Tweet Cute(69)

I tried to match her tone, tried to keep the swell of disappointment out of my voice. “Yeah. Yikes.”

A second later I flinched in surprise as Landon shoved his phone screen under our noses.

“Spell check from the brainiest chicks at Stone Hall?”

I froze like a deer in headlights. Pooja took the phone from him, which had a drafted text he was about to put in the Hallway Chat. I never even read what he was about to post; the username displayed on the screen was Cheetah. My eyes were stuck on it, reading it over and over and over until Pooja finally let out a breath of a forced laugh and handed it back to him.

“Good to post?” Landon asked, leaning in so close to the two of us, I could smell the sharpness of whatever he’d been drinking on his breath.

Pooja offered a tight smile. “There are no spelling errors, that’s for sure.”

“Awesome.”

He hit send on his post—Met steps, bring booze—and walked away abruptly, leaving me on the edge of the steps with my mouth wide open and my chest tight with something I didn’t quite know the shape of yet. Relief, maybe. Or disappointment. Or some mingling of the two.

Landon wasn’t Wolf. That, surprisingly, didn’t seem to move me in one direction or another; it was just a fact, and I accepted it with ease, like someone telling me what was on the menu in the school cafeteria that day.

But the rest of it hit me sideways—because if Landon wasn’t Wolf, somebody else was. And whoever that somebody else was, they apparently wanted nothing to do with me.

Maybe it was the blog. There’s nothing blatant on it that would connect it to me and Paige, but maybe he figured it out anyway. And maybe when he learned the truth, Pepper Evans became a hell of a lot less appealing than Bluebird ever did.

And maybe that’s only fair. On Weazel I’m not the Pepper I am at school. I’m relaxed, and goofy, and free to say whatever I want—and the longer the app didn’t reveal us to each other, the easier it got. But I can’t expect whoever it was to reconcile that with the person I am at Stone Hall. Jack used to call me a robot, and I’ve always known there was a grain of truth to it. I’ve spent all four years at Stone Hall gritting my teeth, keeping my head down, and trying to crush everything in my path. Not exactly conducive to lasting friendships.

Of which I apparently had none at the moment. Jack was AWOL, Wolf was in the void, and I was …

“Thank god enough people have started coming to the study groups that we don’t have to use Weazel anymore,” said Pooja, closing out of the app with a roll of her eyes. “These doofuses are going to clog up the Hallway Chat with their shitposting for the rest of the night.”

I bit my lip, forcing myself to rally. I wasn’t alone.

“That’s for sure,” I agreed.

She took a seat on the edge of the steps, and I followed suit. For a few moments we just watched as the cluster of our classmates weaved in and out of each other like drunk pinballs. A few weeks ago I didn’t know much more about them than their names and what their parents did, but thanks to Pooja’s study groups, I’ve actually gotten to know some of them better—like Bobby and Shane, who launched a podcast where they read all the Twilight books, and Jeannine, who is so obsessed with Lady Gaga, she’s seen her in concert nine times.

I glanced over and saw Pooja was pulling up one of the chain emails about the study group and responding to something.

“It isn’t, like, too much on you?” I asked. “Taking all the time to set this up?”

Pooja shrugged. “It’s worth it.” She hit send on her email and turned to me, shoving her hands back into her pockets and bracing herself against the cold. “Besides, I kind of stopped caring about my grades so much. I think our education system is effed up. The way we’re always teaching to tests. Defining each other by numbers instead of what we can actually contribute.”

A gust of wind picked up, and I stiffened—both against the wind and the truth of her words. My whole body wanted to reject them. I’d defined myself by those numbers for so long, it felt like without them, I didn’t have anything to anchor me in Stone Hall’s world.

“That’s pretty ballsy for this crowd,” I said. “But that’s—it’s great. That you know what you want to do.”

“You were kind of a part of it,” she admitted.

It took me a moment to respond, so surprised that all I could say was, “Me?”

“Yeah.” Pooja shifted her weight on the step, leaning a bit farther from me. “It’s so dumb and you probably don’t remember—like, so dumb—we were doing some quiz bowl thing, freshman year?”

For a moment I went so still that I couldn’t even shiver.

Pooja’s eyes flitted to the side at the memory, looking rueful. “And the teacher called on you, and you hesitated for a moment—and you just looked like, so miserable. Like you were on death row. So I gave you the answer. Or I thought I did. Turns out it was the wrong one.”

“That was an accident?” I blurted, before I could stop myself.

Pooja’s eyes snapped to meet mine. “You do remember.”

Of course I did. It was the catalyst to four years of me trying to keep up with her, four years of trying to one-up her so I could be in a place where she could never one-up me again.