Tweet Cute

Pepper

To be fair, when the alarm goes off, there’s barely even any smoke rising out of the oven.

“Um, is the apartment on fire?”

I lower the screen of my laptop down, where my older sister Paige’s now scowling face is taking up half the screen on a Skype call from UPenn. The other half of the screen is currently occupied by the Great Expectations essay I have written and rewritten enough times that Charles Dickens is probably rolling in his grave.

“Nope,” I mutter, crossing the kitchen to shut the oven off, “just my life.”

I pull the oven open, and another whoosh of smoke comes out, revealing some seriously blackened Monster Cake.

“Crap.”

I grab the stepladder from the pantry to shut off the fire alarm, then open all the windows to our twenty-sixth-floor apartment, where the Upper East Side sprawls out beneath my feet — all the scores of towering buildings with their bright lights burning even long after anyone in their right mind should be asleep. I stare at it for a moment, somehow still not quite used to the staggering view even though we’ve been here nearly four years.

“Pepper?”

Right. Paige. I pull up the laptop screen.

“Under control,” I say, giving her a thumbs-up.

She raises a disbelieving eyebrow, then mimes sweeping at her bangs. I raise my hand to touch my own, and end up streaking the Monster Cake batter all the way down them as Paige winces.

“Well, if you do end up calling the fire department, prop me up on the taller counter so I can see the hot firefighters bust in.” Her eyes shift on her screen away from me, no doubt to look at the unfinished post on the baking blog we run together. “I take it we’re not getting any pictures for the entry tonight?”

“I have three other pans of it from earlier I can snap once they’re frosted. I’ll send them later.”

“Yeesh. How much Monster Cake did you make? Is Mom even back from her trip yet?”

I avoid her eyes by looking at the stove top, where my pans are all lined up in a neat row. Paige barely ever asks about Mom these days, so I feel like I have to be extra careful with whatever I say next — more careful than, say, the state of academic distraction that led me to nearly burn the kitchen to the ground.

“She should be back in two days.” And then, because I apparently can’t help myself, I add, “You could come up, if you wanted. We don’t have much going on this weekend.”

Paige wrinkles her nose. “Pass.”

I bite the inside of my cheek. Paige is so stubborn that anything I say to try to bridge the gap between her and Mom will usually just make things worse.

“But you could come down to Penn and visit me,” she offers brightly.

The idea would be tempting if I didn’t have this Great Expectations essay and a whole slew of other great expectations to deal with. An AP Stats test, an AP Bio project, debate club prep, and my first official day of being captain of the girls’ swim team, to name a few — and that’s only the tip of my figurative, ridiculously stressful iceberg.

Whatever face I’m making must say it all for me, because Paige holds her hands up in surrender.

“Sorry,” I say reflexively.

“First off, stop saying sorry,” says Paige, who is now waist-deep in a feminist theory class and embracing it with aggressive enthusiasm. “And second off, what is going on with you, anyway?”

I fan the last of the smoke toward the window. “Going on with me?”

“This whole … weird … Valedictorian Barbie thing you’ve got going on,” she says, gesturing at the screen.

“I care about my grades.”

Paige snorts. “Not back home, you didn’t.”

By “home,” she means Nashville, where we grew up.

“It’s different here.” It’s not like she’d know, considering she never actually had to go to Stone Hall Academy, a private school so elite and competitive that even Blair Waldorf would probably burn within two minutes of crossing its threshold. The year Mom moved us here, Paige was a senior and insisted on going to the local public school, and she already had grades from her old school to buoy her applications. “The grading scale is harder. College admissions are more competitive.”

“But you aren’t.”

Ha. Maybe I wasn’t before she ditched me for Philadelphia. Now my peers know me as the Terminator. Or Two-Shoes, or Preppy Pepper, or whatever moniker Jack Campbell, notorious class clown and the metaphorical thorn in my very irritated side, has decided to grace me with that week.

“Besides, didn’t you apply to Columbia early decision? You think they’re gonna care about a lousy B plus?”

I don’t think they will, I know they will. I overheard some girls in homeroom saying a kid at another school down the block from ours had their Columbia acceptance pulled after a bout of senioritis. But before I can justify hinging my paranoia on this extremely unsubstantiated rumor, the front door opens, followed by the click click click of my mom’s heels on the apartment’s hardwood floors.

“Peace,” says Paige.

She ends the call before I even turn back to the screen.

I sigh, shutting the laptop just before my mom walks into the kitchen, decked out in her usual airport fare: a pair of tight black jeans, a cashmere sweater, and a pair of oversize black sunglasses that, frankly, look ridiculous on her given the late hour. She pulls them off and perches them up on her perfectly coiffed blonde hair to inspect me, and the hurricane that used to be her spotless kitchen.

“You’re back early.”

“And you’re supposed to be in bed.”

She steps forward and pulls me into a hug, and I squeeze her a little tighter than someone covered in cake batter probably should. It’s only been a few days, but it’s lonely when she’s gone. I’m still not used to it being so quiet, without Paige and Dad around.

She holds me there and takes a demonstrative whiff, no doubt inhaling a lungful of burnt baked good, but when she pulls away, she raises the same eyebrow Paige did and doesn’t say anything.

“I have an essay due.”

She glances over at the pans of cake. “It looks like a riveting read,” she says wryly. “Is this the Great Expectations one?”

“The very same.”

“Didn’t you finish that a week ago?”

She has a point. I guess if push really comes to shove, I can pull up one of the old drafts and submit it. But the problem is, the figurative pushing and shoving at Stone Hall Academy is more like maiming and destroying. I’m competing for Ivy League admissions with legacies who probably descended down from the original Yale bulldog. It’s not enough to be good, or even great—you have to crush your peers, or get crushed.

Well, metaphorically, at least. And speaking of metaphors, for some reason, despite having read this book twice and annotating it into oblivion, I’m having some trouble interpreting any of them in a way that wouldn’t put our AP Lit teacher to sleep. Every time I try to write a coherent sentence, all I can think about is tomorrow’s swim practice. It’s my first day as acting captain and I know Pooja went to a conditioning camp over the summer, which means she might be faster than I am now, which means she has every opportunity to undermine my authority and make me look like an idiot in front of everyone and—

“Do you want to stay home from school tomorrow?”

I blink at my mom like she grew an extra head. That’s the last thing I need. Even missing an hour would give everyone around me an edge.

“No. No, I’m good.” I sit up on the counter. “Did you finish up your meetings?”

She’s been so dead set on launching Big League Burger internationally that it’s practically all she ever talks about these days — meetings with investors in Paris, in London, even in Rome, trying to figure out which European city she’ll take it to first.

“Not quite. I’ll have to fly back out. But corporate’s been having a cow over the new menu launches tomorrow, and it just didn’t look good for me to be away in the middle of it.” She smiles. “Also, I missed my mini-me.”

I snort, but only because between her designer digs and my wrinkled pajamas, right now I look like anything but.

“Speaking of the menu launches,” she says, “Taffy says you haven’t been answering her texts.”

I try to keep the twinge of annoyance from my face. “Yeah, well. I gave her some ideas for tweets to queue up, like, weeks ago. And I’ve had a lot of homework.”

“I know you’re busy. But you’re just so good at what you do.” She sets her finger on my nose the way she’s done since I was little, when she and my dad used to laugh at the way I’d go a little cross-eyed staring at it. “And you know how important this is to the family.”

To the family. I know she doesn’t mean for it to, but it rubs the wrong way, considering where we started and where we are now.

“Ah, yeah. I’m sure Dad’s losing all kinds of sleep over our tweets.”

My mom rolls her eyes in that affectionate, exasperated way she reserves solely for Dad. While plenty of things have changed since they divorced a few years back, they still love each other, even if they’re not so much “in” love, as Mom puts it.

The rest of it, though, has been whiplash. She and my dad started Big League Burger as a mom-and-pop shop in Nashville ten years ago, when it was just milkshakes and burgers and we were barely making rent every month to support it. Nobody ever expected it to franchise so successfully that Big League Burger would become the fourth largest fast-food franchise in the country.

I guess I also didn’t expect my parents to get amicably and almost cheerfully divorced, Paige to totally freeze Mom out for being the one to initiate it, or for Mom to one-eighty from a barefoot cowgirl to a fast-food mogul and move us to the Upper East Side of Manhattan either.

Now with Paige in college in Pennsylvania, my dad still living in the Nashville apartment, and my mom’s fingers near surgically attached to her iPhone, the word family is a bit of a stretch for her teenage daughter guilt-trip campaign.

“Explain to me this concept of yours again?” my mom asks.

I hold in a sigh. “Since we’re launching the grilled cheeses first, we’re ‘grilling’ people on Twitter. Anyone who wants to get ‘grilled’ can take a selfie and tweet it at us, and we’ll tweet something sassy at them about it.”

I could go into detail — pull up the mockups we made of potential responses to tweets, remind her of the #GrilledByBLB hashtag we’re going to push, of the puns we’ve come up with based on the ingredients of the three new grilled cheeses — but I’m exhausted.

My mom whistles lowly. “I love it, but Taffy is definitely going to need your help with that.”

I wince. “Yeah.”

Poor Taffy. She’s the mousy, cardigan-wearing twentysomething who runs the Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram pages for Big League Burger. Mom hired her right out of school when we were first starting to franchise, but after we expanded nationwide, the marketing team decided that Big League Burger’s Twitter presence was going to go the way of KFC or Wendy’s — sarcastic, irreverent, fresh. All the things that Taffy, bless her overworked, Powerpuff Girl heart, has no experience with.

Enter me. Apparently in the vast arsenal of useless talents that aren’t going to help me get into college, I am really good at being snarky on Twitter. Even if these days “good at being snarky” generally means photoshopping an image of Big League Burger on the Krusty Krab and Burger King on the Chum Bucket — which happened to be the first one I made, when Taffy took that trip to Disney World with her boyfriend last year and Mom asked me to pitch in. It ended up getting more retweets than anything we’d ever posted. Mom has been pushing me to help Taffy ever since.

I’m about to remind her that Taffy is long overdue for a raise and actual subordinates so she can get some sleep sometime this year, when my mom turns her back to me and squints at the cake in the pan.

“Monster Cake?”

“The one and only.”

“Ugh,” she says, picking at the pan I already sliced from. “You should hide these from me, you know. I can’t stop myself.”

It’s still strange to me, hearing my mom say stuff like that. If she hadn’t been such a proud foodie, she and my dad wouldn’t have opened Big League Burger in the first place. It sometimes doesn’t seem like that long ago I was standing on the porch of the old Nashville apartment with Paige, while our dad crunched numbers and emailed suppliers and my mom made exhaustive lists of bonkers milkshake combinations, reading them all off for our approval.

I don’t think I’ve seen her have more than a few sips of milkshake in half a decade — now she’s way more into the business side of things. And while I’ve leaned into that by helping with the tweets and trying to make New York work, the shift only seemed to make Paige even angrier with her. Half the time I feel like she’s only so committed to our baking blog as some kind of sticking point.

But no matter what else happens, this one thing my mom has always had a weakness for — Monster Cake. A perilous invention from childhood, the day Paige and Mom and I decided to test the limits of our rinky-dink oven with a combination of Funfetti cake mixed with brownie batter, cookie dough, Oreos, Reese’s Cups, and Rolos. The result was so simultaneously hideous and delicious that my mom fashioned googly eyes on it out of frosting, and thus, Monster Cake was born.

She takes a bite of it now and groans. “Okay, okay, get this away from me.”

My phone pings in my pocket. I pull it out and see a notification from the Weazel app.

Wolf

Hey. If you’re reading this, go to bed.

“Is that Paige?”

I bite down the smile on my face. “No, it’s — a friend of mine.” Well, kind of. I don’t actually know his real name. But Mom doesn’t need to know that.

She nods, pulling up some cake residue from the bottom of the pan with her thumbnail. I brace myself — it’s about now that she usually asks what Paige is up to, and yet again I have to play the middleman — but instead, she asks, “Do you know a boy named Landon who goes to your school?”

If I were the kind of girl who was stupid enough to leave diaries laying out in my bedroom, this would be reason enough to tailspin into full-blown panic. But I’m not the kind of girl who is stupid enough to do that, even if Mom were the kind of parent who snoops.

“Yeah. We’re both on the swim team, I guess.” Which is to say—Yeah, I had a massive, irrational crush on him freshman year, when you essentially dropped me off in a lion’s den of rich kids who’ve known each other since birth.

That first day was about as painfully awkward as a day could be. I’d never worn a school uniform before, and everything seemed to itch and not quite tuck in properly. My hair was still the frizzy, unruly mess it had been in middle school. Everyone was already secure in their own little cliques, and none of those cliques seemed to include anyone who had six pairs of cowboy boots and a Kacey Musgraves poster hung up in their closet.

I nearly burst into tears on the spot when I finally got to my English class and realized, to my horror, there had been summer reading — and there was a pop quiz on the first day. I was too terrified to actually say something to the teacher, but Landon had leaned over from his desk, all tanned from the summer with this broad, easy smile, and said, “Hey, don’t worry about it. My older brother says she just does these quizzes to scare us — they don’t actually count.”

I managed a nod. Sometime in the split second it took for him to lean back over to his own desk and look down at his quiz, my stupid fourteen-year-old brain decided I was in love.

Granted, it only lasted a few months, and I’ve spoken to him approximately six times since. But I’ve been way too busy for crushes in the time between then and now, so it’s pretty much the only blueprint I’ve got.

“Good, good. You should get to know him. Invite him over sometime.”

My jaw drops. I know she went to high school in the nineties, but that does not excuse this fundamental misunderstanding of how teenage social interaction works.

“Um, what?”

“His father is considering a massive investment in taking BLB international,” she says. “Anything we can do to make them feel more at ease…”

I try not to squirm. For all the bad poetry and light angsting to Taylor Swift songs that Landon inspired a few years back, I don’t actually know all that much about him, especially since he’s so busy now with some app development internship off campus that I barely even see him in the hallways. Landon’s been too busy being Landon — exceedingly handsome, universally beloved, and probably out of my mortal league.

“Yeah, I mean. We’re not really friends or anything, but…”

“You’re great with people. Always have been.” She reaches forward and tweaks me on the cheek.

Maybe I was, back at my old school. I had so many friends in Nashville, they basically made up half of the original Big League Burger’s revenue, hanging out there after school. But I never had to do anything to make those friends. They were all just there, the same way Paige was. We grew up together, knew everything about each other, and friendship wasn’t some sort of conscious choice so much as it was something we were just born with.

Of course, I didn’t know that until we moved here into this whole new ecosystem of other kids. That first day of school, everyone stared at me as if I were an alien, and compared to my Manhattan-bred peers who were raised on Starbucks and YouTube makeup tutorials, I basically was. That day I came home, took one look at my mom, and started to bawl.

It spurred her into action faster than if I’d come home literally on fire — within the week, I had more makeup products than my bathroom counter could hold, lessons with a stylist about blow-drying, one-on-one private tutoring so I could catch up to the elite curriculum. My mom had put us into this strange new world, and she was determined to make us both fit.

It’s weird, that I kind of look back on that misery with a fondness. These days my mom and I are too busy for much more than this — weird post-midnight encounters in the kitchen, both of us already poised with one foot out the door.

This time I beat her to it. “I’m gonna go to bed.”

My mom nods. “Don’t forget to leave your phone on tomorrow, so Taffy can reach you.”

“Right.”

I should probably be annoyed that she thinks Twitter takes priority over my actual education — especially considering she put me in one of the most competitive schools in the country — but it’s nice, in a way. To have her need me for something.

Back in my room, I lean on the mass of pillows on my bed, pointedly avoiding my laptop and the mountain of work still waiting for me by opening the Weazel app instead and typing a reply.

Bluebird

Well look who it is. Can’t sleep?

I think for a moment Wolf won’t respond, but sure enough, the chat bubble opens again. There’s a certain kind of thrill and an even more certain kind of dread — a hazard of using the Weazel app. The whole thing is anonymous, and supposedly there are only kids from our school on it. You’re assigned a username when you log on for the first time, always some kind of animal, and stay anonymous as long as you’re in the main Hallway Chat that’s open to everyone.

But if you talk with anyone one-on-one on the app, at some point — you never know when — the app reveals your identities to each other. Boom. Secrecy out the window.

So basically, the more I talk to Wolf, the likelier the odds are that the app will out us to each other. In fact, considering some people are randomly revealed to each other within a week or even within a day, it’s kind of a miracle we’ve gone two months like this.

Wolf

Nah. Too busy worrying about you butchering Pip’s narrative.

Maybe that’s why, lately, we’ve started getting a little more personal than usual. Saying things that won’t quite give us away, but aren’t all that subtle either.

Bluebird

You’d think I’d have an advantage. Pip’s whole rags-to-riches thing isn’t so far off my mark

Wolf

Yeah. I’m starting to think we’re the only ones who weren’t born with silver spoons in multiple orifices

I hold my breath, then, as if the app will out us both right there. I want it and I don’t. It’s kind of pathetic, but everyone is so closed off and competitive that Wolf is the closest thing I’ve had to a friend since we moved here. I don’t want anything to change that.

It’s not really that I’m afraid he’d disappoint me. I’m afraid I’d disappoint him.

Wolf

Anyway, milk it for all it’s worth. Especially cuz those assholes probably paid a much smarter person to write their essays for them.

Bluebird

I hate that you’re probably right.

Wolf

Hey. Only 8 more months ’til graduation.

I lie back on my bed, closing my eyes. Sometimes it feels like those eight months can’t go by fast enough.

Jack

People should be banned from sending emails before 9 a.m. on Mondays. Particularly if said email is going to wreck my day.

To the parents and eager learning beavers of Stone Hall Academy, it begins. A clear sign it’s from Rucker, full-time vice principal and part-time thief of joy.

It has come to the faculty’s attention that members of the student body are engaging in anonymous chats on an app called “Weasel.” Not only is it not sanctioned by the school, but it is a growing cause for concern. The risk of cyberbullying, the potential spread of test answers, and the unknown origins of this app are all reason enough for us to enact a schoolwide ban, effective immediately.

Parents, we urge you to have a frank discussion with students about the dangers of this app. From this day forward, any student caught engaging in “Weasel” on campus will be subject to a disciplinary hearing. Anyone with information about this app is encouraged to come forward.

Have an enriching day,

Vice Principal Rucker

I shut my screen off, throwing myself back onto my pillow and closing my eyes.

Weasel? Of all the hills I’m willing to die on, this should probably be the last one, but I’m irked by the misnomer anyway. It’s “Weazel,” my slightly cheeky homage to early-era apps that abused z and disavowed vowels (I figured leaning into that second one and calling it “Weazl” was a little too much, even for me).

But more importantly, nobody’s using it to cheat or cyberbully or whatever the hell Rucker thinks teenagers do when they finally find a space to interact without adults breathing down their necks. First of all, if anyone at Stone Hall wants to cut any academic corners, odds are a big fat check will do a hell of a lot more than a list of Scantron answers will. And second of all, I’m so vigilant about monitoring the Hallway Chat and erasing any messages that come close to cyberbullying or cheating that now most people know better than to even try.

My door swings open.

“Did you see this?”

Ethan is fully in my bedroom before I’m even awake enough to properly scowl at him. Naturally, he’s already in his school uniform, his hair gelled, his backpack slung over his shoulder. He always gets to school early to make out with his boyfriend on the front steps, and I guess do whatever it is you do when you’re too damn popular for your own good. Read: being student council president, captain of the dive team, and a star pupil so beloved by our teachers that I heard two of them arguing once in the staff lounge over whether he should win the departmental award for English or math at the end of our junior year, since he wasn’t allowed to win both.

All of which would be annoying if Ethan were just my brother, but are made at least ten times worse by the fact that he is my identical twin. There’s nothing quite as awkward as living in a shadow that is quite literally the same shape as yours.

Not that I’m a loser. I have plenty of friends. But I’m definitely more the class-clown variety of high school clichés than my brother, who is basically the Troy Bolton of our school, minus the jazz hands.

(Okay, maybe I’m a little bit of a loser.)

“Yeah, I saw the email,” I mutter, a pit sinking in my stomach.

The thing is, nobody knows I made Weazel. I didn’t ever mean for it to become such a — well, for lack of a better word, such a thing. Ethan asked my parents for a book on app development one Christmas so he could join some club his friends had started, and when he abandoned the idea by New Year’s, I picked it up and found out I actually had a knack for it. I made a few rinky-dink chat platforms and location-based apps, but was way too busy helping my parents out in the deli to do much more than that. Then the idea for Weazel popped into my head and wouldn’t let go.

So I made it. Polished it up. And then one day in August, after I’d had a beer at some party with Ethan and yet another classmate approached, chatted me up for thirty seconds, and abruptly abandoned me when she realized I was not my brother, I’d decided I had had enough of dealing with our peers face-to-face for the night. Only this time, instead of spending the next few hours feeling sorry for myself the way I usually do when this kind of stuff happens, I ended up making a throwaway account and posted a link to download the app on the school’s Tumblr page.

There were fifty students on it by the next morning. I had to immediately put safeties on it so you could only make an account with a Stone Hall student email address. Now there are three hundred, which means there are only about twenty-six people in the entire school who don’t have it — which is maybe for the best, because honestly I’m so low on random animal identities to assign them that the most recent user was just dubbed “Blobfish.”

“What email?” Ethan asks. “I’m talking about the tweets.”

“Huh?”

Ethan grabs my phone off my mattress and does that incredibly irritating twin thing where he unlocks it using his own face. He pulls something up and then promptly shoves it under my nose.

“Wait, what is this?”

I squint down at the tweet from what appears to be the Big League Burger corporate account. It’s introducing a new menu item, one of three new “handcrafted grilled cheeses”—the one in this tweet is called “Grandma’s Special.” I read the ingredients and my confusion hardens into anger so instantly that Ethan can practically feel it like a ripple of air in the room, immediately saying, “Right?”

I look at him, and then back down at the screen. “What the hell?”

We don’t exactly have license on the words “Grandma’s Special” or on specific combinations of ingredients that go on grilled cheese. But there’s no way it’s a coincidence. “Grandma’s Special” has been a mainstay at our family deli since Grandma Belly introduced it to the menu, based on a sandwich her grandma had made. And now dozens of years of Campbell family grilled cheese innovation was just straight up stolen by one of the biggest burger chains in the country, down to the name and five of its very specific ingredients.

We may not be some massive corporate name, but Girl Cheesing has been an installation in the East Village for decades. Every New Yorker worth their salt knows about our legendary sandwiches — particularly “Grandma’s Special,” our top-selling grilled cheese, and its prolific secret ingredient. There’s literally an entire wall of pictures of people posing with it and Grandma Belly, including a photo of some pop star from the eighties that I’m fairly certain my mom prizes more than the photos of me and Ethan taken moments after our birth.

“Dad says to just ignore it,” says Ethan, his nostrils already flared in that way I know mine are too. I can see the gears turning in his head, his fingers curling into fists. I’m right behind him, the rage jolting me awake faster than any stupid email from Rucker ever could.

The world can mess with me however it wants, but I draw the line at it messing with Grandma Belly.

“Yeah, well. He didn’t tell me to ignore it.”

Ethan’s lips quirk upward. “That’s what I was hoping you’d say.”

For all of our differences, at least in this regard, we’re always agreed. Ethan may have begged off most of his shifts at the deli over the last few years — the summer before high school he opted into some volunteer trip to build houses with a group of the more popular kids in our class, and basically came back their new king — but no matter how in demand he is outside of the deli, the loyalty is always there. It’s so bone-deep in both of us that it feels more shared than anything else, even more than being each other’s spitting images.

I pull up the Girl Cheesing Twitter account from my phone. We’re both logged into it, mostly because our parents can’t be bothered keeping up with any of the deli’s pages. If my dad had his way, we wouldn’t have any social media presence at all.

“We’re a word-of-mouth establishment,” he’s constantly saying, with that same stubborn pride he’s always had. Which is all well and good, except that “word of mouth” has not exactly been helping us stay afloat lately. He and Mom haven’t talked about it much, but I’m in the deli practically every day after school — and by virtue of the insane private school education they’ve insisted on, I’m no idiot. Our loyal customer base is aging or leaving the city. The lines are shorter. Our sales are dwindling. We need to get people in the door.

It’s not like I haven’t tried to pull my dad into the twenty-first century. I even pitched a few ideas for social media pushes or apps that we could develop to try to generate more buzz. But before I could tell him that was something I could do myself, he said we needed to put our energy into the store, and not waste it on all the “background noise.”

“Apps, websites — that’s all useless to me,” he’d said at the time. “You’re what matters to this store. This whole family. We just need to work a little harder, is all.”

It still stings, how fast he dismissed the whole thing — but not nearly as much as the crap Big League Burger is pulling on us right now.

I’m still half delirious from sleep when I draft the tweet. It’s honestly not my best work. It’s just a picture of our menu board, which proudly declares we sold our millionth “Grandma’s Special” in 2015, next to a screenshot of Big League Burger’s tweet, which reads, “Nobody grills a cheese like Grandma League can.”

I almost write something as pissed off as I actually am—Who do you asswipes think you are? is the first unhelpful one that comes to mind — but my parents would murder me if I wrote anything rude on the company social media. In the end I decide my safest option to throw just enough shade but not so much that we inspire our parents’ wrath is to write sure, jan on the text above the screenshots, along with a side-eye emoji. I hold the screen up to Ethan for approval, and he nods, mirroring my smirk, and hits “Tweet.”

It’s not going to make the slightest difference. We have a handful of followers to their behemoth four million. But sometimes even shouting into a void feels better than just staring into it

Jack

I manage to calm myself down to non-Hulk levels by the time I reach the 6 train platform, leaving a good twenty minutes after Ethan. The only silver lining to all this bullshit is that Grandma Belly, at least, probably won’t see it — I’m pretty sure she’s never even opened Twitter before. At eighty-five, she’s not exactly a huge fan of the internet.

But then again, that might be changing. She’s been winding down a bit — going on shorter walks, going to more doctor’s appointments. But it’s one of those things we seem to sweep under the counter like the deli’s finances, or what exactly is going to happen when my parents want to retire — as long as nobody actually says that Grandma Belly’s health is waning, we can all act like it isn’t happening.

My phone buzzes in my hands, pulling me out of the tangle of my thoughts. I open the Weazel app, trying not to smile too obviously on the platform when I read the message waiting for me.

Bluebird

afkgjafldgjalfkjahlfkajgd

Wolf

I don’t speak zombie. Did that mean you finished your essay?

Bluebird

“Essay” is certainly a word for it. Whether it will compete against the ghostwriter Shane Anderson’s mom hired is another issue entirely

The 6 train rolls into the station, and I shove my phone into my pocket, Bluebird along with it. She’s been doing this lately — this game of elimination. Not that it helps much that she’s eliminating a guy in our class who has fewer brain cells than fingers, because even if she were massively catfishing me, I’m pretty sure it’s not Anderson on the other end. Bluebird’s too quick-witted for that. (The ghostwriter Anderson’s mom hired, on the other hand…)

Maybe I should know who she is even without the hints. I barely ever interact on the Hallway Chat, where all the users can post and stay anonymous, and I never initiate any chats with people who do. But at one point I posted a link to a free SAT test prep book online, which was met with a resounding silence from my peers and their $200-an-hour tutors — that is, until about an hour later, a private chat came from Bluebird. It was a picture of The Rock mid-flex at the gym, and a text that read Me after devouring all that sweet, sweet Protein Punch — a reference to one of the first math prep questions about a fictional protein company whose products came in powdered and liquid form.

Her profile said she was a girl and she was a senior, so that was initially all I knew. That, and she wasn’t chugging so much Stone Hall Kool-Aid that she was above using free test resources. Still, even after all we’ve talked since — first making dumb jokes about the test prep questions, then our teachers, and sometimes things way beyond school — nothing really seems to narrow it down. I can’t think of a single girl at our school who she might be.

Which, to be fair, might not be so difficult a feat if I paid attention to something other than the dive team and my phone every once in a while.

The truly weird thing about this is that I could just blow the whole thing wide open right now. I have access to the emails attached to the different usernames, for one thing. But I’ve never looked, and it feels like cheating somehow to check on Bluebird’s. Like it would wreck it a little bit, in some way, because I’d feel like a liar. Like I’d pulled one over on her. I’d rather us just stay on level ground.

But I guess I already have pulled one over on her. Technically, the app should have given away our identities weeks ago. That’s the whole point of the name — Weazel, for “Pop! Goes the Weasel” (not the most clever reference, but it was three in the morning when I patented it). But I messed with the code and stopped it from happening between us for reasons I’m still not entirely sure of. Maybe it’s just nice to have someone to talk to who gets it — the whole fish-out-of-water thing. At least, nice to talk to someone who doesn’t have the exact same stupid face as me.

Maybe it’s just nice to finally be honest with someone at all. Ethan’s all too willing to pretend we’re as well-off as our peers, but I can’t separate School Jack and Home Jack the way Ethan does — or at least not as easily. It feels like it takes up way too much space in my brain, trying to make myself fit, but when I’m talking to Bluebird, I never have to switch between the two. I just am.

Not that I’m not grateful and all — Ethan and I may have both worked our asses off to get into Stone Hall, but my parents continue working their asses off to pay for it. My mom went there when she was a kid, and even though she has adjusted to the rest of it — the whole comedown from “uptown princess” to “wife of a deli owner” that must have been some hell of a whirlwind romance before Ethan and I existed — she has always been adamant about our education, and my dad has always been adamant on backing her up on it.

Which is why I find myself on a Monday morning, walking up the steps of a school that looks like it fell out of Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame and nodding at kids whose bank accounts are hefty enough to buy the Starbucks down the street for kicks.

And so commences my least favorite part of every day — the part where people’s eyes graze my face, light up hopefully, and then immediately dim when they realize I am not, in fact, their treasured Ethan, but still just regular me. No amount of letting my hair grow out slightly longer and messier than his or switching up my backpack and shoes or generally walking around with my head in my phone screen has done anything to prevent it.

What I really need is a new face. But since I’m actually partial to it, I’ll settle for waiting for Ethan to blow the Popsicle stand that is Manhattan and go to some yuppie university far away from here.

“Yo. Yo.”

I glance up from my locker to find Paul, who is all of five-foot-five and basically what would happen if the Energizer Bunny and the leprechaun from Lucky Charms had a very ginger, very excitable baby.

“Did you see? Mel and Gina were like, necking in the hallway,” he informs me, his eyes shining with glee.

I pull out my history textbook and shut the locker. “In 1954? Because I’m pretty sure we call it making out now.”

Paul frantically pats my arm. “So here’s what happened,” he says, with the urgency of an intern reporting something to their boss on the way into work. “They were chatting on the Weazel app, and, y’know, flirting and stuff, and then the app revealed their names to each other and now they are dating.”

Paul is grinning one of those manic grins, and for once, I find myself grinning manically back. To be honest, this has been the coolest part of Weazel — people actually connecting on it. Like, the Hallway Chat is sometimes just people shitposting for kicks, but sometimes it gets real. People talking about how freaked out they are about college admissions, or their parents putting pressure on them. People cracking jokes about a test we all failed to lighten the mood. All the tiny little cracks in our armor that we never actually show each other in person, because sometimes this place feels more like a watering hole where we all have to establish ourselves as predator and prey than an actual institution of learning.

But this — this is the stuff that makes all those hours monitoring the app worth it. When people connect with each other on the one-on-one chats. Mel and Gina aren’t the first people to either start dating or strike up a friendship because of it. In fact, so many people were bitching about our calculus midterm that there’s a full-on study group that meets twice a week in the library now.

We round the corner and there, sure enough, are Mel and Gina, going at it so enthusiastically that it is a genuine miracle neither of them has gotten detention yet. It almost makes me worry that something has happened to our dear old friend Vice Principal Rucker, whose sonar for teenage affection usually rivals bomb-sniffing dogs.

“Hot, right?”

I put a hand on Paul’s shoulder, knowing full well it will do nothing to calm his seismic level of excitement, and also knowing full well that he’s only calling it “hot” because he thinks he’s supposed to.

“You’re going full Hefner,” I say, because we’ve talked about this kind of thing before. “Dial it down.”

“Yeah, right, right.”

If there is one person in this school I feel more sorry for than myself, it’s Paul — who, despite having all the trappings of a filthy-rich Stone Hall legacy, is basically what would happen if a Nick Jr. cartoon became three-dimensional. I think if it weren’t for the diving team being so fiercely protective of their own, this place might have eaten him alive.

“Let’s get to homeroom.”

I’m still kind of high on the buzz of my own inflated sense of ego as I sit, itching to check my phone, to see if there’s another message from Bluebird. I’m suddenly bursting to tell someone—I made this happen. I was a small part of something cool. And of all the people in my world, weirdly, it’s the person whose face I don’t even know that I want to tell most.

Well, that’s the other weird thing. I do know her face, whoever she is. I know everyone in our year. It could be Carter, who’s highlighting a set of notes in the front row, or Abby, who’s blowing an impressively large bubble gum bubble, or Hailey or Minae, whose heads are ducked down in a heated discussion about what definitely sounds like Riverdale fan fiction. In some ways, it’s like Bluebird is nobody and everybody at the same time — like every time someone looks up and notices me glancing at them, I could be looking right at her.

Or worse — she could be looking right at me.

Jack

Once the final morning bell rings, I find out pretty fast why Rucker wasn’t around to hit lovesick teens with his metaphorical broomstick.

“Good morning, eager beavers of Stone Hall,” says the nasally voice that probably haunts at least half the school’s dreams over the intercom. “By now you have seen the schoolwide email warning about the ‘Weasel’ app, and disciplinary action that will be taken for any student caught using it. Students are encouraged to report to any faculty members if they observe any of their peers communicating on the app.”

Yikes. The thing Rucker is most notorious for — aside from sporting a collection of patterned pants that even the local Goodwill would burn upon sight — is his loyal little rat pack of students. I don’t know any names for certain, but I have suspicions — namely Pooja Singh and Pepper Evans, two fellow seniors who seem to be in some kind of silent authority-figure-pleasing competition at all times, and some of the kids on the golf team, who seem to be otherwise overlooked because … well … golf. I don’t know if he’s offering them extra credit or college recs or what, but he seems to have at least three narcs in every year who are all too willing to sell the rest of us out. Ethan has taken to calling them Rucker’s “little birds” like that dude in Game of Thrones, but honestly, “complete assholes” suits them just fine.

Paul leans over. “Okay, that’s 1984 as heck.”

I try not to look over at him too obviously. Our homeroom teacher, Mrs. Fairchild, is a big fan of silence. I personally suspect it’s because she is nursing a hangover most of the time, which, respect. If I had to deal with hormonal teenagers who carry black AmEx cards, I’d probably be buying out the Trader Joe’s wine store in Union Square too.

“No kidding.”

Then the door swings open, and in comes Pepper Evans herself. The only reason I’m not entirely sure that Pepper isn’t a robot is that she’s captain of the swim team, and I haven’t seen any circuits actively frying when she gets into the pool. All the other evidence decidedly points toward her being SkyNet material. She’s top of the class, has a GPA that makes mere mortals weep, and is never, ever late.

Which means that if she’s walking in five minutes after the bell, it can only be for one reason.

“So?” I ask, as she slides herself into the seat right next to mine. She either doesn’t hear me or pretends not to. “How many?”

Pepper barely turns to acknowledge me, her face flushed under her freckles and her eyes trained on the chalkboard, where Mrs. Fairchild is half-heartedly writing some reminders about volunteer hours being due by the end of the week.

“How many what?” she mutters, tucking her overgrown bangs behind her ear. Within a second, they’re fanning back over her face, a blonde curtain that, unlike the rest of her, she can never quite seem to tame.

“How many people did you rat out to Rucker?”

She scowls that uneven scowl of hers, one of her eyebrows creasing just a bit more than the other. It is bizarrely satisfying, getting any kind of reaction out of her — like when the machine at Chuck E. Cheese in Harlem used to malfunction and spit out a few extra tickets. I lean forward in my desk, forgetting for a moment about Mrs. Fairchild’s wrath.

“What’d he offer you?” I ask. “A’s on all of your midterms?”

Pepper’s lips thin into her teeth, but her body stays very still. She has this uncanny ability to sit like a statue. I wouldn’t be surprised if pigeons have landed on her in the park.

“Unlike you,” she says, the words perfectly clear even though her mouth hardly moves, “I don’t need any help with my grades.”

I put a hand on my heart, wounded. “You think I’m dumb?”

“Last year I watched you put Kool-Aid mix in pool water and drink it. I know you’re dumb.”

“It was for a bet.”

She arches one perfectly groomed eyebrow before devoting her full attention back to her notebook. I grin and shake my head, turning back to the front. Truth is, I actually don’t mind Pepper. She’s one of the few people who knows, sometimes without even glancing up from her textbook, that I’m me and not my brother.

Which, to be fair, is probably a lot easier for a robot.

Still, it’s kind of unnerving. Even people who’ve known us since kindergarten get tripped up, and she came in out of nowhere and seemed to have me sized up the moment she got to Stone Hall. Sometimes freshman year, I’d notice her staring — not just at me, but at everyone. At that point we were all in that bumbling part of puberty where we were pretending not to notice each other, but Pepper was actively and unabashedly observing everyone, like she was trying to figure out the whole of us before trying to make herself fit.

I still can’t quite figure out what was so weird about it — Pepper specifically, with the keen blue of her eyes on me, or just the fact of feeling seen at all. But I missed the weirdness of it when it was over, when within the month, she was just like everyone else here, so tunnel-visioned about her grades and her SATs that she couldn’t see past her nose, let alone see anyone else.

It’s probably why I rib her, in particular, more than the other Goody Two-shoes in our class — the nicknames, the teasing, the occasional foot-tapping on the back of her chair. Because I miss that strange, undivided attention. Because I know she wasn’t always like this. Once, she was every bit as out of place here as I feel every day.

Homeroom only lasts for thirty minutes, but as usual, Mrs. Fairchild manages to make them as excruciatingly boring as possible. All around me, I can see students with varying degrees of subtlety pulling out their phones and texting — from my desk alone, I can see at least three people on Weazel. I scan the room, looking to see if I can find any more. Then I notice Pepper bent over slightly, her perfect posture just a degree off.

“Are you texting?” I hiss.

She jumps. Literally jumps up in her seat, getting an impressive inch of air.

“None of your business.”

“Are you on Weazel?”

Her eyes are hard. “You saw Rucker’s email. I wouldn’t be caught dead on that app.”

Um, ouch.

She settles her fingers back on her phone screen and types without breaking eye contact with the whiteboard, which even I have to admit is impressive.

“This is a place of learning, Pepperoni.”

She rolls her eyes and shoves her phone into her open backpack. I wonder if she really thinks I was going to bust her for texting in class. The idea of that is oddly more insulting than the whole “I watched you drink Kool-Aid” bit (which, in all fairness, was among the most disgusting things I have ever done because of peer pressure).

I’m about to say something conciliatory, but just then I see Paul’s mouth drop open out of the corner of my eye. Not that I need any peripheral vision to see it — about half the class does, because Paul’s emotional states are generally so demonstrative that I’m pretty sure people in Brooklyn can lick their pointer fingers, hold them to the wind, and know exactly what kind of state Paul is in at any given moment. But as soon as he looks up and his eyes meet mine, I know that whatever it is that has him worked up, it does not bode well for me.

He sucks in a breath to say something, and then, mercifully, the bell rings before he can blurt whatever it is out into the open. Instead, he scrambles out of his desk so fast his bony knees almost knock it over, and yanks on the sleeve of my uniform.

“Did you see?”

I glance to my right — Pepper’s already halfway out the door.

“See what?”

Paul’s hands are shaking as he shoves his phone into my line of vision — an impressively stupid move, all things considered. Weazel aside, we’re not allowed to have our phones out during school hours. But I see the familiar Twitter handle for Girl Cheesing and all of my concerns about future detentions fly out the window.

“Oh my god.”

“Right? This is amazing.”

“Amazing?” I grab his phone from him, holding it up to my face and blinking at it as if I can blink away the literal three thousand retweets and the ungodly number of likes on the tweet I sent from the deli’s account this morning. “My parents are going to gut me like a fucking fish.”

“Language,” Mrs. Fairchild mutters, evidently not even caring about the contraband in my hands.

My heart is halfway up my throat, beating in my skull. My dad doesn’t even like that we’re on Twitter, let alone going viral on it. “How the hell did this happen?”

We have 645 followers. The fact that I know the exact amount is a testament to how very rarely that number changes. Up until now, the most engagement we’ve ever gotten from a tweet on the deli’s account was a meme about early dive team practices that Ethan accidentally posted and a bot retweeted before he realized what he’d done.

“Marigold retweeted it,” says Paul.

My throat feels like sandpaper. Marigold, as in the eighties pop star my mom is obsessed with, who still comes into the deli every now and then.

Marigold, as in the eighties pop star who just unwittingly got me grounded into next year. It was one thing when I thought I might take some heat for tweeting it in the first place — now I’m going to be working unpaid shifts at the deli and smelling like turkey until Christmas.

Because Marigold, as it turns out, has a whopping 12.5 million followers. I don’t need to be coasting in AP Calc to know that translates to roughly a bajillion retweets every time she breathes. And it looks like she only just retweeted us — in the time I’ve stood here staring at Paul’s phone with my mouth unhinged, it’s gotten another 250 retweets.

I tap on her profile and see there’s another tweet she sent herself, right after her retweet. “Shame on Big League Burger!” it reads. “Girl Cheesing perfected Grandma’s Special before that punk was even born.”

By “that punk,” I assume she is referencing the Big League Burger mascot, a cartoon of a chubby-faced, freckled little boy in a baseball cap with a melting ice cream cone in his hands. In commercials he’s always hamming it up to the camera, getting into some kind of annoying shenanigans and saying, “Welcome to the big leagues!” The commercial ends before anyone bothers disciplining him for anything. I better figure out what the secret to that is, and fast, because my parents are going to be none too pleased when I get home.

“You’re famous,” says Paul, elated.

“I’m doomed.”

I hand him back his phone, scanning the hallway for Ethan, wondering if he’s seen. Not that it matters — nothing is going to get me out of what is sure to be another long lecture in our dad’s roster of them. I’m thinking this one will be in the patience is a virtue variety, subsection you need to think before you act. And admittedly, I do have a slight habit of opening my mouth before my brain fully filters what is and isn’t appropriate to say (or, y’know, tweet).

But if I’m bad, our mom is way worse. She once scared a guy with a literal knife trying to hold up the deli by throwing a ham and screaming at him. It’s not like my hotheadedness is some kind of anomaly.

Still, this is one of those moments I wish I’d taken Dad’s advice. It’ll be a miracle if I get out of this unscathed — thanks to Marigold, I’m about to be the level of grounded that will make me flinch at every “Best of the ’80s” playlist for the rest of my life.

Pepper

Wolf

Haven’t heard from you all day, so I’m going to assume you’re among the chosen few and Rucker confiscated your phone. Godspeed, soldier.

I press my forehead to the locker of the changing room. The final bell rang ten minutes ago, and by then Taffy had texted me a whopping total of thirty-two times.

What about this one? reads her latest message. I squint at the screenshot of a tweet she’s sent me. It’s a selfie of a guy holding up a full McDonald’s bag, his mouth crammed with fries, captioned grill this, bitch. It’s one of a few thousand tweets we’ve gotten, tagged to the corporate account for the #GrilledByBLB initiative, but we’re trying to respond to at least two hundred of them with funny comebacks today.

And by “we” I really mean me, because Taffy does not have a sarcastic bone in her entire body.

I draft a tweet and send it to her so fast that I don’t even have to break my stride: it’s illegal to burn trash.

Taffy has it up within the minute, which means it’s going to be another five minutes before she finds another contender, and another ten minutes after that for her to give up on thinking about a tweet on her own and text me. By then, though, I’ll be in the pool — something I’m actually looking forward to for once, since it is the only definitive way to make myself unavailable these days.

It’s not that I don’t like swimming. Paige and I swam in summer leagues growing up, and even as young as six, I was swimming laps around all the other kids. It was fun back then — less about racing and more about playing Uno in the grass between races and begging my parents to let us get those massive baked potatoes at the food truck down the street after swim meets. Once we moved, though, there was no more swimming for fun. People are only here to collect the varsity letter they get every season and slap a line about it on their college apps. Hundreds and hundreds of hours and sweat and chlorine-bleached hair and occasional tears, all reduced to a few printed words.

“Hey, Pep? You want me to run warm-ups or are you gonna be out in a sec?”

Pep. I hate that nickname. Possibly even more than Pepperoni, another Jack Campbell original.

Or maybe it’s less about being called Pep and more about the person who’s saying it.

“I’ll be right out,” I tell Pooja, shoving my backpack into one of the lockers. It feels like I’m shoving Taffy in there with it. Wolf too.

Pooja pushes a lock of hair into her swim cap, then gives me a thumbs-up. “If you’re sure!”

I wait until she’s turned the corner to roll my eyes. The whole exchange was innocuous enough on the surface, sure, but I know Pooja — the two of us have been neck and neck with everything since my first year at Stone Hall. We’re constantly within one point of each other on exams, within milliseconds of each other on our racing times, in all of the same teachers’ office hours. Competing with her has become such a constant in my life that I’m pretty sure on my deathbed, I’ll get a call from her casually bragging about how she bets she’s going to get to die first.

Our eventual mortality aside, there’s no way in hell I’m letting her lead warm-ups on the first day of the season. I earned my spot as the captain of the girls’ team. For once, I had a clear-cut victory over her: I’d gotten the votes. I’d won the numbers game. Coach Martin made her a co-captain in some attempt, maybe, to soften the blow, but if anything, that just made me all the more determined not to let her undermine me in the first hour of the season.

I head out to the pool deck, the smell of chlorine heavy in the air. I probably shouldn’t love the smell so much — and maybe I don’t. It’s the kind of smell that aches, that takes up too much space in your lungs and displaces you in time. It could be last season, or five years ago, or back to a kiddie pool with my floaties on all at once.

I’m knocked out of whatever lingering nostalgia I have, though, when I look down at the pool and see a bunch of people already in it, their arms and legs cutting through the water.

For a second I am frozen, horrified at the idea that Pooja just walked out here and led practice on her own. That I’m going to look like an idiot in front of the whole team because I took an extra minute to write another one of those stupid tweets. But then I see Pooja striding up to me, looking livid.

“We’ve got a problem.”

I follow her scowl to the wall of the pool, realizing I don’t actually know the person who is clinging to the edge of it, shaking water out of her goggles. I look farther up the lanes of the pool and see that really, there is only a cluster of fifteen or so swimmers — just enough to take up most of the three lanes the school is allowed to use at this pool, but not enough for it to be our team.

Someone swims toward the wall and does a flip turn so aggressive, it manages to soak me and Pooja both. I can’t see his face from underwater, but whoever it is seems to be smirking, like I can feel the smirk all over his body. And that’s when I realize it’s none other than Jack Campbell and the band of misfit toys that is our dive team.

Pooja is still sputtering in shock when I take a step toward the pool and mutter, “I’ll handle this.”

I run up to the edge of the pool for momentum and get enough air on my dive that I’m only a few feet behind Jack when I hit the water. I catch up to him in another few seconds, tapping his foot. He keeps kicking as if he hasn’t felt it. I speed up, rope my fingers around his ankle, and yank. Hard.

After a moment of floundering in surprise, Jack emerges from the water, shaking out his dark hair. For a moment, he looks ridiculous without a swim cap on, like a shaggy dog who jumped overboard from someone’s rowboat. Then he runs his fingers through his hair and pushes it back so fast that it’s almost striking, seeing his brown eyes wide on mine, close enough that I can see they’re already tinged with a bit of red from the chlorine.

“Yeesh, Pepperoni,” he says, grabbing the lane line. “No need to go all Sharknado on me.”

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“Um. Right now? Wondering if the lifeguard will stop you from drowning me, mostly.”

“You can’t be here. We booked the pool. Besides, don’t you guys have a plank to go jump off?”

Jack grins one of those half grins of his, the kind that means he’s about to say something he thinks is super clever. I usually manage to ignore it — but even when it’s not aimed at me, it’s something I’ve come to notice after four years of him in the periphery, interrupting peaceful silences in class or the library or when the rest of us are trying to nap on the pool deck in between heats at swim meets. Jack is the kind of person who fills silences. The kind of person who doesn’t necessarily command attention, but always seems to sneak it from you anyway.

The kind of person who steals your pool lanes and makes you look like an idiot on your first day as team captain. And even though Jack has seemed determined to knock me down a peg for years, this time there’s way too much of my pride on the line to let him.

“You talk a big game for someone who’s terrified of that plank.”

My eyes narrow. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Jack’s eyes gleam from under his goggles. We both know I absolutely do.

The swim team and the dive team sometimes stay late after Friday practices to play informal water polo games with a beat-up soccer ball, and there’s always some dumb bet based on who loses. It’s why I have some rather off-putting memories of Jack and his brethren gagging on a Kool-Aid — pool water concoction after a loss, and why the swim team was forced to jump off the high dive after we bit it once freshman year.

Except I didn’t exactly jump. It turns out whatever evolutionary compulsion not to die that’s hardwired into my brain is a lot louder than the rest of the team’s, because I stared at that infinite distance between the diving board and the water and immediately climbed back down so fast, I don’t even remember making a conscious decision to do it.

Unlike Jack, who seems to remember the incident all too well.

But I’m not taking the bait. “Your season hasn’t even officially started yet. Get your team out of our pool.”

Jack blows out a breath, the grin’s wattage going down a notch. “Ethan’s our captain this year,” he says, more to the pool than to me. “Take it up with him.”

“Everything okay over there?” I hear someone call. “What’s going on?”

Despite my not-crush on Landon, my cheeks go red on reflex — as though the sound of his voice triggers something Pavlovian in the blood vessels in my face. I turn toward it and see him standing on the edge of the pool deck, somehow still tan from the summer despite it being the middle of October. He’s filled out a bit since last season too, and judging from the diameter of the eyes of the sophomore girls hanging out on the bleachers, I’m not the only one who’s noticed.

“We’re fine,” I call back. “The dive team was just leaving.”

Jack snorts.

“What’s the holdup, Ethan?” Landon asks.

I don’t have to be looking at Jack to feel his eye roll. I push myself through the water to get closer to the wall, my mom’s voice unhelpful in my ears: Anything we can do to make them feel more at ease.

The problem is, Landon’s at ease just about everywhere he goes. He doesn’t need any help.

I am struggling to think of something clever to say, something that will make some kind of lasting impression, but by the time I hit the wall, I’ve got nothing. How is it I can fire off a stupid text to a guy I literally call Wolf without thinking twice, but when I’m actually confronted with a human being I know, my brain decides to take a hike?

I’m rescued from stammering something dumb when I see Ethan push himself out of the water.

“Hey, sorry — are you guys supposed to have the pool right now?” Ethan asks.

“I mean, it’s all yours, man,” says Landon. “My internship’s got me beat. I’ll take a nap if it’s all the same to you.”

It’s probably my cue to laugh — the sophomore girls sure don’t miss the opportunity — but I’m too thrown off to do anything but get back out of the pool, hyperaware both of my authority being more undermined by the second, and of the fact that I’m pretty sure I have a slight wedgie. For something we do half naked, swimming really is just about the least sexy sport there is.

“Our coach said we needed to put in more laps this year to strengthen up in the preseason,” says Ethan, half to Landon and half to me. He at least has the decency to look apologetic for it. “Cross-training, and all.”

“Where is your coach?” I ask.

“Well, he said he was visiting his mom for the week, but he definitely just posted an Instagram story from Cáncun,” says Ethan with a shrug.

By now Coach Martin has emerged from the lobby of the gym, where she’s been talking to the parents of the new members of the team about the weekend swim meet schedule. She takes one look at all of us in various states of half wet on the pool deck and doesn’t bother holding in her sigh, or asking where the dive coach is. Sightings of Coach Thompkins are so rare that he’s become something of a myth anyway. Considering what a hot mess the dive team is the first few weeks of every season, I guess I can’t blame them for trying to get their shit together without him.

She pulls me and Ethan aside. “I have no idea when Thompkins is going to be back, so in the meantime, we need to work out a schedule. Can you guys meet after practice and figure out who’s going to use the lanes and when?”

“We’ve never shared the lanes before,” I protest.

Coach Martin offers me another one of her trademark I don’t know what to tell you faces. “Technically the school budget for the pool rental times is for both teams, so we can’t tell them no. Work it out.”

Ethan nods, and we make plans to meet up at the coffee shop across the street once practice is over. Already I can feel the seismic shift of trying to adjust my schedule to compensate for it — if I spend twenty minutes with Ethan that means twenty fewer minutes for AP Calc homework, which means it will eat into the time I’ll undoubtedly be answering Taffy’s texts, which means I probably won’t even get to work on my college apps tonight, which, in turn, means I probably won’t be texting Wolf back anytime this century.

I shake the last thought out of my head before I hit the water again. Of all the priorities I’m sinking under right now, banter with some guy I don’t even know should be the absolute last.

Pepper

Two hours later I feel like my entire body has been whipped. I practice often enough in the off-season that it’s not too much of a shock getting into the swing of things, but nobody’s self-directed workouts can reach even half the intensity of Coach Martin’s. I barely have the energy to drag myself over to the coffee shop, let alone run ridiculous negotiations for a pool we shouldn’t be sharing in the first place.

Even if it weren’t for that, the city just makes me nervous in general. I’ve carved myself a little world here in a neat seven-block radius: the apartment, the school, the pool across the street, the bodega where I get my bagels, the drugstore, the good pizza place and the better taco place, and the salon where my mom gets her blowouts. I don’t like leaving my orbit. I know, on a rational level, this part of the city is on a grid, and in the age of smartphones it’s impossible to get lost. But everything is so cramped here, so dense—I hate that I can turn one corner and see an entire world I don’t recognize, have to navigate a street with a completely different mood than the one a few steps away. I hate that I feel like I have to be a different person to match. Some people can weave in and out of these streets like chameleons, but four years have passed, and I still feel like the same kid who rolled up here in a U-Haul wearing cowboy boots — stubborn and unchanged.

In Nashville, there was order. Or at least it felt that way. There was downtown, with its restaurants and honky-tonks and the massive CMA Fest crowds in the summer. There was East Nashville, all earthy and young and hopeful. There was Bellevue, where we lived in the outskirts of the city in an apartment, just beyond Belle Meade, with all of its absurdly decked-out mansions. And then in the city, in the middle of all of it, Centennial Park with its giant Pantheon replica, which to me seemed like the heart of everything, as though all the roads and tangles of freeways led back to it, pumped people in and out each day on their way to and from work.

I miss that. I miss the transition of knowing this is who I am when I’m downtown and this is who I am when I’m home and this is who I am when I visit the restaurant, the original Big League Burger, which was just a stone’s throw away from all the recording studios and publishing houses lined up on Music Row. I miss being able to prepare for things, and knowing where I fit. Not even knowing, really, because when you grow up somewhere, you don’t have to think about fitting into it. You just do.

When Paige is on break from UPenn and deigns to stay with us for a few days at a time, she forces me out of the orbit. We get ramen in the East Village and window shop in Soho and take dorky historical tours that start in different parks. But since she and my mom don’t really talk, the rest of the year it’s just me, a rat in a seven-block cage, wishing something as stupid as walking into an unfamiliar coffee shop didn’t fill me with dread.

Once I actually get inside, I see someone at a table by the window bent over a cup of coffee, wearing Ethan’s baseball hat and holding Ethan’s backpack, with Ethan’s coat draped over the chair. I walk over to him and put my hands on my hips.

“Are you seriously trying to Parent Trap me?”

Jack looks up, brows puckered with disappointment, like he’s a little kid and I just stuck a pin in his balloon. “What gave it away?”

I gesture in the direction of his lanky frame. “Your general Jack-ness.”

“Jack-ness?”

“Well. That, and you’re a little bit of an ass.”

I smirk — a small peace offering — and he returns it and then some, with another one of those half grins. It’s so unabashed that I straighten up a bit, glancing away.

“So where is your brother? Is he in on this little prank of yours? Because if it’s all the same to you, I want to wrap this up quick.”

Jack cocks his head toward the window. “Ethan is currently preoccupied making out with Stephen Chiu on the steps of the Met.”

“So he sent you?”

Jack shrugs. “My brother’s an important dude, in case you haven’t noticed.”

I have. It’s hard not to. Ethan’s one of those man-of-the-people types — always has something nice to say, an extra few minutes to give someone, some practical solution to a problem. Which is why I had been counting on this meeting being a quick one.

Enter Jack, who seems to have absolutely no qualms with wasting time.

My phone pings in my backpack, and I realize with a lurch I haven’t checked it since I got out of the pool. I drop my bag, tell Jack to keep an eye on it while I go grab a tea, and look down at my phone.

Nine texts. Holy crap.

The most recent ones are from my mom: Where are you?? and Is everything okay? My stomach sinks — I never told her I had practice after school today because I didn’t think she’d be home. But then I scroll down and realize that although she is very much worried about my welfare, she was initially more worried about a “Twitter emergency” that needs attending.

I shoot her a quick text to let her know I’m alive and open the ones from Taffy, who — bless her heart — actually remembered I had practice, and broke down the situation with screenshots.

I’m caught up by the time I reach the cashier. Apparently some tiny little deli in the city is claiming Big League Burger copied their grilled cheese recipe, and the accusation now has ten thousand retweets. A Twitter account dedicated to the welfare of small businesses has even co-opted the #GrilledByBLB hashtag, so #KilledByBLB is trending instead.

Jesus. The internet moves fast.

Your mom wants us to fire a sassy tweet back, Taffy has texted. Which is Taffy code for, I know this is a terrible idea, but your mom is my boss and I’m too scared of her to press the point.

I guess I’ll have to, then. I send my mom what I hope is a pacifying text, telling her we should either just let it go or sit on it for a bit and see if it actually merits some kind of apology. I’m no PR professional, but attacking an itty-bitty deli that can’t rub two Twitter followers together can’t be a good look for a goliath like BLB no matter how you slice it.

By the time the barista puts my tea on the counter, my mom is calling. She starts talking before I can even say hello.

“What do you think our next move is?”

I walk over to the counter, prying off my lid to add sugar and milk. I peer out of the corner of my eye to make sure Jack hasn’t made off with my stuff, but he’s just staring out the window, tapping his foot to the beat of whatever he’s listening to with one earbud in his ear.

“I don’t think we should tweet anything at them. People actually seem kind of mad.”

“Well, let them be mad,” says my mom dismissively. “We’re not going to take this lying down.”

“Okay — but maybe you should — I don’t know, talk to them? Not send a tweet?”

“There’s no point in talking to some sandwich place looking for attention. Give me something to fire back at them. I can’t waste time right now.”

It feels like a gut punch through the phone. I clutch my tea, letting it burn against my palms, waiting for it to anchor me. I want to push back, but I know how this goes — it sounds like the beginning of half of Paige and Mom’s fights. One of them would push, and the other would dig their heels into the cement, and before I knew it Paige would be stalking off into Central Park, and Mom would be on the phone with Dad trying to figure out how to deal with her.

I don’t want to be someone she has to deal with. Things are already weird enough between the four of us without me making waves.

“Just, uh … send that GIF from Harry Potter. The ‘excuse me, but who are you’ one.”

There’s a beat. “You’re in the right direction, but let’s go edgier than that.”

I close my eyes. “Fine. I’ll text you something else.”

I text Taffy and my mom the idea, walking over to the table, where Jack is still so very clearly Jack that it’s ridiculous he tried to pretend otherwise.

I can’t lie — despite his shenanigans, it is kind of fascinating, watching him and his brother. How two people can be so strikingly similar, with the same build and the same open face, the same rhythm in the way they talk, and still present it to the world in such different ways. Where Ethan is almost coolly self-possessed, like some kind of politician, Jack is an open book — his eyes unguarded and unselfconscious, his tall frame always strewn across chairs like he has settled into himself earlier than most people our age, his dark eyebrows so expressive and honest that it’s laughable he even tried to pull one over on me in the first place.

While I’m staring without meaning to, Jack takes a very long slurp of his coffee. “So. This pool thing.”

I lean forward, leveling with him. We are two people at odds — me rigid and immovable, him just as at ease as ever, meeting my stare with faint amusement.

“What exactly did your coach want?”

“Ethan says we’re supposed to do a half hour of lap swimming a day.”

We only have the pool for two hours at a time. Every single year before this one, they’ve taken the area by the diving board, and we’ve taken the lanes. Half of me wonders if this is Coach Thompkins’s way of getting under Coach Martin’s skin — they are notorious for not getting along, especially when it comes to using the swim and dive budgets — but that doesn’t mean we can’t deal with it.

“How’s this: you get the pool for twenty minutes a day,” I propose. “The last twenty minutes we have rented.”

“And where will the swim team go?”

“We’ll do dry land exercises. Push-ups and lunges.”

“And you’re going to lead that?”

“I’ll ask Landon to do it.”

Jack blows out a breath. “Sounds like it’s all settled, then.”

I blink, surprised. I don’t know Jack all that well, but I’m not used to him being so … reasonable.

“Wanna go heckle my brother?”

Ah. There it is.

My phone pings from the table — it’s a text from Taffy, letting me know she’s in a meeting. My mom immediately texts and asks me to pull up the corporate account on my phone and tweet it instead.

I wait for a beat, wondering why I feel a pinch of guilt sending it. This isn’t my business, and it’s not my Twitter account. It ultimately has nothing to do with me at all. I’m just a set of fingers on a keyboard.

Big League Burger @B1gLeagueBurger

Replying to @GCheesing

*extremely ms. norbury voice*

do you even go to this school? go home

4:47 PM · 20 Oct 2020

I hit tweet and steel myself. Something feels … grimy about the whole thing. Like I’ve done something wrong.

“They’re only, like, three blocks away.”

I put my phone on the table, the screen facing down. “I know where the Met is,” I say, sounding overly defensive even to my own ears.

But Jack doesn’t even seem to notice. “So?” he asks — an invitation.

I feel like I am itching at my seams, compelled to open the phone back up to the corporate account and see what people are saying back to the tweet. It’s strange, how I can’t seem to untangle myself from the company, even though it looks nothing like it did when it first started. When I was little, the whole of the restaurant felt as if it were mine. Paige and I were so defined by it — everyone who worked there knew our names, let us make up ridiculous milkshake combinations, snuck us leftover fries when my parents were in meetings that ran late. The franchise is so corporate that it’s way beyond me and my dessert whims now, but no matter how big we get, I can’t quite squash the part of me that takes it personally.

There’s no way I’m going to be able to focus on anything tonight, not with the stupid notifications piling up. The idea of it is suddenly so suffocating, the last thing I want to do is go home.

“Yeah. Yeah, let’s go.”

Jack blinks. “Yeah?”

“Why not?”

Pepper

We take our drinks and head out, and it occurs to me as soon as we hit the sidewalk, into the cool October air, that I don’t actually have any idea what to say to Jack. I don’t usually have to come up with small talk for anyone, really. I walk to school alone, I walk back alone, and everywhere else I go tends to be in a group.

But Jack Campbell is nothing if not good at filling up silence.

“Where are you from, anyway?”

I wince. It’s not that I lied about it or anything, but after the first few reactions I got name-dropping a city in the South, I decided not to advertise it. “I’m that much of a sore thumb?”

“No, actually. You fit in alarmingly well.” I’m not sure if this is meant to be a compliment or not, and from the slight bitterness in his tone, I’m not sure if he is either. He clears his throat, the edge in his words softening. “But you were one of like, two people we didn’t already know freshman year, so I’m guessing you moved from somewhere.”

I’m never quite sure whether I’m embarrassed or proud of it. Today I settle on some mix of the two.

“Nashville, actually.”

“Huh.” Jack seems to mull this over, his tongue pressing into the side of his cheek. I can see something shift in the way he considers me, and it makes me uneasy — the not knowing.

I clear my throat. “If you’re about to make a cowgirl joke, you can save it.”

“Nah, it was gonna be Taylor Swift — themed.”

“In that case, you may proceed. But with caution. I was really into her when she was still country.”

“Was?”

There’s that little half grin again. I wonder if Jack has ever smiled with his whole mouth. Someday when he’s an old man, he’ll probably just have wrinkles on the one side.

“Am,” I concede. Just two days ago Paige and I were blasting “Shake It Off” so loudly on a three-way Skype call with our dad that he threatened to start singing himself if we didn’t quit. At that point, considering he has neighbors on both sides of him, it was our civic responsibility to shut it down.

We turn the corner and hit Fifth Avenue, which is emptier now than when I usually see it on the weekends. Today it’s mostly tourists and joggers who have gotten home from work. “Where are you from?”

“Born and bred,” says Jack, gesturing out in the direction of downtown. “We live in the East Village. Have since my great-grandparents.”

I feel an unexpected pang, then. An unwelcome kind of longing. My grandparents are still in Nashville too — on both my mom’s and my dad’s side. It seemed like Nashville was the root of our family tree, like there would never be any conceivable reason for leaving. Even now, four years on the other side of it, I haven’t fully come around to the idea.

I shove my bangs behind my ear, but the wet curl pops out, stubborn as ever. My hair is never more unruly than it is after practice, when I can’t style it between school and home.

“So you’re like some kind of unicorn.”

Jack’s lip quirks. “What?”

“When’s the last time you met someone in New York whose family is actually from New York?”

Jack laughs. “Up here? Not for a while,” he says. “But where I’m from … well. You meet a lot more New Yorkers downtown than you do up here.”

It is a true testament to how enthusiastically Ethan and Stephen are going at it with each other that I notice the two of them on the steps before I notice anything else in the surrounding area — not the intoxicatingly sweet smell of the nut vendor on the curb, or the massive fountains, or the group of little kids squealing and running up and down the iconic steps of the Met. The two of them are utterly oblivious to all of it, kissing like one of them is about to go off to war.

I clap my hand to my chest before I even realize what I’m doing, as if I’m watching one of the ridiculous rom-coms Paige puts on whenever she comes to visit. “Aw. Let’s just leave them be.”

“What? Where’s the fun in that?” Jack crows.

“They look so happy.”

“They look like they need to get a room,” says Jack. But he’s the one who starts walking away first, shaking his head with a rueful smile. “I should have known you’d be a terrible pranking partner.”

“How exactly were you planning on pranking them, anyway?”

“I guess now you’ll never know,” he says, elbowing me in the shoulder.

I rock to the side and push him back without thinking, the gesture so mindless and natural that only after it happens do I stop breathing for a second, sure I’ve crossed some kind of line. Sometimes it feels as if I’ve been interacting with everyone here from behind some kind of veil — as though I’m allowed to be here, but not engage. To look, but not touch. Like the entire social order of this place was decided long before my arrival, and any involvement I have in it is out of mercy from the people who actually belong.

But Jack is just smirking that faint smirk, walking farther down Fifth.

“So, seeing as I’m captain of the dive team now—”

“Is that so?”

“Well, you’ve seen that Ethan is clearly interested in other varieties of diving at the moment.”

“So you’ve decided to elect yourself?”

Jack shrugs, the smirk taking on a new sharpness. “What’s the point of having an identical twin if you can’t schlep your workload onto them every now and then?”

I hold his gaze. “That doesn’t seem fair.”

Jack is uncharacteristically quiet for a moment, watching a group of siblings stand very, very still for a caricature artist as their fanny pack — clad dad flits around them taking video of the whole thing.

“Yeah, well, I’ve got nothing better to do, so.” He licks his upper lip. “So, we should probably start coming up with ideas for fundraising. Before the coaches get on our asses about it.”

“Yeah, probably.”

“What else do we have to square away?”

I’m not sure how seriously I’m supposed to entertain this. Is Jack really just going to take over duties for Ethan and let him take the credit? I love Paige more than anyone in the world, but I can’t imagine giving up that much of my free time this close to trying to impress college admissions boards.

“Uh … well, there’s fundraising. And picking out options for people to vote on for the team shirts this year. And Ethan and I were supposed to meet up every week to plan things for meets — like sending out directions to other pools for away meets, and who’s bringing snacks. And write up the newsletter for the parents.” I’m sure at any second he’s going to interrupt me and back out of this massive time suck, but he just stares back, waiting for me to finish. “It’s — kind of a lot.”

Jack doesn’t miss a beat. “Fundraising, shirts, newsletters, snacks. Got it.” He shoots a glance back in Ethan’s direction, even though he’s well out of sight. “How about we grab food after practice?”

I stop walking. “Are you asking me out?”

The mischief in his eyes makes me regret asking before I even finish the sentence. I brace myself, sure he’s going to do that thing guys do, that thing Paige warned me about—Wow, someone thinks highly of themselves, or some similar belittling comment. Instead, he stretches his back and says, “Well, I wasn’t. But now that it’s on the table…”

I cross my arms over my chest.

“Not a date,” says Jack, holding his hands up in surrender, the eternal Jack grin still branded across his face. “Just to work out the season. We can go once a week, like you and Ethan planned.”

I consider him for a moment, still waiting for some kind of punchline, some ulterior motive. I don’t find any, so I offer my hand for him to shake. He raises his eyebrows at me. I raise mine right back.

Then he claps his hand to mine, shaking it firmly, just once. There is something warm and grounding in it, something that seems to mark a shift between Jack Campbell then and Jack Campbell now. Like maybe I have misjudged the idea of him I had in my head for the last few years.

Jack hikes his backpack up onto his shoulder and looks down Seventy-Eighth Street. “I’m gonna catch the 6 train home. See you tomorrow?”

“Yeah, see you then.”

It’s only then I realize we left my seven-block bubble a few blocks back. I stand on the sidewalk for a minute, feeling ridiculous for the jolt it sends through my system, staring at the back of Jack as he waits for the light to change as if he’s some sort of compass. He pulls his phone out of his pocket, still within earshot when he scrolls for a moment, pauses, and lets out a low “Shiiiiiiiiiiit.”

I touch my own phone, buried in the pocket of my jacket. It’s back to reality for us both.

Jack

Wolf

Do you ever just do something really, really stupid

Bluebird

No, actually. I’m perfect and I’ve never done a single stupid thing in my life

Bluebird

But actually all the time, always. You good?

Wolf

I mean, my parents are less than pleased with me right now. Well, my dad’s not pleased. I think my mom secretly is, but is trying to do that whole solidarity thing

Bluebird

So what did you get busted for?

Wolf

The usual. Selling hard drugs. Joining a cult. Starting an underground fight club for teens, except the one rule is you HAVE to talk about it. Don’t know why my parents won’t just get off my back

Bluebird

Seriously. Cults are a big commitment. They should have more respect.

Bluebird

But I feel you. Also experiencing some not so great parental pressure

Wolf

College stuff?

Bluebird

Hah. I wish

Wolf

Would joining a fight club help?

Bluebird

Now that you mention it …

Bluebird

Ugh, I don’t know. Sometimes I think my mom and I have very different ideas of what I should be doing with my time/my life in general

Wolf

Yeah. I get that

Wolf

My parents are kind of like that too

Bluebird

What do you want to do?

Bluebird

Haha that sounds so dumb. Like, “what do you wanna do when you grow up?” But I guess we’re sort of getting to that point, huh?

“You’d better put that phone away before your dad spots you.”

I flinch. “Jeez, Mom, you’re like a freaking ninja.”

“Former ballerina, but I’ll take it,” she says wryly. She plucks my phone from my hand. “I think you’ve done enough damage on this bad boy for one day.”

Fair enough. I could delay my return home with practice and impromptu field trips with Pepper all I wanted, but that did nothing to get me out of a Supreme Dad Lecture of the highest order. The kind where he doesn’t even wait for me to get upstairs to the apartment we live in above the deli, but raises a thumb and jerks it to the booth in the back, which my mom dubbed the “Time-Out Booth” when we were kids. These days it’s more like the break booth, where we’ll scarf sandwiches mid-shift or do our homework during lulls, but every so often it seems to revert back to its original purpose to suit my parents’ needs.

The truly demoralizing thing about it reverting to the Time-Out Booth is that I haven’t done anything worthy of it in ages. And now that I have, it isn’t over anything edgy, like when our upstairs neighbor Benny hotwired a motorcycle, or when Annie, one of our regulars, got caught with a joint in Roosevelt Park. It was because of a stupid tweet.

“You know we’re not that kind of business.” My dad has so rarely had to discipline me that it’s almost funny, how he’s straightening his back at the worn-out cushions of the booth as though his clothes don’t fit quite right. “I don’t even like that we’re on Twitter and Facebook at all.”

“How else are people going to know about us?” I ask, for about the umpteenth time.

“The same way they always have, for the past sixty years. This is a community, not some … internet clickbait.”

I don’t understand how my dad can look so deceptively young and hip for a dad — all bearded and skinny with a baseball cap that confuses customers into thinking he’s our much older brother — and still be such a bonehead about social media. Honestly, our food is so good it should be in ridiculous Hub Seed roundups and viral food videos. I have watched literal tears form in people’s eyes when they’ve bitten into our sandwiches. The way the cheese in our grilled cheeses peels apart with each bite is near ungodly in nature. With just a few well-lit Instagrams, a few well-executed tweets …

They could be out of the hole they’re in right now, that’s for damn sure.

But I can’t say that to him outright. My parents think Ethan and I don’t know we’re not doing so hot right now, only dealing with the finances in the back office when we’re out of sight — and I’m sure that has every bit as much to do with my dad’s pride as it does with protecting us from it. Trying to push my agenda here will only make things worse.

“And besides,” my dad says, “that tweet was crossing a line.”

“I didn’t think freaking Marigold was gonna retweet it.”

“Even if she hadn’t, it was over the line. I don’t want to be provoking other businesses, especially not—” He cuts himself off, shaking his head. “And now it’s gone ‘viral,’” he says, using actual air quotes, “so we can’t even delete it. Especially since they responded.”

“They what?”

I lunge for my phone, my dad already warning me against the impulse to send something back. But why the hell shouldn’t we? A silly Mean Girls quote in response to them literally stealing from our business?

“This is the Twitter equivalent of spitting in Grandma Belly’s face. You’re gonna just take this lying down?”

He presses his face into his hand. “Everything doesn’t have to be so dramatic.”

In all honesty, I’m a little bit stunned. I may be way more of a hothead than he is, but nobody is a fiercer defender of Grandma Belly than my dad. I open my mouth to remind him as much, but he beats me to the punch.

“No more tweeting. The account is off-limits.”

“But Dad—”

“But nothing.” He gets up abruptly and claps a hand on my shoulder. “You’re gonna be running this place someday, Jack. I have to know you’re gonna be able to do that with its best interests in mind.”

My face burns. His back is turned to me, so he misses the wince I don’t manage to swallow down in time — the one that has only gotten more pronounced over the years as his implications that I’m the twin who will stay behind and take charge of the deli have slowly but certainly become less implied and spoken more like facts.

“Anyway, you’re on register in the evenings for the rest of the week.”

“Seriously?”

It’s actually a lot better than I was expecting. It’s the fact that my dad can flip from telling me he expects me to run this place and then treating it like a punishment in the next heartbeat that really gets me. To me, it’s yet another spoken confirmation of an unspoken thing — that Ethan’s the twin destined for greatness, and I’m the one who will stick around and deal with whatever he leaves in his wake.

“Consider yourself lucky. The next time an eighties pop icon retweets you, I’ll make it a month.”

“They ripped us off,” I argue. I know it’s not helping or hurting my case, but I don’t even care about that anymore. The punishment’s been doled out. The anger is still there.

My dad lets out a sigh, then rattles the shoulder he has his hand on and squeezes. He’s making one of those fatherhood is testing me faces he makes when one of us says something he’s not sure how to answer, like asking about the Easter Bunny, or why the college undergrads smell weird when they come in the deli after 4 p.m. on a Wednesday. (Pot, to be clear. It was 800 percent pot.)

“I know, kid. But we’ve still got something they don’t.”

“A ‘secret ingredient’?” I mutter.

“That. And our family.”

I wrinkle my nose.

“Sorry. Had to go full Nick Junior to snap you out of it. Go help your mom.”

Which is how I find myself here, tied to the register, taking the orders of the old ladies who have book club every Monday night, half of a little league soccer team, and a group of giggling middle schoolers who paid in quarters. Living the dream.

Okay, okay — the cliché burden of my dad’s expectations aside, it’s not so bad. I genuinely enjoy being up front. My popularity in high school doesn’t extend more than a few inches beyond the dive team, which I’ve never minded much — probably because here, people know me. If every block in New York had its own block celebrity, I’d probably be ours. Not for any redeeming qualities of mine, but mostly because all the regulars watched me and Ethan grow up, and of the two of us, I am much worse at shutting my trap. I know way too much about the personal lives of the regulars — the frequency of Mrs. Harvel’s dog’s bowel movements, the messy details of Mr. Carmichael’s wedding that led to an even messier divorce, exactly what kind of fruit Annie — who was sixteen when I met her, but is thirty now — is eating so she can “convince her uterus to spit out one of the girl eggs next time.”

And they know me too. An engineer who comes in every Tuesday and Friday for his tuna sandwich melt will always help if I’m stuck on something in a math class. The book club ladies are always sneaking me homemade peanut butter cookies, even though I’m surrounded by a sea of miscellaneous baked goods. Annie’s been giving me unsolicited dating advice since before my voice started cracking.

So it adds yet another layer of confusion when my dad rolls this out as a “punishment,” like he hasn’t been pulling me or Ethan downstairs to run the register every other day since we were small. It’s not like we’re short-staffed or anything — my dad’s just always been into the idea of this being a family business, so participation has been less than optional. As early as six, we were yelling orders to the cooks in the back and wiping down tables, mostly because the regulars found it charming and it kept us occupied in the summers. Now, my parents have us doing everything from register to inventory to sandwich assembly.

Well, by “us” I mostly mean me. I’m the one tapped for random shifts when there’s a need. And I get it — Ethan’s busy with all the student council nonsense and extracurriculars and generally being the prince of our high school. But I resent the assumption that just because I don’t have debate club practices or someone to make out with on the steps of the Met, his time is somehow worth more than mine.

In my parents’ defense, I guess I haven’t told them about moonlighting as a crappy app developer. And in my defense, there’s no way in hell I’m going to tell them about it now that Rucker is on a witch hunt and Dad is more determined to live in the 1960s than ever.

“Something on your mind?” my mom asks, when there isn’t anyone in line at the register.

I lean against the counter and sigh. “Just the infinite, suffocating void of trying to navigate the world without my phone in my pocket.”

My mom rolls her eyes and swats me with the towel she was using to rub down tables — which, gross.

“Who have you been texting so much?” she asks, reminding me that just about nothing gets past her eagle eyes. “Oh, let me guess. You’re talking on that Woozel app.”

“Weazel.”

“Ah, yes, Weazel.”

If Mom’s favorite thing is mocking Rucker’s emails to the parents, then her second favorite thing is pretending to be hip and cool. Something she can do a lot easier than most parents, because our mom actually is cool. She can somehow walk into a PTA meeting full of Upper East Side moms decked out in pearls and giant sunglasses in nothing but her jeans and a Girl Cheesing T-shirt and intimidate the whole room with a look. It’s like cool just oozes out of her skin.

Luckily, the coolness is genetic. Unluckily, Ethan stole it all in utero and left me out to dry.

“Should I be very alarmed? Are you kids using it to plot a school takeover and replace Rucker with someone who wears pants from this century?”

“Now there’s an idea.”

She presses her lips into a smirk. “You’re welcome.”

Sometimes my mom is so antiestablishment that I’m confused about why she insists on us having a private school education in the first place. But I guess it’s more for my grandparents’ sake than ours — the ones on her side, not Grandma Belly’s. They never quite approved of her marrying my dad and co-running a deli, when, as far as I can tell, they had very much primed her to be some hedge fund manager’s trophy wife. I think putting me and Ethan through Stone Hall was a way of saying she hadn’t completely abandoned her roots, the same way my dad’s always been tied to his.

The same way I’m going to be tied to them, I guess.

“As long as you kids are being safe…”

I snort. “Really, Mom, it’s like — dumber than Snapchat. Just people posting pictures of graffiti in the bathroom and making fun of Rucker.”

“So you are on it.”

I roll my eyes. “Everyone is.”

She gives me a look she rarely has to give, as if she’s lifted some part of me like the hood of a car and is inspecting it for leaks. A stupid part of me wants to tell her right then. I made this, I want to say. I made it without any help, and it’s making people happy. I want to tell her about Mel and Gina making out in the hallway this morning. I want to tell her how someone was having a total meltdown about chem lab in the Hallway Chat the other day, and at least twenty other students sent encouraging messages to calm them down. I want to tell her that in my own weird way, I made something that’s doing good in the world, something that feels as if it matters.

It’s the look. It’s always that damn look. And I start caving and saying all kinds of stuff I shouldn’t.

“But yeah, I’ve been texting a girl from school.”

It’s out of my mouth before I can think the better of it. As much as I try not to wreck this thing with Bluebird by overthinking it, I keep underestimating just how much space she takes in my brain until moments like this — when I’m staring too intently at a classmate on her phone in the hall, or staying awake until some absurd hour trying to come up with an equally witty response to something she’s typed, or apparently about to blurt her entire existence to my mom.

“Aha! Ethan said he spotted you out with a girl.” She sees the indignant look on my face and raises her arms up. “Your dad was looking for you, and you weren’t picking up, so he called Ethan.”

“I’m surprised he came up for air long enough to breathe, let alone pick up his phone,” I mutter. Leave it to Ethan to gossip about me to Mom without saying anything about it to me first. “And it was his fault I was with her in the first place. We were talking about swim and dive stuff.”

“So you’re not dating her?”

“No!”

Mom raises her eyebrows. Okay, that sounded defensive even in my own ears.

“I mean, no. Pepper’s, like — not the kind of girl who’s into dating. More the kind of girl who’s into wrecking the grading curve in AP Gov.”

I’m about to make another quip about her, but for the first time it seems a little unfair. I didn’t hate hanging out with her today. I mostly just offered to go rib Ethan as a joke, to get her to lighten up — I didn’t think she’d actually want to walk around after the politics of swim and dive were all taken care of. Or that she wouldn’t be immediately against the idea of working together. It knocked me so off guard that I actually agreed to take on captaining duties for the rest of the season.

Whoops.

“See? You kids don’t even need your newfangled app to make friends.”

And then the moment is gone — that weird urge to spill the beans to my mom and tell her about Weazel, about the mysterious Bluebird, about what I’ve really been doing when there’s a light under my door past midnight.

The truth is, it feels too much like letting her down. Both of my parents. Like they’re counting on me to be the kid who keeps this place afloat, the kid who stays. I’m almost relieved my mom took my phone away before I had to come up with some kind of answer for Bluebird — the issue isn’t so much what I want to be, but whether or not I can be it without hurting everyone else in the process.

Pepper

When my alarm clock goes off the next morning, it almost feels like a joke. So does the fact that I may be the first person in human history to have a Twitter hangover.

Just as I predicted, the moment I walked in the door, my mom thrust her laptop in my face and asked for help answering more #GrilledByBLB selfies, undeterred by the backlash we’d gotten for our response to that deli that only seemed to be ramping up by the second. Sitting there and getting all the notifications from people tweeting at the corporate account was the internet equivalent of sitting in a dunce chair and having rotten tomatoes chucked at us all night.

I barely even got a chance to text Wolf back, and my AP Calc assignment looks like a drunk person scribbled on graphing paper. I didn’t even get to my college apps. Let that be my mom’s big punishment for dragging me into this — as determined as she’s been to help me blend in here, nothing will look quite as bad as me not getting into a single top-twenty college because she had me tweeting GIFs at strangers all day.

For a moment, I just lie on my pillows and wonder what would happen. We’ve never really talked about it — me getting good grades to get into a good school has always been the expectation. I guess it started around the time she and Paige really started going at it. Mom was so stressed about Paige’s antics, the arguments and the way she refused to make friends with anyone here and was always wandering around the city, pulling the I’m 18 now card like a party trick. But Mom was happy, at least, when I came home with good grades. When teachers were telling her what a delight I was to have in class. When I made varsity swim team.

And when Mom was happy, it was harder for Paige to pick fights — when Mom was happy, it was infectious. I forget, sometimes, that the three of us have good memories in this apartment. That Mom was the one who helped us start our baking blog in the first place. That we watched Gossip Girl reruns and flipped out whenever we recognized an exterior. That every now and then, there was this glimpse of how it could be, instead of how it was.

But then something else would make Paige snap. Dad’s flight to visit us would get canceled for weather, or she’d have a rotten day at her new school. Then she’d do something to get under Mom’s skin, and Mom would push back, and the apartment would go from Hello Kitty to hell on earth in the time it took for me to take out the recycling and come back.

The thing that still doesn’t make sense to me is why Paige even came here in the first place. She could have just stayed in Nashville with Dad, finished senior year with her friends, and avoided this whole mess altogether.

If you can even call it a mess anymore. It’s been so long since Paige started cold-shouldering Mom that it’s more normal than not.

The snooze alarm goes off, ending my pity party. I blearily pull out my phone and see Wolf never got back to me last night. It feels, for an irrational moment, like he knows what I did. Like this is the universe’s way of punishing me for aiding and abetting pettiness on social media. Or maybe he’s just bored of talking to me.

Or worse — maybe I said something specific enough that he knows it’s me, and he’s already disappointed.

I’m being paranoid, and even I know it. He’s probably busy. Doing stuff like AP Calc homework that doesn’t look like it was written while hanging upside down from a ceiling fan. Or whatever it is teenagers do when their parents aren’t dragging them into Twitter wars.

At least the stupid hashtag is over. Or at the very least it should be.

After I finish brushing my teeth, my mom unceremoniously opens the door to the bathroom and shoves her phone screen into my eyeline.

It’s a picture of the new Grandma’s Special grilled cheese in a BLB wrapper, sitting in a puddle on the sidewalk. tell me i’m pretty #GrilledByBLB, the caption reads. It was sent from that deli — Girl Cheesing — just a few minutes before.

“Got a sec?”

Mom’s already decked out in her outfit for the day, a sleek black dress with black tights, and a navy jeweled statement necklace to match her navy boots. Her hair is already blown out, her makeup perfectly applied. Standing next to her in the mirror makes me look like I’ve stumbled out of a crypt.

“Can’t Taffy handle it?”

“Taffy won’t be in until nine, and she wasn’t built for these kinds of tweets anyway. Not like you are.”

I hand her phone back to her, spitting my toothpaste into the sink. “Mom. The recipes are really, really similar.”

“It’s grilled cheese. Don’t be silly.”

But it isn’t silly, really. The recipe alone might have been a coincidence — sourdough bread with muenster, cheddar, apple jam, and honey mustard — but BLB branded it with the exact name as theirs. It’s enough to make any copyright lawyer do a double-take, if we’re unfortunate enough that this deli really does have some kind of legal position to come at us.

“Who even had this idea in the first place? I feel like you should talk to whoever it was.”

She bites the inside of her cheek. “You’re right. And I will. But first, let’s come up with a response to this tweet.”

I shake my head. “The hashtag is over. It was just for the day. It’ll be weird if we keep going now.”

“It’ll take you like two minutes.”

Two minutes to draft it, sure, but then an hour of compulsively checking it to see how it’s being received, and a day of feeling weirdly guilty about it, and by then, she’ll probably ask me to write more tweets that will “take two minutes” and the whole thing will start all over again. A point I have every intention of making to her, except she beats me to the punch.

“And if you see Landon today, could you ask him about dinner? His father and I are scheduling a sit-down here for when he gets back from Japan in a few weeks, and I’d love for him to join us.”

My mouth practically unhinges. “Landon can’t come here.” Not here, with my bright pink Pepto-Bismol bedroom and the watercolors of Big League Burger menu items my mom commissioned and hung on the wall. Not here, where I’d have even more space and time to make an ass of myself in front of Landon than I already do.

“It’ll be good for you. You’ll get a front seat to business negotiations.” She raises her eyebrows at me conspiratorially. “With the kind of jobs you’ll be fielding after college, you’ll need it.”

Before I can protest, her heels are clack-clack-clacking down the hall, her keys are jingling, and she’s out the front door.

I don’t tweet right away. The miniature rebellion doesn’t count for much, but it’s just enough to rub me the wrong way. I take my time getting ready before I send it, so much time that I’m too late to make myself toast and end up digging through the fridge to find my leftover Monster Cake to eat on the way to school.

I notice a bit of it is missing and smile despite myself. Some things, at least, never change.

Pepper

I hit Park Avenue, nodding at the doorman on the way out, and pull the corporate account back up on my phone. It will honestly look stupid for us to respond to this barb. We’re already in hot water for the way we responded to the last one. But it’s either tweet now or get a bunch of semi-terrified texts from Taffy later.

Big League Burger @B1gLeagueBurger

Replying to @GCheesing

OMG! Finally! The public knows the ~secret ingredient~ grandma adds to your grilled cheese. Thanks for the pro tip guys but we’ll pass for now

7:03 AM · 21 Oct 2020

I’m still half asleep by the time I get to homeroom, but not half asleep enough I don’t notice Jack and Ethan muttering to each other in heated voices in a corner of the room. I sit at my usual desk, trying to ignore it, but the room is empty enough it’s hard not to hear them.

“… going to kill me. He thinks I sent that stupid picture.”

“So what? I’ll tell him it was me. I don’t care. It’s not that big of a deal.”

“He’s already texted me like seven times. He told us to drop it—”

“You should have seen the shit people were saying—”

“I did. I did see it. And then I logged off.”

I pull up the Weazel app, wondering if it’s something from the Hallway Chat. But the only recent message in there of note is someone roasting the grammatical correctness of the graffiti someone recently scrawled in one of the stalls of the girls’ bathrooms. No pictures that look like they’d set the Campbell twins at each other’s throats, which is a weird enough occurrence in and of itself — I’ve never once seen them fight.

“Just forget it,” Jack mutters. And then he’s sitting himself right down in the seat next to mine, the same way we were yesterday.

I don’t know if I’m supposed to say anything or not. There’s no way to pretend I didn’t hear their conversation because the three of us are practically the only people in the room. That is, until Ethan says something under his breath to excuse himself and then ducks out.

It’s quiet for a moment, then, but knowing Jack, it won’t be for long.

“Do you have any siblings?” Jack asks.

He looks antsier than usual, slouching in his seat, his knuckles quietly drumming on the desk.

“Yeah. An older sister.”

Jack nods. Opens his mouth as though he’s going to say something else, and then thinks better of it.

I pull out my Monster Cake, a little squished in its aluminum foil, and break off a piece to offer Jack. His eyebrows lift, and he looks at me in confusion, like I’m trying to hand him a fish.

“It’s not poisonous.”

He takes it from me, examining it. A few crumbs end up on his desk. “What is it?”

I hesitate for a moment. I don’t think I’ve actually discussed this unholy mash-up of desserts with anyone aside from my parents and Paige. I wonder if it’s some kind of betrayal, sharing it with someone outside of the family.

“Monster Cake.”

“Monster Cake?”

His lips quirk in amusement, and then I see it again — another shift, another reconsideration. I decide I don’t mind it this time.

“It’s pretty much a mash-up of every junk food known to man, baked into a cake. Hence the name.”

Jack takes a bite. “Holy shit.”

My face heats up. People are starting to walk into the room just as Jack literally tips back in his seat and moans.

“Jack,” I hiss.

“This is the best thing I’ve ever tasted.”

I can’t tell if he’s making fun of me or not, but either way, he is decidedly making a scene. I wrap up the rest of the cake and shove it into my backpack.

“I mean, this is obscene. How did you come up with this?”

“It’s just — I mean, it’s not like I … We were little kids when we made it.”

Jack literally kisses his fingers. I stare into my lap, my face burning, a reluctant smile blooming. I haven’t had a ton of time to update our blog lately — Paige has been posting on overdrive to make up for it — so I’ve forgotten how it feels, having someone try some weird dessert I made up and enjoy it. Usually it’s just people commenting from some corner of the internet, saying they tried it, or Paige groaning her approval when we meet up and bake together.

But this is different. This is so … personal, almost. Having someone outside of the family try something I made right in front of me. Maybe I don’t hate it.

“I feel like you may have flown too close to the dessert sun. I’ve never tasted anything like this, and my parents literally own a—”

“Mr. Campbell, if you insist on eating in my classroom, at least have the decency not to turn my floor into your personal napkin.”

I manage to muffle my laugh by turning it into a cough. Just as Mrs. Fairchild turns her attention back to the board, Jack catches my eye and winks.

I roll my eyes, and then his friend Paul comes in, buzzing about something that happened on the Weazel app. He’s lucky Mrs. Fairchild is either hard of hearing or very committed to pretending she is, or he’d be screwed right now, considering the no-tolerance policy on the app. That aside, there are narcs all over this place — enough of them that I’m never actually stupid enough to pull Weazel up on my phone at school.

Okay. Maybe sometimes. But I try not to, because whoever Wolf is, he responds so fast during school hours, I’m legitimately worried I’m going to get him in trouble.

And despite Jack’s suspicion that I was ratting people out to Rucker the other day, that’s pretty much my worst nightmare. If Wolf got in trouble and was kicked off the app, I don’t know what I’d do. It’s almost scary, how fast I went from not having him in my life to feeling like, Paige aside, he may be the best friend I’ve got. We’re just on the same wavelength on everything. Life at Stone Hall, but more importantly, feeling like the odd one out here.

The likeliest scenario is that Wolf is someone who has a study hall, or a gap in his schedule. Someone like Ethan, who’s constantly in and out for student government stuff. Or someone with one of the senior internships where they get to leave school for two hours a day, like—

Huh. Someone like Landon.

By the time homeroom lets out, my stomach is gurgling from lack of breakfast. I pull out the Monster Cake as covertly as I can, planning to shove some in my mouth when I open my locker, but I discover as soon as I unlock it that I have acquired a stray. Somehow Jack has managed to follow me across the length of the entire hallway, his friend Paul in tow.

“Just one more bite?”

I grin into my locker door, so he can’t see. “You sound like a junkie.”

“I might be one now, and it’s kind of your fault. So you have a responsibility to keep supplying. Or I’ll go into withdrawal.”

“What are you even talking about?” Paul asks, standing on the tips of his toes to look into my locker, even though we’re the exact same height.

I rip off another piece for Jack, and then, in a moment of Monster Cake benevolence, hand some to Paul too. I might as well stay on good terms with as many members of the dive team as I can, now that we’re apparently sharing lanes.

“Oh my god. You’re my new favorite person.”

Jack ribs him. “How easily your loyalties shift.”

Paul salutes us both. “Gotta head to my internship.”

I pause mid-chew. So maybe Landon’s not the only person I know who ducks out of school regularly.

I try to imagine it. Paul awake late at night by the dim light of his phone, texting me terrible puns about Great Expectations, making fun of our chain-smoking PE teacher for her aggressively hypocritical lectures on the dangers of cigarettes. Telling me about his family, listening to my woes about mine.

“Still on for grabbing some grub after practice?”

It doesn’t feel quite right, but that’s the problem — I can’t really imagine anyone being Wolf. Like there’s some kind of mental block, every time I try to give him a face. Sometimes he feels more like some bodiless entity than a person.

And sometimes — like yesterday, when he was upset about that thing with his parents — he’s so real it’s like we’re huddled in a corner together somewhere, so close I could reach out and touch.

I blink up at Jack, mentally replaying the last few seconds of whatever he was saying to me. “Huh? Oh. Yeah, I’m good for after practice.”

“Ethan said your coach sent you a meet calendar, if you want to forward it to me.”

“Oh, yeah.” I check to make sure the hallway is clear, then pull the attachment up on my phone and hand it to him. “You can airdrop it to yourself.”

Jack fumbles for a moment, trying to hold both our phones at the same time. “Your screen just went black.”

My hands are too occupied trying to wrap up the leftover Monster Cake. “The password’s just 1234.” My dad set up our phone codes for us when we all upgraded last month, and the only reason I tell Jack is because I have every intention of changing it when I have time.

Jack lets out a low whistle. “You realize that’s like the phone equivalent of leaving your keys under your mat.”

He hands me back my phone, and then the warning bell rings and Jack salutes me, heading off with a Monster Cake — induced skip in his step, and I can’t help the slight skip in my own.

Pepper

I spend the next few hours attempting and ultimately failing to ignore the texts coming in from my mom and Taffy. Once the final bell rings, I take a few minutes outside of the locker room to attempt to string together a timeline of Twitter events. It turns out Girl Cheesing’s account — which now has a whopping eleven thousand followers compared to yesterday’s three digits — responded to my tweet from this morning pretty fast.

Girl Cheesing @GCheesing

Replying to @B1gLeagueBurger

still tastes better than unoriginality though amirite

7:17 AM · 21 Oct 2020

And maybe that would have been the end of it — nobody asked me to respond to that during school. Odds are my mom might have just let Taffy ignore it, and we all could have moved on with our lives and maybe settled this in small claims court instead of on Twitter, the way I just kind of assumed adults did.

Enter Jasmine Yang, famous YouTuber and host of the popular vlog “Twitter Gets Petty.” In a three-minute video posted about an hour before school let out, she detailed the few tweets involved in our “feud,” essentially narrating the nightmare of the last twenty-four hours of my life.

“I think it’s safe to say these two accounts are pretty cheesed with each other. So who’s it gonna be, Petty People?” she says at the end of the video, addressing her followers with a cheeky grin. “Team Girl Cheesing or Team Big League? Let me know in the comments, y’all. I know who’s getting my vote.”

The video shows a screenshot, then, of her responding to a Big League Burger tweet with the word COPYCAT all in caps, alongside a flood of cat emojis.

And somehow, in the hour between her posting the video and me getting out of school, the idea has taken off so aggressively that hundreds of Twitter users are doing the same. Every tweet, every Instagram post, every Facebook announcement that BLB has made in the last few months is just a sea of people commenting with the cat emoji.

It would be funny, if I were literally anyone else on the planet. But I just happen to be the person who is going to be chained to a phone until I find some way to fix it.

My brain is practically churning by the time practice is over. I’m so preoccupied with what on earth our next tactical move can be I don’t even notice Vice Principal Rucker standing in the lobby of the gym where we hold practices until I hear his unmistakable nasally voice saying, “Excuse me, Miss Singh, but what exactly am I seeing on your phone screen?”

Pooja’s back is turned to Rucker, but I have a direct view of her face — or, more appropriately, the look of sheer terror that has replaced her face. I know it can only mean one thing.

“Um — it’s, uh—”

“No, no, pull it back up. I’d love to see.”

“Is that the phone Coach Thompkins found on the pool deck?”

Pooja is holding her breath, staring at me with traffic-light eyes. It takes her a second to catch on, but then she nods.

“We’re trying to figure out whose it is,” I explain to Rucker. I turn back to Pooja. “Any luck?”

Pooja hands her phone to me, her face collected but her hands shaking. “Not yet.”

Rucker eyes the phone in my hands. I try not to move it too much, knowing if the screen lights up that Pooja has a picture of herself posing with a cut-out of Ruth Bader Ginsburg that will give her up in an instant.

“It looked like it was logged into that Weasel application,” says Rucker.

“Yeah,” I say quickly, “that’s how we know it’s someone from Stone Hall.”

Pooja nods. “And we’ll, uh, definitely tell you whose it is when we figure it out.”

I can feel his eyes on me, and then on Pooja, trying to decide whether or not he trusts us. But his eyes are nothing compared to Pooja’s, who is staring at me like she’s still waiting for me to throw her under the bus. Neither of us really plays dirty — at least not since freshman year — but we haven’t exactly played nice either.

But as much of a thorn Pooja has been in my side over the years, the last thing I want to do to shift the playing field is let her go down for something as dumb as chatting with people on an app I could just as easily have been caught using, if I’d walked out five seconds before she did. If I beat her at anything, I want the satisfaction of knowing it was fair and square.

“Thank you, girls, for being vigilant about this. If you hear anything else…”

I hold back the urge to swallow in relief. “You’ll be the first to know,” I lie through my teeth.

Rucker nods, and then he’s off, not so subtly trying to infiltrate a group of dive team freshmen who see him coming from a mile off. I turn back to Pooja, whose face looks like there isn’t any blood in it.

“Thanks,” she breathes.

I shift my backpack on my shoulder. “No problem.”

“Seriously … you just saved my ass. And like, a dozen other asses. I’m in the middle of setting up the study group times for the history midterm.”

“Don’t worry about — wait. You’re Bunny?”

Pooja nods, almost cautious about it. Then, when I don’t end the conversation the way one of us usually does, she relaxes marginally and says, “I mean, not my first choice, but at least I’m not whoever got saddled with Donkey.”

Usually I make a point to keep my expression as cool as possible in front of Pooja, but I can’t help but stare at her in disbelief. “You’re the one who’s been setting up all the AP study groups.”

Pooja shrugs. “Well, yeah. The app makes it super easy. And this year’s got us all whipped.”

For a moment neither of us says anything, me just staring at her, and Pooja shifting her weight between her feet, like she can’t decide to wait me out or leave.

Because here’s the thing with Pooja — maybe, for a hot second, we could have been friends. We were grouped together in World History freshman year, when our teacher divvied us up for a graded in-class quiz bowl. It was late September, so just when I was starting to get into the groove of how to make myself fit in, and when I was more committed to making a good impression and the grades to match than ever — the fighting with Mom and Paige had only been escalating, and it felt like succeeding at Stone Hall was the only power I had to stop it.

At that point I still hadn’t really made any friends, but I’d scouted out some potentials. Mel, who seemed to bake a lot, based on some light Instagram stalking, and Pooja, who I’d overheard in the halls talking about trying to make the 100-yard butterfly her event. When we got put into the same group, I was hoping to talk to her about the school’s swim team before the season started. I was working up the nerve — it was still new to me, the idea of having to make friends instead of having built-in ones — when immediately I wasn’t nervous at all. Pooja was nice, and funny as hell. She kept writing notes in the margins of her notebook to show the rest of our quiz group, some crack about how the code of Hammurabi would apply to Snapchat, or adding “freshmen at Stone Hall” under the bottom rung of a social hierarchy of Mesopotamia.

I was laughing at one of her jokes when Mr. Clearburn called on me. “Miss Evans, if you’re not too busy goofing around, maybe you could bother to tell us the modern-day country where most of Ancient Mesopotamia was located?”

Even if I did know the answer, I was so mortified in that moment, I couldn’t have told him my first name. I sat there with my mouth open until Pooja whispered, “Syria.”

“Syria,” I blurted.

“Wrong, and I’m deducting a point from your team for disruptiveness. Miss Singh?”

Pooja gave her answer to the desk. “Iraq?”

“Correct.”

The sting of not just looking bad but letting down the other three people on our quiz team was so searing, it felt like I’d been pushed into the fryer at Big League Burger. I glanced over at Pooja, but she wouldn’t even look at me. It was a hard lesson, but a lesson learned: everyone at Stone Hall is out for themselves.

The rivalry just kind of grew organically from there. I never forgot what she did, and I certainly didn’t forgive. Every time we’ve come head-to-head since, in class or in swim team or any other school-related thing in between, I’ve held the embarrassment of that with me like a constant throbbing reminder that this isn’t Nashville. That this is a whole new species of human, and its food chain goes so perilously high that there’s always someone at your feet waiting to pull you down.

But this — this doesn’t add up. Pooja being Bunny, the user on Weazel who’s been reserving library times and hosting coffee shop meetups for all the toughest AP classes. Because if Pooja is Bunny, that means she’s been pulling people up that food chain right along with her.

Finally I shake my head. “I guess I thought…”

The sentence hangs there uncomfortably, because we both know what I thought. Pooja shifts her backpack on her shoulders, looking at her shoes before looking back up at me.

“You should come, you know.” The words are hesitant, like she means them but isn’t sure how I’ll take them. “I mean — not that you need it. But I’m sure it would help some of the others.”

I’m so stunned by the offer that I forget I’m supposed to answer.

“Anyway, my brother’s waiting for me out front, so…” She waves awkwardly. “Thanks again.”

“Yeah.”

And then she’s off — Pooja, Bunny, or whoever she really is — leaving me torn with a new kind of uncertainty in her wake.

Pepper

Once Pooja clears the lobby, my phone pings in my pocket, pulling me out of my confusion and right back into the Twitter maelstrom. I pull out my phone, already bracing myself for the notifications, swiping through them one by one—

And realize there aren’t any from Wolf. That there weren’t any yesterday around this time either. That for the first time in our correspondence, neither of us has said anything between the hours of three and five, which is our usual peak time for bitching about whatever assignments we got earlier in the day.

Okay. I’m not stupid enough to think that Landon is Wolf just because he happens to not be texting on Weazel during the same times as swim and dive practice. By that merit, any member of the swim team, the dive team, the basketball team, the golf team, or the indoor track and soccer teams could be him too. If anything, this has only widened the ridiculously large pool of people he could be.

But it’s just one more thing in a list of already uncanny things that makes me think that maybe, just maybe, it is him after all. That fourteen-year-old Pepper’s crush was fast, but maybe not baseless. That maybe there really was something then, the way there certainly seems to be something with Wolf now.

Another ping comes in, this time from Taffy. U out of practice yet?

I sigh, shaking myself out of my head, and start walking to the bakery where Jack proposed we meet, while attempting to diffuse the Twitter situation on the way. I call Taffy first, an idea forming in my head as I walk down the street, the thousands of cat emojis still swimming in my vision.

“Is anyone from the design team in today?”

Taffy’s voice is approximately an octave higher than usual. “Yeah, Carmen’s here.”

“Okay. Get her to find, like, a stock photo of a cat.”

“Any cat?”

“A cute one, I guess. Yeah, any cat.”

My life gets more ridiculous by the second.

I wait for the light to change at Eighty-Ninth Street as she writes it down on one of the unicorn-shaped Post-it pads she keeps at her desk. We’re so in sync by now, I can sense the exact moment she lifts the pencil from the paper through the phone.

“Then do one of those, like, really corny photoshop jobs so it’s holding a Big League Burger grilled cheese. Like so bad that it’s funny.”

“Got it, got it…”

“Then have her do an animation of sunglasses dropping down on it.”

“I know that one!” says Taffy excitedly, as if she was not hired for the exact purpose of knowing about memes on the internet.

“Okay, those sunglasses. But no text,” I instruct her, feeling like a schoolteacher. “Just the sunglasses dropping down.”

There’s murmuring on the other end. “She’ll have it ready in a half hour.” The murmuring becomes decidedly more distinct, then, and I hear what can only be my mom cutting in, the low, authoritative tone of her voice unmistakable. “… She’ll have it ready in less than five,” Taffy amends.

I’m outside of the bakery, then, and see Jack has already found a table and is quite literally taking a baguette to the face. He looks like the picture of contentment, his hair still damp from the pool and curling at the edges, ripping off the end of the baguette with his teeth in that unselfconscious hungry teenage boy way. I stop for a moment just to watch him, feeling strangely charmed by the whole thing.

He spots me the moment the door opens, waving so I know where he is. I hold up a finger and stand in line to get a cup of tea. At the last moment I peer down at the counter and ask for one of the massive apple pastries, the ones I’ve passed in this window countless times but always have been too busy to stop and get by myself.

My phone hums in my hand. The GIF of the cat is in, just the way I asked for it. I save it to my drive and pull up the corporate Twitter, hating myself for it but also wanting to get it over with as soon as I possibly can.

“Trade you some baguette for some of whatever that is,” Jack offers.

“Deal.” I drop off my backpack and my swim bag at the table. “Just one sec.”

I wince when I see there are over a hundred notifications piled up on BLB’s Twitter, knowing every single one of them is cat-related or worse. I pull up a tweet draft, taking a sip of my tea, as if I can burn the wrongness of it down my throat.

Yuck. I forgot to put sugar in it. I glance around to look for the coffee counter, getting up from my chair and bumping into someone who was coming at me from the left. My tea sloshes onto my shirt, and I back into the table, dropping my phone on it.

“Sorry, sorry—”

“Pepper?”

I blink up into the ice blue of Landon’s eyes, so close I can see the distinctive little freckle just above one of them that I memorized my freshman year like his face was some kind of constellation. He cracks a smile just as I swallow down a grimace.

“Sorry,” I mutter again, ducking my head down. There’s a bread bowl full of mac and cheese on a tray in his hands, the cheese still bubbling. The views are both so overwhelming that I’m not sure which to settle on, the cheese or his face.

“Hey, Ethan—”

“Jack,” the two of us correct him at the same time. Jack turns his attention back to his baguette, but not before I see the sliver of a smile on his face.

When I look back at Landon, he is still momentarily disarmed, blinking before the easy smile is back on his face again. “Well, then. My bad. Fancy running into you guys here.”

My throat feels dry. I am staring at Landon’s uncannily symmetrical face and thinking, of all things, of my mother.

“Yeah,” I half croak. “Was just … sorry. I was going to put sugar in my tea, and…” Am now narrating every pedantic detail of my life to you for no reason.

I beeline for the coffee counter, painfully aware that Landon is falling into step next to me. This is it, then — the universe giving me the opportunity I completely missed during practice today. As if it practically is shining a neon light on my mom’s ridiculous request.

I steel my entire body like a truck is coming at me. It’s a letdown, almost, that I have spent the last four years at Stone Hall trying to be worthy of the Landons of the world — the people who just fit here, the way I used to just fit back in Nashville — but even after all this time, I can’t look at him without feeling like the clueless little freshman I was when we first met.

Eventually I force the words out of my mouth.

“So — are you … um, my mom says your dad is coming to dinner at our place?”

Landon takes a step ahead of me and grabs me a sugar packet from one of the little containers on the counter. It’s the wrong kind, one of the fake ones without any calories in it that make your tongue shrivel, but I’m too busy focusing on not tripping again to care.

“Oh, wow, yeah. My dad mentioned something. Didn’t realize it was your place.”

I nod, way too vigorously than the situation merits. “Yep, um, yeah. My place.” This is social suicide, but somehow still not as bad as letting down my mom. “You should come.”

There’s a half second where he’s still trying to catch up to what I said that I think I may die right there in the middle of the bakery, just lie down on the tiles and let the elements take me.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Landon nods. “Yeah, yeah, I’m — that sounds cool. I’ve got some deadlines for my internship, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be out of the weeds soon.”

I better win some kind of Daughter of the Year award for this. “Maybe I’ll see you then.”

Jack

The really stupid part about the whole thing is, right before it all blows up in my face, I decide I like Pepper. Well, not decide, really — it just kind of sneaks up on me. One second I’m tearing through a baguette, relieved my mom is nowhere within a three-mile radius (consuming bread from other establishments is treason in the Campbell family), and the next I’m looking up, seeing this wry look on Pepper’s face as she’s standing in line for her tea — the kind of look you give someone you don’t just tolerate, but maybe care about. The difference between exasperation and mild amusement, that line of what on earth is that guy doing and what on earth is my friend doing.

And yeah, maybe it was kind of happening before that. Ethan asked me to meet up with Pepper the first time, but I kind of hijacked it after that. Ethan doesn’t even know Pepper and I are meeting to go over swim and dive stuff — not that he’d mind, since the organization of the dive team can roughly be described as “extremely hot mess” and his captainship was more of a formality than anything. He’ll still slap it on his resume and call it a day.

He has kind of a bad habit of doing that — overcommitting and pushing stuff onto me. Saying he’ll bring day-old stuff from the deli for a fundraising thing at school, and then asking me to do it when his schedule gets too thin. Promising Mom he’ll pick up Grandma Belly’s prescription, then calling me in a panic when he realizes his student council meeting is running too long for the pharmacy’s hours. I know he doesn’t mean to do it, but he has a tendency to bite off more than he can chew — and then remember, thanks to me, he has a second mouth.

Funny, though, that as strapped for time as Ethan is, he sure found some to tweet from the Girl Cheesing account this morning and do the one thing our dad told us not to do.

But for once, I really don’t mind picking up Ethan’s slack. I like spending time with Pepper, with her Monster Cake and the unexpected blunt funniness of her and the way she’s always trying to tuck her bangs behind her ear even though they’re too short. I like her enough that I don’t even hesitate to ask if she wants to swap bites of baked goods. I like her enough that, for the first time in months, I’m not glancing at the phone my mom liberated after last night’s shift, waiting to see if Bluebird has responded to my last message.

I like her enough that the minute she bumps into Landon, something unfamiliar and hot coils in my stomach, something that makes me irritated with Landon even though he’s done literally nothing to wrong me in his life.

Something happens to Pepper too. Her cheeks are all red, and I can tell she’s stammering even with her back turned, even from halfway across the café. I squish the piece of pastry she gave me between my fingers, making a gooey apple-y mess.

I pull my eyes away from them, and that’s when it happens. That’s when everything goes to shit in one fell swoop. Her phone is on the table. I don’t even mean to look. I’m a New Yorker; I pride myself in my ability to mind my own damn business. But there’s something moving on the screen, some ridiculous-looking cat GIF, and like a raccoon looking at a shiny thing, I can’t tear my eyes away from it.

Then, as I’m leaning back, I take in the rest of the screen. I notice the blue checkmark first. The GIF is part of a drafted tweet. For a second I’m even amused — is Pepper verified on Twitter? Was she secretly in some kind of sports league or singing in a country band back in Nashville?

But the account doesn’t belong to Pepper. It belongs to Big League Burger.

My brain doesn’t quite know how to communicate the information to my body, so I just laugh. I laugh so hard, the woman attempting to eat a scone at the table next to me looks up in alarm, even though she has noise-filtering headphones on. But it’s like something laughs out of me, then, something heavy that comes loose in my chest and lodges in my stomach and instantly starts to calcify.

Pepper comes back, all red-cheeked and wide-eyed, practically stumbling into her seat as if she’s forgotten what it’s there for. When her eyes finally meet mine, she blinks, snapping out of it so fast, I can only imagine I am projecting every inch of the horror I’m feeling on my face.

“What?”

My mouth opens. Closes. Opens again.

“You have a drafted tweet from the Big League Burger account on your phone.”

I don’t sound angry. Am I angry? It feels like being a little kid again, practicing tricks on the diving board; like all those first few times I tried to jackknife and ended up belly-flopping into the pool. How the sting of it just stuns you for a few beats before the pain hits; the strange whiplash of how water can be so slippery and welcoming in one second and nearly knock the freaking wind out of you in the next.

“Oh.” Pepper grabs her phone, and now her cheeks aren’t just tinged, but a bright, flaming red that creeps up her neck and into her cheeks. “Sorry, didn’t mean to leave my phone here.”

Maybe I shouldn’t say anything. In fact, I absolutely shouldn’t. I feel like every possible appropriate response I could make just shoved its way into a blender, and whatever comes out now is going to come out all wrong.

Pepper fidgets under my stare, reaching for her bangs again. “It’s dumb. My mom — well, my parents founded Big League Burger.” She says it with her shoulders hunched, with her eyes flitting between me and the table. “They have me send tweets from the account sometimes.”

“Like tweets at Girl Cheesing?”

There’s that familiar crease between her brows. “You know about that?”

The baguette feels like it’s sloshing in my stomach. I manage to nod.

Pepper shrugs. “It’s dumb,” she mumbles, picking at the lid of her tea. “The whole thing is…”

“It’s not dumb.”

I don’t mean for it to come out the way it does. Even I’m surprised by the sound of myself. Her eyes snap up to meet mine, wide and wary.

I stand from my chair, grabbing my backpack, my coffee, the ridiculously large baguette.

“Wait — are you leaving?” There’s an edge of panic in her voice, a kind of insecurity I didn’t think someone like Pepper was capable of feeling. “Are you mad or something? They’re just some stupid tweets.”

I round on her, forgetting how tall I am compared to her until she has to jerk her neck up to meet my eye. I take a step back. “Yeah? Well, that’s my family you’re sending those stupid tweets to, that’s my grandma you stole from.”

Pepper’s lips part, a little “oh” of surprise breathing out of her. I watch, my fingers curling and my nails cutting into my palms, as she follows my words through to their meaning and her entire body goes rigid.

It takes her a moment to speak. I want to storm out, want to be anywhere other than this stupid bakery that seems to get smaller by the second, but I’m rooted to the spot, rooted by the way she’s looking at me. She always seems to have a comeback at the ready, some kind of answer prepared. Right now, she just looks lost.

“Your family owns Girl Cheesing?”

“Since 1963. Which is how long Grandma’s Special has been on the menu, by the way.”

Pepper shakes her head. “I didn’t … I had no idea you—”

“Can you imagine what it was like for her? Starting up a business with my grandpa when they didn’t have a penny to their name? Coming up with all of those recipes herself and working sixteen hours a damn day for over half of her life to serve them?”

Something flickers in Pepper’s eyes. It’s not remorse. It’s more like understanding.

I don’t want it. I’m so angry that anything she projects just seems to slide right off me, into a puddle on the floor.

“It’s not — my mom just makes me do it. It’s not anything personal.”

“First of all, your mom didn’t make you do anything.” I glance to my left and see there’s a clear path to the door, but I’m not done yet. I pull out my phone and open the Twitter app to the Girl Cheesing account, shoving the tweet with the crack about the secret ingredient from this morning under Pepper’s nose. “And that’s my grandma’s legacy. That’s my entire family’s livelihood. Don’t you dare stand there and tell me it isn’t personal.”

“Jack, wait—”

“Do whatever you want with the stupid fundraising. I’m sure you’ll have no problem coming up with ideas because you can always just rip off someone else’s.”

Jack

I find out approximately two seconds later that it is very difficult to commit to a heated storm out of a bakery with a giant baguette in your hand. I stalk toward the Eighty-Sixth Street subway station anyway, people looking up at me with alarm that instantly shifts into amusement. I slow my roll just long enough to spot a homeless person who could actually use the baguette I’m wielding, and hand it to him — only to look up and see we’re standing just outside, of all things, of a freaking Big League Burger.

I catch sight of my reflection in the window, my hair all whipped from the wind, my face contorted. I don’t even have the dignity of being able to look angry. Like Ethan and my dad, I’ve been cursed with angry expressions that only extend as far as “mildly confused puppy.” The worst part is, I’ve seen my own face on Ethan’s enough times to know it’s ridiculous.

I’m grateful, suddenly, Ethan busted into the account and kept ribbing Big League Burger all day. So grateful I’m willing to skip into the deli and take the blame with a big fat smile on my face. It’ll be worth it. Hell, I’ll keep on doing it. Just one more thing to tack to the laundry list of things Ethan has started that I’ve had to finish.

There are at least six texts from Pepper by the time I emerge out of the subway, and another few from my dad and from Ethan that I’ve also pointedly ignored. I’m turning the corner when my phone starts to buzz in my pocket — my mom’s calling. I brace myself. I can ignore 99 percent of the people who have my phone number, but I can’t ignore her.

“Where are you?”

“Down the street, why?”

The words come out in a rush, as if I’ve been running. And granted, I have basically been power walking like I’m on fire, but it’s more than that — I’m terrified in that moment that the shoe we’ve been ignoring just dropped. That something happened to Grandma Belly, and not only was I not there, but I was cavorting with the enemy when it happened.

“Get here. Now.”

Okay, scratch that. I’m just in a volcanic amount of trouble. And the only thing worse than my dad being upset with me is my mom being upset with me.

I’m about to open my mouth and tattle on Ethan like the total yellowbelly I apparently am, but my mom beats me to the punch.

“The place is packed. We have customers out the door and not enough hands in the world to serve them. Wherever you are, Jack, RUN.”

For a moment I’m certain it’s a prank. And then I round the corner and see it with my own eyes: a sea of people, so far down the block they’re waiting past the old bookstore, past the bodega and the locksmith and the hole-in-the-wall sex toy shop that doesn’t open until eight o’clock. People of all ages, with backpacks and briefcases and strollers, all of them craning to get a glimpse at the door and how many people are in front of them.

I haven’t seen this many people clustered outside of a shop since the damn cronut.

I take off at a sprint, the anger completely stunned out of me. Some people grumble about me cutting the line—“I work here,” I mutter, which perks a few impatient customers up — and by the time I get up to the counter, I see my mom beaming an almost-manic grin at the register, and we’ve even opened the second one, which is something I don’t think we ever do outside of big events like Pride spilling in more customers, or that summer a Groupon tour ended on our block.

“What happened?” I demand, diving for an extra apron. If Ethan and Mom are already up front, that means I’ll be joining Dad in the back for prep. Thank god this insanity will spare me from parental wrath for at least as long as it takes to get all these people fed.

“Ethan’s tweets!” Mom chirps. Before I even feel my face start to pinch, she adds quickly, “Both of your tweets. After they went viral, I guess…”

I blink. “Wait, so — I do one shady tweet and get in trouble, and Ethan tweets a whole bunch of wildly rude things and—”

My mom leans forward, grabs my chin, and steps on her tiptoes to kiss me on the cheek. “We’ll talk disciplining later. Sandwiches now. Go, go, go.”

For the next three hours until closing, I am barely able to come up for air. I can make any of our sandwiches with my eyes closed, and by the time eight o’clock finally rolls around, I practically am. The line only seems to get longer, and the shenanigans more absurd — there are bloggers taking pictures, a man dressed in a shirt with printed grilled cheeses on it who calls himself a “grilled cheese authority,” teens much trendier than I am taking side-by-side pictures of our Grandma’s Special with Big League Burger’s for their Instagram stories.

And more importantly, a shit ton of cash going into the register.

At the end of the day, when we finally close the door on the last customer and lock it, we all collapse in the Time-Out Booth, wheezing as though we’ve just run the New York marathon.

“I can’t feel my feet,” my mom groans.

I lay my head down on the table. “My entire body is covered in brie and honey mustard.”

I can hear the smirk in Ethan’s voice even with my arm covering my eyes. “Two girls asked for my number.”

“You already have a boyfriend,” I remind him, poking one eye out to glare.

“And I told them that.”

“But you didn’t think to mention you have an identical twin?”

“Okay, we need to strategize,” says my dad, clapping his hands together. “If the rest of the week is going to be anything like this, we need to have all hands on deck. Hannah, if you want to check on stock, I’ll start calling all the day shifters to see if anyone wants overtime. Boys, if you could scrub down and close up shop for the night—”

“Wait. That’s it?”

My dad pauses, halfway up from his seat. “What’s it?”

My face is volcanically warm. I’m not a narc. I’m really not. If I were, Ethan’s golden-child status would have been knocked down more than a few notches years ago — he’s been sneaking beer out with friends in the park and even smoking the occasional joint since we were fourteen.

But the double standard has never been more unfair than it is right now.

My mom gets it before my dad does because she is all too aware of the quiet way I keep score. She puts a hand on my shoulder and squeezes. “Your father already had a talking-to with Ethan before the huge rush of people. No more tweeting. At least, no more like the ones you sent today.”

I have to bite my cheek to stop myself from saying anything else.

“Agreed,” says my dad. He hovers at the edge of the table, for some reason fixing a look at me instead of Ethan. After a moment, he sighs. “You have my permission to tweet from the account again. But I need it reined in. Ethan, if you’re going to tweet from it, you have to run it past Jack first. Understand?”

I blink up at him, not sure I’ve heard correctly.

“Run it past Jack?” Ethan protests.

“Jack managed to keep it somewhat tone-appropriate. Besides, he’s on the Twitter account more than you and spends more time on the floor. I trust his judgment.”

Dad claps me on the back as he walks away, and Mom smirks as she gets up to follow him. I can’t help but feel a little smug about the whole thing — at least until I look up and see Ethan’s face, and the flicker of hurt on it that passes so fast, I almost miss it.

“Okay, then,” he says, holding up his hands in surrender. “It’s all you, bro.”

I lean back in the booth, trying to dial down my satisfaction.

“We’ll do it together,” I offer.

Ethan shakes his head. “You heard Dad. You’re the one they trust.” He says the words like they’re only the edge of something he really wants to say. But before I can press him, he says, “Just make sure to give ’em hell.”

And then, like someone dropping a hammer into my stomach, the afternoon comes rushing back. “About that.”

Ethan leans forward. “What is it?”

Ethan’s my brother and I love him and all, but we don’t have one of those psychic twin vibes. When he sprains his ankle in soccer practice, I don’t feel some phantom twinge across the field, and when one of us is upset about something, the other one usually doesn’t notice until we say something point-blank. Which is how I know my face must look like a real mess if Ethan’s asking me that.

I consider for a moment not telling him. There’s this strange tug pulling me back, some misplaced loyalty to Pepper that I guess even finding out the truth about her didn’t quite knock out of me.

But even if I wanted to keep this to myself, I couldn’t. Not with Pepper as captain of the swim team. Whether I keep doing Ethan’s captain duties or not, one of us will be dealing with her until the end of the season, and I can’t just send him in blind.

“Big League Burger — Pepper’s parents are in charge of it.”

It takes Ethan a moment to place her, and for some reason I feel a flash of annoyance. “Pepper Evans?”

I nod. “And … it looks like Pepper is running their Twitter. Or at least, it looks like she’s a big part of running it.”

Ethan’s eyes widen in the same dumbfounded way I know mine must have three hours ago. “That’s — there’s no way.”

“That’s what I thought. I only found out this afternoon.”

“The world can’t be that small.”

I prop my elbows on the table and lean my head into my hands, suddenly feeling like I haven’t slept in years. I’m past surprise, past disappointment. I just want to throw my body onto my bed and sleep until the end of time.

“Apparently it is,” I mutter.

Ethan lowers his voice. “Are you gonna be able to keep at it? I mean — you’re friends, right?”

“No.” Ethan pulls back, and I realize I’ve said it through my teeth. I sag forward, sinking deeper into my hands, my elbows aching against the table. “At least not anymore, we’re not.”

Ethan levels with me for a moment, and then nods. “Maybe it’ll all just … blow over after this.” He knocks his knuckles on the table as he gets up. “Anyway, let me know if you need any help.”

I wait for a few seconds after everyone’s left to reach into my back pocket and grab my phone. Three messages from Bluebird, but no more texts from Pepper. Somehow I already know what I’m going to see before I open Twitter, but I can’t stop myself — and there, sure enough, is a tweet from Big League Burger. The stupid cat GIF, with its sunglasses and its grilled cheese. I don’t know what part is more stupid — being disappointed about a GIF of a cat, or that there was even a tiny part of me that thought she might not post it at all.

Pepper

Bluebird

So you never told me what it is you want to do with your life.

Bluebird

I mean, no pressure or anything, it’s just the rest of forever

Bluebird

It’s okay if you want to be Rucker’s protege. I mean, I’d stop being friends with you, but who needs friends when you have a 401k and 16 pairs of patterned pants

Great. That makes six unanswered texts to Jack, three unanswered texts to Wolf, and several SOS texts to Paige, who I know is either in class or sucking face with a fellow coed. I hope it’s the former, because I’m really not up to getting a play-by-play right now.

In fact, I’m probably not up to any kind of play right now. My mom’s going to be home any minute, and the kitchen looks like Keebler elves threw a rave in it.

I didn’t mean for it to escalate to the extent it has — a pot of browned butter remnants on the stove, cocoa powder on the marble counter, leftover dark chocolate sauce congealing in a bowl in the sink. After the incident with Jack, I’d walked straight home, reeling from the surprise of it all, the complete absurdity, and convinced myself I could take my mind off it if I just pulled out my AP Gov textbook and buried myself in it.

It turns out no amount of learning about the ins and outs of federalism is enough to distract me from the gnawing guilt, or the unwelcome weight in my chest every time I think of Jack’s face just before he walked out of the bakery’s front doors.

If I couldn’t escape the guilt, there was nothing left to do but lean into it. And leaning into it is what led me to grabbing the forty dollars my mom leaves out in the front to order food if I ever need it, schlepping miserably down to the bodega, and collecting everything I needed to make Paige’s infamous So Sorry Blondies from the summer before she left for college.

I pull them out of the oven now, the smell wafting through the kitchen — the brown sugar and butter and toffee against the richness of the dark chocolate chips and pockets of dark chocolate caramel sauce. A little bitter and a little sweet. I set them on the stove to cool and lean back on the counter, looking at the horror I have wrought upon my mom’s spotless kitchen.

I whip out my phone (no texts from Jack; just a few from my dad, asking which pies to preorder for Thanksgiving) so I can take a few pictures of it for the blog. Paige and I have been playing phone tag all week, but that hasn’t stopped her from nagging me to update. To be fair, she’s had the last three posts, with impressive pictures of Rainy Day Pudding, Unicorn Ice Cream Bread, and a recent addition I’m too scared to ask about called Help Me Hangover Cookies. Meanwhile, I haven’t posted since I made our Trash Talk Tarts in September — courtesy of the thinly veiled comment I found in the Hallway Chat on Weazel, where someone bitched about a “certain blonde android making the rest of the AP Chem class look bad.” While we’re all too stressed out and busy to bully each other beyond the occasional snide remark, I don’t think it’s too presumptuous to assume they meant me.

Just then my phone rings, and my dad’s face dressed up as the Big League Burger mascot for Halloween pops up on the screen.

“What’s up?”

“Pies,” says my dad. I can recognize the background noise from our old favorite bakery in Nashville — the bells on the door, the chime of the register. The place is always packed. “Your mom says apple. Paige says pecan. If you have a third one in mind, open your pie hole and speak now.”

My mouth waters just at the thought of those pies. Ever since we moved here, we always do major holidays in Nashville, since all the grandparents are out there. Sometimes I see old friends. Mostly I just hang out with Paige and tear up Dad’s kitchen the way I tear up Mom’s.

And, of course, run point with Dad to do everything and anything we can to keep Paige and Mom from going at it — which is easier to do these days, since during the holidays they seem to barely talk at all.

“Chocolate,” I tell him. “The pudding one.”

“Chocolate it is,” he says, just as the oven timer goes off on my end. He must hear it, because he says, “Does this mean P&P Bake is getting an update today?”

“If I manage not to burn these blondies like I did with last week’s cake.”

“So Sorry Blondies?” my dad asks. He’s not a big worrier — he’s one of those parents who is more into listening than prying — but even he knows these particular blondies have notorious origins.

The way my parents’ divorce happened was … anticlimactic. They sat us down one day over dinner and told us it was mutual. That they loved each other, but thought they were better off as friends. And as stunned as Paige and I were, it didn’t really rock anyone’s worlds. We were still in Nashville. We all still lived in the same place. My dad just started sleeping in the guest room, and that was that.

Or at least, it was for a few months. It was around that time that Big League Burger was getting too big for them to manage alone. The options were to sell parts of the franchise, or fully take the reins of the whole thing. My dad waffled — his heart was always in the original location, not the others that followed — but my mom didn’t hesitate. She loved every part of it, big and small, and didn’t want someone outside of the family in charge. If he didn’t want to take those reins, she would. And she’d head to New York and open the corporate office there to do it.

Even though our dad was in full support of the idea, it was around then, I think, that Paige conflated everything that happened with BLB with the divorce and started blaming Mom. And for a little while, when Paige wanted me to be on her side about that, I wondered if I should too. After all, she seemed to be the one in motion, instigating the change.

But it wasn’t her so much as it was BLB itself. I think it honestly shocked my dad, how fast we grew. Mom embraced it, pushing outward to the wind, and Dad seemed to cave in on it, becoming more and more invested in the goings-on of our original locations, as if he could just put up blinders and pretend the world ended right there.

So really, it’s not fair to blame one of them. I think, in the end, it punctuated something they knew all along, but the day-to-day of our old lives always shielded them from. Mom is someone who likes adventure, and taking chances, and asking questions. Dad is someone who is perfectly content with what he has and where he is, and doesn’t especially love change. And Big League Burger was nothing if not changing.

And so were we. Mom asked me to come to New York with her, and I couldn’t imagine saying no. I was always her mini-me, always nipping at her heels. She made it sound like an adventure — and maybe it would have been, if Paige hadn’t decided at the last minute that she was coming too.

Enter the So Sorry Blondies. It was a few weeks after we’d moved here, and the first of Paige’s many blowups with Mom, accusing her of all kinds of things — saying she didn’t love Dad at all, that she’d ruined everything, yelling loud enough that it’s a miracle our neighbors’ ears didn’t bleed. Once it was over, Mom left to run in the park, and Paige left to go to the grocery store down the street, and I stayed in the too-big, too-unfamiliar apartment, wrestling with the strange feeling I had to take sides and not knowing which side to take.

Once she’d calmed down, Paige employed my help in making the So Sorry Blondies. We even Skyped in Dad, who didn’t have very strong dessert opinions, other than to make sure the edges were crispy. Mom accepted them with a conciliatory smile, and that night, we all ate them for dinner. It was one of those bright spots that punctuated a grim year; a weird little pocket in the timestream I remember with an equal amount of affection and regret. It hurts to remember, but sometimes I have to, or I’ll forget the way we used to be all together. Like the blondies themselves — the bitter and the sweet.

All this is to say, I know these blondies aren’t magic. It’s not going to make some bridge between me and Jack for all the water to go under. But I can’t think of anything else I can do.

“They’re for — a classmate,” I tell him, just barely stopping myself from saying they’re for a boy.

Mom’s key turns in the door.

“A classmate, huh?” my dad asks. I can hear the relief in his voice. The last thing either of us wants is another family feud. “What kind of teenage drama merits the full blondie?”

Mom waves as she comes in, dropping her briefcase on one of the kitchen stools and offering me a weary smile as she pulls off her sunglasses.

“It’s Dad,” I tell her.

She perks up. “Ask him how the new menu has been doing.” Even though we’re sprouting new locations every other week, she still loves to hear Dad’s day-to-day at the original spot.

“Tell her it’s going well,” says Dad, hearing her from the other end. “The Twitter, though — well, I’m at the front of the line, so I gotta order now. I’ll call you both back in a jif.”

“Chocolate pudding,” I remind him.

“On it, hon. Love you.”

“Love you too.”

I hang up and see my mom looking at the So Sorry Blondies, a wistful expression on her face. It makes my throat ache, like the space in the room where Paige should be has never been quite as big.

“Everything okay, Pep?”

No. And I’m not even really sure why. Only a few days ago I was about as attached to Jack as I am to the guy who delivers our mail.

I tuck my bangs behind my ear. If I get into it like I almost did with Dad, I’ll have to tell her about Jack, and given the circumstances, I don’t especially want her to know. “Yeah, just … doing a post for the blog.”

“Paige is still posting too?”

I bite the inside of my cheek. It’s weird that most of the information Mom gets about Paige these days comes from me or from Dad.

“Yeah.”

She closes the fridge and leans there against the door for a moment, biting her cheek the same way I am. No matter what evolution of my mom I’m looking at — the barefoot, back-porch-singing Nashville one, or the high-heeled, power-walking one — there are always these uncanny moments when we’re both thinking the same thing or feeling the same way, and our bodies seem to mirror each other’s, like two halves of a coin.

She blows out a breath, reopening the fridge to grab the jar of tomatoes she’s always snacking out of, and then props herself on the other kitchen stool. “Taffy had trouble reaching you toward the end of the day.”

“I had practice. And homework.” And apparently two hours of guilt-induced baking, although that goes without saying.

My mom nods. “There are a lot of eyes and ears on that Twitter feed, you know. I know you’re juggling a lot right now, but we could really use your help.”

“I did.” Not necessarily on purpose; after I ghosted on her, Taffy must have sent out the GIF of the cat herself. It had ten thousand retweets last I checked. “And now that the whole thing with that deli is winding down—”

“Winding down?” My mom laughs. “It’s just getting started.”

“What do you mean?”

She pulls out her phone and opens Twitter, where there’s a new tweet from the Girl Cheesing account.

Girl Cheesing @GCheesing

Anyone who unfollows Big League Burger on Twitter gets 50 percent off their next grilled cheese! And, y’know, the relative comfort of knowing they’re eating something that doesn’t suck

6:48 PM · 21 Oct 2020

“So? Got any ideas cooking?”

The thing is, I always do. Within seconds, usually. Sometimes before I even finish reading a tweet. But right now, my mind just draws a giant blank. Right now, I’m looking at this tweet, but the only words I’m really hearing are Jack’s on his way out the door: Don’t you dare stand there and tell me it isn’t personal.

“Actually, I was thinking — I had some other ideas for things we could post, memes or some funny quote retweets we could do—”

“Sure, of course, we can do those later. But how are we going to respond to this?”

I’ve been smiling this uneasy smile, but I can feel it starting to tilt on my face. And that’s not the only thing tilting. Something is off here, something I don’t fully understand.

“Should we?” I ask. I keep my voice bright and noncombative. “I mean, they’re such small potatoes. We can do better than that, right? The McDonald’s Twitter account posted some promotion about their new McCafé flavor this morning, and I bet I could—”

“Maybe you could sleep on it? We can loop in Taffy in the morning.”

She pops another tomato into her mouth.

“Actually, Mom, um — I’m really busy this week, and I don’t think I should tweet at that Girl Cheesing account anymore.”

She shrugs. “So give Taffy some jumping-off points.”

I turn my back on her, pretending to wipe some crumbs off the counter so I can pinch my eyes shut for a moment and brace myself. Unlike Paige, I’m not so good on the whole rebellion front.

“What I mean is, I think we should just … full stop. No more tweeting at them at all.”

The tomato crunching stops for a moment. “You can’t just let him win.”

My ears snag on the word, my heart lurching.

“What do you mean ‘him’?”

There’s a beat, and then my mom waves her hand dismissively. “The owner’s probably a he.”

“It’s called Girl Cheesing.”

Not to mention, assuming an owner of a business is a guy is just not my mom’s MO. Long before she dreamed up the idea for Big League Burger and helped build it up to the veritable empire it is today, she was almost too progressive a feminist for a place like Nashville, where she jokingly but not-quite-jokingly would clamp her hands over our ears anytime a line in a country song said something about girls with painted-on jeans or sitting on tailgates, saying it would make us “the complicit kind of cowgirl.”

“You know what I mean.”

But now she’s the one having trouble looking at me.

I could tell her, I suppose. About Jack. But I already know what it’ll look like — that I have a crush on him or something, and I’m backing out of something that matters to her over a dumb boy.

“I’m going to lie down,” says my mom, getting up from the table so suddenly she leaves her briefcase and her sunglasses behind. “There should be leftovers in the fridge if you’re hungry.”

I can’t stand the idea of her being upset with me. I feel it all over again like some phantom force — that tug between her and Paige, except this time, of all people, it’s between her and Jack.

“I’ll queue up some ideas,” I tell her retreating back.

Which isn’t a lie. I will. They just won’t necessarily have anything to do with our Twitter feud. This has to be where it ends. It was embarrassing enough when it was a tiger against an ant; it’s another thing entirely when it’s a tiger attacking a family. And as determined as Jack was not to hear me out, the truth is, I understand that — the pride. The loyalty. The ridiculous lengths you’ll go to when it comes to protecting your own.

We used to have that, once upon a time. Now, I guess, the front lines are just me and 280 characters on a phone screen.

Jack

Wolf

This. Has been. The longest day. Of my entire existence

Bluebird

Oh hey look who’s alive!

Wolf

Barely, though

Wolf

Sorry I’ve been MIA

Wolf

And to answer your question: be Spider-Man. That is what I want to do with my life

Wolf

But since that is a biological impossibility I have turned my attention to slightly more realistic pursuits

Bluebird

Disappointing, but go on

Wolf

Honestly? What’s probably going to happen is I end up in the family business

Bluebird

Maybe don’t go on. This is starting to sound like the opening to a Godfather movie

Wolf

Believe me, I have made PLENTY of offers people have no problem refusing

Wolf

But family business aside, I guess I like working with apps

Bluebird

Like making them?

Wolf

I guess, yeah. I mean I’m obviously not a pro at it but it’s fun to tinker with

Bluebird

Well? Have you made any?

Wolf

REALLY dumb things

Bluebird

Show me

Wolf

You might not like me anymore

Bluebird

Who says I like you now?

Wolf

Um OUCH

Bluebird

How about this? If you don’t show me I won’t like you anymore

Wolf

That logic is cruel but sound. You asked for this

Wolf

macncheeseme.com

Bluebird

Is this … is this an app for finding emergency mac and cheese

Wolf

Like Spider-Man, I am only looking out for the citizens of New York

Bluebird

Oh my god it says there are 203 places within a three-mile radius of me where I could get mac and cheese RIGHT NOW

Wolf

Really though is there any other reason for people to live in this city

Bluebird

I AM SO OVERWHELMED

Wolf

Mac and cheese fan?

Bluebird

You should do another one of these but with cupcakes

Wolf

Your feedback is noted and appreciated

Bluebird

Really though, this is super cool

Wolf

Thanks. You’re like one of two people on the planet who has the access link, so be honored I guess

Bluebird

WHAT? You should be sharing this shit with the world. It’s your moral responsibility

Wolf

With great power …

Bluebird

Comes delicious responsibility

Bluebird

I think I’m gonna get mac and cheese, I’m not kidding

Wolf

This is my legacy now, huh?

Bluebird

And hey your dreams technically didn’t NOT come true

Bluebird

Since you’re posting your app on the world wide … web

Bluebird

Get it?

Wolf

I’m blocking you.

Bluebird

WEBS. Like SPIDER-MAN’S!!!!

Wolf

Blocked

Bluebird doesn’t answer me for a few moments, then. I assume she’s just hustling her way out the door like I am, until I reach the 6 train platform and see another notification come in that makes my stomach drop.

Bluebird

Do you think it’s weird that the app hasn’t outed us yet?

Bluebird

Like maybe we are lab rats in this app’s experiment or something

Wolf

IDK. It is weird though

Bluebird

Are we going to do something dumb like not tell each other who we are until graduation

Wolf

Do you want to know?

Bluebird

Sometimes

Bluebird

You?

Wolf

Sometimes

Wolf

I feel like

Wolf

Ah sorry that sent too soon

Wolf

I don’t know. What if you think I’m someone I’m not and you’re disappointed?

Bluebird

I feel the same way

Bluebird

Just kidding. I’m embarrassingly hot. I’m actually Blake Lively

Wolf

Well this is awkward because I’m sitting with her right now, so

Bluebird

SHIT. Not again

Wolf

XOXO gossip wolf

I spend the rest of the ride to the Upper East Side typing and deleting messages back, wondering if I should just leave it at that or say what I want to say. The trouble is, I don’t know what I want to say. If I want us to stay in the dark, or if I want all our cards out on the table.

But if I’ve learned one thing from occasionally being too impulsive for my own good, it’s that once you open a door like that, you don’t get to close it again. Right now, Bluebird is nobody and everybody at once — but right now, Bluebird likes me. And I’m worried that in changing that first bit, the second one might change too.

Apparently that worry is intense enough that I forget my breakfast. My family owns a deli we live on top of, but somehow I not only forget to grab one of the infinite delicious options I have at my disposal, but I don’t realize it until I’m standing outside of homeroom, five minutes to the bell, with no other options but to eat the ridiculous red tie they make us wear as part of our uniforms.

My stomach gurgles like a sentient being. This is it, then. I’ll die before noon.

It doesn’t help I got next to no sleep last night. After that shift, I should have slept like a dead person, but every time I did, my dreams were all tangled, like someone rattled the synapses in my brain. I kept waking up to different jolts to my system — my anger at Pepper. The irritation of Ethan getting off scot-free, yet again. The worry of wondering whether I’d shown the mysterious Bluebird too much by sending her the link to that old app I made last year, and the gnawing guilt of knowing even by sending it, the situation just got a little more complicated than it was before.

I scan the hallway for Paul. There’s one friendship I know I haven’t screwed up. A friendship that comes with a free CLIF Bar, if I’m lucky, because Paul seems to be carrying an absurd amount with him at all times, as if the apocalypse is going to hit while we’re in class.

Apparently my luck has really and truly run out this morning, because the person whose face I spot instead of Paul’s is the last one I want to see right now.

“Can I talk to you?”

I had a plan for this. I rehearsed it in my head last night like a total loser, which I had plenty of time to do, thanks to the not-sleeping thing. And the plan was simple, because the plan was this: ignore Pepper. Don’t acknowledge anything she says, and walk away.

The thing I did not factor into that equation, unfortunately, was Pepper herself. Or the fact that she seems every bit as miserable as I do, with her bangs slightly off-kilter and her blue eyes earnest and overtired, as though she spent most of last night awake too. Still, I’m determined not to acknowledge her — that is, until I see that she appears to be holding a container full of the most obscenely gooey blondie situation I have ever laid eyes on in my life.

I shift my weight between my feet, my resolve and bravado as absent as my breakfast.

“The bell’s about to ring,” I say.

“Just for a second?”

It’s more than her eyes. There’s this openness to her. Not like there’s a crack in the mask of Robot Pepper, but like the mask is off completely. Somehow in this moment that she’s never looked more different, she’s also never seemed more familiar — and just like that, I realize she’s already become someone I can’t just dismiss, even though by all accounts I should.

“Fine.”

Ethan passes us in the hallway, raising his eyebrows at me as he does. Pepper’s face is on fire by the time he slips into homeroom.

“I know I said it, but — I really am sorry. I had no idea it was you on the other end of that.”

“But you knew it was someone.”

“Yeah. And I felt gross about it. But my mom…” She shakes her head before I can even pull a face. “It’s a whole thing. But what I wanted to say was that I get it. I mean, I know it doesn’t seem like I would, but — we were smaller, once.”

I can’t help it — it’s coming out of me before I can do anything to clamp it down. “You think we can’t hold our own because we’re small?”

“No, no, that’s not what I — sorry. That’s not what I meant at all.” She takes a breath, and I realize she’s actually flustered. Pepper, the girl who was one time challenged to argue against global warming for a debate club event in front of half the school, is flustered talking to me. “What I mean is, back when Big League Burger started, it was just us. My parents and my sister and me. And it was like that for a while, before we … well, you know. So I get it.”

There’s this uncertain lilt in her voice, in the way she is looking at me. Like she isn’t expecting me to accept her apology. To be fair, I wasn’t either.

But that’s not the reason why, for a few moments, I don’t say anything. It’s that there’s something else hovering on the end of that last bit, like there’s more to the story. Something else that fractured between the Big League Burger then and whatever it’s become since.

I want to ask, but then Pepper is shoving the Tupperware under my nose. “Also, these are for you.”

I may have my pride, but my stomach sure doesn’t. I already know I’m going to take them, probably already knew before Pepper opened her mouth and swayed me with her speech.

“What are they?” I somehow manage to ask, despite the saliva pooling in my mouth.

“An apology. They’re literally called So Sorry Blondies.”

“Another Evans sisters invention?”

She lets out a huff of a laugh, like she’s been holding her breath. “Yeah.”

I take it from her, partially because she looks like she has no intention of putting her arms down otherwise, and partially because I’m so hungry, the janitor might have to come peel me off the floor if I don’t eat something soon. She watches me nervously, as if she can’t tell if she’s actually been forgiven or not.

“Look.” I glance into the classroom, where Ethan is thoroughly distracted by Stephen and no longer keeping an eye on us. “I may have … overreacted.”

Pepper shakes her head. “I told you. I get it. It’s your family.”

“Yeah. But it’s also — well, to be honest, this has been kind of good for business.”

Pepper’s brow furrows, that one little crease returning. “What, the tweets?”

“Yeah.” I scratch the back of my neck, sheepish. “Actually, we had a line out the door yesterday. It was kind of intense.”

“That’s … that’s good, right?”

The tone of my voice is clearly not matching up with the words I’m saying, but if I’m being honest, I’m still wary of this whole overnight business boom. And if I’m being honest, I’m even more wary of Pepper. If this really is as much of a family business as she claims it is — to the point where she’s helping run the Twitter handle, when even I know enough about corporate Twitter accounts to know entire teams of experienced people get paid to do that — then she might have had more of a hand in this whole recipe theft thing than she’s letting on.

The fact of the matter is, I can’t trust her. To the point of not knowing whether I can even trust her knowing how our business is doing, or just how badly we need it.

“Yeah, um, I guess.” I try to make it sound noncommittal. My acting skills, much like my breakfast-packing skills, leave much to be desired.

“So…”

“So.”

Pepper presses her lips into a thin line, a question in her eyes.

“So, I guess — if your mom really wants you to keep tweeting…”

“Wait. Yesterday you were pissed. Two minutes ago you were pissed.”

“I am pissed. You stole from us,” I reiterate. “You stole from an eighty-five-year-old woman.”

“I didn’t—”

“Yeah, yeah, but still. You’re them, and I’m … her. It’s like a choose your fighter situation, and we just happen to be the ones up to bat.”

“So you’re saying — you don’t not want me to keep this up?”

“The way I see it, you don’t have to make your mom mad, and we get a few more customers in the door too.”

Pepper takes a breath like she’s going to say something, like she’s going to correct me, but after a moment, she lets it go. Her face can’t quite settle on an expression, toeing the line between dread and relief.

“You’re sure?”

I answer by opening the container she handed me. The smell that immediately wafts out of it should honestly be illegal; it stops kids I’ve never even spoken to in their tracks.

“Are you a witch?” I ask, reaching in and taking a bite of one. It’s like Monster Cake, the Sequel — freaking Christmas in my mouth. I already want more before I’ve even managed to chew. My eyes close as if I’m experiencing an actual drug high — and maybe I am, because I forget myself entirely and say, “This might even be better than our Kitchen Sink Macaroons.”

“Kitchen Sink Macaroons?”

Eyes open again. Yikes. Note to self: dessert is the greatest weapon in Pepper’s arsenal. I swallow my bite so I can answer her.

“It’s kind of well-known, at least in the East Village. It even got in some Hub Seed roundup once. I’d tell you to try some, but you might steal the recipe, so.”

Pepper smiles, then — actually smiles, instead of the little smirk she usually does. It’s not startling, but what it does to me in that moment kind of is.

Before I can examine the unfamiliar lurch in my stomach, the bell rings and knocks the smile right off her face. I follow just behind her, wondering why it suddenly seems too hot in here, like they cranked the air up for December instead of October. I dismiss it by the time I get to my desk — probably just all the Twitter drama and the glory of So Sorry Blondies getting to my head.

“One rule,” she says, as we sit in the last two desks in the back of the room.

I raise my eyebrows at her.

“We don’t take any of it personally.” She leans forward on her desk, leveling with me, her bangs falling into her face. “No more getting mad at each other. Cheese and state.”

“What happens on Twitter stays on Twitter,” I say with a nod of agreement. “Okay, then, second rule: no kid gloves.”

Mrs. Fairchild is giving that stern look over the room that never quite successfully quiets anyone down. Pepper frowns, waiting for me to elaborate.

“I mean — no going easy on each other. If we’re going to play at this, we’re both going to give it our A game, okay? No holding back because we’re…”

Friends, I almost say. No, I’m going to say. But then—

“I’d appreciate it if even one of you acknowledged the bell with your silence,” Mrs. Fairchild grumbles.

I turn to Pepper, expecting to find her snapping to attention the way she always does when an adult comes within a hundred feet of disciplining her. But her eyes are still intent on me, like she is sizing something up — like she’s looking forward to something I haven’t anticipated yet.

“All right. No taking it personally. And no holding back.”

She holds her hand out for me to shake again, under the desk so Mrs. Fairchild won’t see it. I smile and shake my head, wondering how someone can be so aggressively seventeen and seventy-five at the same time, and then I take it. Her hand is warm and small in mine, but her grip is surprisingly firm, with a pressure that almost feels like she’s still got her fingers wrapped around mine even after we let go.

I turn back to the whiteboard, a ghost of a smirk on my face. “Let the games begin.”