It still stings, how fast he dismissed the whole thing — but not nearly as much as the crap Big League Burger is pulling on us right now.
I’m still half delirious from sleep when I draft the tweet. It’s honestly not my best work. It’s just a picture of our menu board, which proudly declares we sold our millionth “Grandma’s Special” in 2015, next to a screenshot of Big League Burger’s tweet, which reads, “Nobody grills a cheese like Grandma League can.”
I almost write something as pissed off as I actually am—Who do you asswipes think you are? is the first unhelpful one that comes to mind — but my parents would murder me if I wrote anything rude on the company social media. In the end I decide my safest option to throw just enough shade but not so much that we inspire our parents’ wrath is to write sure, jan on the text above the screenshots, along with a side-eye emoji. I hold the screen up to Ethan for approval, and he nods, mirroring my smirk, and hits “Tweet.”
It’s not going to make the slightest difference. We have a handful of followers to their behemoth four million. But sometimes even shouting into a void feels better than just staring into it
Jack
I manage to calm myself down to non-Hulk levels by the time I reach the 6 train platform, leaving a good twenty minutes after Ethan. The only silver lining to all this bullshit is that Grandma Belly, at least, probably won’t see it — I’m pretty sure she’s never even opened Twitter before. At eighty-five, she’s not exactly a huge fan of the internet.
But then again, that might be changing. She’s been winding down a bit — going on shorter walks, going to more doctor’s appointments. But it’s one of those things we seem to sweep under the counter like the deli’s finances, or what exactly is going to happen when my parents want to retire — as long as nobody actually says that Grandma Belly’s health is waning, we can all act like it isn’t happening.
My phone buzzes in my hands, pulling me out of the tangle of my thoughts. I open the Weazel app, trying not to smile too obviously on the platform when I read the message waiting for me.
Bluebird
afkgjafldgjalfkjahlfkajgd
Wolf
I don’t speak zombie. Did that mean you finished your essay?
Bluebird
“Essay” is certainly a word for it. Whether it will compete against the ghostwriter Shane Anderson’s mom hired is another issue entirely
The 6 train rolls into the station, and I shove my phone into my pocket, Bluebird along with it. She’s been doing this lately — this game of elimination. Not that it helps much that she’s eliminating a guy in our class who has fewer brain cells than fingers, because even if she were massively catfishing me, I’m pretty sure it’s not Anderson on the other end. Bluebird’s too quick-witted for that. (The ghostwriter Anderson’s mom hired, on the other hand…)
Maybe I should know who she is even without the hints. I barely ever interact on the Hallway Chat, where all the users can post and stay anonymous, and I never initiate any chats with people who do. But at one point I posted a link to a free SAT test prep book online, which was met with a resounding silence from my peers and their $200-an-hour tutors — that is, until about an hour later, a private chat came from Bluebird. It was a picture of The Rock mid-flex at the gym, and a text that read Me after devouring all that sweet, sweet Protein Punch — a reference to one of the first math prep questions about a fictional protein company whose products came in powdered and liquid form.
Her profile said she was a girl and she was a senior, so that was initially all I knew. That, and she wasn’t chugging so much Stone Hall Kool-Aid that she was above using free test resources. Still, even after all we’ve talked since — first making dumb jokes about the test prep questions, then our teachers, and sometimes things way beyond school — nothing really seems to narrow it down. I can’t think of a single girl at our school who she might be.
Which, to be fair, might not be so difficult a feat if I paid attention to something other than the dive team and my phone every once in a while.
The truly weird thing about this is that I could just blow the whole thing wide open right now. I have access to the emails attached to the different usernames, for one thing. But I’ve never looked, and it feels like cheating somehow to check on Bluebird’s. Like it would wreck it a little bit, in some way, because I’d feel like a liar. Like I’d pulled one over on her. I’d rather us just stay on level ground.
But I guess I already have pulled one over on her. Technically, the app should have given away our identities weeks ago. That’s the whole point of the name — Weazel, for “Pop! Goes the Weasel” (not the most clever reference, but it was three in the morning when I patented it). But I messed with the code and stopped it from happening between us for reasons I’m still not entirely sure of. Maybe it’s just nice to have someone to talk to who gets it — the whole fish-out-of-water thing. At least, nice to talk to someone who doesn’t have the exact same stupid face as me.
Maybe it’s just nice to finally be honest with someone at all. Ethan’s all too willing to pretend we’re as well-off as our peers, but I can’t separate School Jack and Home Jack the way Ethan does — or at least not as easily. It feels like it takes up way too much space in my brain, trying to make myself fit, but when I’m talking to Bluebird, I never have to switch between the two. I just am.
Not that I’m not grateful and all — Ethan and I may have both worked our asses off to get into Stone Hall, but my parents continue working their asses off to pay for it. My mom went there when she was a kid, and even though she has adjusted to the rest of it — the whole comedown from “uptown princess” to “wife of a deli owner” that must have been some hell of a whirlwind romance before Ethan and I existed — she has always been adamant about our education, and my dad has always been adamant on backing her up on it.
Which is why I find myself on a Monday morning, walking up the steps of a school that looks like it fell out of Disney’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame and nodding at kids whose bank accounts are hefty enough to buy the Starbucks down the street for kicks.
And so commences my least favorite part of every day — the part where people’s eyes graze my face, light up hopefully, and then immediately dim when they realize I am not, in fact, their treasured Ethan, but still just regular me. No amount of letting my hair grow out slightly longer and messier than his or switching up my backpack and shoes or generally walking around with my head in my phone screen has done anything to prevent it.
What I really need is a new face. But since I’m actually partial to it, I’ll settle for waiting for Ethan to blow the Popsicle stand that is Manhattan and go to some yuppie university far away from here.
“Yo. Yo.”
I glance up from my locker to find Paul, who is all of five-foot-five and basically what would happen if the Energizer Bunny and the leprechaun from Lucky Charms had a very ginger, very excitable baby.
“Did you see? Mel and Gina were like, necking in the hallway,” he informs me, his eyes shining with glee.
I pull out my history textbook and shut the locker. “In 1954? Because I’m pretty sure we call it making out now.”
Paul frantically pats my arm. “So here’s what happened,” he says, with the urgency of an intern reporting something to their boss on the way into work. “They were chatting on the Weazel app, and, y’know, flirting and stuff, and then the app revealed their names to each other and now they are dating.”