I feel a weird pinch of guilt as I walk out of the locker room, but not necessarily for locking Pepper out of the account. For the reminder that, fun and games aside, this whole Twitter thing means a lot more than either of us want to admit.

Pepper

“Please don’t make us do this,” Pooja moans.

Landon puts a hand on her shoulder, jostling it slightly. I still have my eyes peeled on it as he takes the hand away. “Rules are rules,” he says with an easy grin. “And you guys lost fair and square.”

“At least it’s not pool water Kool-Aid this time,” says Ethan.

I glance up the pool deck, toward the locker rooms, not even realizing I’m looking for Jack until I come up empty of him. It’s not like it matters where he is, but I can’t stop myself from compulsively checking, like he’s become some kind of shadow I feel weird without. That, and his team lost—and the terms of this particular water polo war were that everyone on the losing team had to do 100 yards of butterfly, nonstop. There are very few things in this world I would pay good money to see, but watching Jack flounder at the hardest stroke after years of acting all cocky about doing flips into the water is decidedly one of them.

“Ugh. Say nice things at my funeral.”

“C’mon, Pooja,” says Landon, “you could swim this in your sleep.”

I shouldn’t care. And I don’t. Or I wouldn’t, if it weren’t for something I’m getting a little more sure of by the day, something I can’t decide whether I want to be sure of or not.

I might be right about Landon. It all checks out. Him texting during the day, when he would be off-campus. Not texting during the exact same times as swim and dive practice. And there is nothing quite so damning as the app Wolf sent me, the mac-and-cheese locator—Landon’s the only senior this year interning at an app development startup, and the smell of that mac-and-cheese bread bowl he was sporting the other day is so burned into my memory that I’ll probably be telling my grandchildren about it.

I’m going to ask him. Tonight. Point-blank. He’ll already be in our apartment for that dinner with his dad. The second most embarrassing scenario will have already occurred, so I might as well just lean into the first. And if I don’t ask him then, when I actually have him alone for the first time in four years, I don’t think I ever will.

I head into the locker room, overly aware of the fact I’m going to have to hustle home to get my hair and my outfit in working order before Landon and his dad get to our place for dinner. Naturally, by putting a desire into the universe not to waste time, I run smack into Jack.

“Ah. Sorry, Pepperoni,” he says, touching the spot where his shoulder brushed mine. He looks unsettled, his eyes a little wide. “Good luck keeping up with me tonight.”

He moves to walk away from me, but I stop him, grabbing the crook of his arm. For a dive team slacker who probably couldn’t remember the order of strokes in an individual medley to save his life, it’s surprisingly firm.

“If you think I’m out for the count just because it’s Friday…”

Jack takes the hand I have on his arm and presses it between his with mock solemnity. Mine is still wet, so our palms and fingers slick against each other’s in a way that would be weirdly intimate if his grin wasn’t at the exact half tilt it always is before he makes fun of me.

“Oh, don’t worry. I figure you’ll be free as a bird.”

I narrow my eyes. He looks more pleased with himself than usual.

“See you Monday,” he says, letting go of my hand and striding down the pool deck to his brother.

I’m still shaking my head as I walk into the locker room, coming out of the fog of being in the pool and back into the laser focus of everything beyond it. There’s not just the dinner to think about, but homework, and Twitter, and calling Paige back, and that college essay prompt I haven’t even started on—

“What the hell?”

The Big League Burger Twitter account has logged me out. I type in the password, but nothing happens—it just prompts me to type in something else. I’m about to call Taffy and ask if the password has changed, but she beats me to it with a text.

Did you change the twitter password?

Shit. We’ve been hacked.

And the irony is, I don’t even have my own Twitter account to log into so I can see what the person who hacked us is doing to the account.

No. I’ll hit “forgot password” and get us back in. Anyone from the tech team around?

I’ve never met anyone on the tech team, but judging from my mom’s less-than-veiled complaints about them, I’m guessing they’re not going to be very quick about this. Which means whoever out there in the world just turned my Twitter account into their personal tweeting playground might just as easily be able to hack back in and do it again.

I look away from the phone for a moment. My Twitter account?

There are texts from my mom too, that I must have opened without realizing when I tried to get into Twitter. I wonder how many seconds it’s going to take for her to catch wind of this.

And naturally, no texts from Wolf either. Just a whole stream of people in the Hallway Chat bitching about the administration cracking down on Senior Skip Day. I obviously wasn’t going to participate in that anyway—we have weekends to do whatever stupid teenage nonsense we need to do, not to mention an entire summer before college.