Right now, when I realize I’m going to miss these barbs after it’s all over.
But we still have swim and dive, for another month and a half. And homeroom. It’s not as though we’re moving to other planets.
Yeah. After that we lay down our keyboards
Which means this will all be over by the end of this week.
I put my phone back down on my mattress, assuming that’s the end of our texting for tonight. It’s weird enough I texted her in the first place. Like nudging some kind of boundary, turning us into that kind of friend.
But then her next text pushes it further than I did.
Today 8:02 PM
It’s weird to me that it took four years and a Twitter war for us to be friends
Aw. So you do admit it?
Begrudgingly
But really. I know you have this thing about Ethan, but you shouldn’t. I feel like you’ve kind of been hiding because of it
Pepperoni. I’m the loudest person in our class.
And if we’re talking about hiding, it’s really Pepper who is probably guilty of it most. She chameleoned into Stone Hall so quickly, sometimes it’s hard to remember we didn’t grow up with her, like she was always there in the periphery, setting the bar annoyingly high for the rest of us.
Yeah. I think that’s a version of hiding, sometimes
I set the phone back down, my eyes flitting up to the window, feeling so absurdly exposed that for a moment I half expect someone to be peering in from the other side of it. I shut my eyes and try to rein myself in, the way my whole body wants to reject the thing I just read.
I don’t know what’s worse — that she might be right, or that she figured it out before I did.
Today 8:10 PM
Anyway, loudmouth or not, you’re fine the way you are.
But burn that text so nobody can hold it against me later.
I grin.
Yeah, well. Ruthless overachiever with a bloodlust for crushing other people’s GPAs aside, you’re fine the way you are too.
We both know that’s the end of our texting for tonight, as if someone gently closed a book before going to sleep. I sit there on my bed, almost in disbelief it happened in the mere span of an hour when it feels like it wasn’t in the bounds of normal time — the kind of conversation you already know is going to stick to your skin long after it’s over, long after the person you had it with is gone from your life.
I bite the inside of my cheek. I wonder where Pepper will end up when we’re all done here. Wonder in a way and with an ache I haven’t even wondered for myself.
In the end, it’s Pepper’s fault I do the thing I’ve been alternately trying to do and trying not to do for months now. I pull up the Weazel app and tap on my conversation with Bluebird.
Wolf
Okay, so it’s clear the app isn’t going to tattle on us anytime soon.
Only kind of a lie, since I’m the one who stopped it from triggering. But the response is almost immediate.
Bluebird
Are you suggesting we take matters into our own hands?
Wolf
I am.
Bluebird
When?
I glance up at the calendar I have hanging on my closet, the one my mom dutifully changes the months on when I forget. On Thursday the tally will be in for our retweet war on Hub Seed. The next day is Senior Skip Day.
Wolf
Friday?
Bluebird
Works for me.
I take a breath, feeling the familiar swoop of anxiety in my gut. But it feels anchored this time. You’re fine the way you are. It’s almost nothing, but in this moment, with this one choice, it makes all the difference.
Wolf
Cool. The seniors are all hanging out around town that night. We can figure it out then
Bluebird
Excellent. Gives me just enough time to come up with an alibi
God, this is gonna be fun.
Pepper
I lied to Jack. My mom wasn’t annoyed about Ethan’s picture. She was pissed.
“We need to get Hub Seed’s social media manager on the phone,” she said to me the instant I walked through the door.
I was oddly unfazed. “That’s Taffy’s job.”
She was standing in the kitchen, leaning over the counter, staring into the remnants of A-Plus Angel Cake — Paige’s recipe, not mine; apparently she’d aced her French midterm, and I couldn’t resist replicating her recipe after she posted it on our blog. Now, though, a good chunk of it was missing, and there was a fork propped in my mom’s hands.
“It’s a Saturday,” she said.
“So it can wait until Monday.”
“Weren’t you the one who arranged this whole deal?”
Despite Jack stealing my phone, I don’t think Mom has any idea I go to school with the sons of the people running Girl Cheesing. She just thinks I got hacked through the cloud or something. So she can’t know Jack exists, or that we’ve been toe-to-toe in person as often as we have been on Twitter. As far as she knows, my hands are completely clean of this.
“Hub Seed reached out to us,” I reminded her. “And yeah, the retweet showdown was my idea, and we set the terms. They broke them. That’s not my fault.”
She stabbed her fork into the angel cake, her mouth twisting into a frustrated line.
I stood very still, watching her mull it over and feeling more unsettled by the second. “The tweet’s already up, and there’s nothing we can do about it. And for what it’s worth, I said we should quit doing this weeks ago.”
“Well, that’s not your call.”
“It is if you’re going to keep me up all night sending out stupid tweets.”
My mom looked up at me sharply. Then her brows deepened into a scowl, and her body postured like she was suddenly anticipating a fight.
Like I was challenging her. Like I was Paige.
But this had escalated far enough. If nobody else was around to challenge her, it would have to be me.
“Is there something about this you’re not telling me?”
She wouldn’t meet my eyes. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“This whole Twitter thing. It’s insane. Dad and Paige and half the internet thinks we’re losing it.”
“Half the internet is seeing a ton of press about us.”
“And thinks we’re jerks,” I emphasized. “Which we are.”
“For defending ourselves?”
“If we’d just let it go, it would have been like — like a baby bird trying to attack a mountain. But now it’s a thing, and it’s a thing because we made it one, not them. The further we take this, the worse we look.”
“I’m the CEO. I’m the one who built this place up — the one who turned this operation from a backyard grill to the force it is today—”
She stopped, then, because the tears sprang into my eyes so fast it stunned us both.
“Pepper.”
I blinked them back. “I miss that backyard grill.”
There were a few beats of silence, then, when one of us was clearly going to wave the white flag. I knew if I waited, it would be her. I knew it could just as easily be me.
Instead, I said, “We had integrity, then.”
My mom thinned her lips, glaring down at the angel cake. “I didn’t steal anything from that deli.”
“Then why won’t you let this go? We’re going to be the laughingstock of—”
“Go to your room.”
It was the first time anybody had said that to me since elementary school. I almost laughed.