It’s the look. It’s always that damn look. And I start caving and saying all kinds of stuff I shouldn’t.

“But yeah, I’ve been texting a girl from school.”

It’s out of my mouth before I can think the better of it. As much as I try not to wreck this thing with Bluebird by overthinking it, I keep underestimating just how much space she takes in my brain until moments like this—when I’m staring too intently at a classmate on her phone in the hall, or staying awake until some absurd hour trying to come up with an equally witty response to something she’s typed, or apparently about to blurt her entire existence to my mom.

“Aha! Ethan said he spotted you out with a girl.” She sees the indignant look on my face and raises her arms up. “Your dad was looking for you, and you weren’t picking up, so he called Ethan.”

“I’m surprised he came up for air long enough to breathe, let alone pick up his phone,” I mutter. Leave it to Ethan to gossip about me to Mom without saying anything about it to me first. “And it was his fault I was with her in the first place. We were talking about swim and dive stuff.”

“So you’re not dating her?”

“No!”

Mom raises her eyebrows. Okay, that sounded defensive even in my own ears.

“I mean, no. Pepper’s, like—not the kind of girl who’s into dating. More the kind of girl who’s into wrecking the grading curve in AP Gov.”

I’m about to make another quip about her, but for the first time it seems a little unfair. I didn’t hate hanging out with her today. I mostly just offered to go rib Ethan as a joke, to get her to lighten up—I didn’t think she’d actually want to walk around after the politics of swim and dive were all taken care of. Or that she wouldn’t be immediately against the idea of working together. It knocked me so off guard that I actually agreed to take on captaining duties for the rest of the season.

Whoops.

“See? You kids don’t even need your newfangled app to make friends.”

And then the moment is gone—that weird urge to spill the beans to my mom and tell her about Weazel, about the mysterious Bluebird, about what I’ve really been doing when there’s a light under my door past midnight.

The truth is, it feels too much like letting her down. Both of my parents. Like they’re counting on me to be the kid who keeps this place afloat, the kid who stays. I’m almost relieved my mom took my phone away before I had to come up with some kind of answer for Bluebird—the issue isn’t so much what I want to be, but whether or not I can be it without hurting everyone else in the process.

Pepper

When my alarm clock goes off the next morning, it almost feels like a joke. So does the fact that I may be the first person in human history to have a Twitter hangover.

Just as I predicted, the moment I walked in the door, my mom thrust her laptop in my face and asked for help answering more #GrilledByBLB selfies, undeterred by the backlash we’d gotten for our response to that deli that only seemed to be ramping up by the second. Sitting there and getting all the notifications from people tweeting at the corporate account was the internet equivalent of sitting in a dunce chair and having rotten tomatoes chucked at us all night.

I barely even got a chance to text Wolf back, and my AP Calc assignment looks like a drunk person scribbled on graphing paper. I didn’t even get to my college apps. Let that be my mom’s big punishment for dragging me into this—as determined as she’s been to help me blend in here, nothing will look quite as bad as me not getting into a single top-twenty college because she had me tweeting GIFs at strangers all day.

For a moment, I just lie on my pillows and wonder what would happen. We’ve never really talked about it—me getting good grades to get into a good school has always been the expectation. I guess it started around the time she and Paige really started going at it. Mom was so stressed about Paige’s antics, the arguments and the way she refused to make friends with anyone here and was always wandering around the city, pulling the I’m 18 now card like a party trick. But Mom was happy, at least, when I came home with good grades. When teachers were telling her what a delight I was to have in class. When I made varsity swim team.

And when Mom was happy, it was harder for Paige to pick fights—when Mom was happy, it was infectious. I forget, sometimes, that the three of us have good memories in this apartment. That Mom was the one who helped us start our baking blog in the first place. That we watched Gossip Girl reruns and flipped out whenever we recognized an exterior. That every now and then, there was this glimpse of how it could be, instead of how it was.

But then something else would make Paige snap. Dad’s flight to visit us would get canceled for weather, or she’d have a rotten day at her new school. Then she’d do something to get under Mom’s skin, and Mom would push back, and the apartment would go from Hello Kitty to hell on earth in the time it took for me to take out the recycling and come back.

The thing that still doesn’t make sense to me is why Paige even came here in the first place. She could have just stayed in Nashville with Dad, finished senior year with her friends, and avoided this whole mess altogether.

If you can even call it a mess anymore. It’s been so long since Paige started cold-shouldering Mom that it’s more normal than not.