“We’re trying to figure out whose it is,” I explain to Rucker. I turn back to Pooja. “Any luck?”
Pooja hands her phone to me, her face collected but her hands shaking. “Not yet.”
Rucker eyes the phone in my hands. I try not to move it too much, knowing if the screen lights up that Pooja has a picture of herself posing with a cut-out of Ruth Bader Ginsburg that will give her up in an instant.
“It looked like it was logged into that Weasel application,” says Rucker.
“Yeah,” I say quickly, “that’s how we know it’s someone from Stone Hall.”
Pooja nods. “And we’ll, uh, definitely tell you whose it is when we figure it out.”
I can feel his eyes on me, and then on Pooja, trying to decide whether or not he trusts us. But his eyes are nothing compared to Pooja’s, who is staring at me like she’s still waiting for me to throw her under the bus. Neither of us really plays dirty — at least not since freshman year — but we haven’t exactly played nice either.
But as much of a thorn Pooja has been in my side over the years, the last thing I want to do to shift the playing field is let her go down for something as dumb as chatting with people on an app I could just as easily have been caught using, if I’d walked out five seconds before she did. If I beat her at anything, I want the satisfaction of knowing it was fair and square.
“Thank you, girls, for being vigilant about this. If you hear anything else…”
I hold back the urge to swallow in relief. “You’ll be the first to know,” I lie through my teeth.
Rucker nods, and then he’s off, not so subtly trying to infiltrate a group of dive team freshmen who see him coming from a mile off. I turn back to Pooja, whose face looks like there isn’t any blood in it.
“Thanks,” she breathes.
I shift my backpack on my shoulder. “No problem.”
“Seriously … you just saved my ass. And like, a dozen other asses. I’m in the middle of setting up the study group times for the history midterm.”
“Don’t worry about — wait. You’re Bunny?”
Pooja nods, almost cautious about it. Then, when I don’t end the conversation the way one of us usually does, she relaxes marginally and says, “I mean, not my first choice, but at least I’m not whoever got saddled with Donkey.”
Usually I make a point to keep my expression as cool as possible in front of Pooja, but I can’t help but stare at her in disbelief. “You’re the one who’s been setting up all the AP study groups.”
Pooja shrugs. “Well, yeah. The app makes it super easy. And this year’s got us all whipped.”
For a moment neither of us says anything, me just staring at her, and Pooja shifting her weight between her feet, like she can’t decide to wait me out or leave.
Because here’s the thing with Pooja — maybe, for a hot second, we could have been friends. We were grouped together in World History freshman year, when our teacher divvied us up for a graded in-class quiz bowl. It was late September, so just when I was starting to get into the groove of how to make myself fit in, and when I was more committed to making a good impression and the grades to match than ever — the fighting with Mom and Paige had only been escalating, and it felt like succeeding at Stone Hall was the only power I had to stop it.
At that point I still hadn’t really made any friends, but I’d scouted out some potentials. Mel, who seemed to bake a lot, based on some light Instagram stalking, and Pooja, who I’d overheard in the halls talking about trying to make the 100-yard butterfly her event. When we got put into the same group, I was hoping to talk to her about the school’s swim team before the season started. I was working up the nerve — it was still new to me, the idea of having to make friends instead of having built-in ones — when immediately I wasn’t nervous at all. Pooja was nice, and funny as hell. She kept writing notes in the margins of her notebook to show the rest of our quiz group, some crack about how the code of Hammurabi would apply to Snapchat, or adding “freshmen at Stone Hall” under the bottom rung of a social hierarchy of Mesopotamia.
I was laughing at one of her jokes when Mr. Clearburn called on me. “Miss Evans, if you’re not too busy goofing around, maybe you could bother to tell us the modern-day country where most of Ancient Mesopotamia was located?”
Even if I did know the answer, I was so mortified in that moment, I couldn’t have told him my first name. I sat there with my mouth open until Pooja whispered, “Syria.”
“Syria,” I blurted.
“Wrong, and I’m deducting a point from your team for disruptiveness. Miss Singh?”
Pooja gave her answer to the desk. “Iraq?”
“Correct.”
The sting of not just looking bad but letting down the other three people on our quiz team was so searing, it felt like I’d been pushed into the fryer at Big League Burger. I glanced over at Pooja, but she wouldn’t even look at me. It was a hard lesson, but a lesson learned: everyone at Stone Hall is out for themselves.
The rivalry just kind of grew organically from there. I never forgot what she did, and I certainly didn’t forgive. Every time we’ve come head-to-head since, in class or in swim team or any other school-related thing in between, I’ve held the embarrassment of that with me like a constant throbbing reminder that this isn’t Nashville. That this is a whole new species of human, and its food chain goes so perilously high that there’s always someone at your feet waiting to pull you down.
But this — this doesn’t add up. Pooja being Bunny, the user on Weazel who’s been reserving library times and hosting coffee shop meetups for all the toughest AP classes. Because if Pooja is Bunny, that means she’s been pulling people up that food chain right along with her.
Finally I shake my head. “I guess I thought…”
The sentence hangs there uncomfortably, because we both know what I thought. Pooja shifts her backpack on her shoulders, looking at her shoes before looking back up at me.
“You should come, you know.” The words are hesitant, like she means them but isn’t sure how I’ll take them. “I mean — not that you need it. But I’m sure it would help some of the others.”
I’m so stunned by the offer that I forget I’m supposed to answer.
“Anyway, my brother’s waiting for me out front, so…” She waves awkwardly. “Thanks again.”
“Yeah.”
And then she’s off — Pooja, Bunny, or whoever she really is — leaving me torn with a new kind of uncertainty in her wake.
Pepper
Once Pooja clears the lobby, my phone pings in my pocket, pulling me out of my confusion and right back into the Twitter maelstrom. I pull out my phone, already bracing myself for the notifications, swiping through them one by one—
And realize there aren’t any from Wolf. That there weren’t any yesterday around this time either. That for the first time in our correspondence, neither of us has said anything between the hours of three and five, which is our usual peak time for bitching about whatever assignments we got earlier in the day.
Okay. I’m not stupid enough to think that Landon is Wolf just because he happens to not be texting on Weazel during the same times as swim and dive practice. By that merit, any member of the swim team, the dive team, the basketball team, the golf team, or the indoor track and soccer teams could be him too. If anything, this has only widened the ridiculously large pool of people he could be.
But it’s just one more thing in a list of already uncanny things that makes me think that maybe, just maybe, it is him after all. That fourteen-year-old Pepper’s crush was fast, but maybe not baseless. That maybe there really was something then, the way there certainly seems to be something with Wolf now.