Tweet Cute(85)
She closes the laptop and holds her hand there for a moment. “I have to ask. Are you drunk in that picture?”
“No, Jesus, Mom. I had food poisoning.”
She nods and puts a hand up in defense of herself, brushing the matter aside so quickly that at the very least I know she believes me. Then she goes very still, seeming to absorb it all. I watch the familiar shape of her face, the frown that says there is a problem but she’s going to find a way to solve it, but it doesn’t last nearly long enough. We both know there’s nothing we can do.
“I’m sure this will all blow over in a—”
“I have voicemails on my personal cell phone from national publications requesting comments, Mom. This isn’t blowing anywhere.”
There’s a beat, the wobbly kind where it seems anything could happen. We are still so unused to fighting that there’s no script to follow, no obvious move to anticipate next. But the last thing I’m expecting is for her to stand abruptly to leave the room.
“Where are you going?”
She pauses in the doorway, her back to me and her head turned just enough for me to see some of her chin. “To talk to your principal and straighten this suspension out before it goes on your permanent record.”
“But, Mom—”
“And when I get back, and I’ve sorted through what on earth is going on here … we need to have a talk.”
She turns fully then, stiff in that distinct way she always is when she’s dealing with Paige. It stings more than anything she could say to me.
“Yeah. Let’s talk, Ronnie.”
It is somehow the worst but most effective hit I could aim in that moment. My mom is unflappable enough that I’ve seen her nearly get clipped by taxis and not so much as flinch, but the nickname seems to hit her in the one place she didn’t think to protect.
She sweeps out the door before I can see just how lasting the blow is, leaving me there with my bedhead and my laptop and an infinite void of pictures of me throwing up into various pop culture phenomena.
For a good ten minutes or so, I’m too stunned to move. There’s no distraction from the itch, the hurt, the anger—I can’t call Paige. I can’t even go to school. There’s no place to shake it off, nowhere to go.
And suddenly I need somewhere to go.
I kick off the covers, my eyes stinging, my face overheating. I grab an old pair of jeans, a T-shirt covered in cartoon doughnuts that I stole from Paige, a ratty old pair of sneakers, and yank my hair into a ponytail. I slip myself back into the me I once was, and for a few moments, in my old clothes and my old shoes and my old state of mind, I can let it go: the endless homework, the college applications, the Twitter notifications, the stupid meme.
What I can’t let go of is the way I tried just now to tell my mom my world was falling apart, and she left.
Well, if she’s allowed to leave, then so am I. I grab my wallet, my keys, the MetroCard Jack talked me through buying the other day. There’s only one place I want to go, and it’s the last place I should be.
Jack
I’m really raking in the superlatives. It kicked off with Worst Pseudo Pen Pal on the Planet, veered sharply into Worst Best Friend in the Galaxy, and now, to top it all off, Worst Son/Grandson in the Known Universe and Every Infinite Reality Hereafter.
There are so many people to apologize to, I don’t even know where to start. It feels like there’s a fire in every corner of my brain, and instead of putting any of them out, I’m just frozen and watching it spread across the room.
The mess with Pepper is terrible enough on its own. There are so many things I could have, would have, should have done—like take down that stupid picture when I saw Ethan tweet it—but the moment we heard Grandma Belly fall over in the other room, anything beyond it was out of my mind so quickly and so thoroughly, there wasn’t space for anything other than panic and this gray look on my dad’s face I don’t think I’ll ever forget.
She slipped getting out of a chair and ended up hitting her head, and in the end had a concussion and a few stitches. They released her last night, and she’s back at home and going to be fine. But that first minute when we walked in and saw her on the floor with blood on the carpet, before my dad started shouting for me to get the phone and the commotion stirred her awake, was probably the worst minute of my life.
And while that was by far the worst of it, it turns out it was just the beginning of the long, lingering shitstorm that has since taken over my life.
“I don’t even know what to do with you,” says my dad. It’s bright and early in the morning, a time when he’s usually overseeing things in the kitchen or going over our stock to put in orders to our meat and cheese suppliers, but instead we’re sitting in the Time-Out Booth so the whole world is witness to my humiliation.
Not that my dad can really do anything to me now. I can’t see how he can possibly make me feel any worse than I already do.
In the last twenty-four hours, not only have I let Pepper get turned into the meme of the week, but I’ve basically wrecked Paul’s life too. After I left to help my mom get Grandma Belly out of the hospital, Paul apparently decided to ignore everything I said to him and agreed to meet this Goldfish person on the roof of the school. After about a half hour of waiting last night it started to get dark, and Paul realized not only was he locked up there, but Goldfish had posted a picture of him stuck up there and written, can u believe this guy actually self-described as “hot”? weazel app i want my money back.