Once Pooja clears the lobby, my phone pings in my pocket, pulling me out of my confusion and right back into the Twitter maelstrom. I pull out my phone, already bracing myself for the notifications, swiping through them one by one—
And realize there aren’t any from Wolf. That there weren’t any yesterday around this time either. That for the first time in our correspondence, neither of us has said anything between the hours of three and five, which is our usual peak time for bitching about whatever assignments we got earlier in the day.
Okay. I’m not stupid enough to think that Landon is Wolf just because he happens to not be texting on Weazel during the same times as swim and dive practice. By that merit, any member of the swim team, the dive team, the basketball team, the golf team, or the indoor track and soccer teams could be him too. If anything, this has only widened the ridiculously large pool of people he could be.
But it’s just one more thing in a list of already uncanny things that makes me think that maybe, just maybe, it is him after all. That fourteen-year-old Pepper’s crush was fast, but maybe not baseless. That maybe there really was something then, the way there certainly seems to be something with Wolf now.
Another ping comes in, this time from Taffy. U out of practice yet?
I sigh, shaking myself out of my head, and start walking to the bakery where Jack proposed we meet, while attempting to diffuse the Twitter situation on the way. I call Taffy first, an idea forming in my head as I walk down the street, the thousands of cat emojis still swimming in my vision.
“Is anyone from the design team in today?”
Taffy’s voice is approximately an octave higher than usual. “Yeah, Carmen’s here.”
“Okay. Get her to find, like, a stock photo of a cat.”
“Any cat?”
“A cute one, I guess. Yeah, any cat.”
My life gets more ridiculous by the second.
I wait for the light to change at Eighty-Ninth Street as she writes it down on one of the unicorn-shaped Post-it pads she keeps at her desk. We’re so in sync by now, I can sense the exact moment she lifts the pencil from the paper through the phone.
“Then do one of those, like, really corny photoshop jobs so it’s holding a Big League Burger grilled cheese. Like so bad that it’s funny.”
“Got it, got it…”
“Then have her do an animation of sunglasses dropping down on it.”
“I know that one!” says Taffy excitedly, as if she was not hired for the exact purpose of knowing about memes on the internet.
“Okay, those sunglasses. But no text,” I instruct her, feeling like a schoolteacher. “Just the sunglasses dropping down.”
There’s murmuring on the other end. “She’ll have it ready in a half hour.” The murmuring becomes decidedly more distinct, then, and I hear what can only be my mom cutting in, the low, authoritative tone of her voice unmistakable. “… She’ll have it ready in less than five,” Taffy amends.
I’m outside of the bakery, then, and see Jack has already found a table and is quite literally taking a baguette to the face. He looks like the picture of contentment, his hair still damp from the pool and curling at the edges, ripping off the end of the baguette with his teeth in that unselfconscious hungry teenage boy way. I stop for a moment just to watch him, feeling strangely charmed by the whole thing.
He spots me the moment the door opens, waving so I know where he is. I hold up a finger and stand in line to get a cup of tea. At the last moment I peer down at the counter and ask for one of the massive apple pastries, the ones I’ve passed in this window countless times but always have been too busy to stop and get by myself.
My phone hums in my hand. The GIF of the cat is in, just the way I asked for it. I save it to my drive and pull up the corporate Twitter, hating myself for it but also wanting to get it over with as soon as I possibly can.
“Trade you some baguette for some of whatever that is,” Jack offers.
“Deal.” I drop off my backpack and my swim bag at the table. “Just one sec.”
I wince when I see there are over a hundred notifications piled up on BLB’s Twitter, knowing every single one of them is cat-related or worse. I pull up a tweet draft, taking a sip of my tea, as if I can burn the wrongness of it down my throat.
Yuck. I forgot to put sugar in it. I glance around to look for the coffee counter, getting up from my chair and bumping into someone who was coming at me from the left. My tea sloshes onto my shirt, and I back into the table, dropping my phone on it.
“Sorry, sorry—”
“Pepper?”
I blink up into the ice blue of Landon’s eyes, so close I can see the distinctive little freckle just above one of them that I memorized my freshman year like his face was some kind of constellation. He cracks a smile just as I swallow down a grimace.
“Sorry,” I mutter again, ducking my head down. There’s a bread bowl full of mac and cheese on a tray in his hands, the cheese still bubbling. The views are both so overwhelming that I’m not sure which to settle on, the cheese or his face.
“Hey, Ethan—”
“Jack,” the two of us correct him at the same time. Jack turns his attention back to his baguette, but not before I see the sliver of a smile on his face.
When I look back at Landon, he is still momentarily disarmed, blinking before the easy smile is back on his face again. “Well, then. My bad. Fancy running into you guys here.”
My throat feels dry. I am staring at Landon’s uncannily symmetrical face and thinking, of all things, of my mother.
“Yeah,” I half croak. “Was just … sorry. I was going to put sugar in my tea, and…” Am now narrating every pedantic detail of my life to you for no reason.
I beeline for the coffee counter, painfully aware that Landon is falling into step next to me. This is it, then—the universe giving me the opportunity I completely missed during practice today. As if it practically is shining a neon light on my mom’s ridiculous request.
I steel my entire body like a truck is coming at me. It’s a letdown, almost, that I have spent the last four years at Stone Hall trying to be worthy of the Landons of the world—the people who just fit here, the way I used to just fit back in Nashville—but even after all this time, I can’t look at him without feeling like the clueless little freshman I was when we first met.
Eventually I force the words out of my mouth.
“So—are you … um, my mom says your dad is coming to dinner at our place?”
Landon takes a step ahead of me and grabs me a sugar packet from one of the little containers on the counter. It’s the wrong kind, one of the fake ones without any calories in it that make your tongue shrivel, but I’m too busy focusing on not tripping again to care.
“Oh, wow, yeah. My dad mentioned something. Didn’t realize it was your place.”
I nod, way too vigorously than the situation merits. “Yep, um, yeah. My place.” This is social suicide, but somehow still not as bad as letting down my mom. “You should come.”
There’s a half second where he’s still trying to catch up to what I said that I think I may die right there in the middle of the bakery, just lie down on the tiles and let the elements take me.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Landon nods. “Yeah, yeah, I’m—that sounds cool. I’ve got some deadlines for my internship, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be out of the weeds soon.”
I better win some kind of Daughter of the Year award for this. “Maybe I’ll see you then.”
