by Emma Lord
“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.
Pepper
In the end, Rucker can’t really do anything to us—the only proof he has that anyone did anything was me blurting it in a hallway with only Pooja as a witness, and Pooja was smart enough to grab another swimmer to put in charge of the booth and book it out of there the moment after Rucker called me in and sent one of the teacher’s assistants to go find Jack.
It’s fruitless. But I insist over and over, until all three of our ears are bleeding, that I was only kidding about Jack making Weazel.
“That doesn’t seem like a joke, young lady,” says Rucker, narrowing his eyes at me.
“It’s, uh … it’s part of the Twitter thing. I’m sure you’ve seen the article on the Hub about us?” I’m desperate. Grasping at straws. “We started, uh, pranking each other in real life too.”
“Spreading allegations like this doesn’t really seem like a prank.”
Jack isn’t even bothering to jump in. He was indignant when they first brought him in, insisting he had nothing to do with it, but then his eyes swept up and met mine, and the fight drained out of them. Rucker told him what I said in the hallway, and he hasn’t so much as looked at me since.
I don’t know what else to do to save him, if he’s not willing to save himself. So I play the only card that has a prayer of working. “I mean, it’s Jack. He’s not the brightest bulb. You really think he’s capable of making an app like that?”
Jack winces. I don’t move a muscle, determined not to break eye contact with Rucker.
They’ve already searched our phones. They didn’t find Weazel on either of them—someone posted an app in the Hallway Chat to hide app icons weeks ago. The only way they’ll find it is if another student rats us out and shows them how, and nobody can do that without incriminating themselves.
“I’m calling both of your parents—”
“Wait—could you…” Jack blows out a breath. “It’s not a great time.”
Rucker tilts his chin down in a way that would probably seem more effectively condescending if he weren’t wearing pants with palm trees embroidered on them. “My apologies, Mr. Campbell,” he says, his voice dripping with sarcasm. “When would be a more convenient time for you?”
He dismisses us, then, and we both walk out without looking at each other. I hover outside the office door, straddling an awkward line between guilt and rage.
“I didn’t mean to rat you out,” I finally say, so someone will break the silence. It’s not an apology, but I can’t find it in me to give him one.
Jack’s lips thin. “How long have you known, then?”
“I didn’t. At least not until a few minutes ago.” The anger makes me bolder than it should. For the first time in months, I finally say the name out loud, the same name that takes up so much space in my brain it seems ridiculous I’ve never actually uttered it: “Wolf.”
For once, Jack is utterly still, standing like a scarecrow.
“So,” he says.
I’ll say it if he won’t. “You lied to me.”
“I didn’t—I didn’t mean to,” says Jack. “I mean, I rigged the whole thing so I wouldn’t know who you were. I didn’t want to know—”
“You’ve made that pretty clear.”
“I get that you’re mad, but—”
“And then you let me go to the park that day and make an ass of myself in front of Landon. And to top it all off, apparently you took a picture of me looking like a drunk hurling into a Big League Burger bag and posted it on the internet?”
I’m waiting for his face to shift into confusion, waiting for him to ask what I’m talking about. Waiting for that familiar tic where he scratches the back of his neck or moves like he doesn’t know whether to step forward or back.
Instead, Jack closes his eyes. “I can explain that.”
My voice is shaking. “Then explain it.”
“First of all, Ethan posted it.”
“I’m not an idiot. The angle that photo was taken from—it could only have been you. So how did Ethan get it?”
“The same way he always does,” says Jack. “He opened my phone with Face ID. He must have found the picture and tweeted it himself.”
“Then why didn’t you delete it?”
“Because—because I thought we were done with Twitter. I thought we agreed. And then you came after my grandma.” I’m about to interrupt him and defend myself, but his eyes are red-rimmed and his face contorts into the kind of hurt that goes way beyond jabs on Twitter. “And she’s in the hospital right now, and I…”
Whatever I was going to say next is blown right out of me.
“So yeah, I didn’t delete Ethan’s little tweet, because I was mad, okay? And—and busy.”
The hallway has never felt more empty. Jack is somehow looking at me and not looking at me at the same time, alternating between apology and defiance and what I now understand must be complete and total exhaustion.
“Is she okay?”
Jack nods. “Yeah, she—they’re releasing her tonight.”
I wait to see if he’ll elaborate, but he doesn’t. And after everything that’s happened, I don’t think it’s my place to pry.
/>
“I need you to know I didn’t post that tweet. My mom did.”
Jack swipes at his eyes and lets out a breathy noise that might have started its life as a laugh. “Well, shit.”
It’s not an apology, but the regret that so immediately sears across his face is more than enough of one.
“Yeah,” is the only thing I can think of to say. Because all my other questions—about Jack, about Weazel, about what on earth almost did or didn’t happen last night—dissolve all at once, drowned in a sea of something much bigger and more important than them.
Jack’s phone buzzes and lights up in his hand. “I gotta … that’ll be my mom. I gotta get back home.”
I nod. “Let me know if there’s anything I can do.”
Jack nods back, and there’s something kind of tentative in it, but also kind of final. Like we walked out to the middle of a bridge together thinking we’d cross to some other side, even lingered in that middle spot over the depths below for a while, but ultimately turned right back around and headed to familiar ground.
My eyes are burning when I turn and head back to the bake sale. I’m not even sure what those familiar grounds used to look like, back when Jack and I were just classmates. When I didn’t know Jack’s half grin had infinite degrees that all held different feelings, when I didn’t know exactly what part of him was going to fidget before he even moved, when he called me Pepperoni and it didn’t unfurl something quiet in my chest.
It’s weird, how you have no idea how far you’ve come until suddenly you can’t find the way back.
Pepper
I don’t hear from Jack all night, but I do hear from plenty of other people. Pooja, checking in. Friends from my old junior high in Nashville. The Hub Seed reporter who wrote the article on me and Jack, asking for comment. My dad.
And then Paige.
“This has gone too far,” says Paige, before I even finish telling her what happened. “She’s out of her mind.”
“Okay,” I say, in a measured tone that I’m all too practiced in, “yes, it sucks, but it’s not like she could have seen this coming.”
“Bullshit. She should have known something was going to happen.”
The thing is that I agree with her. This part is squarely on Mom. But telling Paige about this even though I knew it would only make things worse is decidedly on me. Now, yet again, I’m backtracking, trying to undo the damage.
Too late.
“Why are you always defending her?” Paige snaps. For once, it seems like some of the anger is directed not just at her, but at me. “This is all her, you know. Twitter. Those stupid Stone Hall kids. If she hadn’t just uprooted you—”
“Paige, I came here by choice.”
Paige huffs. “You were fourteen. You were a little kid who didn’t know any better.”
My eyes squeeze shut, the words slicing in an unexpected way. Maybe because they’re true, but maybe because they’re not—maybe because even at fourteen, there was something in me that knew, deep under the frizzy hair and the acne and awkwardness, that I was supposed to be here. That New York was something I might never grow into, but would grow around me, making space where there wasn’t any before. That the future was going to be a big unknown either way, but I wanted to be with Mom when I faced it.
But in this moment, it doesn’t matter what I thought, not at fourteen and not right now—because the anger is suddenly so white-hot that I can’t stop myself from saying what I say next.
“But you did.” My voice is shaking. I don’t want to say it, but it feels like I’ve been pushed and pushed to an edge that I can’t lean over anymore, and it’s all just falling out. “You did know better, and you came out here anyway, and wrecked things with Mom when you could have just stayed and let it be.”
Paige doesn’t hesitate. She says it with a conviction so quiet and firm that I know there’s no way it isn’t true. “I came to New York because of you.”
The indignant breath I was sucking in stops in my throat, almost painful. It hovers there in the awful silence, as I scramble to make sense of something that makes too much sense all at once.
Some of that firmness is gone when Paige continues, like her voice is farther away than it was moments ago, farther even than the miles separating us. “I came because I thought you’d get eaten alive. And I thought—I thought maybe Mom would see how miserable we were and change her mind.”
I close my eyes, already anticipating the wave of regret before it crashes into me—only it isn’t a wave. It’s searing, like my blood is suddenly on fire with it.
“But you weren’t miserable. It only took you a few weeks to fit in. And I…”
She stayed miserable. I remember. The slammed doors, the long walks—the way she went from being one of the most popular girls in her old school to being this angry, pale version of herself, stalking in and out of the apartment like a ghost.
“I didn’t know.” My eyes are stinging, my face burning. I don’t know what to say, except to say it again: “I didn’t know.”
There’s a beat. “Yeah, well.” The words are wet, like she’s crying too. Before I can say anything else, she says, “I’m sorry, I’ve got to go.”
Then she hangs up. I don’t try to call her back; I know better than that. And I know better than to think that whatever just fractured between us won’t eventually heal. But it still hurts just the same, in some core of me that I thought was too deep to be shaken.
All this time, I have blamed Paige and Mom for the fights that tore us apart. I never once thought the root of it all just might be me.
Pepper
I wake up the next morning feeling like I’ve been smacked by an MTA bus. In the five hours or so I manage to sleep, the internet sure hasn’t. Before I even fully peel my eyes open, I see there are no texts or calls from Paige—but that worry is almost entirely forgotten when I realize there’s a Twitter Moment, a Hub Seed article, a Jasmine Yang video, and a few other viral sites with roundups of the memed versions of me. People have been photoshopping the Big League Burger bag, first with other logos, like one from a recent superhero movie that flopped in theaters. Then people started labeling it with things like “your hot takes on Twitter.” It’s come so full circle, someone wrote “seeing this meme 15 times on my dash in one minute” on it.
There’s even an article on Know Your Meme talking about the origins of the meme, which has officially dubbed it “Vomiting Girl.”
Points for originality, I guess.
I don’t even dare Google my name to see what comes up now. I pull the covers up over my head the way Paige and I did when we were little kids and shut my eyes, willing myself to disappear between the sheets, or wake up to find the whole thing is some bake-sale-sugar-high-induced dream.
Eventually my mom knocks on my door, looking more spent than I’ve ever seen her. She’s in her work clothes and her hair and makeup are done, but her posture is all wrong for it, like someone else dressed her. She doesn’t look angry, which is why I’m not expecting her to say, “Your vice principal just called. You’re suspended for two days.”
“I’m what?”
She stays there in the doorway. “That boy confessed to making whatever app it is the school’s been emailing about. Rucker said you intentionally withheld information about it to protect him.”
I grit my teeth. Level her gaze as if I’m not pajama-clad and lying in bed, but on equal ground. “Well, then, I guess I’m not going to school today.”
My mom blinks, but recovers. “That’s all you have to say for yourself?”
I can’t believe we are having this conversation as if she didn’t just burn a Pepper-shaped corner of the internet to the ground. “What about you, Mom?”
“What about me?” She still hasn’t moved from my doorway, like she’s some kind of vampire who needs my permission to cross the threshold. “I saw this coming from a mile away, and I tried to stop you. And now you might have just compromised your entire future over this stupid boy
.”
I consider standing, the anger so electric under my skin it feels like I have to, but even that seems like too much of a concession. “For someone so concerned about my future, you sure don’t seem to care that I’m the literal laughingstock on the internet because of you.”
She’s already shaking her head. “What on earth are you—”
“Jack and I ended the Twitter war. It was ridiculous from the start, and then it got way too personal, and it was over. But you just had to get another stupid, cheap shot in, didn’t you?”
“There was no reason for it to get personal, which is exactly why I’ve been saying you shouldn’t—”
“But it is personal, Mom. For me and obviously for you, because this whole thing with Girl Cheesing wasn’t a coincidence, was it?”
Her arms are crossed so tightly against her chest that her whole body looks like it’s on the verge of snapping. Her lips are drawn, her eyes skimming the floor, and when it’s clear she isn’t going to immediately answer, I go ahead and plow on without giving her the chance.
“Anyway, it doesn’t get any more personal than this. Jack’s brother responded to your tweet with a picture of me that’s all over the internet now. It’s bad enough that I’m actually glad I’m suspended.”
That sure gets her attention. “What are you talking about?”
I pull my laptop from where I abandoned it on the other side of my bed, and open it to nearly two dozen open tabs of meme roundups and Tumblr posts and some website’s super creepy deep dive into my life, including old Facebook photos from Paige’s account. My mom sits on the edge of my bed, and I watch her flit through them, feeling a grim satisfaction in watching the way the shock loosens the scowl on her face.
She closes the laptop and holds her hand there for a moment. “I have to ask. Are you drunk in that picture?”
“No, Jesus, Mom. I had food poisoning.”
She nods and puts a hand up in defense of herself, brushing the matter aside so quickly that at the very least I know she believes me. Then she goes very still, seeming to absorb it all. I watch the familiar shape of her face, the frown that says there is a problem but she’s going to find a way to solve it, but it doesn’t last nearly long enough. We both know there’s nothing we can do.
