“We actually need that for school,” I remind her, as Pepper blushes furiously next to me, looking pleased with herself.
My mom holds up a finger. “Hush. I’m having a moment over here.” Pepper snorts as my mom finishes having said moment, and then turns to Pepper, her fingers still sticky with cake, and says, “You are welcome to this kitchen any day of the week for the rest of your damn life.” Before Pepper can respond, she turns to me and says, “But if you don’t clean up this disaster, yours, my dear, is over.”
By the time we finish scrubbing all the pots and pans, Pepper’s cheek is dusted with flour, and a strand of her hair has come loose and somehow ended up streaked with melted chocolate. I reach up without thinking and run my fingers through it, trying to get it out. Her eyes dart over to mine, but not in alarm — in this hopeful, surprised kind of way that suddenly gives meaning to something I thought in the moment was meaningless, that makes me second-guess myself.
“Chocolate,” I say dumbly, pulling my hand away to show her.
She rolls her eyes at herself. “Typical.”
I shift my weight onto the foot that’s farther from her. “We could, uh — chill at our place, while we’re waiting for everything to cool down?” I point upward. “We live right upstairs, if you want to stay for dinner.”
“Are you sure?”
I sweep my hand over to the other side of the kitchen, which is stacked to the gills with meats, cheeses, breads, and every weird sandwich accoutrement known to humankind. “If you can dream it, you can make it.”
We both avoid grilled cheese, since the whole debacle is still a little too fresh. I make myself a pastrami on rye, and Pepper uses the bread ends of a baguette to fashion a swiss cheese, ham, and butter sandwich. I pull out the cranberry relish, and she mutters the word “genius” at me before adding it to hers, and I can still feel it inflating my chest five minutes later when we take our spoils back up to the apartment.
I’m expecting to see Grandma Belly in her chair when we walk in, but she must be napping. Instead, it’s just me and Pepper and suddenly a little more of myself than I counted on Pepper seeing, from the cheesy photos of me and Ethan hung up on the fridge, to the door to my room that is very much wide open, leaving an old Super Smash Bros. poster I forgot was even on the wall in plain view.
Suddenly I am so at a loss for what to do, I actually find myself wishing a parent would come in and interrupt.
“We could, uh, watch a movie?” I suggest.
“Yeah, sure.”
I glance at the shelf, weighing our options, and turn to Pepper with a smirk. “Mean Girls?”
Pepper meets my eye like she suspects I’m kidding. “Don’t laugh, but I’m obsessed.”
I’m already walking over to pluck it from the collection. “Yeah, I know. You reference Mean Girls on the Big League Burger account more than you actually talk about burgers.”
“I’m not a regular social media manager. I’m a cool social media manager,” says Pepper, plopping on the couch with her sandwich as I queue up the DVD.
“You think that’s what you wanna do? When we’re finally freed from the prisonscape of Stone Hall?”
Pepper has already taken an absurdly large bite of her sandwich, but she wrinkles her nose in response. “No. God. What a nightmare.”
“Eh, we had some good times.”
I sit next to her, a little closer than I meant to, but she doesn’t scoot away and neither do I.
“Are we going to wax poetic someday about the good old days on Twitter?” Pepper asks. “Has this been our heyday the whole time?”
We both lean back into the couch, and she turns her head toward me, waiting for an answer that for some reason it takes me a moment to give.
I make a decision, right then — close a door I’ve been tiptoeing around now for months. I decide not to tell Pepper about any of it. About Weazel, about Bluebird and Wolf, about the tangled web of our friendship that is secretly more complicated than she could ever have guessed.
Because this, right here — whatever this is — has a strange kind of magic I feel as if I could accidentally breathe right out of the air if I say the wrong thing and puncture it. Pepper’s eyes are on mine, and it’s kind of scary, but it’s also just so simple. Usually at least half my brain is preoccupied with self-doubt and second-guessing and my Olympic-sized twin complex, but right now everything is quiet. Just Pepper and sticky sandwich fingers and little smirks, and the feeling that whatever we’re sharing between us right now adds up to something bigger than the sum of what we were by ourselves.
It’s the talk about the future, maybe. Pepper using the word someday. Suddenly there is a someday, and that one spoken word seems to imply so many other unspoken ones — that we mean more to each other now than the people we were a month ago, who might have briefly nodded to each other at the all-night grad party in the spring and never seen each other again.
Not telling Pepper is easier than telling her, sure — but it’s more than that now. I want to hold on to what’s taking shape here. I don’t want to compromise that someday by telling her something that doesn’t even matter anymore.
“Nah,” I say after a moment. “This was just the beginning. We’ll go to war on Snapchat next.”
She ribs me with her elbow and doesn’t move her arm back, so it’s just tucked into my side. I watch the movie without really watching it, the two of us eating our sandwiches, Pepper saying her favorite lines with the characters often enough that it’s clear in the first five minutes she has the entire film memorized down to the exact degree of exasperation in Tina Fey’s face before she speaks. Still, she laughs like she hasn’t seen it more times than she can count, hard enough I can feel the vibration of it through her arm and into my ribs like she’s sharing it with me.
Just as Cady is about to throw up on Aaron Samuels’s shoes, the DVD starts to skip, and then pauses.
“Oh, man. It does this sometimes,” I mutter. “It’ll start itself back up in a sec.”
“I haven’t had to deal with this in a while. DVD players — so retro.”
I turn to her, somehow surprised by how close her face is to mine even though I’ve been fully and excruciatingly aware of all of her for over an hour. “Well, the East Village has to keep its hipster cred somehow.”
“I guess that rep is more important ever now that we’re famous, huh?”
I laugh, accidentally leaning in closer — or maybe she’s the one leaning. “Those kids today — how freaking weird have our lives gotten?”
“I feel like I hallucinated that. Like I hallucinated the entire comments section of that Hub Seed article too.”
“Jactricia,” I snicker, before I even realize what I’m saying — and then we’re both red in the face, because it’s the first time we’ve mutually acknowledged the extreme awkwardness that is strangers actually, legitimately shipping us online.
Pepper clears her throat. “Well, obviously we need to petition for a better ship name.”
Some of the awkwardness diffuses, but the tension is still there, tight like a coil between us.
“Jepper? Pack?”
“Pass,” she says, nudging me with her elbow again — and then something shifts. The apartment is eerily still, with the same kind of quiet there was in the pool the other day, where you’re not sure if it’s actually quiet or if the rest of the world’s sounds just don’t apply to you anymore.
“Maybe just Jack and Pepper, then,” I concede.
There’s a ghost of a smirk on Pepper’s face, but she’s so close, I can hear it more than I can see it. “Pepper and Jack,” she corrects me. Then her eyes light up. “Pepperjack.”