I turn back to the whiteboard, a ghost of a smirk on my face. “Let the games begin.”

PART TWO

Jack

“Should we have a signal?”

I pull my goggles off my face. “Why would we need a signal?”

“I dunno,” says Paul, shifting his weight between his feet so rapidly, I’m a little worried he’s going to slip on the pool deck. “Just in case I forget? You said 4:15, right? Sometimes I just get so in the zone when we get to play water polo, man, and I might just—”

“If you forget, I’ll just … swim up and nudge you or something.”

“That’s not much of a signal.”

I hold in an almighty sigh. I’m lucky Paul is helping me in the first place. This is kind of above and beyond the best friend call of duty. “Fine. I’ll—hold up three fingers, I guess.”

Paul’s face bursts into a freckly grin. “Sweet. I’m on it. This is gonna go so great.”

Somehow the more times Paul has said some variation of that in the last twenty-four hours—which I think is a number in the dozens by now—the less likely it seems that it will. The good news is, as usual, if this doesn’t work, I have more than a few backup ideas in my arsenal. In the last two weeks, I’ve learned that staying a step ahead of Pepper means you’re already three steps behind.

We agreed not to go easy on each other, but I suspected for the first, say, four hours or so, maybe she was anyway. Apparently she was just waiting for lunch to quote retweet the deal I posted to our Twitter page:

Big League Burger @B1gLeagueBurger

Anyone who unfollows Girl Cheesing on Twitter gets 50% off our grilled cheese too! All three and a half of you are welcome anytime

Girl Cheesing @GCheesing · 1d

Anyone who unfollows Big League Burger on Twitter gets 50 percent off their next grilled cheese! And, y’know, the relative comfort of knowing they’re eating something that doesn’t suck

12:35 PM · 22 Oct 2020

Before we’d hit the pool deck that day, I’d been scrolling through Twitter and decided to go another route. Some video was trending, with the headline:

Big League Burger May Start Testing Delivery in Several States

I quote retweeted it from the Girl Cheesing account, writing:

Girl Cheesing @GCheesing

oh god is nowhere safe

Boostle @boostle · 1d

cool never putting on real pants again boostle.com/p/big-league-burger-maystart-testing-delivery-in-several-states

2:42 PM · 22 Oct 2020

It hit a thousand retweets before practice even started. I realized, then, the notifications that had been rolling in weren’t just comments and likes and retweets—people were starting to follow our account too. Thousands of people. People who seemed every bit as invested in this Twitter spat as Pepper and I were ourselves.

After practice that day she’d offered me a breezy wave, then walked into the locker room, where she’d promptly responded to my tweet with an image of a bike messenger posing outside of Girl Cheesing, holding up a giant Big League Burger bag. The tweet read: Apparently not!

By nightfall, Jasmine Yang released another vlog update on “Twitter Gets Petty,” breaking the whole exchange down with screenshots and even analyzing all the unrelated likes and replies both accounts made in between.

“Stay up-to-date with all things in the #BigCheese war by tuning in to my page, where you can decide in real time who’s in the lead.” She pointed down to the bottom of the screen. “Comment with the cheese emoji for Girl Cheesing, and the burger emoji for Big League Burger. Ta-ta for now, Petty People!”

And just like that, our Twitter war had a hashtag, we had a rabid new fanbase, and I’d learned a valuable lesson: I was better off not provoking Pepper into responding to something, because she had home-court advantage and knew how to use it.

I catch sight of her now, somehow ridiculously easy for me to spot in the sea of swimmers even though she’s wearing the same black Stone Hall swimsuit and cap as every other girl in the water. They’re doing some kind of sprint drill right now, switching back and forth between butterfly and freestyle every other lap, while their coach hollers vaguely motivational things from the bleachers. It looks like hell, but for me, it also looks like salvation—when Pepper’s submerged for two hours, it’s the only time she isn’t a few buttons away from the Big League Burger Twitter page, poised to strike.

And boy, has she ever. So that evening I didn’t tweet at all. Well, couldn’t, really—the deli was packed to the gills again, with a line so far out the door that when Grandma Belly saw it from the window of the apartment, she asked if people were waiting to get raptured.

“They’re here for your grilled cheese,” I told her.

She fixed me with a look, crossing a leg on the massive armchair she spent most of her time in and raising a single eyebrow at me. “Not unless you changed my secret ingredient to cocaine, they’re not.”

I swear she only ever rolls out her most crass lines when it’s just her and me. I guess that’s the price Ethan pays for being so busy all the time.

When I didn’t respond right away, she added, “Back in my day, it was more than my grilled cheese bringing in customers, if you know what I mean.”