“You look kind of … green.”
I glance over at Pooja, who has been my literal only solace in this crinkle-cookie crapfest of a day. I spent most of it staring at my phone screen, waiting for either a response from Wolf confirming we were still on for tonight, or a response from Jack after I texted him that morning asking why he wasn’t in class. Nothing, nada, the phone screen so blank, I could practically feel myself shrinking into my seat.
I considered not even going out to hang with Landon and the other seniors, filled with an inexplicable kind of dread as the day went on. But I couldn’t miss it. Either Landon was Wolf or he wasn’t, and I was too invested in knowing to back out now.
Well. It’s safe to say now that Landon is very much not Wolf. In fact, there are a whole host of things Landon is and is not that have become extremely apparent in the last few hours I have spent in his company.
I got a text from him around five to meet up with the group just outside of the Met steps. I’d been ready for at least two hours, having carefully picked out an outfit for one of the rare few moments my classmates would see me out of uniform, applying and reapplying such an absurd amount of a lipstick Paige left behind that I was on the verge of accidentally tattooing my lips. I’d picked out a sweater dress with tights and a pair of smart boots, with a pretty pea coat my mom handed down to me and a scarf my dad got me for my birthday.
It was perfect for a crisp day in November, but all wrong for what I stumbled into — which was not my classmates, but the drunk, rowdy, raided-my-rich-parents’-liquor-cabinet version of them. Landon was the first to spot me, his hair all askew, wearing a pair of jeans and a Lacoste T-shirt, and red in the cheeks despite the fact it was forty degrees outside.
“If it isn’t the Big League Burger heiress herself!” he yelled, prompting some hoots from our classmates that made the tips of my ears burn. “Better watch out, Campbell!”
Ethan glanced up from his perch on the steps, also red-cheeked and glossy-eyed but far more composed than Landon and some of the other stumbling boys were. “Hey,” he said with a friendly enough wave, before returning to the far more important business of making out with Stephen.
I had an uneven, topsy-turvy sense that they had been talking about me before I arrived, which maybe I should have expected, given my new Hub Seed notoriety. Landon wrapped a drunken arm around me, a half hug of a greeting, and messed up my hair. My cheeks burned and my whole body went stiff — why couldn’t I just be normal? Be casual and fun and lean into a hug, rib him the way he was clearly about to rib me, do something to flirt back?
The moment was over too late for me to do anything but be annoyed at myself for it — for the way I still felt like I had to make myself fit into this world, even after all this time. For the realization that for some reason, I’d hinged that feeling on this person who seemed entirely unaware of the way I’d thought of him, both at the beginning of Stone Hall to the near end.
I glanced around the group, hoping to make eye contact with literally anyone on the same level of sobriety as me, which is when, mercifully, Pooja showed up, looking every bit as thrown as I was. She got a similarly raucous greeting from the group, dodging a boy who tried to hug her with what seemed to be an open container of some sort of alcoholic concoction in his hands and ducking her way over to me.
“Uhhhh,” she said, her eyes wide on mine.
I smiled in relief. “Yeah.”
And maybe we both would have ditched right then — her eyes seemed to be asking me without asking if I was game — but then Shane announced he was drunkenly posting in the Hallway Chat on Weazel, and then everyone was grabbing for their phones to either look at what he’d posted or do the same.
Pooja shoved her hands into her pockets, taking a step back from the madness as if to wash her hands of responsibility for it. “I guess we’re not going to an actual place to eat,” she said wryly.
I tried to match her tone, tried to keep the swell of disappointment out of my voice. “Yeah. Yikes.”
A second later I flinched in surprise as Landon shoved his phone screen under our noses.
“Spell check from the brainiest chicks at Stone Hall?”
I froze like a deer in headlights. Pooja took the phone from him, which had a drafted text he was about to put in the Hallway Chat. I never even read what he was about to post; the username displayed on the screen was Cheetah. My eyes were stuck on it, reading it over and over and over until Pooja finally let out a breath of a forced laugh and handed it back to him.
“Good to post?” Landon asked, leaning in so close to the two of us, I could smell the sharpness of whatever he’d been drinking on his breath.
Pooja offered a tight smile. “There are no spelling errors, that’s for sure.”
“Awesome.”
He hit send on his post—Met steps, bring booze—and walked away abruptly, leaving me on the edge of the steps with my mouth wide open and my chest tight with something I didn’t quite know the shape of yet. Relief, maybe. Or disappointment. Or some mingling of the two.
Landon wasn’t Wolf. That, surprisingly, didn’t seem to move me in one direction or another; it was just a fact, and I accepted it with ease, like someone telling me what was on the menu in the school cafeteria that day.
But the rest of it hit me sideways — because if Landon wasn’t Wolf, somebody else was. And whoever that somebody else was, they apparently wanted nothing to do with me.
Maybe it was the blog. There’s nothing blatant on it that would connect it to me and Paige, but maybe he figured it out anyway. And maybe when he learned the truth, Pepper Evans became a hell of a lot less appealing than Bluebird ever did.
And maybe that’s only fair. On Weazel I’m not the Pepper I am at school. I’m relaxed, and goofy, and free to say whatever I want — and the longer the app didn’t reveal us to each other, the easier it got. But I can’t expect whoever it was to reconcile that with the person I am at Stone Hall. Jack used to call me a robot, and I’ve always known there was a grain of truth to it. I’ve spent all four years at Stone Hall gritting my teeth, keeping my head down, and trying to crush everything in my path. Not exactly conducive to lasting friendships.
Of which I apparently had none at the moment. Jack was AWOL, Wolf was in the void, and I was …
“Thank god enough people have started coming to the study groups that we don’t have to use Weazel anymore,” said Pooja, closing out of the app with a roll of her eyes. “These doofuses are going to clog up the Hallway Chat with their shitposting for the rest of the night.”
I bit my lip, forcing myself to rally. I wasn’t alone.
“That’s for sure,” I agreed.
She took a seat on the edge of the steps, and I followed suit. For a few moments we just watched as the cluster of our classmates weaved in and out of each other like drunk pinballs. A few weeks ago I didn’t know much more about them than their names and what their parents did, but thanks to Pooja’s study groups, I’ve actually gotten to know some of them better — like Bobby and Shane, who launched a podcast where they read all the Twilight books, and Jeannine, who is so obsessed with Lady Gaga, she’s seen her in concert nine times.