It happens the moment homeroom lets out on Monday. Jack and I link eyes and open our mouths like we’re poised to rib each other like we normally do, but there’s nothing really to say—we’ve both stayed off each other’s respective Twitter feeds since our run-in on Saturday. Instead, we blow out the same breath and smile sheepishly at each other.
“So,” he says, walking up and drumming his knuckles on my desk.
I expect him to brag about the fact Ethan and his grilled cheese have racked up at least five thousand more retweets than we have, but somehow I know from the shape of the half grin that he isn’t.
“So,” I say back.
He huffs out a laugh. “Well—now that this is all winding down—we should probably … I don’t know. Actually do our captaining duties?”
I finish shoving my books into my bag. “Oh, those?”
“Let me guess. You already did everything and then some.”
“No, no.” Truth is, outside of talking to Jack and going to actual practice, I’ve barely had the time to do anything. “I wanted to save all the dirty work for you.”
“Well, in that case, we should probably figure out what we’re doing for fundraising. Since the bajillion dollars they bleed out of us for tuition isn’t enough.”
This time his tone isn’t bitter, but knowing—an acknowledgment that I get it. That I come from a background like his, even if I’m well displaced from it now. Like at the end of all of these shenanigans, we’ve finally landed on common ground.
“Actually … I was thinking maybe a bake sale.”
Jack’s eyebrows lift in surprise. “How old school of you.”
I shrug. “Between your deli and my baking prowess, we might actually make it, y’know, not suck.”
Jack considers this. “Huh. That isn’t a terrible idea.”
“I have a good one every now and then.”
“You should actually come to the deli.”
He made the offer last night, but only in person can I tell he’s actually serious about it.
“You guys are in the East Village, right?”
I must sound nervous because Jack pats me on the back. “It’s a straight shot down on the 6 train.”
“Right.”
“It’ll be good for you, Pepperoni. See some more of what this great big city has to offer.”
The idea of it somewhat terrifies me. It’s all well and good to say straight shot on the 6 train, but it’s so much more complicated than that. There’s wrangling a MetroCard, and making sure you don’t get on the wrong train, and making sure you get on one going in the right direction, and I’ve heard sometimes they just decide to go express, and if you’re not paying attention, you can end up in the middle of Brooklyn, and then what on earth happens to you?
“We can smuggle you in if you want,” says Jack. “I think I have a wig leftover from when Ethan was the Joker for Halloween.”
I’m being ridiculous. The subway isn’t going to swallow me whole. I’ll be eighteen in a few months, and in this city for at least seven more—I can’t be totally helpless forever.
“What day do you think we should—”
“Did you see this?”
It’s Paul and Pooja, blurting the exact same words at the same time on either side of us. They pause and look up at each other in alarm like they just ripped a hole through the matrix, and then they’re shoving phone screens into our faces, without any caution for Mrs. Fairchild five feet away on the other side of the door.
I take Pooja’s phone from her. I’d recognize the Hub Seed logo anywhere—what I’m having trouble processing is the picture of my face on it.
“Oh my god.”
Twitter’s Most Iconic Brand War To Date Is Being Spearheaded—Fittingly—By The Teens
“The teens?” Jack is muttering next to me. “I didn’t realize we spoke for all of Gen Z, but okay.”
“How did they get my picture?”
“Your mom?”
“Oh, hell no.”
It had to have been Taffy. My mom would never have sanctioned this. Hell, I wouldn’t have sanctioned this. And yet there I am—identified as “Patricia,” dear God—in my yearbook photo from junior year with the massive zit on my chin, and there’s Jack, cropped badly out of a shot of the dive team from last season.
If you’re a breathing human with a Twitter account, there’s no way you’ve missed #BigCheese, this month’s epic battle between fast-food chain Big League Burger and their unexpected adversary, a locally beloved deli by the name of Girl Cheesing.
Their respective tweeting has hit an internet already accustomed to the snarky, audience-targeted kind of tweeting we’ve seen from plenty of brand accounts in the past few years, from Wendy’s to Moon Pie to Netflix.
Those accounts may have just laid the groundwork for the kind of war that BLB and GC are waging—a war that has earned a small-time deli a whopping half a million followers and counting, and launched more hashtags than there are things on their menus. But the most surprising thing about this year’s #GrilledCheeseGate?
It isn’t being run by social media managers. This is a war waged by teens.
Embedded in the article is another video of Jasmine Yang, who seems to have done most of the sleuthing before the Hub Seed reporter wrote about us. Apparently a new vlog of hers went live late last night, and the amount of stalkery involved in it puts any research I’ve ever done for the debate club to shame. It introduces Jack first, with a smattering of information from his Facebook account and Ethan’s. Her bit about me is much shorter, but anyone who knows me would recognize me on sight—in addition to the yearbook picture, there’s an old one of me, Paige, my mom, and my dad, posing in front of the first Big League Burger in Nashville, some ten years ago. All four of us are holding burgers. Paige is beaming from behind a pair of braces, and my hair is pulled into astronomically high pigtails.
Any teenager in their right mind would probably be humiliated. But I can’t stop staring at the four of us, at the proof I didn’t just gloss over the memories in my head—it really was this simple, once upon a time.
The article mentions we live in New York, even says we go to the same school, although it does us the small mercy of not mentioning which one. The article pivots then into a summary of everything Jack and I have tweeted at each other so far, a weird little digital scrapbook of our clashes. I see the first ever tweet he sent, the quote retweet about our new menu items, and see he’s paused to look at it on his screen too.
“The tweet that launched a thousand other tweets.”
“To think we were only mildly sleep-deprived, then.”
The article shifts into all the repercussions of our tweets, some of which I am already aware of, and others I decidedly am not. For instance, I’d seen the hashtags, even responded to a few of them—but I had not seen the literal fan art depicting Girl Cheesing’s and Big League Burger’s mascots fighting each other in comic panels, the freckled little girl and cherubic little boy fighting by chucking food at each other.
We get to the line about the joking-but-not-quite-joking fan fiction shipping an older version of the mascots and both of us react so viscerally, several heads swivel to stare at us in the hallway.
“They’re shipping them?” Jack blurts.
I shake my head. “They’re minors, for god’s sake. This is unholy.”
“Forget shipping them,” says Pooja, taking her phone back from me and scrolling down to the comments section. “Now they’re shipping you.”
My face is burning before my eyes even land on the first few of them.
lilmarvin 4 minutes ago
Omg, TELL me they’re dating!
kdeeeeen 11 minutes ago
Okay but I need ALL the AUs about this on tumblr, stat
SuzieQueue 14 minutes ago
Sry shakespeare twitter is the new r&j
And then, as if she were the moon controlling this new internet tide, I finally see what Jasmine Yang titled her video about us: “Cheese-Crossed Lovers.”
I can’t look at Jack. I can’t look at anyone. I don’t even know what this feeling is—not embarrassment. No, it’s more all-encompassing than that, something I can feel burning from the tips of my ears to the bottom of my heels. It feels like there’s a spotlight on all 360 degrees of me, like there isn’t a single part of me that isn’t exposed.
“Pepper?”
My voice sounds strange even to my own ears, like it’s underwater. “This is … wow.”
The bell rings. Neither of us moves. Pooja and Paul collect their phones and hover for a moment, before giving us harried, sympathetic goodbyes and taking off down the hall with the rest of our classmates.
Jack’s the one to break the silence: “Are we gonna make this weird?”
I let out a relieved laugh. “Oh, definitely.”
“Cool, cool. In that case, I better get ahead of the rumors that are going to spread about us by telling everyone you have cooties.”
“In that case, I’m definitely telling everyone you sleep in Hello Kitty pajamas.”
Jack’s half grin is curling. “I’m going to tell everyone you chew raw garlic after every meal.”
I can feel the laughter bubbling up my throat. “I’m going to tell them you drink pool water. Oh wait! You did.”
Jack shakes his head. “You’re just neeeever gonna let that one go, are you, Peppero—”
The bell rings, and we startle at the sound. We’ve leaned in so close to each other laughing, it’s a miracle we don’t end up knocking our heads together, our eyes both going comically wide like we’ve never heard a bell before, like they haven’t spent years dictating every second of our teenage lives.
But then for a beat, neither of us moves, staring at each other like our eyes are snagged there.
“Class.” The word comes out in a blurt; like it’s not a real word, but some gibberish I made up.
“Oh, yeah, that,” says Jack. He falls into pace with me. “Wait, no, I’ve got independent study this period.”
He turns and heads abruptly to the other end of the hall. I watch him go, all tall legs and long strides, and realize just before I turn back that I’m still smiling like an idiot. Somehow, though, I don’t have it in me to stop.
