But more importantly, nobody’s using it to cheat or cyberbully or whatever the hell Rucker thinks teenagers do when they finally find a space to interact without adults breathing down their necks. First of all, if anyone at Stone Hall wants to cut any academic corners, odds are a big fat check will do a hell of a lot more than a list of Scantron answers will. And second of all, I’m so vigilant about monitoring the Hallway Chat and erasing any messages that come close to cyberbullying or cheating that now most people know better than to even try.
My door swings open.
“Did you see this?”
Ethan is fully in my bedroom before I’m even awake enough to properly scowl at him. Naturally, he’s already in his school uniform, his hair gelled, his backpack slung over his shoulder. He always gets to school early to make out with his boyfriend on the front steps, and I guess do whatever it is you do when you’re too damn popular for your own good. Read: being student council president, captain of the dive team, and a star pupil so beloved by our teachers that I heard two of them arguing once in the staff lounge over whether he should win the departmental award for English or math at the end of our junior year, since he wasn’t allowed to win both.
All of which would be annoying if Ethan were just my brother, but are made at least ten times worse by the fact that he is my identical twin. There’s nothing quite as awkward as living in a shadow that is quite literally the same shape as yours.
Not that I’m a loser. I have plenty of friends. But I’m definitely more the class-clown variety of high school clichés than my brother, who is basically the Troy Bolton of our school, minus the jazz hands.
(Okay, maybe I’m a little bit of a loser.)
“Yeah, I saw the email,” I mutter, a pit sinking in my stomach.
The thing is, nobody knows I made Weazel. I didn’t ever mean for it to become such a — well, for lack of a better word, such a thing. Ethan asked my parents for a book on app development one Christmas so he could join some club his friends had started, and when he abandoned the idea by New Year’s, I picked it up and found out I actually had a knack for it. I made a few rinky-dink chat platforms and location-based apps, but was way too busy helping my parents out in the deli to do much more than that. Then the idea for Weazel popped into my head and wouldn’t let go.
So I made it. Polished it up. And then one day in August, after I’d had a beer at some party with Ethan and yet another classmate approached, chatted me up for thirty seconds, and abruptly abandoned me when she realized I was not my brother, I’d decided I had had enough of dealing with our peers face-to-face for the night. Only this time, instead of spending the next few hours feeling sorry for myself the way I usually do when this kind of stuff happens, I ended up making a throwaway account and posted a link to download the app on the school’s Tumblr page.
There were fifty students on it by the next morning. I had to immediately put safeties on it so you could only make an account with a Stone Hall student email address. Now there are three hundred, which means there are only about twenty-six people in the entire school who don’t have it — which is maybe for the best, because honestly I’m so low on random animal identities to assign them that the most recent user was just dubbed “Blobfish.”
“What email?” Ethan asks. “I’m talking about the tweets.”
“Huh?”
Ethan grabs my phone off my mattress and does that incredibly irritating twin thing where he unlocks it using his own face. He pulls something up and then promptly shoves it under my nose.
“Wait, what is this?”
I squint down at the tweet from what appears to be the Big League Burger corporate account. It’s introducing a new menu item, one of three new “handcrafted grilled cheeses”—the one in this tweet is called “Grandma’s Special.” I read the ingredients and my confusion hardens into anger so instantly that Ethan can practically feel it like a ripple of air in the room, immediately saying, “Right?”
I look at him, and then back down at the screen. “What the hell?”
We don’t exactly have license on the words “Grandma’s Special” or on specific combinations of ingredients that go on grilled cheese. But there’s no way it’s a coincidence. “Grandma’s Special” has been a mainstay at our family deli since Grandma Belly introduced it to the menu, based on a sandwich her grandma had made. And now dozens of years of Campbell family grilled cheese innovation was just straight up stolen by one of the biggest burger chains in the country, down to the name and five of its very specific ingredients.
We may not be some massive corporate name, but Girl Cheesing has been an installation in the East Village for decades. Every New Yorker worth their salt knows about our legendary sandwiches — particularly “Grandma’s Special,” our top-selling grilled cheese, and its prolific secret ingredient. There’s literally an entire wall of pictures of people posing with it and Grandma Belly, including a photo of some pop star from the eighties that I’m fairly certain my mom prizes more than the photos of me and Ethan taken moments after our birth.
“Dad says to just ignore it,” says Ethan, his nostrils already flared in that way I know mine are too. I can see the gears turning in his head, his fingers curling into fists. I’m right behind him, the rage jolting me awake faster than any stupid email from Rucker ever could.
The world can mess with me however it wants, but I draw the line at it messing with Grandma Belly.
“Yeah, well. He didn’t tell me to ignore it.”
Ethan’s lips quirk upward. “That’s what I was hoping you’d say.”
For all of our differences, at least in this regard, we’re always agreed. Ethan may have begged off most of his shifts at the deli over the last few years — the summer before high school he opted into some volunteer trip to build houses with a group of the more popular kids in our class, and basically came back their new king — but no matter how in demand he is outside of the deli, the loyalty is always there. It’s so bone-deep in both of us that it feels more shared than anything else, even more than being each other’s spitting images.
I pull up the Girl Cheesing Twitter account from my phone. We’re both logged into it, mostly because our parents can’t be bothered keeping up with any of the deli’s pages. If my dad had his way, we wouldn’t have any social media presence at all.
“We’re a word-of-mouth establishment,” he’s constantly saying, with that same stubborn pride he’s always had. Which is all well and good, except that “word of mouth” has not exactly been helping us stay afloat lately. He and Mom haven’t talked about it much, but I’m in the deli practically every day after school — and by virtue of the insane private school education they’ve insisted on, I’m no idiot. Our loyal customer base is aging or leaving the city. The lines are shorter. Our sales are dwindling. We need to get people in the door.
It’s not like I haven’t tried to pull my dad into the twenty-first century. I even pitched a few ideas for social media pushes or apps that we could develop to try to generate more buzz. But before I could tell him that was something I could do myself, he said we needed to put our energy into the store, and not waste it on all the “background noise.”
“Apps, websites — that’s all useless to me,” he’d said at the time. “You’re what matters to this store. This whole family. We just need to work a little harder, is all.”