Approximately eighteen hours after my kiss with Jack Campbell—my kiss with Jack Campbell—I am sitting at a card table with Pooja in the front entrance of the school behind our veritable army of baked goods, overanalyzing the situation to such an absurd degree, it is now less of a kiss and more of an FBI investigation.
Pooja, however, isn’t having it.
“He likes you. You like him,” says Pooja. “Honestly, it’s old news. Even preteens in Iowa on the Hub realized it before you.”
“But last night…”
“Talk to him.”
“I’ve tried.” It’s a humiliating thing to confess, but Pooja needs context if I’m going to get any advice: “He hasn’t texted back.”
In fact, Jack has all but turned into a ghost. He mysteriously did not show up for homeroom. I only know he’s here today because I saw him in the cafeteria at lunch, but he was way across the room and had slipped into his calc class before I could catch up to him. And now he’s conspicuously absent from the bake sale too—the only reason we even have the baked goods is because Ethan, in a rare moment of actually participating in his dive captain duties, dropped them off at the front office for us.
Granted, he is most likely making out with Stephen under the stairwell by the gym while we hawk all these goods, but at least he kind of tried.
“Well, he can’t hide forever. So I guess you’ll get your answers soon enough.” Pooja leans back and props her foot on the chair that was supposed to be occupied with Jack. “Maybe he’s just embarrassed, after the whole thing with your mom.”
“Yeah, maybe.” I shake my head. “His dad called Mom Ronnie. My dad doesn’t even call her that. Vee, maybe, but never Ronnie.”
“That, I have to admit, is intriguing. And I will be the first one to reblog the conspiracy theories when they hit Tumblr, because I personally suspect your parents are part of some weird underground fast casual food cult,” says Pooja, popping another bit of a peanut-butter-and-jelly cupcake in her mouth. In her defense, she did pay for it. “But your mom can’t ban you from seeing Jack. He’s ridiculous, sure, but he’s not, like, a delinquent.”
“Maybe he wasn’t yesterday,” I mutter, thinking of his unexplained absence.
“And the kiss was good, right?”
“I mean, it wasn’t not good.” I shrug, trying to seem casual about it even as my heart starts beating a little faster and my palms are sweating where they’re propped on the cash box. It was my first kiss, and one of those milestones I only realized I hadn’t given enough thought to executing until it was actually happening—and boy, did it happen.
And then swiftly un-happen so fast my ears are still ringing from Jack’s Wait and my mom’s lecturing on the Uber ride back.
Still, even with all that lecturing, and the fact I am grounded until kingdom come, and my mom is quite possibly part of a food services mafia with Jack’s dad, it was kind of absurdly, stupidly great.
Or at least it was until the second Jack brought it to an abrupt halt.
It’s not just the kiss, though. I know I should feel bad about lying to my mom, about breaking her trust, and I do. Enough that I almost blurted out the whole thing to Paige on the phone last night, just so I could feel better when she inevitably took my side. But the guilt is completely separate from the rest of it, from the terror and the thrill of something as simple as getting on the 6 train and taking a twenty-minute ride downtown.
It was like emerging into an entirely different city. Not that there’s any surprise in that—sometimes it feels like individual blocks here are their own islands, separate from the massive one they’re all built on. It’s just I’ve never seen a new part of the city or experienced it through my own eyes because of a choice I made.
And I guess, in a way, I still haven’t. I saw it through Jack’s eyes. The mingling of the newer, kitschier shops with storied buildings with storefronts so much older than we are that you feel like a blip in time. The bustle of NYU students and New York natives and street vendors and people wearing ridiculous outfits nobody bats an eye at. The people who waved at Jack like a parade all the way from the 6 train to the deli, as if he was every bit as much a fixture down there as the little shops and restaurants.
Girl Cheesing itself has its own magic, the way every shop around it seemed to give way to it like it was the pulse of the block. And yesterday, I got to be a part of it. I got to see a whole new part of this city and still be myself in it without it spitting me back out, and I’m restless at the idea of it now, at how much more there is to see—the five or so blocks I walked with Jack function like their own separate planet, and there are hundreds, thousands of others squeezed into this city all around it.
I’ve spent so long resisting the rest of this place that I feel like I’ve had my hands over my ears and my eyes clamped shut ever since I got here, waiting to ride it out until the day I could leave. Now suddenly, graduation seems less like a jailbreak and a little more like an expiration date. The day I might run out of time here, to see the rest of everything I’ve been so determined to ignore.
I’m about to talk to Pooja about it, but we’re interrupted by the sharp squeak of shoes on linoleum, a squeak so familiar that I know it belongs to Paul before I even look down the hall. Sure enough, he’s hightailing it with his usual speed and talking a mile a minute—talking to Jack, who is walking a beat behind him, his face hovering in the beginnings of a scowl.
“Look who decided to show up,” says Pooja—but Jack and Paul don’t head in our direction, and instead divert sharply down into the music hallway. I catch just the side of Jack’s face as he turns the corner, and whatever the scowl is about, it’s way beyond the usual Paul levels of exasperation. He looks straight-up wrecked, like he didn’t sleep at all last night.
Pooja is already looking at me when I find her eyes, like I need some kind of cue.
“Maybe he forgot,” she says.
I raise my eyebrows at her, but only because it’s that or give in to the alternative—that Jack regrets that kiss. That I was just imagining the moments leading up to it, building something up in my head. That somehow, over the course of one weekend, I’ve been rejected both by the anonymous friend I’ve been pouring my heart out to for months, and the very real friend I accidentally spilled it out to faster than I ever thought possible.
“I’ll go talk to—”
“Listen, Pepper, I swear I didn’t have anything to do with it.”
I blink up at Landon, who is towering over the bake-sale table with an expression on his face I’ve only ever seen on people called into Rucker’s office on the PA. Some mingling of guilt and sheer terror.
“Uh … I mean, yeah, I hope not. Unless you paid off a hot dog vendor to give her food poisoning,” says Pooja.
Landon doesn’t even look at her, his eyes still focused on mine. “I told anyone who had pictures to delete them. They were being dicks.”
“The pictures of Pepper blowing chunks?” Pooja asks, her tone already heated.
Landon starts to nod, and I roll my eyes.
“Let me guess,” I mutter. “Someone posted one into the Hallway Chat.”
Landon’s mouth opens and then stays open for just a beat long enough for me to feel a trickle of dread.
“You haven’t seen?”
I narrow my eyes at him. “Seen what?”
“I didn’t have anything to do with it,” he says again. “It’s, uh—you might want to check Twitter.”
Landon takes off and is down the hall and out of sight before Pooja can pull the app up on her phone. Her scowl hardens, and then she passes it over to me.
It’s a picture of me in the park from Friday night. My face is pinched and pale, just a half second away from retching into the bag Pooja grabbed for me out of the trash can—a bag that very visibly has the iconic Big League Burger logo on it, something I failed to notice as I was using it as a receptacle for my stomach contents. I look awful, like some drunk, stumbling teenage cliché, but more to the point, I look like myself. The picture was taken within close enough range that there’s no mistaking it for anyone but me.
Especially because the picture was tweeted from the Girl Cheesing account, under the caption: Evergreen mood.
My stomach plummets all over again, this time in one heavy, lurching swoop. I thumb the picture and scroll down over a thousand retweets so far, and it was only posted an hour ago. oh ew un-stanning immediately, someone has tweeted. turns out patty’s a party animal, writes another, along with a GIF of Kristen Wiig dressed like a drunk Cinderella on an old episode of Saturday Night Live. Another one, that hits a little closer to the vest than I thought it would, reads, No wonder her tweets sucked so much this week.
I’ve been so far removed from it since Jack and I settled the score that I haven’t even been on the app all week—Taffy fully took the reins, and I disabled the notifications I used to get every time Jack tweeted. Maybe this shouldn’t feel like such a slap in the face, but it still stings like one.
“He wouldn’t do this,” I say instantly.
“Then why hasn’t he deleted it?” says Pooja. “Anyway, it looks like it’s responding to something the Big League account said.”
I pull it up and see a tweet from a few hours ago. It’s so cringeworthy that I know Taffy couldn’t have been the one who drafted it. It’s a picture of our two versions of Grandma’s Special Grilled Cheese along with the number of them we’ve sold versus theirs.
retweet all you want, but this grandma is wiping the floor with yours, it reads.
“Oh, for god’s sake,” I mutter.
“Go get him to delete that shit,” says Pooja. “Someone already memed it.”
I close my eyes. My mom just had to keep this stupid Twitter fight up, didn’t she? And now I’m not only the laughingstock of the school, but probably poised to be the laughingstock of the country. No matter what I accomplish in this life, whenever someone Googles my first name for the next hundred years, a picture of me heaving my guts into a Big League Burger bag will probably be the first hit.
“I’ll be right back,” I mutter, getting up so fast from the bake-sale table that the chair legs screech across the floor out from under me.
I follow the little hallway they disappeared down. I can hear Jack’s voice faintly before I reach the little offshoot of the hallway—and then he raises it, and it’s not faint at all. I stop in my tracks, stunned by the level of irritation in it.
“… cannot even begin to tell you how little this matters to me right now,” I hear Jack saying from around the corner. He and Paul are standing in front of a row of lockers, where Paul must be grabbing his clarinet.
“Dude, I’m your best friend.”
“Yeah? Then don’t ask me to do dumb shit.”
“It’s not dumb. I just want to know who Goldfish is. We’ve been talking for a few weeks now, and I really think it could, y’know, be a thing. But I just gotta know who she is or I’m gonna embarrass myself.”
Jack lets out a sigh like he’s recalibrating himself. “You won’t.”
“Have you met me?”
It’s about then that my brain makes sense of the use of Goldfish, and I realize Paul must be talking about someone he’s met on Weazel. My face burns; the lingering embarrassment over the debacle with Wolf is still weirdly fresh, underneath everything that’s happened since.
“Trust me, Paul, it’s just—you don’t want to mess around with this app. In fact, I think I’m just gonna—disable it, maybe. Make another version where people can’t be anonymous, so we can still have all the study group setups and stuff.”
I’m listening so intently, I’m not even breathing anymore. I don’t fully remember why I came down this hall in the first place. Disable it? The words ricochet somewhere in my head and refuse to settle. Make another version?
There’s only one scenario where it would make sense for Jack to say something like that.
“But dude, there are so many people who have become friends on it—”
“Yeah, but Rucker’s right. Sometimes people are assholes on it. I monitor it whenever I can, but I just plain don’t have time anymore, and I…”
“At least just tell me who Goldfish is.”
“I told you I’m not going to do that. And besides, it’s—you think you want to know, but maybe you don’t, you know?”
Every muscle in my body tenses, like it already knows something I don’t.
“No?” says Paul, his voice starting to lean into a whine. “I really, really do.”
“Like—the other day I found out who someone I’d been talking to on it was before the app triggered it, and it just made everything weirdly complicated, me knowing and her not knowing.”
The hallway suddenly seems smaller, like the ceiling is closer to the floor, like it’s the only part of the school that’s left, and it’s going to compress and shove me into them at any moment.
“So you did cheat and find out who someone was on it,” says Paul, both excited and accusatory. “I knew it. You don’t just make an app like that and—”
“No, jeez, Paul. No, I didn’t. She just—said something in the chat, sent me this link, and then I knew it was her and it just—it made everything weird. I hated it. I wished I hadn’t known.”
My heart is slamming in my ribcage. Paul says something else, but I turn and sweep up the hall before I can hear it, blinking back tears.
Jack is Wolf.
And I’m a goddamn idiot.
I don’t even know how I make it back to the bake-sale table, because no conscious part of me is committed to getting there. Jack is Wolf is like a balloon swelling in my brain, knocking all the other thoughts aside. Because if Jack is Wolf, that means I’ve been talking to him for months. If Jack is Wolf, that means he not only knows who I am, but that he didn’t want it to be me. Because if Jack is Wolf, he let me go to that stupid hangout in the park to meet him knowing full well I’d embarrass the hell out of myself thinking it was Landon on the other end of those texts.
Figures it would all come full circle. He let me humiliate myself there, and now his picture from that night will humiliate me for eternity.
It’s not even that, though. I can live with the stupid picture, can live with Landon avoiding me for the rest of senior year, can even live with whatever fallout will inevitably come when my mom catches wind of all of this.
What I can’t live with is the fact the nightmare has come true: Wolf knows who I am and is obviously disappointed. And the hurt is twice as big knowing Jack is disappointed too.
It casts a shadow of doubt on everything. I was the one who kissed him. I was the one who pushed for us to meet.
It made everything weird. I hated it. I wished I just hadn’t known.
“What the hell happened to you?”
Pooja is looking at me like a ghost has approached her. I open my mouth—Jack is Wolf!—but that doesn’t make any sense, not to anyone, because I kept it so close to my heart that I never breathed a word of it. So instead, what comes out is an ill-timed, too-loud blurt: “Jack is the one who made the Weazel app.”
Pooja’s jaw drops, and the blood seems to leave her face. While I expect a reaction, I’m not expecting a reaction that drastic—but Pooja isn’t looking at me. She’s looking behind me.
“Miss Evans, can I see you in my office?”
Shit.
