I manage to calm myself down to non-Hulk levels by the time I reach the 6 train platform, leaving a good twenty minutes after Ethan. The only silver lining to all this bullshit is that Grandma Belly, at least, probably won’t see it—I’m pretty sure she’s never even opened Twitter before. At eighty-five, she’s not exactly a huge fan of the internet.
But then again, that might be changing. She’s been winding down a bit—going on shorter walks, going to more doctor’s appointments. But it’s one of those things we seem to sweep under the counter like the deli’s finances, or what exactly is going to happen when my parents want to retire—as long as nobody actually says that Grandma Belly’s health is waning, we can all act like it isn’t happening.
My phone buzzes in my hands, pulling me out of the tangle of my thoughts. I open the Weazel app, trying not to smile too obviously on the platform when I read the message waiting for me.
Bluebird
afkgjafldgjalfkjahlfkajgd
Wolf
I don’t speak zombie. Did that mean you finished your essay?
Bluebird
“Essay” is certainly a word for it. Whether it will compete against the ghostwriter Shane Anderson’s mom hired is another issue entirely
The 6 train rolls into the station, and I shove my phone into my pocket, Bluebird along with it. She’s been doing this lately—this game of elimination. Not that it helps much that she’s eliminating a guy in our class who has fewer brain cells than fingers, because even if she were massively catfishing me, I’m pretty sure it’s not Anderson on the other end. Bluebird’s too quick-witted for that. (The ghostwriter Anderson’s mom hired, on the other hand…)
Maybe I should know who she is even without the hints. I barely ever interact on the Hallway Chat, where all the users can post and stay anonymous, and I never initiate any chats with people who do. But at one point I posted a link to a free SAT test prep book online, which was met with a resounding silence from my peers and their $200-an-hour tutors—that is, until about an hour later, a private chat came from Bluebird. It was a picture of The Rock mid-flex at the gym, and a text that read Me after devouring all that sweet, sweet Protein Punch—a reference to one of the first math prep questions about a fictional protein company whose products came in powdered and liquid form.
Her profile said she was a girl and she was a senior, so that was initially all I knew. That, and she wasn’t chugging so much Stone Hall Kool-Aid that she was above using free test resources. Still, even after all we’ve talked since—first making dumb jokes about the test prep questions, then our teachers, and sometimes things way beyond school—nothing really seems to narrow it down. I can’t think of a single girl at our school who she might be.
Which, to be fair, might not be so difficult a feat if I paid attention to something other than the dive team and my phone every once in a while.
The truly weird thing about this is that I could just blow the whole thing wide open right now. I have access to the emails attached to the different usernames, for one thing. But I’ve never looked, and it feels like cheating somehow to check on Bluebird’s. Like it would wreck it a little bit, in some way, because I’d feel like a liar. Like I’d pulled one over on her. I’d rather us just stay on level ground.
But I guess I already have pulled one over on her. Technically, the app should have given away our identities weeks ago. That’s the whole point of the name—Weazel, for “Pop! Goes the Weasel” (not the most clever reference, but it was three in the morning when I patented it). But I messed with the code and stopped it from happening between us for reasons I’m still not entirely sure of. Maybe it’s just nice to have someone to talk to who gets it—the whole fish-out-of-water thing. At least, nice to talk to someone who doesn’t have the exact same stupid face as me.
Maybe it’s just nice to finally be honest with someone at all. Ethan’s all too willing to pretend we’re as well-off as our peers, but I can’t separate School Jack and Home Jack the way Ethan does—or at least not as easily. It feels like it takes up way too much space in my brain, trying to make myself fit, but when I’m talking to Bluebird, I never have to switch between the two. I just am.
Not that I’m not grateful and all—Ethan and I may have both worked our asses off to get into Stone Hall, but my parents continue working their asses off to pay for it. My mom went there when she was a kid, and even though she has adjusted to the rest of it—the whole comedown from “uptown princess” to “wife of a deli owner” that must have been some hell of a whirlwind romance before Ethan and I existed—she has always been adamant about our education, and my dad has always been adamant on backing her up on it.
Which is why I find myself on a Monday morning, walking up the steps of a school that looks like it fell out of Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame and nodding at kids whose bank accounts are hefty enough to buy the Starbucks down the street for kicks.
And so commences my least favorite part of every day—the part where people’s eyes graze my face, light up hopefully, and then immediately dim when they realize I am not, in fact, their treasured Ethan, but still just regular me. No amount of letting my hair grow out slightly longer and messier than his or switching up my backpack and shoes or generally walking around with my head in my phone screen has done anything to prevent it.
What I really need is a new face. But since I’m actually partial to it, I’ll settle for waiting for Ethan to blow the Popsicle stand that is Manhattan and go to some yuppie university far away from here.
“Yo. Yo.”
I glance up from my locker to find Paul, who is all of five-foot-five and basically what would happen if the Energizer Bunny and the leprechaun from Lucky Charms had a very ginger, very excitable baby.
“Did you see? Mel and Gina were like, necking in the hallway,” he informs me, his eyes shining with glee.
I pull out my history textbook and shut the locker. “In 1954? Because I’m pretty sure we call it making out now.”
Paul frantically pats my arm. “So here’s what happened,” he says, with the urgency of an intern reporting something to their boss on the way into work. “They were chatting on the Weazel app, and, y’know, flirting and stuff, and then the app revealed their names to each other and now they are dating.”
Paul is grinning one of those manic grins, and for once, I find myself grinning manically back. To be honest, this has been the coolest part of Weazel—people actually connecting on it. Like, the Hallway Chat is sometimes just people shitposting for kicks, but sometimes it gets real. People talking about how freaked out they are about college admissions, or their parents putting pressure on them. People cracking jokes about a test we all failed to lighten the mood. All the tiny little cracks in our armor that we never actually show each other in person, because sometimes this place feels more like a watering hole where we all have to establish ourselves as predator and prey than an actual institution of learning.
But this—this is the stuff that makes all those hours monitoring the app worth it. When people connect with each other on the one-on-one chats. Mel and Gina aren’t the first people to either start dating or strike up a friendship because of it. In fact, so many people were bitching about our calculus midterm that there’s a full-on study group that meets twice a week in the library now.
We round the corner and there, sure enough, are Mel and Gina, going at it so enthusiastically that it is a genuine miracle neither of them has gotten detention yet. It almost makes me worry that something has happened to our dear old friend Vice Principal Rucker, whose sonar for teenage affection usually rivals bomb-sniffing dogs.
“Hot, right?”
I put a hand on Paul’s shoulder, knowing full well it will do nothing to calm his seismic level of excitement, and also knowing full well that he’s only calling it “hot” because he thinks he’s supposed to.
“You’re going full Hefner,” I say, because we’ve talked about this kind of thing before. “Dial it down.”
“Yeah, right, right.”
If there is one person in this school I feel more sorry for than myself, it’s Paul—who, despite having all the trappings of a filthy-rich Stone Hall legacy, is basically what would happen if a Nick Jr. cartoon became three-dimensional. I think if it weren’t for the diving team being so fiercely protective of their own, this place might have eaten him alive.
“Let’s get to homeroom.”
I’m still kind of high on the buzz of my own inflated sense of ego as I sit, itching to check my phone, to see if there’s another message from Bluebird. I’m suddenly bursting to tell someone—I made this happen. I was a small part of something cool. And of all the people in my world, weirdly, it’s the person whose face I don’t even know that I want to tell most.
Well, that’s the other weird thing. I do know her face, whoever she is. I know everyone in our year. It could be Carter, who’s highlighting a set of notes in the front row, or Abby, who’s blowing an impressively large bubble gum bubble, or Hailey or Minae, whose heads are ducked down in a heated discussion about what definitely sounds like Riverdale fan fiction. In some ways, it’s like Bluebird is nobody and everybody at the same time—like every time someone looks up and notices me glancing at them, I could be looking right at her.
Or worse—she could be looking right at me.
