Tweet Cute: A Novel

I spend the next few hours attempting and ultimately failing to ignore the texts coming in from my mom and Taffy. Once the final bell rings, I take a few minutes outside of the locker room to attempt to string together a timeline of Twitter events. It turns out Girl Cheesing’s account—which now has a whopping eleven thousand followers compared to yesterday’s three digits—responded to my tweet from this morning pretty fast.

And maybe that would have been the end of it—nobody asked me to respond to that during school. Odds are my mom might have just let Taffy ignore it, and we all could have moved on with our lives and maybe settled this in small claims court instead of on Twitter, the way I just kind of assumed adults did.

Enter Jasmine Yang, famous YouTuber and host of the popular vlog “Twitter Gets Petty.” In a three-minute video posted about an hour before school let out, she detailed the few tweets involved in our “feud,” essentially narrating the nightmare of the last twenty-four hours of my life.

“I think it’s safe to say these two accounts are pretty cheesed with each other. So who’s it gonna be, Petty People?” she says at the end of the video, addressing her followers with a cheeky grin. “Team Girl Cheesing or Team Big League? Let me know in the comments, y’all. I know who’s getting my vote.”

The video shows a screenshot, then, of her responding to a Big League Burger tweet with the word COPYCAT all in caps, alongside a flood of cat emojis.

And somehow, in the hour between her posting the video and me getting out of school, the idea has taken off so aggressively that hundreds of Twitter users are doing the same. Every tweet, every Instagram post, every Facebook announcement that BLB has made in the last few months is just a sea of people commenting with the cat emoji.

It would be funny, if I were literally anyone else on the planet. But I just happen to be the person who is going to be chained to a phone until I find some way to fix it.

My brain is practically churning by the time practice is over. I’m so preoccupied with what on earth our next tactical move can be I don’t even notice Vice Principal Rucker standing in the lobby of the gym where we hold practices until I hear his unmistakable nasally voice saying, “Excuse me, Miss Singh, but what exactly am I seeing on your phone screen?”

Pooja’s back is turned to Rucker, but I have a direct view of her face—or, more appropriately, the look of sheer terror that has replaced her face. I know it can only mean one thing.

“Um—it’s, uh—”

“No, no, pull it back up. I’d love to see.”

“Is that the phone Coach Thompkins found on the pool deck?”

Pooja is holding her breath, staring at me with traffic-light eyes. It takes her a second to catch on, but then she nods.

“We’re trying to figure out whose it is,” I explain to Rucker. I turn back to Pooja. “Any luck?”

Pooja hands her phone to me, her face collected but her hands shaking. “Not yet.”

Rucker eyes the phone in my hands. I try not to move it too much, knowing if the screen lights up that Pooja has a picture of herself posing with a cut-out of Ruth Bader Ginsburg that will give her up in an instant.

“It looked like it was logged into that Weasel application,” says Rucker.

“Yeah,” I say quickly, “that’s how we know it’s someone from Stone Hall.”

Pooja nods. “And we’ll, uh, definitely tell you whose it is when we figure it out.”

I can feel his eyes on me, and then on Pooja, trying to decide whether or not he trusts us. But his eyes are nothing compared to Pooja’s, who is staring at me like she’s still waiting for me to throw her under the bus. Neither of us really plays dirty—at least not since freshman year—but we haven’t exactly played nice either.

But as much of a thorn Pooja has been in my side over the years, the last thing I want to do to shift the playing field is let her go down for something as dumb as chatting with people on an app I could just as easily have been caught using, if I’d walked out five seconds before she did. If I beat her at anything, I want the satisfaction of knowing it was fair and square.

“Thank you, girls, for being vigilant about this. If you hear anything else…”

I hold back the urge to swallow in relief. “You’ll be the first to know,” I lie through my teeth.

Rucker nods, and then he’s off, not so subtly trying to infiltrate a group of dive team freshmen who see him coming from a mile off. I turn back to Pooja, whose face looks like there isn’t any blood in it.

“Thanks,” she breathes.

I shift my backpack on my shoulder. “No problem.”

“Seriously … you just saved my ass. And like, a dozen other asses. I’m in the middle of setting up the study group times for the history midterm.”

“Don’t worry about—wait. You’re Bunny?”

Pooja nods, almost cautious about it. Then, when I don’t end the conversation the way one of us usually does, she relaxes marginally and says, “I mean, not my first choice, but at least I’m not whoever got saddled with Donkey.”

Usually I make a point to keep my expression as cool as possible in front of Pooja, but I can’t help but stare at her in disbelief. “You’re the one who’s been setting up all the AP study groups.”

Pooja shrugs. “Well, yeah. The app makes it super easy. And this year’s got us all whipped.”

For a moment neither of us says anything, me just staring at her, and Pooja shifting her weight between her feet, like she can’t decide to wait me out or leave.

Because here’s the thing with Pooja—maybe, for a hot second, we could have been friends. We were grouped together in World History freshman year, when our teacher divvied us up for a graded in-class quiz bowl. It was late September, so just when I was starting to get into the groove of how to make myself fit in, and when I was more committed to making a good impression and the grades to match than ever—the fighting with Mom and Paige had only been escalating, and it felt like succeeding at Stone Hall was the only power I had to stop it.

At that point I still hadn’t really made any friends, but I’d scouted out some potentials. Mel, who seemed to bake a lot, based on some light Instagram stalking, and Pooja, who I’d overheard in the halls talking about trying to make the 100-yard butterfly her event. When we got put into the same group, I was hoping to talk to her about the school’s swim team before the season started. I was working up the nerve—it was still new to me, the idea of having to make friends instead of having built-in ones—when immediately I wasn’t nervous at all. Pooja was nice, and funny as hell. She kept writing notes in the margins of her notebook to show the rest of our quiz group, some crack about how the code of Hammurabi would apply to Snapchat, or adding “freshmen at Stone Hall” under the bottom rung of a social hierarchy of Mesopotamia.

I was laughing at one of her jokes when Mr. Clearburn called on me. “Miss Evans, if you’re not too busy goofing around, maybe you could bother to tell us the modern-day country where most of Ancient Mesopotamia was located?”

Even if I did know the answer, I was so mortified in that moment, I couldn’t have told him my first name. I sat there with my mouth open until Pooja whispered, “Syria.”

“Syria,” I blurted.

“Wrong, and I’m deducting a point from your team for disruptiveness. Miss Singh?”

Pooja gave her answer to the desk. “Iraq?”

“Correct.”

The sting of not just looking bad but letting down the other three people on our quiz team was so searing, it felt like I’d been pushed into the fryer at Big League Burger. I glanced over at Pooja, but she wouldn’t even look at me. It was a hard lesson, but a lesson learned: everyone at Stone Hall is out for themselves.

The rivalry just kind of grew organically from there. I never forgot what she did, and I certainly didn’t forgive. Every time we’ve come head-to-head since, in class or in swim team or any other school-related thing in between, I’ve held the embarrassment of that with me like a constant throbbing reminder that this isn’t Nashville. That this is a whole new species of human, and its food chain goes so perilously high that there’s always someone at your feet waiting to pull you down.

But this—this doesn’t add up. Pooja being Bunny, the user on Weazel who’s been reserving library times and hosting coffee shop meetups for all the toughest AP classes. Because if Pooja is Bunny, that means she’s been pulling people up that food chain right along with her.

Finally I shake my head. “I guess I thought…”

The sentence hangs there uncomfortably, because we both know what I thought. Pooja shifts her backpack on her shoulders, looking at her shoes before looking back up at me.

“You should come, you know.” The words are hesitant, like she means them but isn’t sure how I’ll take them. “I mean—not that you need it. But I’m sure it would help some of the others.”

I’m so stunned by the offer that I forget I’m supposed to answer.

“Anyway, my brother’s waiting for me out front, so…” She waves awkwardly. “Thanks again.”

“Yeah.”

And then she’s off—Pooja, Bunny, or whoever she really is—leaving me torn with a new kind of uncertainty in her wake.