I lied to Jack. My mom wasn’t annoyed about Ethan’s picture. She was pissed.
“We need to get Hub Seed’s social media manager on the phone,” she said to me the instant I walked through the door.
I was oddly unfazed. “That’s Taffy’s job.”
She was standing in the kitchen, leaning over the counter, staring into the remnants of A-Plus Angel Cake—Paige’s recipe, not mine; apparently she’d aced her French midterm, and I couldn’t resist replicating her recipe after she posted it on our blog. Now, though, a good chunk of it was missing, and there was a fork propped in my mom’s hands.
“It’s a Saturday,” she said.
“So it can wait until Monday.”
“Weren’t you the one who arranged this whole deal?”
Despite Jack stealing my phone, I don’t think Mom has any idea I go to school with the sons of the people running Girl Cheesing. She just thinks I got hacked through the cloud or something. So she can’t know Jack exists, or that we’ve been toe-to-toe in person as often as we have been on Twitter. As far as she knows, my hands are completely clean of this.
“Hub Seed reached out to us,” I reminded her. “And yeah, the retweet showdown was my idea, and we set the terms. They broke them. That’s not my fault.”
She stabbed her fork into the angel cake, her mouth twisting into a frustrated line.
I stood very still, watching her mull it over and feeling more unsettled by the second. “The tweet’s already up, and there’s nothing we can do about it. And for what it’s worth, I said we should quit doing this weeks ago.”
“Well, that’s not your call.”
“It is if you’re going to keep me up all night sending out stupid tweets.”
My mom looked up at me sharply. Then her brows deepened into a scowl, and her body postured like she was suddenly anticipating a fight.
Like I was challenging her. Like I was Paige.
But this had escalated far enough. If nobody else was around to challenge her, it would have to be me.
“Is there something about this you’re not telling me?”
She wouldn’t meet my eyes. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“This whole Twitter thing. It’s insane. Dad and Paige and half the internet thinks we’re losing it.”
“Half the internet is seeing a ton of press about us.”
“And thinks we’re jerks,” I emphasized. “Which we are.”
“For defending ourselves?”
“If we’d just let it go, it would have been like—like a baby bird trying to attack a mountain. But now it’s a thing, and it’s a thing because we made it one, not them. The further we take this, the worse we look.”
“I’m the CEO. I’m the one who built this place up—the one who turned this operation from a backyard grill to the force it is today—”
She stopped, then, because the tears sprang into my eyes so fast it stunned us both.
“Pepper.”
I blinked them back. “I miss that backyard grill.”
There were a few beats of silence, then, when one of us was clearly going to wave the white flag. I knew if I waited, it would be her. I knew it could just as easily be me.
Instead, I said, “We had integrity, then.”
My mom thinned her lips, glaring down at the angel cake. “I didn’t steal anything from that deli.”
“Then why won’t you let this go? We’re going to be the laughingstock of—”
“Go to your room.”
It was the first time anybody had said that to me since elementary school. I almost laughed.
And maybe it was funny. I’d spent my whole life in constant fear of rocking the boat, of making anybody angry. Jack had probably forgotten the Pepper People-Pleaser moniker he’d briefly given me sophomore year, but it applied then and certainly had up until now.
But nothing terrible happened. The earth didn’t pull out from under my feet.
I didn’t feel good, exactly, but I didn’t feel bad either.
And it was in this weirdly grounded mindset that Jack texted me out of the blue, and I found myself being more forthright with him than I ever would have been even a few weeks ago. It was in that same mindset that, not too long after, Wolf chatted me on the Weazel app and asked if we should finally meet.
It seemed stupid not to say yes. Especially since I would be out with Landon and the other seniors anyway. Now, hopefully, we could do it with all the air cleared between us. It would be different, then—Landon would snap back into the self he is with me, the self he is when everybody isn’t watching, and it would all make sense. I had to believe that.
So I said yes.
And it’s all I’ve thought about since—through the frosty breakfast with my mom the next morning, when we barely spoke to each other even though she was on her way out the door for a business trip; through my study date with Pooja, where we split a sandwich and a salad at Panera; through the phone call I had with my dad that night, when he near bored me to tears recounting something Carrie Underwood’s husband did in a hockey game.
All I’ve thought about until suddenly there was a much, much larger thing to think about in my immediate line of sight: the article that Hub Seed published about us.
And I mean us. Not us as in Girl Cheesing and Big League Burger—us as in me and Jack.
