I wake up the next morning feeling like I’ve been smacked by an MTA bus. In the five hours or so I manage to sleep, the internet sure hasn’t. Before I even fully peel my eyes open, I see there are no texts or calls from Paige—but that worry is almost entirely forgotten when I realize there’s a Twitter Moment, a Hub Seed article, a Jasmine Yang video, and a few other viral sites with roundups of the memed versions of me. People have been photoshopping the Big League Burger bag, first with other logos, like one from a recent superhero movie that flopped in theaters. Then people started labeling it with things like “your hot takes on Twitter.” It’s come so full circle, someone wrote “seeing this meme 15 times on my dash in one minute” on it.
There’s even an article on Know Your Meme talking about the origins of the meme, which has officially dubbed it “Vomiting Girl.”
Points for originality, I guess.
I don’t even dare Google my name to see what comes up now. I pull the covers up over my head the way Paige and I did when we were little kids and shut my eyes, willing myself to disappear between the sheets, or wake up to find the whole thing is some bake-sale-sugar-high-induced dream.
Eventually my mom knocks on my door, looking more spent than I’ve ever seen her. She’s in her work clothes and her hair and makeup are done, but her posture is all wrong for it, like someone else dressed her. She doesn’t look angry, which is why I’m not expecting her to say, “Your vice principal just called. You’re suspended for two days.”
“I’m what?”
She stays there in the doorway. “That boy confessed to making whatever app it is the school’s been emailing about. Rucker said you intentionally withheld information about it to protect him.”
I grit my teeth. Level her gaze as if I’m not pajama-clad and lying in bed, but on equal ground. “Well, then, I guess I’m not going to school today.”
My mom blinks, but recovers. “That’s all you have to say for yourself?”
I can’t believe we are having this conversation as if she didn’t just burn a Pepper-shaped corner of the internet to the ground. “What about you, Mom?”
“What about me?” She still hasn’t moved from my doorway, like she’s some kind of vampire who needs my permission to cross the threshold. “I saw this coming from a mile away, and I tried to stop you. And now you might have just compromised your entire future over this stupid boy.”
I consider standing, the anger so electric under my skin it feels like I have to, but even that seems like too much of a concession. “For someone so concerned about my future, you sure don’t seem to care that I’m the literal laughingstock on the internet because of you.”
She’s already shaking her head. “What on earth are you—”
“Jack and I ended the Twitter war. It was ridiculous from the start, and then it got way too personal, and it was over. But you just had to get another stupid, cheap shot in, didn’t you?”
“There was no reason for it to get personal, which is exactly why I’ve been saying you shouldn’t—”
“But it is personal, Mom. For me and obviously for you, because this whole thing with Girl Cheesing wasn’t a coincidence, was it?”
Her arms are crossed so tightly against her chest that her whole body looks like it’s on the verge of snapping. Her lips are drawn, her eyes skimming the floor, and when it’s clear she isn’t going to immediately answer, I go ahead and plow on without giving her the chance.
“Anyway, it doesn’t get any more personal than this. Jack’s brother responded to your tweet with a picture of me that’s all over the internet now. It’s bad enough that I’m actually glad I’m suspended.”
That sure gets her attention. “What are you talking about?”
I pull my laptop from where I abandoned it on the other side of my bed, and open it to nearly two dozen open tabs of meme roundups and Tumblr posts and some website’s super creepy deep dive into my life, including old Facebook photos from Paige’s account. My mom sits on the edge of my bed, and I watch her flit through them, feeling a grim satisfaction in watching the way the shock loosens the scowl on her face.
She closes the laptop and holds her hand there for a moment. “I have to ask. Are you drunk in that picture?”
“No, Jesus, Mom. I had food poisoning.”
She nods and puts a hand up in defense of herself, brushing the matter aside so quickly that at the very least I know she believes me. Then she goes very still, seeming to absorb it all. I watch the familiar shape of her face, the frown that says there is a problem but she’s going to find a way to solve it, but it doesn’t last nearly long enough. We both know there’s nothing we can do.
“I’m sure this will all blow over in a—”
“I have voicemails on my personal cell phone from national publications requesting comments, Mom. This isn’t blowing anywhere.”
There’s a beat, the wobbly kind where it seems anything could happen. We are still so unused to fighting that there’s no script to follow, no obvious move to anticipate next. But the last thing I’m expecting is for her to stand abruptly to leave the room.
“Where are you going?”
She pauses in the doorway, her back to me and her head turned just enough for me to see some of her chin. “To talk to your principal and straighten this suspension out before it goes on your permanent record.”
“But, Mom—”
“And when I get back, and I’ve sorted through what on earth is going on here … we need to have a talk.”
She turns fully then, stiff in that distinct way she always is when she’s dealing with Paige. It stings more than anything she could say to me.
“Yeah. Let’s talk, Ronnie.”
It is somehow the worst but most effective hit I could aim in that moment. My mom is unflappable enough that I’ve seen her nearly get clipped by taxis and not so much as flinch, but the nickname seems to hit her in the one place she didn’t think to protect.
She sweeps out the door before I can see just how lasting the blow is, leaving me there with my bedhead and my laptop and an infinite void of pictures of me throwing up into various pop culture phenomena.
For a good ten minutes or so, I’m too stunned to move. There’s no distraction from the itch, the hurt, the anger—I can’t call Paige. I can’t even go to school. There’s no place to shake it off, nowhere to go.
And suddenly I need somewhere to go.
I kick off the covers, my eyes stinging, my face overheating. I grab an old pair of jeans, a T-shirt covered in cartoon doughnuts that I stole from Paige, a ratty old pair of sneakers, and yank my hair into a ponytail. I slip myself back into the me I once was, and for a few moments, in my old clothes and my old shoes and my old state of mind, I can let it go: the endless homework, the college applications, the Twitter notifications, the stupid meme.
What I can’t let go of is the way I tried just now to tell my mom my world was falling apart, and she left.
Well, if she’s allowed to leave, then so am I. I grab my wallet, my keys, the MetroCard Jack talked me through buying the other day. There’s only one place I want to go, and it’s the last place I should be.
