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Today 9:34 PM

No. I’m not doing that





but you CAN

right???

I put down the phone again, hooking it up to the charger and setting my alarm for the morning, determined to cope with this influx of information the only way my body knows how: going the hell to sleep. Just as I turn off the light, the phone buzzes again.

Jaaaaaaaaaaaaaacckkkk

And then, finally, whatever it is I’m feeling finds a point of focus, finds a place to funnel itself.

NO. Stop asking. It’s not fair to the other people on the app and I’m not gonna be a dick just so you can cheat it

I set the phone back down with unnecessary force and flick off the light. The phone doesn’t buzz for the rest of the night.





Pepper


By seven o’clock on Friday night, I am drafting a blog post for the next Pepper/Paige creation in my head: Pepper’s Crappy Crap Day Crinkle Cookies.

Ingredients: First, add unresolved tension with one Jack Campbell, who is either out sick or out participating in the Senior Skip Day shenanigans taking place during the school day. Mix in nearly twenty-four hours without contact from Wolf, two seconds after essentially baring my soul to him by showing him the thing I am most proud of in this world. Add what is proving to be the most awkward hangout with Landon and a large group of incredibly drunk teenagers on the face of the earth. Add chocolate chips, butter, flour, salt, cocoa powder, eggs, and more embarrassment than the body of a teenage girl can possibly contain, set the oven to a bajillion degrees, and set the whole damn thing on fire.

“You look kind of … green.”

I glance over at Pooja, who has been my literal only solace in this crinkle-cookie crapfest of a day. I spent most of it staring at my phone screen, waiting for either a response from Wolf confirming we were still on for tonight, or a response from Jack after I texted him that morning asking why he wasn’t in class. Nothing, nada, the phone screen so blank, I could practically feel myself shrinking into my seat.

I considered not even going out to hang with Landon and the other seniors, filled with an inexplicable kind of dread as the day went on. But I couldn’t miss it. Either Landon was Wolf or he wasn’t, and I was too invested in knowing to back out now.

Well. It’s safe to say now that Landon is very much not Wolf. In fact, there are a whole host of things Landon is and is not that have become extremely apparent in the last few hours I have spent in his company.

I got a text from him around five to meet up with the group just outside of the Met steps. I’d been ready for at least two hours, having carefully picked out an outfit for one of the rare few moments my classmates would see me out of uniform, applying and reapplying such an absurd amount of a lipstick Paige left behind that I was on the verge of accidentally tattooing my lips. I’d picked out a sweater dress with tights and a pair of smart boots, with a pretty pea coat my mom handed down to me and a scarf my dad got me for my birthday.

It was perfect for a crisp day in November, but all wrong for what I stumbled into—which was not my classmates, but the drunk, rowdy, raided-my-rich-parents’-liquor-cabinet version of them. Landon was the first to spot me, his hair all askew, wearing a pair of jeans and a Lacoste T-shirt, and red in the cheeks despite the fact it was forty degrees outside.

“If it isn’t the Big League Burger heiress herself!” he yelled, prompting some hoots from our classmates that made the tips of my ears burn. “Better watch out, Campbell!”

Ethan glanced up from his perch on the steps, also red-cheeked and glossy-eyed but far more composed than Landon and some of the other stumbling boys were. “Hey,” he said with a friendly enough wave, before returning to the far more important business of making out with Stephen.

I had an uneven, topsy-turvy sense that they had been talking about me before I arrived, which maybe I should have expected, given my new Hub Seed notoriety. Landon wrapped a drunken arm around me, a half hug of a greeting, and messed up my hair. My cheeks burned and my whole body went stiff—why couldn’t I just be normal? Be casual and fun and lean into a hug, rib him the way he was clearly about to rib me, do something to flirt back?

The moment was over too late for me to do anything but be annoyed at myself for it—for the way I still felt like I had to make myself fit into this world, even after all this time. For the realization that for some reason, I’d hinged that feeling on this person who seemed entirely unaware of the way I’d thought of him, both at the beginning of Stone Hall to the near end.

I glanced around the group, hoping to make eye contact with literally anyone on the same level of sobriety as me, which is when, mercifully, Pooja showed up, looking every bit as thrown as I was. She got a similarly raucous greeting from the group, dodging a boy who tried to hug her with what seemed to be an open container of some sort of alcoholic concoction in his hands and ducking her way over to me.

“Uhhhh,” she said, her eyes wide on mine.

I smiled in relief. “Yeah.”

And maybe we both would have ditched right then—her eyes seemed to be asking me without asking if I was game—but then Shane announced he was drunkenly posting in the Hallway Chat on Weazel, and then everyone was grabbing for their phones to either look at what he’d posted or do the same.

Pooja shoved her hands into her pockets, taking a step back from the madness as if to wash her hands of responsibility for it. “I guess we’re not going to an actual place to eat,” she said wryly.