For someone who has had the kind of day that ended in literal vomit, I have no right to be full-on grinning in the elevator. But I am, and it’s wild, like there’s something bubbling in me, pooling at the base of me and making me feel so light I feel as if I should tether myself to the railing. I let myself imagine things I never let myself imagine: what it would feel like to grab Jack by the sleeve of his coat and pull him close. What it would feel like to run my hand through his wet, messy, post-dive hair. What it would feel like to cross the distance to him in the pool yesterday, close my eyes, and kiss him.
I’m still dizzy in my own imagination when I open the door, completely miss my mom’s suitcases lined up by the doorway, and walk straight into her poised on the couch with an expression that slams into my daydreams like an oncoming truck.
“Uh.”
My mom raises her eyebrows at me. “Sit.”
I consider my other options, which are limited to running away and seeing how far the five dollars in my purse will take me. Pooja told me the other day the Q train goes straight to Coney Island.
Too bad it doesn’t go to Mars.
So I sit. Mom turns to me, her expression unreadable—I can’t tell if she’s mad or concerned, but she’s definitely some kind of upset. “We have several things we need to discuss.”
I wonder if it’s too late to pull the I just vomited in a public park card, but it feels too risky.
“Okay?”
She pulls out her phone, and I can feel the anger inflating in me like a balloon. If she pulls up the Twitter page, I will explode. I will go full Paige Evans with a metaphorical baseball bat and yell until the neighbors think she’s back from college. I may even lean fully into the teenage cliché of slamming and locking the bedroom door.
She passes it to me. It’s not the Twitter page. It’s my … midterm grades.
And they’re not stellar.
“Oh.”
I mean, it’s not like they’re terrible. But by Pepper standards, they are pretty bad. I feel an unfamiliar kind of swoop in my stomach, something I’m so unused to, I don’t even recognize it for a moment: failure.
If this were Nashville, I could shrug and say, Okay, so I have a couple of B’s. So what? But this isn’t Nashville. And here, a B in the final stretch of college admissions is the equivalent of rolling over and playing dead.
“I didn’t realize…”
My mom leans in, pulling the phone away. “What’s going on, Pepper? This isn’t like you.”
Of course it isn’t. I’ve run on a steady diet of five hours of sleep on weekdays for four years now. How could anything be like me? How am I supposed to know exactly what I’m like anymore?
And the past few weeks have dialed it up to eleven. There’s no time, and this whole “war” with Girl Cheesing has stolen what little of it I have, carved it up, and chopped it into stupid tweets. I know it’s not going to fly as an excuse, but it’s the truth.
“The Twitter thing. It’s taking up my study time.”
“You send like two tweets a day. It’s not exactly a full-time job.”
I feel a twinge of sympathy for Taffy that is far from the first and certainly won’t be the last. “It is exactly like a full-time job, Mom. It takes time to come up with those tweets, to figure out how to respond, to gauge the audience reaction to them—”
“I worry what’s taking up most of your time is flirting with this boy.”
And there it is. I sit very still, like an animal with the viewfinder of a gun targeted on its back, waiting to see where exactly she’s planning to take aim.
“I finally read that article on Hub Seed,” says my mom. “I didn’t realize you were going toe-to-toe with your classmate. Or that you wanted this attached to your name on the internet forever.”
My face is burning. “I had nothing to do with that. I didn’t ask or want Taffy to put my name on anything.”
I worry she’s not going to believe me, but she’s moved on too fast for it to matter. “And this Jack?’
It feels important to protect him. I didn’t realize how intentionally I’d kept his existence from her until now. “He goes to my school.”
The deflection is about as effective as hiding behind the couch cushions. In fact, my mom doesn’t even seem surprised. “And he has nothing to do with these grades, or you ignoring Taffy’s texts?”
“I stopped answering because we’re done with this. The retweet war on the Hub settled it.”
Her jaw tightens. “I can only assume that boy pulled one over on you with that picture.”
“It wasn’t his fault, it was—”
“A lesson learned. You shouldn’t trust the competition.”
It stings unexpectedly, hearing this right on the heels of my talk with Pooja. I bite the inside of my cheek. I’m not gonna say it, I’m not gonna say it, I’m not—
“Yeah, well, you shouldn’t put your teenage daughter in charge of a massive corporate Twitter account.”
My mom purses her lips. “You are plenty qualified,” she says. “I wouldn’t put you in charge of it if you weren’t. But I’m less concerned about that than I am about the grades. Colleges still check first semester of senior year.”
If that’s true, she has a funny way of showing it. But instead of saying that, I say something that stuns us both.
“Who says I even want to go to college?”
My mom’s elbow is propped on the couch, like she anticipated she’d be using her hand to hold up her forehead sooner or later in this conversation. Sure enough, she leans into it with a weary sigh.
“Pepper…”
“No, seriously.” My heart is hammering in my chest like it’s suddenly twice as thick as it usually is. I stare my mom down, not even sure where I’m going with this until it’s coming out of me, pushed from some depth I haven’t even acknowledged myself: “Maybe I—maybe I want to take a gap year. Or go back home for a little while. Or—or open my own business, like a bakery or something.”
That last one takes me by surprise, enough that I clamp my mouth shut as soon as I finish saying it, but my mom is oddly unfazed.
“Pepper, you’re a smart girl. A driven one. If you know what you want, then take it.”
I open my mouth. I don’t know what I want.
“I thought…”
She actually looks amused, her face softening.
“What?” She waits for me to finish, and then I remember the thing New York sometimes makes it so easy to forget—she’s on my side. We’re on the same team, even if the team is considerably smaller than it used to be. “Pepper, I didn’t finish college. Your dad and I made our own way in the world. You and Paige are both too stubborn and too smart not to be able to do the same.”
I sit there for a moment, the anger so stunned out of me, I don’t know what to do with myself. I unclench my fists and spread my fingers out on my legs, staring down at them, feeling more lost than ever—all this time I thought I was doing this to make her happy, or to beat Pooja, or to fit in. All the unhappiness or loneliness I ever felt, I was so prepared to pin on someone else. Only in this moment is it clear that it was nobody’s fault but my own.
And more than that realization is the bottomless kind of panic that comes with it. I’ve just assumed there were certain directions my life was going to take. The safe kind. The kind everyone else was taking, and I plowed through with a vengeance. It hasn’t been easy, but it hasn’t been brave either. The idea of actually straying from it is either thrilling or terrifying, the two feelings swallowing each other and spitting each other back out before I can settle on one.
Then, suddenly, I can picture it: the thing Paige and I dreamed about as kids and joked about as teenagers and let fade into the periphery. A bakery tucked into the corner of some street, with a blue-and-white striped awning, with Monster Cake and Rainy Day Pudding in the window, with mismatched mugs and sticky-fingered kids and a little spot in the back kitchen that’s all my own to make whatever it is I want to make.
I can see it so clearly, I feel like I just breathed it into existence.
“As long as you don’t let some teenage boy stand in the way of it.”
I should be more indignant on Jack’s behalf, but I’m still reeling. “He would never.”
“Well, those grades speak for themselves,” says my mom. “You don’t have to go to college, but you’re in the endgame now. Finish strong and keep your options open.”
I nod.
“And stay away from that Jack.”
My mouth unhinges, and then I laugh. My mom doesn’t. She stares me down like we’re in a bad made-for-TV movie of a modern Romeo and Juliet, like she can actually forbid me from associating with a boy who goes to my school.
“Stay away from Jack?”
“He’s clearly not a good influence.” She stands, a clear bookend to this conversation. “And I don’t see what the problem is anyway. It’s not as if you actually like him.”
She’s testing me. He’s my friend, I want to say, but even that’s a trap—if I admit that, it’s as good as admitting he’s the reason why I’ve quit tweeting. But if I’m defensive, either swearing I don’t like him—or worse, admitting I do—the whole thing blows up even further into my face.
In the end, I settle for none of the above, letting the verdict roll over me like some kind of wave I am willingly letting myself drown in.
“And Taffy and I will take over the Twitter until you get your grades back up.”
She slips out of the living room, then, and the dust settles on the not-quite-fight before I can tell which one of us has won.
