An hour and a half later, we are the proud parents of two massive sheets of Monster Cake, some impressive concoction called Unicorn Ice Cream Bread, three dozen Kitchen Sink Macaroons, peanut-butter-and-jelly cupcakes, a three-layer Paige creation dubbed Sex-Positive Brownies (“Slutty Brownies,” Pepper explained, “but Paige took a course on feminism and sex work, so.”), an ungodly amount of banana pudding, and a bunch of misshapen cake balls we rolled around in melted chocolate and stuck in the fridge.
My mom comes in at some point, lured by the smell. She tries a sliver of the Monster Cake, groans, and says, “Don’t look me in the eye,” as she immediately cuts off a second slice.
“We actually need that for school,” I remind her, as Pepper blushes furiously next to me, looking pleased with herself.
My mom holds up a finger. “Hush. I’m having a moment over here.” Pepper snorts as my mom finishes having said moment, and then turns to Pepper, her fingers still sticky with cake, and says, “You are welcome to this kitchen any day of the week for the rest of your damn life.” Before Pepper can respond, she turns to me and says, “But if you don’t clean up this disaster, yours, my dear, is over.”
By the time we finish scrubbing all the pots and pans, Pepper’s cheek is dusted with flour, and a strand of her hair has come loose and somehow ended up streaked with melted chocolate. I reach up without thinking and run my fingers through it, trying to get it out. Her eyes dart over to mine, but not in alarm—in this hopeful, surprised kind of way that suddenly gives meaning to something I thought in the moment was meaningless, that makes me second-guess myself.
“Chocolate,” I say dumbly, pulling my hand away to show her.
She rolls her eyes at herself. “Typical.”
I shift my weight onto the foot that’s farther from her. “We could, uh—chill at our place, while we’re waiting for everything to cool down?” I point upward. “We live right upstairs, if you want to stay for dinner.”
“Are you sure?”
I sweep my hand over to the other side of the kitchen, which is stacked to the gills with meats, cheeses, breads, and every weird sandwich accoutrement known to humankind. “If you can dream it, you can make it.”
We both avoid grilled cheese, since the whole debacle is still a little too fresh. I make myself a pastrami on rye, and Pepper uses the bread ends of a baguette to fashion a swiss cheese, ham, and butter sandwich. I pull out the cranberry relish, and she mutters the word “genius” at me before adding it to hers, and I can still feel it inflating my chest five minutes later when we take our spoils back up to the apartment.
I’m expecting to see Grandma Belly in her chair when we walk in, but she must be napping. Instead, it’s just me and Pepper and suddenly a little more of myself than I counted on Pepper seeing, from the cheesy photos of me and Ethan hung up on the fridge, to the door to my room that is very much wide open, leaving an old Super Smash Bros. poster I forgot was even on the wall in plain view.
Suddenly I am so at a loss for what to do, I actually find myself wishing a parent would come in and interrupt.
“We could, uh, watch a movie?” I suggest.
“Yeah, sure.”
I glance at the shelf, weighing our options, and turn to Pepper with a smirk. “Mean Girls?”
Pepper meets my eye like she suspects I’m kidding. “Don’t laugh, but I’m obsessed.”
I’m already walking over to pluck it from the collection. “Yeah, I know. You reference Mean Girls on the Big League Burger account more than you actually talk about burgers.”
“I’m not a regular social media manager. I’m a cool social media manager,” says Pepper, plopping on the couch with her sandwich as I queue up the DVD.
“You think that’s what you wanna do? When we’re finally freed from the prisonscape of Stone Hall?”
Pepper has already taken an absurdly large bite of her sandwich, but she wrinkles her nose in response. “No. God. What a nightmare.”
“Eh, we had some good times.”
I sit next to her, a little closer than I meant to, but she doesn’t scoot away and neither do I.
“Are we going to wax poetic someday about the good old days on Twitter?” Pepper asks. “Has this been our heyday the whole time?”
We both lean back into the couch, and she turns her head toward me, waiting for an answer that for some reason it takes me a moment to give.
I make a decision, right then—close a door I’ve been tiptoeing around now for months. I decide not to tell Pepper about any of it. About Weazel, about Bluebird and Wolf, about the tangled web of our friendship that is secretly more complicated than she could ever have guessed.
Because this, right here—whatever this is—has a strange kind of magic I feel as if I could accidentally breathe right out of the air if I say the wrong thing and puncture it. Pepper’s eyes are on mine, and it’s kind of scary, but it’s also just so simple. Usually at least half my brain is preoccupied with self-doubt and second-guessing and my Olympic-sized twin complex, but right now everything is quiet. Just Pepper and sticky sandwich fingers and little smirks, and the feeling that whatever we’re sharing between us right now adds up to something bigger than the sum of what we were by ourselves.
It’s the talk about the future, maybe. Pepper using the word someday. Suddenly there is a someday, and that one spoken word seems to imply so many other unspoken ones—that we mean more to each other now than the people we were a month ago, who might have briefly nodded to each other at the all-night grad party in the spring and never seen each other again.
Not telling Pepper is easier than telling her, sure—but it’s more than that now. I want to hold on to what’s taking shape here. I don’t want to compromise that someday by telling her something that doesn’t even matter anymore.
“Nah,” I say after a moment. “This was just the beginning. We’ll go to war on Snapchat next.”
She ribs me with her elbow and doesn’t move her arm back, so it’s just tucked into my side. I watch the movie without really watching it, the two of us eating our sandwiches, Pepper saying her favorite lines with the characters often enough that it’s clear in the first five minutes she has the entire film memorized down to the exact degree of exasperation in Tina Fey’s face before she speaks. Still, she laughs like she hasn’t seen it more times than she can count, hard enough I can feel the vibration of it through her arm and into my ribs like she’s sharing it with me.
Just as Cady is about to throw up on Aaron Samuels’s shoes, the DVD starts to skip, and then pauses.
“Oh, man. It does this sometimes,” I mutter. “It’ll start itself back up in a sec.”
“I haven’t had to deal with this in a while. DVD players—so retro.”
I turn to her, somehow surprised by how close her face is to mine even though I’ve been fully and excruciatingly aware of all of her for over an hour. “Well, the East Village has to keep its hipster cred somehow.”
“I guess that rep is more important ever now that we’re famous, huh?”
I laugh, accidentally leaning in closer—or maybe she’s the one leaning. “Those kids today—how freaking weird have our lives gotten?”
“I feel like I hallucinated that. Like I hallucinated the entire comments section of that Hub Seed article too.”
“Jactricia,” I snicker, before I even realize what I’m saying—and then we’re both red in the face, because it’s the first time we’ve mutually acknowledged the extreme awkwardness that is strangers actually, legitimately shipping us online.
Pepper clears her throat. “Well, obviously we need to petition for a better ship name.”
Some of the awkwardness diffuses, but the tension is still there, tight like a coil between us.
“Jepper? Pack?”
“Pass,” she says, nudging me with her elbow again—and then something shifts. The apartment is eerily still, with the same kind of quiet there was in the pool the other day, where you’re not sure if it’s actually quiet or if the rest of the world’s sounds just don’t apply to you anymore.
“Maybe just Jack and Pepper, then,” I concede.
There’s a ghost of a smirk on Pepper’s face, but she’s so close, I can hear it more than I can see it. “Pepper and Jack,” she corrects me. Then her eyes light up. “Pepperjack.”
It’s ridiculous, but the word is like a key turning into a lock. And then impossibly, even though some part of me knew it would happen the moment I saw Pepper walk out of the subway, we lean in and our lips touch and we’re kissing on my couch.
It is awkward, and messy, and perfect. We’re so bad at it, but even in the first few seconds I can feel us getting better, her hand hesitant and then sure as she sets it on my shoulder, our lips giving way to each other’s, this self-conscious, giddy little laugh escaping Pepper and humming in my teeth.
“Wait.”
The laugh is already dissolving out of her face when I pull away, and crap, I don’t know what I’m doing or why I’m doing it now, but I was wrong. I can’t lie to her. I can’t start something that feels this big built on what still feels like a lie. I just didn’t understand how big it was until it was already happening.
“You’re right,” Pepper blurts, a mile ahead of me. “I mean, we’re just—I don’t know. My mom, and the whole thing, and I…”
“No, not—I don’t care about that.”
She looks equal parts panicked and exasperated. “You were the one who said wait.”
“It’s just that there’s something I need to tell you.”
“Oh.”
Her eyes are already starting to dim, and my brain is scrambling for the words I need to recover when, without warning, the front door cracks open and a woman says, “Pepper Marie Evans, what on earth do you think you’re doing?”
Pepper snaps herself away from me so fast, I might have burned her. My back is turned to the front door, but judging from the sheer horror in Pepper’s eyes, I don’t need to fully turn around to know it can only be her mother.
What I’m not expecting to see when I finally turn is my dad walking in right behind her, looking both exasperated and furious. It isn’t until his eyes meet mine that I realize the fury is reserved for none other than me.
“Mom?” Pepper bleats. “How did you—what did you—”
“What, you didn’t think I’d see this plastered all over the internet?” says Pepper’s mom, walking into our apartment without even a beat of hesitation, as if her name is on the lease. She shoves a phone in Pepper’s face, pointedly ignoring me. Pepper tilts the screen so I can see it too—the picture of the two of us with the middle schoolers has already accumulated four hundred retweets, with both the Big League Burger and Girl Cheesing accounts tagged.
I gulp. Literally gulp, like I’m in some bad sitcom, or maybe just a really off-the-wall dream that I’m going to wake up from any moment now. But it only gets weirder from there.
“Ronnie,” says my dad under his breath, “there’s no reason to—”
“I rarely, if ever, have set rules for you, Pepper.” By now she is towering over the both of us, and we’re sitting on the couch utterly paralyzed. “But I told you very specifically to stay away from that boy.”
She says “that boy” as if I’m not even here, but I can’t even let that demoralizing fact wrap around my brain—Pepper and I are both staring at each other, my dad’s “Ronnie” still an open question dangling in the air between us.
“I—I needed to use the oven.” Pepper is redder than I’ve ever seen her, and I can tell it’s every bit on my behalf as it is for hers. “There’s a bake sale tomorrow, and I know you didn’t want me to bake, so—”
“Get your things. We are leaving, and having a very long discussion about the appropriate punishment on the taxi ride home.”
Pepper reaches for her backpack, shoving her phone into it and zipping it up with shaking hands. She looks back at me, her eyes searing with a desperate kind of apology in them. I’m too stunned to react, my mouth hanging open, still buzzing from a kiss that feels like it happened in some other lifetime.
In her panic, Pepper reaches for the half of a Kitchen Sink Macaroon she hadn’t finished yet. Her mom reaches her hand forward and picks it up first, holding it up and scrutinizing it. Out of context, I would have laughed—I’ve never seen a grown woman look so inexplicably furious at a dessert before.
“Figures,” she mutters to herself. Then, for some reason, she turns to my dad. She opens her mouth to say something, and he tilts his head sharply—not quite shaking his head, but making enough of a movement there’s no mistaking its intention.
She lets out whatever breath she was going to use to say something to him, sets a hand on Pepper’s shoulder, and guides her out of the room. Then they’re gone, the apartment door slamming behind them, leaving me and my dad in total silence.
I’m not sure what to say or if I should even speak. The air in the room is so thick, it feels like it’s slowing down time. I glance over at my dad, cautious at first, but he’s not even looking at me. He’s leaning on the kitchen counter and scowling at his knuckles.
“Dad?”
He blinks, looking over at me. I’m expecting some kind of punishment of my own. A Time-Out Booth–level lecture, maybe. Something on par with whatever the hell just happened here.
But he seems so distracted that even when he does get around to the whole disciplining thing, it seems like more of an afterthought than anything else.
“You shouldn’t be bringing a date into this apartment without supervision.”
“It wasn’t…”
Well. It kind of was. But it’s not like Mom didn’t know we were up here. And Grandma Belly is technically home.
But my dad’s already pacing out of the kitchen, heading for his bedroom. He’s not even waiting for me to apologize. And he’s certainly not waiting for me to ask the dozens of questions on the tip of my tongue, chasing Pepper and her mom out the door.
“Sorry,” I say—partially because I am, for Pepper’s sake, and because I want him to stop for a second, so I can figure out what to ask and how to ask it.
My dad just nods.
So that’s it. I’ve gotten away with … whatever it is I got away with, I guess. I’m still puzzling out what exactly that is, but my dad’s Ronnie and Pepper’s mom’s Figures and the absurdly weighted look between the two of them just before they booked it out of here is still rattling around in my head like a pinball in a machine.
And then there’s a thud from the other room, and both my dad and I stop in our tracks, everything else forgotten faster than it takes for us to get to Grandma Belly’s door.
