad doesn’t even call her that. Vee, maybe, but never Ronnie.”

  “That, I have to admit, is intriguing. And I will be the first one to reblog the conspiracy theories when they hit Tumblr, because I personally suspect your parents are part of some weird underground fast casual food cult,” says Pooja, popping another bit of a peanut-butter-and-jelly cupcake in her mouth. In her defense, she did pay for it. “But your mom can’t ban you from seeing Jack. He’s ridiculous, sure, but he’s not, like, a delinquent.”

  “Maybe he wasn’t yesterday,” I mutter, thinking of his unexplained absence.

  “And the kiss was good, right?”

  “I mean, it wasn’t not good.” I shrug, trying to seem casual about it even as my heart starts beating a little faster and my palms are sweating where they’re propped on the cash box. It was my first kiss, and one of those milestones
I only realized I hadn’t given enough thought to executing until it was actually happening—and boy, did it happen.

  And then swiftly un-happen so fast my ears are still ringing from Jack’s Wait and my mom’s lecturing on the Uber ride back.

  Still, even with all that lecturing, and the fact I am grounded until kingdom come, and my mom is quite possibly part of a food services mafia with Jack’s dad, it was kind of absurdly, stupidly great.

  Or at least it was until the second Jack brought it to an abrupt halt.

  It’s not just the kiss, though. I know I should feel bad about lying to my mom, about breaking her trust, and I do. Enough that I almost blurted out the whole thing to Paige on the phone last night, just so I could feel better when she inevitably took my side. But the guilt is completely separate from the rest of it, from the terror and the thrill of something as simple as getting on the 6 train and taking a twenty-minute ride downtown.

  It was like emerging into an entirely different city. Not that there’s any surprise in that—sometimes it feels like individual blocks here are their own islands, separate from the massive one they’re all built on. It’s just I’ve never seen a new part of the city or experienced it through my own eyes because of a choice I made.

  And I guess, in a way, I still haven’t. I saw it through Jack’s eyes. The mingling of the newer, kitschier shops with storied buildings with storefronts so much older than we are that you feel like a blip in time. The bustle of NYU students and New York natives and street vendors and people wearing ridiculous outfits nobody bats an eye at. The people who waved at Jack like a parade all the way from the 6 train to the deli, as if he was every bit as much a fixture down there as the little shops and restaurants.

  Girl Cheesing itself has its own magic, the way every shop around it seemed to give way to it like it was the pulse of the block. And yesterday, I got to be a part of it. I got to see a whole new part of this city and still be myself in it without it spitting me back out, and I’m restless at the idea of it now, at how much more there is to see—the five or so blocks I walked with Jack function like their own separate planet, and there are hundreds, thousands of others squeezed into this city all around it.

  I’ve spent so long resisting the rest of this place that I feel like I’ve had my hands over my ears and my eyes clamped shut ever since I got here, waiting to ride it out until the day I could leave. Now suddenly, graduation seems less like a jailbreak and a little more like an expiration date. The day I might run out of time here, to see the rest of everything I’ve been so determined to ignore.

  I’m about to talk to Pooja about it, but we’re interrupted by the sharp squeak of shoes on linoleum, a squeak so familiar that I know it belongs to Paul before I even look down the hall. Sure enough, he’s hightailing it with his usual speed and talking a mile a minute—talking to Jack, who is walking a beat behind him, his face hovering in the beginnings of a scowl.

  “Look who decided to show up,” says Pooja—but Jack and Paul don’t head in our direction, and instead divert sharply down into the music hallway. I catch just the side of Jack’s face as he turns the corner, and whatever the scowl is about, it’s way beyond the usual Paul levels of exasperation. He looks straight-up wrecked, like he didn’t sleep at all last night.

  Pooja is already looking at me when I find her eyes, like I need some kind of cue.

  “Maybe he forgot,” she says.

  I raise my eyebrows at her, but only because it’s that or give in to the alternative—that Jack regrets that kiss. That I was just imagining the moments leading up to it, building something up in my head. That somehow, over the course of one weekend, I’ve been rejected both by the anonymous friend I’ve been pouring my heart out to for months, and the very real friend I accidentally spilled it out to faster than I ever thought possible.

  “I’ll go talk to—”

  “Listen, Pepper, I swear I didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  I blink up at Landon, who is towering over the bake-sale table with an expression on his face I’ve only ever seen on people called into Rucker’s office on the PA. Some mingling of guilt and sheer terror.

  “Uh … I mean, yeah, I hope not. Unless you paid off a hot dog vendor to give her food poisoning,” says Pooja.

  Landon doesn’t even look at her, his eyes still focused on mine. “I told anyone who had pictures to delete them. They were being dicks.”

  “The pictures of Pepper blowing chunks?” Pooja asks, her tone already heated.

  Landon starts to nod, and I roll my eyes.

  “Let me guess,” I mutter. “Someone posted one into the Hallway Chat.”

  Landon’s mouth opens and then stays open for just a beat long enough for me to feel a trickle of dread.

  “You haven’t seen?”

  I narrow my eyes at him. “Seen what?”

  “I didn’t have anything to do with it,” he says again. “It’s, uh—you might want to check Twitter.”

  Landon takes off and is down the hall and out of sight before Pooja can pull the app up on her phone. Her scowl hardens, and then she passes it over to me.

  It’s a picture of me in the park from Friday night. My face is pinched and pale, just a half second away from retching into the bag Pooja grabbed for me out of the trash can—a bag that very visibly has the iconic Big League Burger logo on it, something I failed to notice as I was using it as a receptacle for my stomach contents. I look awful, like some drunk, stumbling teenage cliché, but more to the point, I look like myself. The picture was taken within close enough range that there’s no mistaking it for anyone but me.

  Especially because the picture was tweeted from the Girl Cheesing account, under the caption: Evergreen mood.

  My stomach plummets all over again, this time in one heavy, lurching swoop. I thumb the picture and scroll down over a thousand retweets so far, and it was only posted an hour ago. oh ew un-stanning immediately, someone has tweeted. turns out patty’s a party animal, writes another, along with a GIF of Kristen Wiig dressed like a drunk Cinderella on an old episode of Saturday Night Live. Another one, that hits a little closer to the vest than I thought it would, reads, No wonder her tweets sucked so much this week.

  I’ve been so far removed from it since Jack and I settled the score that I haven’t even been on the app all week—Taffy fully took the reins, and I disabled the notifications I used to get every time Jack tweeted. Maybe this shouldn’t feel like such a slap in the face, but it still stings like one.

  “He wouldn’t do this,” I say instantly.

  “Then why hasn’t he deleted it?” says Pooja. “Anyway, it looks like it’s responding to something the Big League account said.”

  I pull it up and see a tweet from a few hours ago. It’s so cringeworthy that I know Taffy couldn’t have been the one who drafted it. It’s a picture of our two versions of Grandma’s Special Grilled Cheese along with the number of them we’ve sold versus theirs.

  retweet all you want, but this grandma is wiping the floor with yours, it reads.

  “Oh, for god’s sake,” I mutter.

  “Go get him to delete that shit,” says Pooja. “Someone already memed it.”

  I close my eyes. My mom just had to keep this stupid Twitter fight up, didn’t she? And now I’m not only the laughingstock of the school, but probably poised to be the laughingstock of the country. No matter what I accomplish in this life, whenever someone Googles my first name for the next hundred years, a picture of me heaving my guts into a Big League Burger bag will probably be the first hit.

  “I’ll be right back,” I mutter, getting up so fast from the bake-sale table that the chair legs screech across the floor out from under me.

  I follow the little hallway they disappeared down. I can hear Jack’s voice faintly before I reach the little offshoot of the hallway—and then he raises it, and it’s not faint at all. I stop in my tracks, stunned by the level of irritation in it.

  “… cannot even begin to tell you how
little this matters to me right now,” I hear Jack saying from around the corner. He and Paul are standing in front of a row of lockers, where Paul must be grabbing his clarinet.

  “Dude, I’m your best friend.”

  “Yeah? Then don’t ask me to do dumb shit.”

  “It’s not dumb. I just want to know who Goldfish is. We’ve been talking for a few weeks now, and I really think it could, y’know, be a thing. But I just gotta know who she is or I’m gonna embarrass myself.”

  Jack lets out a sigh like he’s recalibrating himself. “You won’t.”

  “Have you met me?”

  It’s about then that my brain makes sense of the use of Goldfish, and I realize Paul must be talking about someone he’s met on Weazel. My face burns; the lingering embarrassment over the debacle with Wolf is still weirdly fresh, underneath everything that’s happened since.

  “Trust me, Paul, it’s just—you don’t want to mess around with this app. In fact, I think I’m just gonna—disable it, maybe. Make another version where people can’t be anonymous, so we can still have all the study group setups and stuff.”

  I’m listening so intently, I’m not even breathing anymore. I don’t fully remember why I came down this hall in the first place. Disable it? The words ricochet somewhere in my head and refuse to settle. Make another version?

  There’s only one scenario where it would make sense for Jack to say something like that.

  “But dude, there are so many people who have become friends on it—”

  “Yeah, but Rucker’s right. Sometimes people are assholes on it. I monitor it whenever I can, but I just plain don’t have time anymore, and I…”

  “At least just tell me who Goldfish is.”

  “I told you I’m not going to do that. And besides, it’s—you think you want to know, but maybe you don’t, you know?”

  Every muscle in my body tenses, like it already knows something I don’t.

  “No?” says Paul, his voice starting to lean into a whine. “I really, really do.”