“Please don’t make us do this,” Pooja moans.
Landon puts a hand on her shoulder, jostling it slightly. I still have my eyes peeled on it as he takes the hand away. “Rules are rules,” he says with an easy grin. “And you guys lost fair and square.”
“At least it’s not pool water Kool-Aid this time,” says Ethan.
I glance up the pool deck, toward the locker rooms, not even realizing I’m looking for Jack until I come up empty of him. It’s not like it matters where he is, but I can’t stop myself from compulsively checking, like he’s become some kind of shadow I feel weird without. That, and his team lost—and the terms of this particular water polo war were that everyone on the losing team had to do 100 yards of butterfly, nonstop. There are very few things in this world I would pay good money to see, but watching Jack flounder at the hardest stroke after years of acting all cocky about doing flips into the water is decidedly one of them.
“Ugh. Say nice things at my funeral.”
“C’mon, Pooja,” says Landon, “you could swim this in your sleep.”
I shouldn’t care. And I don’t. Or I wouldn’t, if it weren’t for something I’m getting a little more sure of by the day, something I can’t decide whether I want to be sure of or not.
I might be right about Landon. It all checks out. Him texting during the day, when he would be off-campus. Not texting during the exact same times as swim and dive practice. And there is nothing quite so damning as the app Wolf sent me, the mac-and-cheese locator—Landon’s the only senior this year interning at an app development startup, and the smell of that mac-and-cheese bread bowl he was sporting the other day is so burned into my memory that I’ll probably be telling my grandchildren about it.
I’m going to ask him. Tonight. Point-blank. He’ll already be in our apartment for that dinner with his dad. The second most embarrassing scenario will have already occurred, so I might as well just lean into the first. And if I don’t ask him then, when I actually have him alone for the first time in four years, I don’t think I ever will.
I head into the locker room, overly aware of the fact I’m going to have to hustle home to get my hair and my outfit in working order before Landon and his dad get to our place for dinner. Naturally, by putting a desire into the universe not to waste time, I run smack into Jack.
“Ah. Sorry, Pepperoni,” he says, touching the spot where his shoulder brushed mine. He looks unsettled, his eyes a little wide. “Good luck keeping up with me tonight.”
He moves to walk away from me, but I stop him, grabbing the crook of his arm. For a dive team slacker who probably couldn’t remember the order of strokes in an individual medley to save his life, it’s surprisingly firm.
“If you think I’m out for the count just because it’s Friday…”
Jack takes the hand I have on his arm and presses it between his with mock solemnity. Mine is still wet, so our palms and fingers slick against each other’s in a way that would be weirdly intimate if his grin wasn’t at the exact half tilt it always is before he makes fun of me.
“Oh, don’t worry. I figure you’ll be free as a bird.”
I narrow my eyes. He looks more pleased with himself than usual.
“See you Monday,” he says, letting go of my hand and striding down the pool deck to his brother.
I’m still shaking my head as I walk into the locker room, coming out of the fog of being in the pool and back into the laser focus of everything beyond it. There’s not just the dinner to think about, but homework, and Twitter, and calling Paige back, and that college essay prompt I haven’t even started on—
“What the hell?”
The Big League Burger Twitter account has logged me out. I type in the password, but nothing happens—it just prompts me to type in something else. I’m about to call Taffy and ask if the password has changed, but she beats me to it with a text.
Did you change the twitter password?
Shit. We’ve been hacked.
And the irony is, I don’t even have my own Twitter account to log into so I can see what the person who hacked us is doing to the account.
No. I’ll hit “forgot password” and get us back in. Anyone from the tech team around?
I’ve never met anyone on the tech team, but judging from my mom’s less-than-veiled complaints about them, I’m guessing they’re not going to be very quick about this. Which means whoever out there in the world just turned my Twitter account into their personal tweeting playground might just as easily be able to hack back in and do it again.
I look away from the phone for a moment. My Twitter account?
There are texts from my mom too, that I must have opened without realizing when I tried to get into Twitter. I wonder how many seconds it’s going to take for her to catch wind of this.
And naturally, no texts from Wolf either. Just a whole stream of people in the Hallway Chat bitching about the administration cracking down on Senior Skip Day. I obviously wasn’t going to participate in that anyway—we have weekends to do whatever stupid teenage nonsense we need to do, not to mention an entire summer before college.
And no doubt whatever Ethan and the rest of the kids who usually lead this kind of thing will want to do is downtown, and I, being the loser that I am, have yet to go unchaperoned below Seventy-Fifth.
I have half a mind to post something in the Hallway Chat. Something about needing a good idea for a low-key place to take a date, or maybe something about prom. Some ridiculous thing that Bluebird can post, so Wolf can see it in the open forum and remember I am, in fact, still alive.
Jesus. I’m trying to play head games with someone I haven’t even technically met.
Another text, this one from my mom.
Did you let anyone touch your phone?
“Oh, for god’s sake,” I mutter.
“Everything okay?”
“Yes,” I snap.
Pooja takes a step back, looking stunned, still a little breathless from her swim. I realize half a dozen heads have swiveled to look at us, and my teeth are gritted like an animal poised to attack.
“Sorry—I didn’t mean to butt in,” she says.
“No, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—I’m fine. Sorry.”
Pooja nods and goes back to her locker without saying anything. I change as quickly as I can back into my uniform, desperate to get out of there—but to go where? To the apartment, where I’ll have to sit like an animatronic puppet and smile at Landon’s dad until my cheeks hurt, until I think I might actually explode into molten lava from the embarrassment of what I’m about to ask him?
Maybe I just won’t. Maybe it’s better if I just let the whole thing go, Landon and Wolf with it. Because what’s on the other side of it, if it really is him? If Landon liked me as Pepper, he had plenty of chances to show it in the last few years.
Or he would if I hadn’t avoided him like the plague for the first two of them, afraid of humiliating myself.
But maybe I owe it to that girl—to the freshman me who was too scared to talk to him. There must have been some reason I felt that way, even if it doesn’t quite feel that way now.
I turn to leave and end it right there, but then Pooja walks past.
“I really am sorry,” I say, following her out. “I didn’t mean to snap.”
I’m expecting her to brush it off again, but then she tilts her head at me and says something that stops me in my tracks.
“It’s Jack, isn’t it?”
Something tightens in my chest. “Huh?”
She smiles at me, this guarded little oh, c’mon kind of smile. It’s weird, but I spend so much time deliberately not meeting Pooja’s eye, I’m surprised to see the warmth in them. Surprised, and then profoundly uncomfortable—because I don’t need her being nice to me. I don’t want to owe her anything, don’t want to tip the scale that’s been teetering between us since the great Mesopotamia mishap of freshman year.
But before I can even parse through that, I have to figure out how the hell she found out about Jack. As far as I know, we haven’t spoken a word about the Twitter war to anyone outside of Ethan at this school.
“I mean, you guys are dating, right? Or like … kind of seeing each other?”
My laugh is so sharp, it pierces through the now-emptying locker room. “Dating?” I manage. “Me and Jack?”
Pooja’s expression doesn’t change. “You guys are around each other, like, all the time.”
“Yeah, because—” Because we’re destroying each other in a virtual battlefield armed with memes and snark. “Because he’s helping Ethan with captain stuff. You know how busy he is.”
Pooja shrugs. “Okay.” She adjusts her backpack straps, still staring at me in this way that lets me know she’s not done talking. “I just … well. If you want to talk to someone about it, I’m probably your best bet, all things considered.”
I let out a huff of a laugh before I can think better of it. Pooja’s lips set in this grim line, like I’ve brought something out into the open, something we both know. Which is why I end up asking, “Wait, what do you mean?”
“Oh, please. Everyone knew about my big crush on Ethan two years ago.”
“I didn’t.”
Pooja flushes. “Oh. Well. I made some very public declarations about it, which was pretty stupid of me, because he was out by then. You’d think I’d know him well enough to know that before I decided to have a massive crush on him, but…” She shrugs.
“Oh.” It’s all I can manage. I feel stupid for not having known, but then again, I guess I haven’t exactly been a social butterfly these last few years.
Pooja waves a hand at me. “Water under the bridge. We’re actually good friends now because of it.”
“Well—that’s good.”
I don’t know what else to say. It occurs to me that, Paige’s antics with undergraduates aside, I’ve never really talked about crushes with anyone before. There hasn’t been much to report on my end, and everyone else already had built-in friends to talk to about it with when I got here.
“Yeah. He’s been using the student council to help me organize the study groups too.”
When she says it, I can hear that same detached caution we usually use around each other starting to creep back in. It feels like there’s some kind of gate starting to close back up again. At the last second, I shove a hand through to stop it.
“Those are going well?”
“Yeah, I think so,” she says, brightening a bit. “It’s sort of getting people to—I don’t know. Band together. Us against them, instead of us against each other, you know?”
I do and I don’t. “But—aren’t we?” I feel stupid for asking, but it doesn’t change the fact of college admissions. “Against each other?”
Pooja’s lips crease. “See, I hate that. And I think it’s making us all a little dumber, in the end. What’s the point of learning if you’re just doing it to beat someone, you know?”
I blink at her. Because that’s the thing—that’s kind of always been the point. At least, it has been since I moved here.
“I actually remember stuff we learn when we all meet up to study. So I think it’s good. For grades, and for the long run.” She opens her mouth and hovers for a moment, hesitating. “You know—Ethan was supposed to lead the calc study group on Tuesday, but he can’t make it. And I know that’s one of your best subjects, if you wanted to maybe … I mean, if you have time.”
I open my mouth to dismiss the idea, but then I surprise us both. “Yeah. I’ll check it out.”
Pooja’s smile is bright enough to compete with all of the fluorescent lights in the girls’ locker room combined, and for an absurd moment, I almost want to tell her everything. The stupid Twitter war. The chats on Weazel. The way I haven’t slept through a full night in so long that every now and then, I feel like I’m about to crack. It’s stuff I can’t talk about with Paige because it would just make her angry with Mom—and stuff I can’t talk about with anyone else, because it feels like giving too much of myself away.
But Pooja just gave me a piece of her, whether she meant to or not. Maybe it really is that easy. Maybe I really can just talk to her, and not just to some faceless boy in an app.
“Pooja, your brother’s waiting for you!”
I let the breath I was holding go, and Pooja waves and heads out of the locker room, taking my urge to spill everything with her.
