I hit Park Avenue, nodding at the doorman on the way out, and pull the corporate account back up on my phone. It will honestly look stupid for us to respond to this barb. We’re already in hot water for the way we responded to the last one. But it’s either tweet now or get a bunch of semi-terrified texts from Taffy later.
I’m still half asleep by the time I get to homeroom, but not half asleep enough I don’t notice Jack and Ethan muttering to each other in heated voices in a corner of the room. I sit at my usual desk, trying to ignore it, but the room is empty enough it’s hard not to hear them.
“… going to kill me. He thinks I sent that stupid picture.”
“So what? I’ll tell him it was me. I don’t care. It’s not that big of a deal.”
“He’s already texted me like seven times. He told us to drop it—”
“You should have seen the shit people were saying—”
“I did. I did see it. And then I logged off.”
I pull up the Weazel app, wondering if it’s something from the Hallway Chat. But the only recent message in there of note is someone roasting the grammatical correctness of the graffiti someone recently scrawled in one of the stalls of the girls’ bathrooms. No pictures that look like they’d set the Campbell twins at each other’s throats, which is a weird enough occurrence in and of itself—I’ve never once seen them fight.
“Just forget it,” Jack mutters. And then he’s sitting himself right down in the seat next to mine, the same way we were yesterday.
I don’t know if I’m supposed to say anything or not. There’s no way to pretend I didn’t hear their conversation because the three of us are practically the only people in the room. That is, until Ethan says something under his breath to excuse himself and then ducks out.
It’s quiet for a moment, then, but knowing Jack, it won’t be for long.
“Do you have any siblings?” Jack asks.
He looks antsier than usual, slouching in his seat, his knuckles quietly drumming on the desk.
“Yeah. An older sister.”
Jack nods. Opens his mouth as though he’s going to say something else, and then thinks better of it.
I pull out my Monster Cake, a little squished in its aluminum foil, and break off a piece to offer Jack. His eyebrows lift, and he looks at me in confusion, like I’m trying to hand him a fish.
“It’s not poisonous.”
He takes it from me, examining it. A few crumbs end up on his desk. “What is it?”
I hesitate for a moment. I don’t think I’ve actually discussed this unholy mash-up of desserts with anyone aside from my parents and Paige. I wonder if it’s some kind of betrayal, sharing it with someone outside of the family.
“Monster Cake.”
“Monster Cake?”
His lips quirk in amusement, and then I see it again—another shift, another reconsideration. I decide I don’t mind it this time.
“It’s pretty much a mash-up of every junk food known to man, baked into a cake. Hence the name.”
Jack takes a bite. “Holy shit.”
My face heats up. People are starting to walk into the room just as Jack literally tips back in his seat and moans.
“Jack,” I hiss.
“This is the best thing I’ve ever tasted.”
I can’t tell if he’s making fun of me or not, but either way, he is decidedly making a scene. I wrap up the rest of the cake and shove it into my backpack.
“I mean, this is obscene. How did you come up with this?”
“It’s just—I mean, it’s not like I … We were little kids when we made it.”
Jack literally kisses his fingers. I stare into my lap, my face burning, a reluctant smile blooming. I haven’t had a ton of time to update our blog lately—Paige has been posting on overdrive to make up for it—so I’ve forgotten how it feels, having someone try some weird dessert I made up and enjoy it. Usually it’s just people commenting from some corner of the internet, saying they tried it, or Paige groaning her approval when we meet up and bake together.
But this is different. This is so … personal, almost. Having someone outside of the family try something I made right in front of me. Maybe I don’t hate it.
“I feel like you may have flown too close to the dessert sun. I’ve never tasted anything like this, and my parents literally own a—”
“Mr. Campbell, if you insist on eating in my classroom, at least have the decency not to turn my floor into your personal napkin.”
I manage to muffle my laugh by turning it into a cough. Just as Mrs. Fairchild turns her attention back to the board, Jack catches my eye and winks.
I roll my eyes, and then his friend Paul comes in, buzzing about something that happened on the Weazel app. He’s lucky Mrs. Fairchild is either hard of hearing or very committed to pretending she is, or he’d be screwed right now, considering the no-tolerance policy on the app. That aside, there are narcs all over this place—enough of them that I’m never actually stupid enough to pull Weazel up on my phone at school.
Okay. Maybe sometimes. But I try not to, because whoever Wolf is, he responds so fast during school hours, I’m legitimately worried I’m going to get him in trouble.
And despite Jack’s suspicion that I was ratting people out to Rucker the other day, that’s pretty much my worst nightmare. If Wolf got in trouble and was kicked off the app, I don’t know what I’d do. It’s almost scary, how fast I went from not having him in my life to feeling like, Paige aside, he may be the best friend I’ve got. We’re just on the same wavelength on everything. Life at Stone Hall, but more importantly, feeling like the odd one out here.
The likeliest scenario is that Wolf is someone who has a study hall, or a gap in his schedule. Someone like Ethan, who’s constantly in and out for student government stuff. Or someone with one of the senior internships where they get to leave school for two hours a day, like—
Huh. Someone like Landon.
By the time homeroom lets out, my stomach is gurgling from lack of breakfast. I pull out the Monster Cake as covertly as I can, planning to shove some in my mouth when I open my locker, but I discover as soon as I unlock it that I have acquired a stray. Somehow Jack has managed to follow me across the length of the entire hallway, his friend Paul in tow.
“Just one more bite?”
I grin into my locker door, so he can’t see. “You sound like a junkie.”
“I might be one now, and it’s kind of your fault. So you have a responsibility to keep supplying. Or I’ll go into withdrawal.”
“What are you even talking about?” Paul asks, standing on the tips of his toes to look into my locker, even though we’re the exact same height.
I rip off another piece for Jack, and then, in a moment of Monster Cake benevolence, hand some to Paul too. I might as well stay on good terms with as many members of the dive team as I can, now that we’re apparently sharing lanes.
“Oh my god. You’re my new favorite person.”
Jack ribs him. “How easily your loyalties shift.”
Paul salutes us both. “Gotta head to my internship.”
I pause mid-chew. So maybe Landon’s not the only person I know who ducks out of school regularly.
I try to imagine it. Paul awake late at night by the dim light of his phone, texting me terrible puns about Great Expectations, making fun of our chain-smoking PE teacher for her aggressively hypocritical lectures on the dangers of cigarettes. Telling me about his family, listening to my woes about mine.
“Still on for grabbing some grub after practice?”
It doesn’t feel quite right, but that’s the problem—I can’t really imagine anyone being Wolf. Like there’s some kind of mental block, every time I try to give him a face. Sometimes he feels more like some bodiless entity than a person.
And sometimes—like yesterday, when he was upset about that thing with his parents—he’s so real it’s like we’re huddled in a corner together somewhere, so close I could reach out and touch.
I blink up at Jack, mentally replaying the last few seconds of whatever he was saying to me. “Huh? Oh. Yeah, I’m good for after practice.”
“Ethan said your coach sent you a meet calendar, if you want to forward it to me.”
“Oh, yeah.” I check to make sure the hallway is clear, then pull the attachment up on my phone and hand it to him. “You can airdrop it to yourself.”
Jack fumbles for a moment, trying to hold both our phones at the same time. “Your screen just went black.”
My hands are too occupied trying to wrap up the leftover Monster Cake. “The password’s just 1234.” My dad set up our phone codes for us when we all upgraded last month, and the only reason I tell Jack is because I have every intention of changing it when I have time.
Jack lets out a low whistle. “You realize that’s like the phone equivalent of leaving your keys under your mat.”
He hands me back my phone, and then the warning bell rings and Jack salutes me, heading off with a Monster Cake–induced skip in his step, and I can’t help the slight skip in my own.
