By seven o’clock on Friday night, I am drafting a blog post for the next Pepper/Paige creation in my head: Pepper’s Crappy Crap Day Crinkle Cookies.
Ingredients: First, add unresolved tension with one Jack Campbell, who is either out sick or out participating in the Senior Skip Day shenanigans taking place during the school day. Mix in nearly twenty-four hours without contact from Wolf, two seconds after essentially baring my soul to him by showing him the thing I am most proud of in this world. Add what is proving to be the most awkward hangout with Landon and a large group of incredibly drunk teenagers on the face of the earth. Add chocolate chips, butter, flour, salt, cocoa powder, eggs, and more embarrassment than the body of a teenage girl can possibly contain, set the oven to a bajillion degrees, and set the whole damn thing on fire.
“You look kind of … green.”
I glance over at Pooja, who has been my literal only solace in this crinkle-cookie crapfest of a day. I spent most of it staring at my phone screen, waiting for either a response from Wolf confirming we were still on for tonight, or a response from Jack after I texted him that morning asking why he wasn’t in class. Nothing, nada, the phone screen so blank, I could practically feel myself shrinking into my seat.
I considered not even going out to hang with Landon and the other seniors, filled with an inexplicable kind of dread as the day went on. But I couldn’t miss it. Either Landon was Wolf or he wasn’t, and I was too invested in knowing to back out now.
Well. It’s safe to say now that Landon is very much not Wolf. In fact, there are a whole host of things Landon is and is not that have become extremely apparent in the last few hours I have spent in his company.
I got a text from him around five to meet up with the group just outside of the Met steps. I’d been ready for at least two hours, having carefully picked out an outfit for one of the rare few moments my classmates would see me out of uniform, applying and reapplying such an absurd amount of a lipstick Paige left behind that I was on the verge of accidentally tattooing my lips. I’d picked out a sweater dress with tights and a pair of smart boots, with a pretty pea coat my mom handed down to me and a scarf my dad got me for my birthday.
It was perfect for a crisp day in November, but all wrong for what I stumbled into—which was not my classmates, but the drunk, rowdy, raided-my-rich-parents’-liquor-cabinet version of them. Landon was the first to spot me, his hair all askew, wearing a pair of jeans and a Lacoste T-shirt, and red in the cheeks despite the fact it was forty degrees outside.
“If it isn’t the Big League Burger heiress herself!” he yelled, prompting some hoots from our classmates that made the tips of my ears burn. “Better watch out, Campbell!”
Ethan glanced up from his perch on the steps, also red-cheeked and glossy-eyed but far more composed than Landon and some of the other stumbling boys were. “Hey,” he said with a friendly enough wave, before returning to the far more important business of making out with Stephen.
I had an uneven, topsy-turvy sense that they had been talking about me before I arrived, which maybe I should have expected, given my new Hub Seed notoriety. Landon wrapped a drunken arm around me, a half hug of a greeting, and messed up my hair. My cheeks burned and my whole body went stiff—why couldn’t I just be normal? Be casual and fun and lean into a hug, rib him the way he was clearly about to rib me, do something to flirt back?
The moment was over too late for me to do anything but be annoyed at myself for it—for the way I still felt like I had to make myself fit into this world, even after all this time. For the realization that for some reason, I’d hinged that feeling on this person who seemed entirely unaware of the way I’d thought of him, both at the beginning of Stone Hall to the near end.
I glanced around the group, hoping to make eye contact with literally anyone on the same level of sobriety as me, which is when, mercifully, Pooja showed up, looking every bit as thrown as I was. She got a similarly raucous greeting from the group, dodging a boy who tried to hug her with what seemed to be an open container of some sort of alcoholic concoction in his hands and ducking her way over to me.
“Uhhhh,” she said, her eyes wide on mine.
I smiled in relief. “Yeah.”
And maybe we both would have ditched right then—her eyes seemed to be asking me without asking if I was game—but then Shane announced he was drunkenly posting in the Hallway Chat on Weazel, and then everyone was grabbing for their phones to either look at what he’d posted or do the same.
Pooja shoved her hands into her pockets, taking a step back from the madness as if to wash her hands of responsibility for it. “I guess we’re not going to an actual place to eat,” she said wryly.
I tried to match her tone, tried to keep the swell of disappointment out of my voice. “Yeah. Yikes.”
A second later I flinched in surprise as Landon shoved his phone screen under our noses.
“Spell check from the brainiest chicks at Stone Hall?”
I froze like a deer in headlights. Pooja took the phone from him, which had a drafted text he was about to put in the Hallway Chat. I never even read what he was about to post; the username displayed on the screen was Cheetah. My eyes were stuck on it, reading it over and over and over until Pooja finally let out a breath of a forced laugh and handed it back to him.
“Good to post?” Landon asked, leaning in so close to the two of us, I could smell the sharpness of whatever he’d been drinking on his breath.
Pooja offered a tight smile. “There are no spelling errors, that’s for sure.”
“Awesome.”
He hit send on his post—Met steps, bring booze—and walked away abruptly, leaving me on the edge of the steps with my mouth wide open and my chest tight with something I didn’t quite know the shape of yet. Relief, maybe. Or disappointment. Or some mingling of the two.
Landon wasn’t Wolf. That, surprisingly, didn’t seem to move me in one direction or another; it was just a fact, and I accepted it with ease, like someone telling me what was on the menu in the school cafeteria that day.
But the rest of it hit me sideways—because if Landon wasn’t Wolf, somebody else was. And whoever that somebody else was, they apparently wanted nothing to do with me.
Maybe it was the blog. There’s nothing blatant on it that would connect it to me and Paige, but maybe he figured it out anyway. And maybe when he learned the truth, Pepper Evans became a hell of a lot less appealing than Bluebird ever did.
And maybe that’s only fair. On Weazel I’m not the Pepper I am at school. I’m relaxed, and goofy, and free to say whatever I want—and the longer the app didn’t reveal us to each other, the easier it got. But I can’t expect whoever it was to reconcile that with the person I am at Stone Hall. Jack used to call me a robot, and I’ve always known there was a grain of truth to it. I’ve spent all four years at Stone Hall gritting my teeth, keeping my head down, and trying to crush everything in my path. Not exactly conducive to lasting friendships.
Of which I apparently had none at the moment. Jack was AWOL, Wolf was in the void, and I was …
“Thank god enough people have started coming to the study groups that we don’t have to use Weazel anymore,” said Pooja, closing out of the app with a roll of her eyes. “These doofuses are going to clog up the Hallway Chat with their shitposting for the rest of the night.”
I bit my lip, forcing myself to rally. I wasn’t alone.
“That’s for sure,” I agreed.
She took a seat on the edge of the steps, and I followed suit. For a few moments we just watched as the cluster of our classmates weaved in and out of each other like drunk pinballs. A few weeks ago I didn’t know much more about them than their names and what their parents did, but thanks to Pooja’s study groups, I’ve actually gotten to know some of them better—like Bobby and Shane, who launched a podcast where they read all the Twilight books, and Jeannine, who is so obsessed with Lady Gaga, she’s seen her in concert nine times.
I glanced over and saw Pooja was pulling up one of the chain emails about the study group and responding to something.
“It isn’t, like, too much on you?” I asked. “Taking all the time to set this up?”
Pooja shrugged. “It’s worth it.” She hit send on her email and turned to me, shoving her hands back into her pockets and bracing herself against the cold. “Besides, I kind of stopped caring about my grades so much. I think our education system is effed up. The way we’re always teaching to tests. Defining each other by numbers instead of what we can actually contribute.”
A gust of wind picked up, and I stiffened—both against the wind and the truth of her words. My whole body wanted to reject them. I’d defined myself by those numbers for so long, it felt like without them, I didn’t have anything to anchor me in Stone Hall’s world.
“That’s pretty ballsy for this crowd,” I said. “But that’s—it’s great. That you know what you want to do.”
“You were kind of a part of it,” she admitted.
It took me a moment to respond, so surprised that all I could say was, “Me?”
“Yeah.” Pooja shifted her weight on the step, leaning a bit farther from me. “It’s so dumb and you probably don’t remember—like, so dumb—we were doing some quiz bowl thing, freshman year?”
For a moment I went so still that I couldn’t even shiver.
Pooja’s eyes flitted to the side at the memory, looking rueful. “And the teacher called on you, and you hesitated for a moment—and you just looked like, so miserable. Like you were on death row. So I gave you the answer. Or I thought I did. Turns out it was the wrong one.”
“That was an accident?” I blurted, before I could stop myself.
Pooja’s eyes snapped to meet mine. “You do remember.”
Of course I did. It was the catalyst to four years of me trying to keep up with her, four years of trying to one-up her so I could be in a place where she could never one-up me again.
“I was so humiliated, and Mr. Clearburn was glaring at us, so I just blurted out my second guess and it was right. I tried to say something to you, and you wouldn’t even look at me, and after class you just bolted. And that night I was so upset I told the whole thing to my parents, and they were so mad about it that they wanted to pull me out of Stone Hall right then. They’re both professors,” she said, by way of explanation, “and they’re big into education being about learning, not—well. Whatever it is some of the teachers at Stone Hall are trying to accomplish.”
“Another Hunger Games,” I supplied.
Pooja let out a breathy laugh. “Exactly.” She seemed almost shy, when she looked back over at me. “Anyway—I meant to say something to you, but I was in damage-control mode, trying to talk my parents out of pulling me out and homeschooling me.” She shudders. “That’s how it kind of started. I didn’t want to leave. All my friends are here. So I’ve just tried to fix things, where I can. And having Weazel weirdly helped make that happen.”
My throat was tight. All this time I had painted us both in these certain lights—me an underdog, and her some kind of bully—and using it to fuel this fire in me. Not just to justify my need to be the best, but to justify everything else—the chip on my shoulder. The way I didn’t make many friends here. In one stupid moment that I completely misread, I decided it was me against the world.
“You’re right,” I managed after a few moments. “The system really is effed up.”
I wondered if I should apologize. If the thing between us was as concrete for her as it was for me. But before I could decide, she hoisted herself back up and offered me her hand, pulling me to my feet.
“Looks like they’ve descended on the food carts,” said Pooja. “Wanna grab a bite and see how long we can endure them?”
I realized then that she didn’t want an apology. That the rivalry went unspoken, and the apology would too. We were on the other side of something that took way too long to cross, but at least now we were here.
“Yeah, let’s.”
We made a plan to grab smoothies, but while the alcohol in Landon’s system made him forget things like appropriate conversation volumes and how to walk in a straight line, it apparently was not strong enough for him to forget his gallantry. He kept to his word and bought me dinner—a hot dog from the stand next to it, covered in ketchup and mustard and a mountain of relish.
He bowed a little as he handed it to me. “A hot dog for the burger princess.”
I winced. I’d managed to go four years without anyone making a connection between me and the Big League empire, but apparently my luck didn’t just run out, but went full into the red.
“Thanks.”
I didn’t really even mean to eat it. As snobby as it sounded, it was no Big League Burger Messy Dog, the toppings for which my dad and I once dreamed up on a ride back from a Nashville Sounds game. But I took a bite, and another, and polished off the whole thing, mostly so I had something to occupy my mouth so I didn’t have to attempt to talk to Landon and his crew.
An hour later I am deeply, deeply regretting it.
“Seriously, you don’t look so hot,” says Pooja. “You wanna find a place to sit?”
Truth be told, I don’t feel so hot. My stomach is doing that unsettling thing where it feels like it is trying to take up residence in my throat. We’ve been wandering around Central Park, loosely following the cluster of our classmates, which only seems to get bigger as more of them find us and join in on the hijinks. But thanks to me, we’ve been falling behind.
“No, no, I’m good,” I lie.
“You sure?”
I stop for a second, do a quick self-assessment. It’s probably just nerves—about Wolf, or Landon, or this whole mess of a Senior Skip Day.
“Yeah, I’m sure.”
Before Pooja can say anything else, we’re both cut off by the sound of Landon letting out a whoop and attempting to cartwheel on a patch of grass. He lands gracelessly on his back and laughs up at the sky like it’s the funniest thing in the world.
“You know what’s ridiculous?” Pooja asks. At some point in the last few minutes, we’ve stopped walking and started observing, ceased being part of the group and started to fully lean into being on the outside looking in. “I came out here because I had a stupid crush on Landon.”
Landon gets up and lets out a belch so loud, I swear it stirs birds from their nests.
“Safe to say that’s over,” she deadpans.
I start laughing, even though it’s making my gut churn.
“What?” asks Pooja, a self-conscious smile curling on her lips.
I’m half speaking for her and half for myself when I say, “You can do much better than Landon.”
Pooja blushes. “Yeah, well. At this point I’m probably gonna wait until college to find out.”
My stomach twists again as if in direct protest of this idea. The closer we get to college, the more distant it seems to me. I’ve been so focused on the finish line aspect of the whole thing, of just getting the admissions letters and knowing I didn’t fail, that I still haven’t given much thought to what happens after.
“Same,” I say anyway.
“Aw, come on. Are you telling me you and Jack really aren’t a thing?” asks Pooja, kicking at a stray rock in our path.
“No,” I say, too quickly. “No, no, we’re just friends.”
“The people of the internet have spoken, Pep, and they ship Jactricia.”
I pull a face, shuddering. “Please tell me nobody actually typed that ship name with their bare hands.”
“I would, but that would make me a liar.” She tilts her head back up to stare at the boys, who are now engaged in what seems like a drunken game of Red Rover that will inevitably end with at least one broken bone and two very angry coaches. “Anyway, he’s clearly not as big of a dope as this lot, so he has that going for him.”
I laugh, turning my head away from them because it is honestly starting to make me nervous. But just as soon as I turn away, I blink myself there again, standing in the shallow end of the pool, staring into Jack’s face in that breathless, hesitant moment from yesterday. In some ways I’ve been there all day, the thought of it latching and tugging to every other thought, refusing to leave me alone. For a moment I just let it happen to me, let it take me to wherever it wants to go, and then—
“Oh, god.”
“What?”
My stomach lets out one of those ominous, inevitable kind of roils, and I manage to blurt, “I’m definitely gonna hurl.”
Pooja doesn’t miss a beat. “Okay. Uh—sit tight.”
She runs over to a trash can and comes back with a paper bag, just in time for me to shove my face into it and let out half the contents of my stomach.
“Pepper?”
It sounds like Jack, but that’s ridiculous. And in any case, round two follows up round one so quickly, it’s a miracle I’m still upright, with the amount of hot dog I’m presently upchucking. It’s volcanic, and so disgusting the mere act of throwing up makes me want to throw up, like some kind of vomit-ception. Pooja had the foresight at least to grab my hair before the worst of it, and I turn to give her some messy combination of a thank-you and an apology when I realize the hand holding my aforementioned hair back belongs to Jack.
What are you doing here? I almost ask, but then I clamp my mouth shut—I’m sure my breath smells like a hot dog funeral.
“Hey, put your phone down, you asshole,” Pooja yells.
I glance in the direction she’s shouting and see I have accumulated quite the audience. Landon, Ethan, Stephen, Shane—the whole drunken crew has stopped what they’re doing to stare, as have random people in the park.
The Pepper I was five minutes ago was so naive to think this day couldn’t get any worse.
I straighten up and manage to put the vomit-filled bag back in the garbage. Jack’s hand is on my elbow, following me like a shadow, and Pooja is charging forward and yelling at someone who must have taken a picture.
“Whoa,” says Landon lowly, coming up to me with a broad grin on his face. “Props, Pepper. Never would have guessed you’d be the first party foul, considering the size of the stick up your—”
Jack moves forward with his fist cocked, looking like a cartoon character. I yank him back by his elbow, and he’s surprisingly easy to pull, all momentum and lanky limbs.
“She’s not drunk, you dick.”
“Jack, it’s fine,” I mutter, pulling him back a little farther so he’s next to me. He gives in to the tug like a very angry noodle, but doesn’t look at me.
Landon’s expression can’t quite settle on irritated or amused. “Hey, man, chill out.”
“Seriously, Jack,” says Ethan, who has walked over to the commotion.
Jack scowls. “Really, Ethan?”
Ethan gestures vaguely, like he wants to apologize but his body doesn’t know how to commit to it.
“Nice,” Jack mutters.
Ethan sighs. “Shouldn’t someone get her home?”
“On it,” says Pooja. She hooks her arm into mine, and I feel a rush of gratitude so intense that for once, it doesn’t make me ache for my own sister—for once it feels like I have someone as unquestionably on my team as a person can get. She steers us away, flanking one side of me with Jack on the other, who is hovering like he walked into the wrong reality and needs directions to get back.
“Are you okay?” Jack asks.
“Yeah. I weirdly feel better now.”
“It was definitely that shady hot dog,” Pooja concurs.
“In that case, I hope Landon starts chucking some up soon too.”
“Why?”
Jack is in full Jack mode, his body like a live wire as he follows us.
“Jack, you don’t have to—I mean, I live like six blocks away.” I nod my head back at the edge of the park. “You can go hang out with the others.”
Jack hesitates. Out of the corner of my eye I can see his arm lift, can see him scratch the back of his neck the way he always does when he’s put on the spot. “Actually, I came to see you.”
Pooja ducks her head in an ineffective attempt to hide her smirk.
“Oh.” Something lifts in my chest. Thankfully this time it isn’t dinner. “Sorry to be a buzzkill.”
“Eh, I’ve seen worse,” says Jack.
I look over at him and he’s got this doofy kind of smile on his face, the kind that tricks me into thinking I look okay right now instead of the sweaty-browed, post-throw-up mess of a human I absolutely am. It’s stupid how relieved I am to see him, how glad I am he’s here. That he’s talking to me. That he crossed the whole length of this overcrowded island to do it.
Pooja and Jack drop me off at the lobby of the building, Pooja hugging me and rattling off instructions to stay hydrated. Jack leans in unexpectedly and hugs me too, like it’s the most natural thing in the world, and just like that it is. I hug him back, squeezing him for an extra beat, accidentally scrunching some of his jacket in my fist.
“Feel better,” he says, his cheeks bright red.
I do. So much better, I forget to respond, until the doorman of the building clears his throat and Pooja’s eyebrows go up as if to say, Girl.
“Yeah—you too.” Shit. “I mean—well—”
Jack laughs, backing up and nearly stumbling into someone on the sidewalk. “Later, Pepperoni.”
