It’s fruitless. But I insist over and over, until all three of our ears are bleeding, that I was only kidding about Jack making Weazel.
“That doesn’t seem like a joke, young lady,” says Rucker, narrowing his eyes at me.
“It’s, uh … it’s part of the Twitter thing. I’m sure you’ve seen the article on the Hub about us?” I’m desperate. Grasping at straws. “We started, uh, pranking each other in real life too.”
“Spreading allegations like this doesn’t really seem like a prank.”
Jack isn’t even bothering to jump in. He was indignant when they first brought him in, insisting he had nothing to do with it, but then his eyes swept up and met mine, and the fight drained out of them. Rucker told him what I said in the hallway, and he hasn’t so much as looked at me since.
I don’t know what else to do to save him, if he’s not willing to save himself. So I play the only card that has a prayer of working. “I mean, it’s Jack. He’s not the brightest bulb. You really think he’s capable of making an app like that?”
Jack winces. I don’t move a muscle, determined not to break eye contact with Rucker.
They’ve already searched our phones. They didn’t find Weazel on either of them — someone posted an app in the Hallway Chat to hide app icons weeks ago. The only way they’ll find it is if another student rats us out and shows them how, and nobody can do that without incriminating themselves.
“I’m calling both of your parents—”
“Wait — could you…” Jack blows out a breath. “It’s not a great time.”
Rucker tilts his chin down in a way that would probably seem more effectively condescending if he weren’t wearing pants with palm trees embroidered on them. “My apologies, Mr. Campbell,” he says, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “When would be a more convenient time for you?”
He dismisses us, then, and we both walk out without looking at each other. I hover outside the office door, straddling an awkward line between guilt and rage.
“I didn’t mean to rat you out,” I finally say, so someone will break the silence. It’s not an apology, but I can’t find it in me to give him one.
Jack’s lips thin. “How long have you known, then?”
“I didn’t. At least not until a few minutes ago.” The anger makes me bolder than it should. For the first time in months, I finally say the name out loud, the same name that takes up so much space in my brain it seems ridiculous I’ve never actually uttered it: “Wolf.”
For once, Jack is utterly still, standing like a scarecrow.
“So,” he says.
I’ll say it if he won’t. “You lied to me.”
“I didn’t — I didn’t mean to,” says Jack. “I mean, I rigged the whole thing so I wouldn’t know who you were. I didn’t want to know—”
“You’ve made that pretty clear.”
“I get that you’re mad, but—”
“And then you let me go to the park that day and make an ass of myself in front of Landon. And to top it all off, apparently you took a picture of me looking like a drunk hurling into a Big League Burger bag and posted it on the internet?”
I’m waiting for his face to shift into confusion, waiting for him to ask what I’m talking about. Waiting for that familiar tic where he scratches the back of his neck or moves like he doesn’t know whether to step forward or back.
Instead, Jack closes his eyes. “I can explain that.”
My voice is shaking. “Then explain it.”
“First of all, Ethan posted it.”
“I’m not an idiot. The angle that photo was taken from — it could only have been you. So how did Ethan get it?”
“The same way he always does,” says Jack. “He opened my phone with Face ID. He must have found the picture and tweeted it himself.”
“Then why didn’t you delete it?”
“Because — because I thought we were done with Twitter. I thought we agreed. And then you came after my grandma.” I’m about to interrupt him and defend myself, but his eyes are red-rimmed and his face contorts into the kind of hurt that goes way beyond jabs on Twitter. “And she’s in the hospital right now, and I…”
Whatever I was going to say next is blown right out of me.
“So yeah, I didn’t delete Ethan’s little tweet, because I was mad, okay? And — and busy.”
The hallway has never felt more empty. Jack is somehow looking at me and not looking at me at the same time, alternating between apology and defiance and what I now understand must be complete and total exhaustion.
“Is she okay?”
Jack nods. “Yeah, she — they’re releasing her tonight.”
I wait to see if he’ll elaborate, but he doesn’t. And after everything that’s happened, I don’t think it’s my place to pry.
“I need you to know I didn’t post that tweet. My mom did.”
Jack swipes at his eyes and lets out a breathy noise that might have started its life as a laugh. “Well, shit.”
It’s not an apology, but the regret that so immediately sears across his face is more than enough of one.
“Yeah,” is the only thing I can think of to say. Because all my other questions — about Jack, about Weazel, about what on earth almost did or didn’t happen last night — dissolve all at once, drowned in a sea of something much bigger and more important than them.
Jack’s phone buzzes and lights up in his hand. “I gotta … that’ll be my mom. I gotta get back home.”
I nod. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do.”
Jack nods back, and there’s something kind of tentative in it, but also kind of final. Like we walked out to the middle of a bridge together thinking we’d cross to some other side, even lingered in that middle spot over the depths below for a while, but ultimately turned right back around and headed to familiar ground.
My eyes are burning when I turn and head back to the bake sale. I’m not even sure what those familiar grounds used to look like, back when Jack and I were just classmates. When I didn’t know Jack’s half grin had infinite degrees that all held different feelings, when I didn’t know exactly what part of him was going to fidget before he even moved, when he called me Pepperoni and it didn’t unfurl something quiet in my chest.
It’s weird, how you have no idea how far you’ve come until suddenly you can’t find the way back.
Pepper
I don’t hear from Jack all night, but I do hear from plenty of other people. Pooja, checking in. Friends from my old junior high in Nashville. The Hub Seed reporter who wrote the article on me and Jack, asking for comment. My dad.
And then Paige.
“This has gone too far,” says Paige, before I even finish telling her what happened. “She’s out of her mind.”
“Okay,” I say, in a measured tone that I’m all too practiced in, “yes, it sucks, but it’s not like she could have seen this coming.”
“Bullshit. She should have known something was going to happen.”
The thing is that I agree with her. This part is squarely on Mom. But telling Paige about this even though I knew it would only make things worse is decidedly on me. Now, yet again, I’m backtracking, trying to undo the damage.
Too late.
“Why are you always defending her?” Paige snaps. For once, it seems like some of the anger is directed not just at her, but at me. “This is all her, you know. Twitter. Those stupid Stone Hall kids. If she hadn’t just uprooted you—”
“Paige, I came here by choice.”
Paige huffs. “You were fourteen. You were a little kid who didn’t know any better.”
My eyes squeeze shut, the words slicing in an unexpected way. Maybe because they’re true, but maybe because they’re not — maybe because even at fourteen, there was something in me that knew, deep under the frizzy hair and the acne and awkwardness, that I was supposed to be here. That New York was something I might never grow into, but would grow around me, making space where there wasn’t any before. That the future was going to be a big unknown either way, but I wanted to be with Mom when I faced it.