“Um, ow.”

“Jesus.”

And then, at the same time: “Are you okay?”

There’s a beat where we look at each other, not fully processing what just happened—no doubt courtesy of the mild concussion we might have just given each other—and for a second, I forget where we are entirely.

“Jinx,” I say. Jack Campbell, moment killer.

Pepper laughs, looking relieved. “Oh, good. I was worried I’d killed your last brain cell, but you seem okay.”

“Hey. Jinx means you’re not allowed to talk. Did you have a childhood?”

“I actually came out of the womb a Twitter bot.”

“Must have been one heck of a shock for your parents.”

“Yeah, but at least there weren’t two of me.”

“When you’re this good-looking, it only makes sense to have a spare.”

“Campbell! Evans! Are you going to keep flirting over there or actually make yourselves useful?”

It’s Landon, yelling from the other end of the pool. Pepper immediately takes off, but not before I see that her face has gone so red, it actually looks like a pepper. She all but leaves me in the dust, not even looking back.

“Now?”

I blink. Somehow Paul has swum up right behind me without making a sound and is holding three anxious fingers in front of my face. I check the clock by the pool and see it’s almost 4:15, glance farther up the water and see Pepper and Landon laughing at whatever Ethan just said.

“Yeah. Now’s good.”

And so starts a performance so stilted and awkward that somewhere up the street, our classmates rehearsing for the school’s production of Seussical! just shuddered without knowing why.

“Oh, man. I feel quite ill,” says Paul. Loudly. And in what appears to be a slight British accent.

I hold in a sigh. “Oh no, that sucks. Want me to walk you to the nurse?”

“Yeah. Because I’m sick. Like in a stomach way,” Paul continues.

One of the sophomores on the swim team cringes from behind him, and she and a few of the others swim in the opposite direction. I figure they’ll spread what Paul said fast enough nobody will question us when we get out of the pool and don’t come back for an inordinately long time. Sure enough, the coaches don’t even bat an eye as we get out and Paul makes another declaration about his mysterious illness, which is starting to become a lot more dramatic than originally scripted.

“How’d I do?” he asks excitedly, the moment we make it to the locker rooms.

“Academy Award–worthy,” I deadpan, pausing outside of the girls’ locker room. I knock and crack open the door, calling, “Maintenance,” and waiting a beat.

No answer. Perfect. I find the TEMPORARILY CLOSED FOR CLEANING sign propped against the wall and Velcro it to the door.

“I’ll be right back,” I tell Paul, who salutes me as I take one last glance over our shoulders and sneak into the girls’ locker room.

It doesn’t take long to find Pepper’s backpack in one of the lockers—it may be the same nondescript navy Herschel bag that half the people in our class have, but there’s a tiny little keychain that says “Music City” on her zipper. I find her phone in the front pocket where I always see her sliding it out before and after class and type in 1234, hoping against hope that she never got around to changing it.

Boom. I’m in.

It’s almost too easy.

I pull up the Big League Burger Twitter account, and it occurs to me that I could do some major damage right now. Like, get someone fired kind of damage. Send a tweet that says We confess to ripping off a defenseless old lady’s grilled cheese recipe because we’re all corporate assholes kind of damage.

But even I’m not that much of a tool. I pull up the settings to the account, change the password, and lock her out.

I’m about to quit the app and shove the phone back into her bag when it buzzes in my hand. It’s a text from “Mom.”

Text me when practice is over—that last tweet was good, but I think we can do better

I don’t mean to read it, it’s just there. And very quickly followed up by another one.

Also Taffy’s leaving early tomorrow, do you mind checking the tweets she queued?

My thumb grazes the screen and accidentally taps the text, opening it up to a whole string of them. I move my finger to close out of it, but not before I’ve managed to skim some of the recent messages—Can you just send Taffy a tweet idea real quick if you get a chance? It’s been hours, says one of them.

Paul coughs noisily from the front door.

“Shit.”

My signal to leave. I shove Pepper’s phone back into her backpack and zip it up, then race to the exit on the other side of the girls’ locker room, barely making it out before someone walks in from the original one.

And then that’s it. The deed is done. I slink back into the boys’ locker room, where Paul is already waiting for me, his expression manic and gleeful. He claps me on the back a few too many times, a hyper parody of something the Landons or the Ethans of the world might do. I smile back, but it feels a little less like a victory and a little too much like that moment Pepper stuck her hand on my head and dunked me.

This whole time I’d rolled my eyes about her mom whenever she came up. I didn’t believe a grown adult could be this invested in their kid doing something this objectively dumb—not even my parents, who joke about all the business it brings in, but probably wouldn’t do more than shrug if I swore off it forever.