Tweet Cute(72)

Pooja and Jack drop me off at the lobby of the building, Pooja hugging me and rattling off instructions to stay hydrated. Jack leans in unexpectedly and hugs me too, like it’s the most natural thing in the world, and just like that it is. I hug him back, squeezing him for an extra beat, accidentally scrunching some of his jacket in my fist.

“Feel better,” he says, his cheeks bright red.

I do. So much better, I forget to respond, until the doorman of the building clears his throat and Pooja’s eyebrows go up as if to say, Girl.

“Yeah—you too.” Shit. “I mean—well—”

Jack laughs, backing up and nearly stumbling into someone on the sidewalk. “Later, Pepperoni.”





Pepper


For someone who has had the kind of day that ended in literal vomit, I have no right to be full-on grinning in the elevator. But I am, and it’s wild, like there’s something bubbling in me, pooling at the base of me and making me feel so light I feel as if I should tether myself to the railing. I let myself imagine things I never let myself imagine: what it would feel like to grab Jack by the sleeve of his coat and pull him close. What it would feel like to run my hand through his wet, messy, post-dive hair. What it would feel like to cross the distance to him in the pool yesterday, close my eyes, and kiss him.

I’m still dizzy in my own imagination when I open the door, completely miss my mom’s suitcases lined up by the doorway, and walk straight into her poised on the couch with an expression that slams into my daydreams like an oncoming truck.

“Uh.”

My mom raises her eyebrows at me. “Sit.”

I consider my other options, which are limited to running away and seeing how far the five dollars in my purse will take me. Pooja told me the other day the Q train goes straight to Coney Island.

Too bad it doesn’t go to Mars.

So I sit. Mom turns to me, her expression unreadable—I can’t tell if she’s mad or concerned, but she’s definitely some kind of upset. “We have several things we need to discuss.”

I wonder if it’s too late to pull the I just vomited in a public park card, but it feels too risky.

“Okay?”

She pulls out her phone, and I can feel the anger inflating in me like a balloon. If she pulls up the Twitter page, I will explode. I will go full Paige Evans with a metaphorical baseball bat and yell until the neighbors think she’s back from college. I may even lean fully into the teenage cliché of slamming and locking the bedroom door.

She passes it to me. It’s not the Twitter page. It’s my … midterm grades.

And they’re not stellar.

“Oh.”

I mean, it’s not like they’re terrible. But by Pepper standards, they are pretty bad. I feel an unfamiliar kind of swoop in my stomach, something I’m so unused to, I don’t even recognize it for a moment: failure.

If this were Nashville, I could shrug and say, Okay, so I have a couple of B’s. So what? But this isn’t Nashville. And here, a B in the final stretch of college admissions is the equivalent of rolling over and playing dead.

“I didn’t realize…”

My mom leans in, pulling the phone away. “What’s going on, Pepper? This isn’t like you.”

Of course it isn’t. I’ve run on a steady diet of five hours of sleep on weekdays for four years now. How could anything be like me? How am I supposed to know exactly what I’m like anymore?

And the past few weeks have dialed it up to eleven. There’s no time, and this whole “war” with Girl Cheesing has stolen what little of it I have, carved it up, and chopped it into stupid tweets. I know it’s not going to fly as an excuse, but it’s the truth.

“The Twitter thing. It’s taking up my study time.”

“You send like two tweets a day. It’s not exactly a full-time job.”

I feel a twinge of sympathy for Taffy that is far from the first and certainly won’t be the last. “It is exactly like a full-time job, Mom. It takes time to come up with those tweets, to figure out how to respond, to gauge the audience reaction to them—”

“I worry what’s taking up most of your time is flirting with this boy.”

And there it is. I sit very still, like an animal with the viewfinder of a gun targeted on its back, waiting to see where exactly she’s planning to take aim.

“I finally read that article on Hub Seed,” says my mom. “I didn’t realize you were going toe-to-toe with your classmate. Or that you wanted this attached to your name on the internet forever.”

My face is burning. “I had nothing to do with that. I didn’t ask or want Taffy to put my name on anything.”

I worry she’s not going to believe me, but she’s moved on too fast for it to matter. “And this Jack?’

It feels important to protect him. I didn’t realize how intentionally I’d kept his existence from her until now. “He goes to my school.”

The deflection is about as effective as hiding behind the couch cushions. In fact, my mom doesn’t even seem surprised. “And he has nothing to do with these grades, or you ignoring Taffy’s texts?”

“I stopped answering because we’re done with this. The retweet war on the Hub settled it.”

Her jaw tightens. “I can only assume that boy pulled one over on you with that picture.”