Tweet Cute(79)

I’m not sure what to say or if I should even speak. The air in the room is so thick, it feels like it’s slowing down time. I glance over at my dad, cautious at first, but he’s not even looking at me. He’s leaning on the kitchen counter and scowling at his knuckles.

“Dad?”

He blinks, looking over at me. I’m expecting some kind of punishment of my own. A Time-Out Booth–level lecture, maybe. Something on par with whatever the hell just happened here.

But he seems so distracted that even when he does get around to the whole disciplining thing, it seems like more of an afterthought than anything else.

“You shouldn’t be bringing a date into this apartment without supervision.”

“It wasn’t…”

Well. It kind of was. But it’s not like Mom didn’t know we were up here. And Grandma Belly is technically home.

But my dad’s already pacing out of the kitchen, heading for his bedroom. He’s not even waiting for me to apologize. And he’s certainly not waiting for me to ask the dozens of questions on the tip of my tongue, chasing Pepper and her mom out the door.

“Sorry,” I say—partially because I am, for Pepper’s sake, and because I want him to stop for a second, so I can figure out what to ask and how to ask it.

My dad just nods.

So that’s it. I’ve gotten away with … whatever it is I got away with, I guess. I’m still puzzling out what exactly that is, but my dad’s Ronnie and Pepper’s mom’s Figures and the absurdly weighted look between the two of them just before they booked it out of here is still rattling around in my head like a pinball in a machine.

And then there’s a thud from the other room, and both my dad and I stop in our tracks, everything else forgotten faster than it takes for us to get to Grandma Belly’s door.





Pepper


Approximately eighteen hours after my kiss with Jack Campbell—my kiss with Jack Campbell—I am sitting at a card table with Pooja in the front entrance of the school behind our veritable army of baked goods, overanalyzing the situation to such an absurd degree, it is now less of a kiss and more of an FBI investigation.

Pooja, however, isn’t having it.

“He likes you. You like him,” says Pooja. “Honestly, it’s old news. Even preteens in Iowa on the Hub realized it before you.”

“But last night…”

“Talk to him.”

“I’ve tried.” It’s a humiliating thing to confess, but Pooja needs context if I’m going to get any advice: “He hasn’t texted back.”

In fact, Jack has all but turned into a ghost. He mysteriously did not show up for homeroom. I only know he’s here today because I saw him in the cafeteria at lunch, but he was way across the room and had slipped into his calc class before I could catch up to him. And now he’s conspicuously absent from the bake sale too—the only reason we even have the baked goods is because Ethan, in a rare moment of actually participating in his dive captain duties, dropped them off at the front office for us.

Granted, he is most likely making out with Stephen under the stairwell by the gym while we hawk all these goods, but at least he kind of tried.

“Well, he can’t hide forever. So I guess you’ll get your answers soon enough.” Pooja leans back and props her foot on the chair that was supposed to be occupied with Jack. “Maybe he’s just embarrassed, after the whole thing with your mom.”

“Yeah, maybe.” I shake my head. “His dad called Mom Ronnie. My dad doesn’t even call her that. Vee, maybe, but never Ronnie.”

“That, I have to admit, is intriguing. And I will be the first one to reblog the conspiracy theories when they hit Tumblr, because I personally suspect your parents are part of some weird underground fast casual food cult,” says Pooja, popping another bit of a peanut-butter-and-jelly cupcake in her mouth. In her defense, she did pay for it. “But your mom can’t ban you from seeing Jack. He’s ridiculous, sure, but he’s not, like, a delinquent.”

“Maybe he wasn’t yesterday,” I mutter, thinking of his unexplained absence.

“And the kiss was good, right?”

“I mean, it wasn’t not good.” I shrug, trying to seem casual about it even as my heart starts beating a little faster and my palms are sweating where they’re propped on the cash box. It was my first kiss, and one of those milestones I only realized I hadn’t given enough thought to executing until it was actually happening—and boy, did it happen.

And then swiftly un-happen so fast my ears are still ringing from Jack’s Wait and my mom’s lecturing on the Uber ride back.

Still, even with all that lecturing, and the fact I am grounded until kingdom come, and my mom is quite possibly part of a food services mafia with Jack’s dad, it was kind of absurdly, stupidly great.

Or at least it was until the second Jack brought it to an abrupt halt.

It’s not just the kiss, though. I know I should feel bad about lying to my mom, about breaking her trust, and I do. Enough that I almost blurted out the whole thing to Paige on the phone last night, just so I could feel better when she inevitably took my side. But the guilt is completely separate from the rest of it, from the terror and the thrill of something as simple as getting on the 6 train and taking a twenty-minute ride downtown.