Granted, he is most likely making out with Stephen under the stairwell by the gym while we hawk all these goods, but at least he kind of tried.
“Well, he can’t hide forever. So I guess you’ll get your answers soon enough.” Pooja leans back and props her foot on the chair that was supposed to be occupied with Jack. “Maybe he’s just embarrassed, after the whole thing with your mom.”
“Yeah, maybe.” I shake my head. “His dad called Mom Ronnie. My dad doesn’t even call her that. Vee, maybe, but never Ronnie.”
“That, I have to admit, is intriguing. And I will be the first one to reblog the conspiracy theories when they hit Tumblr, because I personally suspect your parents are part of some weird underground fast casual food cult,” says Pooja, popping another bit of a peanut-butter-and-jelly cupcake in her mouth. In her defense, she did pay for it. “But your mom can’t ban you from seeing Jack. He’s ridiculous, sure, but he’s not, like, a delinquent.”
“Maybe he wasn’t yesterday,” I mutter, thinking of his unexplained absence.
“And the kiss was good, right?”
“I mean, it wasn’t not good.” I shrug, trying to seem casual about it even as my heart starts beating a little faster and my palms are sweating where they’re propped on the cash box. It was my first kiss, and one of those milestones I only realized I hadn’t given enough thought to executing until it was actually happening — and boy, did it happen.
And then swiftly un-happen so fast my ears are still ringing from Jack’s Wait and my mom’s lecturing on the Uber ride back.
Still, even with all that lecturing, and the fact I am grounded until kingdom come, and my mom is quite possibly part of a food services mafia with Jack’s dad, it was kind of absurdly, stupidly great.
Or at least it was until the second Jack brought it to an abrupt halt.
It’s not just the kiss, though. I know I should feel bad about lying to my mom, about breaking her trust, and I do. Enough that I almost blurted out the whole thing to Paige on the phone last night, just so I could feel better when she inevitably took my side. But the guilt is completely separate from the rest of it, from the terror and the thrill of something as simple as getting on the 6 train and taking a twenty-minute ride downtown.
It was like emerging into an entirely different city. Not that there’s any surprise in that — sometimes it feels like individual blocks here are their own islands, separate from the massive one they’re all built on. It’s just I’ve never seen a new part of the city or experienced it through my own eyes because of a choice I made.
And I guess, in a way, I still haven’t. I saw it through Jack’s eyes. The mingling of the newer, kitschier shops with storied buildings with storefronts so much older than we are that you feel like a blip in time. The bustle of NYU students and New York natives and street vendors and people wearing ridiculous outfits nobody bats an eye at. The people who waved at Jack like a parade all the way from the 6 train to the deli, as if he was every bit as much a fixture down there as the little shops and restaurants.
Girl Cheesing itself has its own magic, the way every shop around it seemed to give way to it like it was the pulse of the block. And yesterday, I got to be a part of it. I got to see a whole new part of this city and still be myself in it without it spitting me back out, and I’m restless at the idea of it now, at how much more there is to see — the five or so blocks I walked with Jack function like their own separate planet, and there are hundreds, thousands of others squeezed into this city all around it.
I’ve spent so long resisting the rest of this place that I feel like I’ve had my hands over my ears and my eyes clamped shut ever since I got here, waiting to ride it out until the day I could leave. Now suddenly, graduation seems less like a jailbreak and a little more like an expiration date. The day I might run out of time here, to see the rest of everything I’ve been so determined to ignore.
I’m about to talk to Pooja about it, but we’re interrupted by the sharp squeak of shoes on linoleum, a squeak so familiar that I know it belongs to Paul before I even look down the hall. Sure enough, he’s hightailing it with his usual speed and talking a mile a minute — talking to Jack, who is walking a beat behind him, his face hovering in the beginnings of a scowl.
“Look who decided to show up,” says Pooja — but Jack and Paul don’t head in our direction, and instead divert sharply down into the music hallway. I catch just the side of Jack’s face as he turns the corner, and whatever the scowl is about, it’s way beyond the usual Paul levels of exasperation. He looks straight-up wrecked, like he didn’t sleep at all last night.
Pooja is already looking at me when I find her eyes, like I need some kind of cue.
“Maybe he forgot,” she says.
I raise my eyebrows at her, but only because it’s that or give in to the alternative — that Jack regrets that kiss. That I was just imagining the moments leading up to it, building something up in my head. That somehow, over the course of one weekend, I’ve been rejected both by the anonymous friend I’ve been pouring my heart out to for months, and the very real friend I accidentally spilled it out to faster than I ever thought possible.
“I’ll go talk to—”
“Listen, Pepper, I swear I didn’t have anything to do with it.”
I blink up at Landon, who is towering over the bake-sale table with an expression on his face I’ve only ever seen on people called into Rucker’s office on the PA. Some mingling of guilt and sheer terror.
“Uh … I mean, yeah, I hope not. Unless you paid off a hot dog vendor to give her food poisoning,” says Pooja.
Landon doesn’t even look at her, his eyes still focused on mine. “I told anyone who had pictures to delete them. They were being dicks.”
“The pictures of Pepper blowing chunks?” Pooja asks, her tone already heated.
Landon starts to nod, and I roll my eyes.
“Let me guess,” I mutter. “Someone posted one into the Hallway Chat.”
Landon’s mouth opens and then stays open for just a beat long enough for me to feel a trickle of dread.
“You haven’t seen?”
I narrow my eyes at him. “Seen what?”
“I didn’t have anything to do with it,” he says again. “It’s, uh — you might want to check Twitter.”
Landon takes off and is down the hall and out of sight before Pooja can pull the app up on her phone. Her scowl hardens, and then she passes it over to me.
It’s a picture of me in the park from Friday night. My face is pinched and pale, just a half second away from retching into the bag Pooja grabbed for me out of the trash can — a bag that very visibly has the iconic Big League Burger logo on it, something I failed to notice as I was using it as a receptacle for my stomach contents. I look awful, like some drunk, stumbling teenage cliché, but more to the point, I look like myself. The picture was taken within close enough range that there’s no mistaking it for anyone but me.
Especially because the picture was tweeted from the Girl Cheesing account, under the caption: Evergreen mood.
My stomach plummets all over again, this time in one heavy, lurching swoop. I thumb the picture and scroll down over a thousand retweets so far, and it was only posted an hour ago. oh ew un-stanning immediately, someone has tweeted. turns out patty’s a party animal, writes another, along with a GIF of Kristen Wiig dressed like a drunk Cinderella on an old episode of Saturday Night Live. Another one, that hits a little closer to the vest than I thought it would, reads, No wonder her tweets sucked so much this week.