Tweet Cute: A Novel

It turns out all of Mom’s panicking is for nothing. Whoever hacked the Twitter account didn’t do anything to it, and didn’t bother trying to get in again over the weekend either. The tech team promises to keep an eye on it and try to trace the breach when they all get back into work on Monday.

I spend the weekend alternating between the homework I’ve neglected and battling Jack on Twitter. On Saturday morning he posts a tweet reading: finally tried BLB’s “grilled cheese.” video review below! with a link to a compilation of animals making scream noises in the wild that goes on for a full ten minutes.

“Have you noticed that the BLB Twitter page is off its rocker lately?” Paige asks when I finally manage to call her on Sunday morning. “It looks like they’re in some kind of tiff with a deli?”

I wince. “Yeah … I guess it’s all … part of the strategy, or whatever.”

“I can’t believe Mom hasn’t shut that the hell down. Even Dad’s noticed. He called me all stressed out about it.”

I talked to our dad just the other day, and he didn’t mention it to me. I think he must know I’ve been recruited into this Twitter madness. He’s pretty quiet, but not a lot gets past him either. Especially not when it comes to Mom.

“I mean, do we even know these people?”

Yes. A little too well. So well that I can, all too easily, picture the exact tilt of the smirk on Jack’s face when he posted the screaming tweet.

“I dunno.” I make a quick move to change the subject. “Wanna explain the Fuck Your Midterms Meringue recipe you just put on the blog, or…”

Paige laughs. “Buckle up, kid, cuz you’re about to get an earful about my Greek History professor.”

After I get off the phone with Paige, Mom and I go down to Bloomingdale’s to look at couches for the new corporate office expansion, which is renting out another floor in their Midtown building. We stop for lunch at a little café, and we talk about school and all the clothes I’m going to wear when I get to college and don’t have to wear a uniform and Taffy’s new puppy, which she has been Instagramming so enthusiastically, I feel like I’m half raising it with her.

Nobody mentions Twitter, or college apps, or the veritable disaster of Friday night. The day ends with a shine already on the memory of it. It reminds me of the way Mom would, once a year, let me and Paige play hooky from school—she’d drive us all the way there and then just pass the school and keep driving, and we’d get pancakes at IHOP or take pictures on the bridge or drive into Belle Meade and stare at all the mansions. A stolen day. The kind of day that ends too fast but stays with you much longer.

I should have known the universe would find some way to balance it out.

Jack is particularly smirky during Monday’s practice, for reasons beyond me—he has yet to respond to the latest volley in our tweets, so the ball is in his court.

“Seemed a little quiet on Friday night,” he says, as the swim team is getting out of the pool to give up the lanes for the divers. “Fall asleep on the job?”

And then the meaning of the smirk becomes all too clear. “Did you…”

Jack tilts his head at me. “Did I what?”

Landon calls over to me to help pull out the stretch bands for dry land exercises, and before I can turn back around, Jack has already jumped into the water and started swimming away. I go through the next twenty minutes trying to decide just how angry I’m going to get about this, or if I’m really even allowed to get angry at all. We said we wouldn’t let it be personal. We said we wouldn’t hold back.

But nobody said anything about hacking into a corporate-run Twitter account.

I guess he didn’t really do anything, though. In the grand scheme of things, he just minorly inconvenienced the tech team on a Friday night.

Or at least, that’s all I think he’s done, until I get into the locker room and see five missed calls and a voicemail from my mom.

“So the tech team finished their little investigation. Turns out whoever changed the password on the account did it from your phone.”

I freeze, the phone poised on my ear, my blood running cold. That’s impossible. If someone were going to access the account from my phone, they’d have to know my passcode first. And nobody would know that, unless—

I’m going to kill him. I’m going to maim him.

“Call me as soon as you get this, and come straight home after practice. We need to talk.”

I set the phone down and just stand there. Jack has jokingly called me a robot more times in the last few years than I can count, but in that moment, I genuinely feel like I’m short-circuiting. There is too much of me happening all at once, and my body doesn’t know what to settle on—the anger at Jack, the indignation at my mom, the fact I’ve been juggling so much in the past few weeks that I’m tired enough to sleep on the floor of the locker room with everyone gossiping and changing over my head.

Naturally, it eventually settles on the least convenient option, which is to burst into tears.

I feel someone’s hands on my shoulders pulling me away from the lockers, and only vaguely process they belong to Pooja, who manages to pull me over to the handicap bathroom stall and lock the door on us before the snot starts flying. I have the blessing and curse of being the kind of person who only cries twice a year, so naturally, when it happens, it happens in the most volcanic, disgusting way possible—red eyes, gushing nose, splotchy face, and all.

I manage to pull myself together after a minute or so, and blink at Pooja, who’s leaning against the plastic wall on the other side of the stall.

“Thanks,” I say, my voice clogged with snot.

She unrolls some toilet paper, bunches it up, and hands it to me. “You wanna talk about it?”

I shake my head, but in that same moment I take this ridiculous, hiccupping breath, and whoosh. It’s not just the snot floodgates that are open, but the verbal ones too. Before I even realize what I’m doing, I’m telling her everything—about tweeting for Big League Burger, about Jack and Girl Cheesing, about my mom breathing down my neck and about me being stupid enough to tell a teenage boy my phone’s terrible passcode and not immediately change it.

For a few moments, all Pooja can do is blink at me.

“Okay, first of all, this is possibly the weirdest thing I’ve ever heard. And we live in New York City, so that’s saying something.”

I let out a wet laugh.

“And second of all … well. I don’t really know anything about sending good tweets or what exactly the extent of this bizarrely flirtatious war between you and Jack is.”

“It’s not—nobody’s flirting—”

“But,” says Pooja, pointedly ignoring my protests, “I can think of a way to get Jack back.”

Pooja may think the whole Twitter thing is weird, but to me, it doesn’t quite get any weirder than this—Pooja extending an olive branch, after four years of being just short of an archnemesis. I should be suspicious of this, maybe, but that’s the thing—despite never actually being her friend, I know Pooja. Alarmingly well, in fact. I know her motivations, know the exact expression she makes when she is calculating a next move, know her weaknesses and strengths almost as well as I know my own. The same way I know, for whatever reason, she is being sincere right now.

Plus, it means getting payback.

“I’m listening.”