I’ve been so far removed from it since Jack and I settled the score that I haven’t even been on the app all week — Taffy fully took the reins, and I disabled the notifications I used to get every time Jack tweeted. Maybe this shouldn’t feel like such a slap in the face, but it still stings like one.
“He wouldn’t do this,” I say instantly.
“Then why hasn’t he deleted it?” says Pooja. “Anyway, it looks like it’s responding to something the Big League account said.”
I pull it up and see a tweet from a few hours ago. It’s so cringeworthy that I know Taffy couldn’t have been the one who drafted it. It’s a picture of our two versions of Grandma’s Special Grilled Cheese along with the number of them we’ve sold versus theirs.
retweet all you want, but this grandma is wiping the floor with yours, it reads.
“Oh, for god’s sake,” I mutter.
“Go get him to delete that shit,” says Pooja. “Someone already memed it.”
I close my eyes. My mom just had to keep this stupid Twitter fight up, didn’t she? And now I’m not only the laughingstock of the school, but probably poised to be the laughingstock of the country. No matter what I accomplish in this life, whenever someone Googles my first name for the next hundred years, a picture of me heaving my guts into a Big League Burger bag will probably be the first hit.
“I’ll be right back,” I mutter, getting up so fast from the bake-sale table that the chair legs screech across the floor out from under me.
I follow the little hallway they disappeared down. I can hear Jack’s voice faintly before I reach the little offshoot of the hallway — and then he raises it, and it’s not faint at all. I stop in my tracks, stunned by the level of irritation in it.
“… cannot even begin to tell you how little this matters to me right now,” I hear Jack saying from around the corner. He and Paul are standing in front of a row of lockers, where Paul must be grabbing his clarinet.
“Dude, I’m your best friend.”
“Yeah? Then don’t ask me to do dumb shit.”
“It’s not dumb. I just want to know who Goldfish is. We’ve been talking for a few weeks now, and I really think it could, y’know, be a thing. But I just gotta know who she is or I’m gonna embarrass myself.”
Jack lets out a sigh like he’s recalibrating himself. “You won’t.”
“Have you met me?”
It’s about then that my brain makes sense of the use of Goldfish, and I realize Paul must be talking about someone he’s met on Weazel. My face burns; the lingering embarrassment over the debacle with Wolf is still weirdly fresh, underneath everything that’s happened since.
“Trust me, Paul, it’s just — you don’t want to mess around with this app. In fact, I think I’m just gonna — disable it, maybe. Make another version where people can’t be anonymous, so we can still have all the study group setups and stuff.”
I’m listening so intently, I’m not even breathing anymore. I don’t fully remember why I came down this hall in the first place. Disable it? The words ricochet somewhere in my head and refuse to settle. Make another version?
There’s only one scenario where it would make sense for Jack to say something like that.
“But dude, there are so many people who have become friends on it—”
“Yeah, but Rucker’s right. Sometimes people are assholes on it. I monitor it whenever I can, but I just plain don’t have time anymore, and I…”
“At least just tell me who Goldfish is.”
“I told you I’m not going to do that. And besides, it’s — you think you want to know, but maybe you don’t, you know?”
Every muscle in my body tenses, like it already knows something I don’t.
“No?” says Paul, his voice starting to lean into a whine. “I really, really do.”
“Like — the other day I found out who someone I’d been talking to on it was before the app triggered it, and it just made everything weirdly complicated, me knowing and her not knowing.”
The hallway suddenly seems smaller, like the ceiling is closer to the floor, like it’s the only part of the school that’s left, and it’s going to compress and shove me into them at any moment.
“So you did cheat and find out who someone was on it,” says Paul, both excited and accusatory. “I knew it. You don’t just make an app like that and—”
“No, jeez, Paul. No, I didn’t. She just — said something in the chat, sent me this link, and then I knew it was her and it just — it made everything weird. I hated it. I wished I hadn’t known.”
My heart is slamming in my ribcage. Paul says something else, but I turn and sweep up the hall before I can hear it, blinking back tears.
Jack is Wolf.
And I’m a goddamn idiot.
I don’t even know how I make it back to the bake-sale table, because no conscious part of me is committed to getting there. Jack is Wolf is like a balloon swelling in my brain, knocking all the other thoughts aside. Because if Jack is Wolf, that means I’ve been talking to him for months. If Jack is Wolf, that means he not only knows who I am, but that he didn’t want it to be me. Because if Jack is Wolf, he let me go to that stupid hangout in the park to meet him knowing full well I’d embarrass the hell out of myself thinking it was Landon on the other end of those texts.
Figures it would all come full circle. He let me humiliate myself there, and now his picture from that night will humiliate me for eternity.
It’s not even that, though. I can live with the stupid picture, can live with Landon avoiding me for the rest of senior year, can even live with whatever fallout will inevitably come when my mom catches wind of all of this.
What I can’t live with is the fact the nightmare has come true: Wolf knows who I am and is obviously disappointed. And the hurt is twice as big knowing Jack is disappointed too.
It casts a shadow of doubt on everything. I was the one who kissed him. I was the one who pushed for us to meet.
It made everything weird. I hated it. I wished I just hadn’t known.
“What the hell happened to you?”
Pooja is looking at me like a ghost has approached her. I open my mouth—Jack is Wolf! — but that doesn’t make any sense, not to anyone, because I kept it so close to my heart that I never breathed a word of it. So instead, what comes out is an ill-timed, too-loud blurt: “Jack is the one who made the Weazel app.”
Pooja’s jaw drops, and the blood seems to leave her face. While I expect a reaction, I’m not expecting a reaction that drastic — but Pooja isn’t looking at me. She’s looking behind me.
“Miss Evans, can I see you in my office?”
Shit.
Pepper
In the end, Rucker can’t really do anything to us — the only proof he has that anyone did anything was me blurting it in a hallway with only Pooja as a witness, and Pooja was smart enough to grab another swimmer to put in charge of the booth and book it out of there the moment after Rucker called me in and sent one of the teacher’s assistants to go find Jack.