We divide up into the same teams we’ve had since my freshman year, give or take a few new recent additions of underclassmen. Since the dive team is significantly smaller than the swim team, each of our water polo “teams” is a mix of both. Much to the annoyance of literally everyone in the pool, Ethan and I are on separate teams — a condition we abuse liberally, because more often than not some sucker from the wrong team will pass one of us the ball and give us an unexpected advantage.
Well, suckers who aren’t Pepper, at least. Who happens to be both ruthless and on Ethan’s team.
The game starts out the way it usually does — with Landon chucking the ball into the middle ground of the pool and everyone swarming it like piranhas, dunking each other by grabbing onto heads and shoulders, barely avoiding elbowing each other in the face. I steer clear of the madness, swimming out closer to our goal, hoping one of the six sets of hands currently clutching the soccer ball that’s half submerged underwater will throw it in my vague direction.
“Been a few hours since your last tweet. You losing steam there, Campbell?”
“Oh, trust me, Pepperoni, my next move will be worth the wait.”
She treads a few inches closer to me, close enough I can see the strands of hair poking out of her cap. Her hair isn’t particularly wild, but I’ve noticed anytime the swim coach puts them through an intense set, her cap can’t stay fully on her head to save its own life.
“Judging from what I saw of the dive team’s lap swimming today, you’re an expert at making people wait.”
I grin into the water. “Been watching me swim, huh?”
Pepper’s eyes are still on the mayhem ahead, unfazed, but I see her lip twitch. “If you can call that swimming.”
“Please, I could take you in a race in a heartbeat.”
She laughs out loud. “Wanna bet?”
“Sure. Let’s go.”
She follows my eyeline to the edge of the pool like she might actually race me, but then I reach forward and tug her cap off her head in one swift motion, her blonde hair spilling into the pool in wet tangles around her face and shoulders.
“Foul!” Pepper crows, yanking it back from me.
“You know, for someone named Pepper, you’re pretty salty about losing.”
She groans at my pun as she shoves her hair back into the cap, but then counters, “For someone named Jack, you’re pretty bad at knowing when to hit the road.”
“Wow, Burger Princess, sick burn.”
And damn it if she hasn’t gone and done it again — distracted me right at a peak moment for me to most fully make an ass of myself. The soccer ball is sailing over our heads, and Pepper’s already plowing through the water with the focus of a shark, halfway to where it’s about to smack into no man’s land.
Not on my watch.
I reach out and grab her ankle and yank her back the way she’s done to me too many times to count, but unlike me, she seems to be expecting it — expecting it so readily, she snaps her body through the water like a rubber band, using me as an anchor for momentum, and before I know it, she’s got a palm squarely on top of my head and is dunking my entire body underwater.
I let out a glugging cough of surprise before breaking the surface, just in time to see Pepper scooping the ball out of the water and chucking it to Ethan halfway across the pool in a motion so fluid and seamless I might have dreamed it.
“What—how—”
She swims back over to me, her strokes dainty and smug. “You were saying?”
I set my pointer finger and my thumb on the surface of the water and flick some at her. She responds by full-on splashing me.
“Jack! Oy!”
It’s Paul, being about as subtle as a gun, yelling across the pool to indicate he’s going to pass to me. I kick myself away from Pepper so I might have a Klondike Bar’s chance in hell of actually catching it, but I’m not fast enough — her hand is already resting on my shoulder.
It’s a basic defensive move in water polo, but for one weird, weightless blip, it isn’t. She takes her fingers and squeezes them, tightening them around the muscle of my shoulder, not enough to be aggressive or competitive. Just enough that I’m not sure if my heartbeat is from the adrenaline or something else.
It’s weird — I think, guiltily, of Bluebird. Of the near radio silence between the two of us lately. As soon as we got on the topic of each other’s identities a few weeks ago, I panicked and pulled back — the less we talked, maybe, the less room she’d have to wonder why the app hadn’t revealed our identities to each other.
So I bizarrely feel like I’m cheating on her. With Twitter, not Pepper, of course. But I’d be lying if I said there weren’t a kind of relief to the switch. Pepper, at least, I don’t have to lie to. We do all of the backhanded stuff right out in the open, where everyone can see.
The ball is sailing over the other players, headed straight for me. I pull myself out of Pepper’s grasp, but she’s launching herself out of the water too, using me as leverage again. The ball smacks both of our hands at the same time and then skims right past us, but not before we look at each other in surprise. For a second our faces are alarmingly close, close enough that she gasps and I forget to breathe altogether, and then wham—our foreheads smack right into each other’s.
“Um, ow.”
“Jesus.”
And then, at the same time: “Are you okay?”
There’s a beat where we look at each other, not fully processing what just happened — no doubt courtesy of the mild concussion we might have just given each other — and for a second, I forget where we are entirely.
“Jinx,” I say. Jack Campbell, moment killer.
Pepper laughs, looking relieved. “Oh, good. I was worried I’d killed your last brain cell, but you seem okay.”
“Hey. Jinx means you’re not allowed to talk. Did you have a childhood?”
“I actually came out of the womb a Twitter bot.”
“Must have been one heck of a shock for your parents.”
“Yeah, but at least there weren’t two of me.”
“When you’re this good-looking, it only makes sense to have a spare.”
“Campbell! Evans! Are you going to keep flirting over there or actually make yourselves useful?”
It’s Landon, yelling from the other end of the pool. Pepper immediately takes off, but not before I see that her face has gone so red, it actually looks like a pepper. She all but leaves me in the dust, not even looking back.
“Now?”
I blink. Somehow Paul has swum up right behind me without making a sound and is holding three anxious fingers in front of my face. I check the clock by the pool and see it’s almost 4:15, glance farther up the water and see Pepper and Landon laughing at whatever Ethan just said.
“Yeah. Now’s good.”
And so starts a performance so stilted and awkward that somewhere up the street, our classmates rehearsing for the school’s production of Seussical! just shuddered without knowing why.
“Oh, man. I feel quite ill,” says Paul. Loudly. And in what appears to be a slight British accent.
I hold in a sigh. “Oh no, that sucks. Want me to walk you to the nurse?”
“Yeah. Because I’m sick. Like in a stomach way,” Paul continues.
One of the sophomores on the swim team cringes from behind him, and she and a few of the others swim in the opposite direction. I figure they’ll spread what Paul said fast enough nobody will question us when we get out of the pool and don’t come back for an inordinately long time. Sure enough, the coaches don’t even bat an eye as we get out and Paul makes another declaration about his mysterious illness, which is starting to become a lot more dramatic than originally scripted.