“How’d I do?” he asks excitedly, the moment we make it to the locker rooms.
“Academy Award — worthy,” I deadpan, pausing outside of the girls’ locker room. I knock and crack open the door, calling, “Maintenance,” and waiting a beat.
No answer. Perfect. I find the TEMPORARILY CLOSED FOR CLEANING sign propped against the wall and Velcro it to the door.
“I’ll be right back,” I tell Paul, who salutes me as I take one last glance over our shoulders and sneak into the girls’ locker room.
It doesn’t take long to find Pepper’s backpack in one of the lockers — it may be the same nondescript navy Herschel bag that half the people in our class have, but there’s a tiny little keychain that says “Music City” on her zipper. I find her phone in the front pocket where I always see her sliding it out before and after class and type in 1234, hoping against hope that she never got around to changing it.
Boom. I’m in.
It’s almost too easy.
I pull up the Big League Burger Twitter account, and it occurs to me that I could do some major damage right now. Like, get someone fired kind of damage. Send a tweet that says We confess to ripping off a defenseless old lady’s grilled cheese recipe because we’re all corporate assholes kind of damage.
But even I’m not that much of a tool. I pull up the settings to the account, change the password, and lock her out.
I’m about to quit the app and shove the phone back into her bag when it buzzes in my hand. It’s a text from “Mom.”
Text me when practice is over — that last tweet was good, but I think we can do better
I don’t mean to read it, it’s just there. And very quickly followed up by another one.
Also Taffy’s leaving early tomorrow, do you mind checking the tweets she queued?
My thumb grazes the screen and accidentally taps the text, opening it up to a whole string of them. I move my finger to close out of it, but not before I’ve managed to skim some of the recent messages—Can you just send Taffy a tweet idea real quick if you get a chance? It’s been hours, says one of them.
Paul coughs noisily from the front door.
“Shit.”
My signal to leave. I shove Pepper’s phone back into her backpack and zip it up, then race to the exit on the other side of the girls’ locker room, barely making it out before someone walks in from the original one.
And then that’s it. The deed is done. I slink back into the boys’ locker room, where Paul is already waiting for me, his expression manic and gleeful. He claps me on the back a few too many times, a hyper parody of something the Landons or the Ethans of the world might do. I smile back, but it feels a little less like a victory and a little too much like that moment Pepper stuck her hand on my head and dunked me.
This whole time I’d rolled my eyes about her mom whenever she came up. I didn’t believe a grown adult could be this invested in their kid doing something this objectively dumb — not even my parents, who joke about all the business it brings in, but probably wouldn’t do more than shrug if I swore off it forever.
I feel a weird pinch of guilt as I walk out of the locker room, but not necessarily for locking Pepper out of the account. For the reminder that, fun and games aside, this whole Twitter thing means a lot more than either of us want to admit.
Pepper
“Please don’t make us do this,” Pooja moans.
Landon puts a hand on her shoulder, jostling it slightly. I still have my eyes peeled on it as he takes the hand away. “Rules are rules,” he says with an easy grin. “And you guys lost fair and square.”
“At least it’s not pool water Kool-Aid this time,” says Ethan.
I glance up the pool deck, toward the locker rooms, not even realizing I’m looking for Jack until I come up empty of him. It’s not like it matters where he is, but I can’t stop myself from compulsively checking, like he’s become some kind of shadow I feel weird without. That, and his team lost — and the terms of this particular water polo war were that everyone on the losing team had to do 100 yards of butterfly, nonstop. There are very few things in this world I would pay good money to see, but watching Jack flounder at the hardest stroke after years of acting all cocky about doing flips into the water is decidedly one of them.
“Ugh. Say nice things at my funeral.”
“C’mon, Pooja,” says Landon, “you could swim this in your sleep.”
I shouldn’t care. And I don’t. Or I wouldn’t, if it weren’t for something I’m getting a little more sure of by the day, something I can’t decide whether I want to be sure of or not.
I might be right about Landon. It all checks out. Him texting during the day, when he would be off-campus. Not texting during the exact same times as swim and dive practice. And there is nothing quite so damning as the app Wolf sent me, the mac-and-cheese locator — Landon’s the only senior this year interning at an app development startup, and the smell of that mac-and-cheese bread bowl he was sporting the other day is so burned into my memory that I’ll probably be telling my grandchildren about it.
I’m going to ask him. Tonight. Point-blank. He’ll already be in our apartment for that dinner with his dad. The second most embarrassing scenario will have already occurred, so I might as well just lean into the first. And if I don’t ask him then, when I actually have him alone for the first time in four years, I don’t think I ever will.
I head into the locker room, overly aware of the fact I’m going to have to hustle home to get my hair and my outfit in working order before Landon and his dad get to our place for dinner. Naturally, by putting a desire into the universe not to waste time, I run smack into Jack.
“Ah. Sorry, Pepperoni,” he says, touching the spot where his shoulder brushed mine. He looks unsettled, his eyes a little wide. “Good luck keeping up with me tonight.”
He moves to walk away from me, but I stop him, grabbing the crook of his arm. For a dive team slacker who probably couldn’t remember the order of strokes in an individual medley to save his life, it’s surprisingly firm.
“If you think I’m out for the count just because it’s Friday…”
Jack takes the hand I have on his arm and presses it between his with mock solemnity. Mine is still wet, so our palms and fingers slick against each other’s in a way that would be weirdly intimate if his grin wasn’t at the exact half tilt it always is before he makes fun of me.
“Oh, don’t worry. I figure you’ll be free as a bird.”
I narrow my eyes. He looks more pleased with himself than usual.
“See you Monday,” he says, letting go of my hand and striding down the pool deck to his brother.
I’m still shaking my head as I walk into the locker room, coming out of the fog of being in the pool and back into the laser focus of everything beyond it. There’s not just the dinner to think about, but homework, and Twitter, and calling Paige back, and that college essay prompt I haven’t even started on—
“What the hell?”
The Big League Burger Twitter account has logged me out. I type in the password, but nothing happens — it just prompts me to type in something else. I’m about to call Taffy and ask if the password has changed, but she beats me to it with a text.
Did you change the twitter password?