How to Suck at Confessing to the Girl You Like that You’ve Secretly Been Messaging Her on a Platform You Created, Then Convince Her It’s Not as Shady as It Sounds: a terrible novel, written by me.
The first attempt to tell Pepper the truth was noble enough—I begged off the end of my shift on Friday and took the 6 train uptown to where the Senior Skip Day shenanigans were going down, all inflated with this confidence and bravado, ready to lay everything out on the line. I was even going to be cheeky about it—sneak up and take a picture of her from behind, then message it to her on the app so when she turned around, she’d see me there, with a cupcake I’d brought from the deli.
I imagined Pepper would be surprised, and maybe angry, and then eventually hear me out. I imagined every possible scenario after that, from ones as ridiculous as her shoving me into the lake, as hopeful as her maybe even being into our whole accidental secret pals thing, and as realistic as her just plain being disappointed I wasn’t Landon.
Of all these imagined scenarios, though, the one that did not come up was the one that ended with Pepper vomiting up some impressive chunks of a partially digested hot dog.
The second attempt goes about as well as the first. It’s never hard to spot Pepper during a swim meet, especially now that she’s the team captain—she runs warm-ups, harasses the freshmen boys who are dicking around when their heats are coming up, confiscates the chocolate espresso beans one of the junior girls started passing around to give everyone an “extra edge” on their relay race (only at Stone Hall). No, spotting her isn’t the issue—it’s getting her alone that proves to be impossible.
Especially because she seems very, very intent on avoiding me. Like, book-it-across-the-pool-deck-like-her-butt’s-on-fire level of intent.
I finally manage to corner her after she pulls herself out of the pool from the 50-yard butterfly, headed for her towel in a cluster of other senior girls.
“Yo, Pepperoni, I was wondering—”
“Check your texts.”
She says it out of the corner of her mouth, and so fast that it takes me a few seconds after she’s passed me to rewind it in my head enough times to make sense of it. I hustle up to the bleachers and zip my phone out of my bag, where sure enough, there’s a text from Pepper.
This is super dumb, but my mom is here and she doesn’t want me talking to you. She’s touchy about the Hub Seed article.
I glance up in alarm, like someone just told me a panther was let loose in the building. I don’t look up with the intention of finding Pepper’s mom, but in an instant I lock eyes with a woman sitting with the parents on the other end of the pool who can only be her—she has the same blonde hair, the same keenness in her eyes, and the exact same pinched look on her face Pepper used to get whenever I said something she didn’t like.
Except the full force of that expression on Pepper’s face isn’t half as terrifying as it is coming from a woman dressed in a power suit in the middle of a pool deck. If it were possible for her to shank me with her eyes, I think she just might.
I look away, shoving my phone back into my bag, paranoid she somehow read Pepper’s warning to me from across the pool. I don’t bother trying to talk to her again for the rest of the night. I barely talk to anyone for the rest of the night. It’s awkward enough that Pepper’s mom clearly hates me—it skips past awkward and goes straight to eerie when, throughout the next few hours, I feel her mom’s eyes watching me every now and then, as critical as they were the first time. It’s jarring enough I even screw up one of my dives, landing with enough of a plunk in the water it’s all Paul will talk about for the rest of the meet.
I wait until I’m home to text her back.
Today 9:14 PM
So … your mom is terrifying?
Which is to say, I kind of get your whole “my mom made me do it” thing with Twitter now.
Hoooly shit did she TALK to you?
Tell me she didn’t talk to you
No, no, she just pierced me with the kind of stare that makes human souls shrivel
Oh man
She doesn’t usually come to meets but we were hanging out all day and she’s been out of town for a while so
YIKES
No it’s fine I’m a new yorker. i’m used to people giving me the stink eye for no reason
Well, I guess technically she has reason
Speaking of my mom I have noooo idea where she stands re: using the oven tomorrow for the bake sale
The ban is still in place?
If it is joke’s on her I’ll just go hide in the big league burger kitchen down the street
I mean we have like five ovens. Come use one of ours
She doesn’t answer right away. She’s all the way uptown, but I can still feel her overthinking like she’s sitting right next to me.
Today 9:27 PM
The 6 train isn’t that scary. Call me and I’ll talk you through it
Ha ha
For real. Worst that can happen is you end up in brooklyn, get kidnapped by hipsters, and your mom strangles me in broad daylight. What’ve you got to lose
Well when you put it THAT way
Does tomorrow afternoon work for you?
See ya then pepperoni
As it turns out, Pepper was not kidding about her lack of subway experience. The next day she calls me around three in the afternoon outside of the Eighty-Sixth Street subway station, where I talk her through using the spare change in her purse to get a one-way MetroCard, swipe, and find the platform for the 6 train that goes to Brooklyn Bridge. I get a few nervous texts from her—If I’m at 23rd, I haven’t passed you yet, right?—but she makes it to Astor Place without getting kidnapped or stuck on a train going express and emerges blinking out at the new skyline like she just teleported to another world.
She pulls out her phone to text me, and I let out a loud whistle, raising my hand to get her attention. Her head snaps up, and her face bursts into this wide, blinding kind of grin, the same one that nearly knocked the air out of me when she jumped off the high dive for the first time.
“Hi,” she says, running up to me. And then we’re hugging, because I guess that’s just a thing we do now, and it’s great and it’s awkward, but it’s terrible because as soon as it happens, I don’t want to let her go.
“You did it!” I say, at the same time she says, “You’re here.”
I shrug, glad it’s cold enough now that my cheeks are already red from the wind. “I figured I’d give you a quick walking tour of the ’hood.”
It’s strange, seeing her in her everyday clothes instead of her uniform or her swimsuit. I mean, I guess I did on Friday, but the upchucking distracted from it pretty fast. We’re both in jeans and coats, her hair tucked up into a bun with loose ends all sticking out of it, and the whole thing is just so relaxed and normal, it’s like the usual thirty seconds or so it takes for us to fall into a groove together just falls away.
She sticks close to me on the short walk to the deli, close enough our hands brush a few times, and I have to fight the impulse to take it. It’s weird—unlike Ethan, I’ve never actually dated anyone beyond the occasional awkward kiss with girls in our class at school dances. I always thought the motions of it would be so strange, like something that had to be learned and practiced. But it’s the opposite of that—it would be too easy to grab her hand, to reach up and tuck her bangs behind her ear, to stop and stare at her and see if that moment from the pool was just a moment or something that led to a much bigger one.
I show her the ice cream shop, the little bookstore, the food cart where I sometimes get coffee even though it drives my dad nuts.
“You’re so popular,” Pepper notes, when the third person waves at me from behind a window or a cash register.
“Hah. No. They’re all just scarred for life from me and Ethan running buck wild around this block as kids.”
“I bet you guys were cute.”
“Yeah, it’s a shame what’s happened since.”
She ribs me, just as Annie, the bookshop owner, pokes her head out and says so loudly half the street can hear, “Jack Campbell, are you on a date?”
I freeze in my tracks, hoping lightning will miraculously strike me down where I stand.
“Let me guess,” says Pepper, without missing a beat. “You bring all the girls to the deli.”
Annie’s grin is merciless. “He woos them with ham slices.”
“Hey!” I protest, finally finding my voice. “I’m so clearly a cheese guy! I’m offended.”
“And I’m intrigued. Come into the store on date two, and I’ll tell you all the embarrassing stories about baby Jack you want to know.”
Pepper laughs, and I’m expecting it to be one of those self-conscious laughs she muffles with her wrist, the kind that ends with, Oh, this isn’t a date. Because it’s not, really. It’s just some pseudo-flirty, post–Twitter war, pre-baking thing I’m not sure how to—
“I’ll swap you for the embarrassing dive team ones,” Pepper promises.
Annie’s eyebrows shoot up. “Ooh, I like her.”
“C’mon, c’mon,” I mutter through a smile, hooking my elbow with Pepper’s and dragging her away as she waves goodbye to Annie.
The deli’s in full Sunday afternoon swing when we arrive, the line not quite out the door but only because people have packed themselves inside to avoid the November cold. The woman who always comes in with her five grandkids waves at me, one of the line cooks who’s on her break tweaks my shoulder when she walks by, an NYU professor who comes in from time to time nods from his coffee cup and turns his attention back to some book about seafaring.
Pepper stops just out of the doorway, staring with an inscrutable look on her face. It didn’t occur to me until this moment to be self-conscious about showing her this place. I’ve never had to give the grand tour of it to someone whose opinion actually matters, because the people who are close to me have known this place as long as or longer than I have.
“What?”
“Nothing.” Then she shakes her head to retract it. “It just reminds me of … well, the first Big League Burger.”
“Oh my god. Are you Patricia?”
A moony-eyed middle schooler has approached, a group of her friends lagging about a foot behind her. They’re all so pint-sized that Pepper and I tower over them, and I have an unfamiliar shift of feeling like—well, like an adult.
“Um, yeah?” says Pepper.
The girl’s face lights up like a Christmas tree. “From the Big League Burger Twitter!”
“No way!” one of her friends crows. They’re looking at me now. “You guys are dating?”
“Would you sign my backpack?”
“Let’s get a picture!”
Pepper and I exchange mutual looks of red-faced bafflement, but end up submitting to the overexcited whims of our apparent fan club. We pose for a picture with them, and sign one of their cell phone cases, and by the time they’re done, my mom is staring at us from her perch behind the counter with an eyebrow cocked like she’s just waiting to make fun of us.
Ethan cuts in before she can.
“If you give her even a bite of our grilled cheese, we’re all disowning you,” he announces from the register, with a salute at Pepper to let her know he’s mostly kidding.
Pepper salutes right back. “I’ll stick to the baked goods.”
“So this is the famous Pepper,” says my mom, leaning in as if to inspect her.
There’s a beat when Pepper freezes—our coloring and the messy hair is so similar on us there’s no mistaking my mom is, well, my mom. She cuts a glance at me and then back at my mom, and only then does it occur to me she’s worried we might also be holding a Pepper’s mom–sized grudge.
My mom softens her eyebrow, makes her voice low and conspiratorial. “So you’re the one I should send the bills to when I have to send my kid to Twitter therapy?”
Pepper eases up, letting out a breath. “He can just push them through the slits of my locker.”
“Hah!” My mom gives Pepper that look she gets when she’s decided she’s sized someone up and is satisfied with what she sees. I don’t realize I’ve been holding my breath too until I’m slouching in relief. “Can do.”
Then she reaches out and nudges me on the shoulder. “Ovens two and four are cleared for teenage shenanigans. Try not to burn the place down, hmm?”
“Are these the Kitchen Sink Macaroons?” Pepper asks, her eyes wide on the display case.
“They sure are,” says my mom, her hands on her hips. “A Campbell classic, according to your father. I whipped up a batch this morning myself.”
I grab tissue paper and pluck one from the display, handing it to Pepper.
“What—are you sure—”
“He owns the place, he’s sure,” says my mom wryly.
I stiffen at the words, but then Pepper takes a hearty bite of it and closes her eyes. “Oh my god. Are there pretzel bits in this?”
“And you and that no-good brother of yours told me I was pushing my luck, adding those in last week,” says my mom, pointing a finger at me.
“Okay, okay, but to be fair, that was right on the heels of the licorice experimentation, and I didn’t want to scar any more customers for life.”
Pepper takes another bite. “This version might actually be better than Monster Cake.”
“Whoa. Don’t get too carried away,” I say, wondering when the tables turned so drastically on us that I’m defending her own food to her.
“Monster Cake?” asks my mom, intrigued.
“We’ll have some ready in an hour,” says Pepper. “It’s an atrocity.”
“A delicious one,” I add.
Pepper beams like I’ve just handed her on Oscar. Then she hikes her backpack off her shoulder, revealing enough junk food and various dessert sauces that it could put Cookie Monster into a coma just by looking at it.
“Well,” I say, “it looks like we’ve got our work cut out for us.”
“Let the ridiculous dessert mash-up games begin.”
