“Marigold retweeted it,” says Paul.

My throat feels like sandpaper. Marigold, as in the eighties pop star my mom is obsessed with, who still comes into the deli every now and then.

Marigold, as in the eighties pop star who just unwittingly got me grounded into next year. It was one thing when I thought I might take some heat for tweeting it in the first place—now I’m going to be working unpaid shifts at the deli and smelling like turkey until Christmas.

Because Marigold, as it turns out, has a whopping 12.5 million followers. I don’t need to be coasting in AP Calc to know that translates to roughly a bajillion retweets every time she breathes. And it looks like she only just retweeted us—in the time I’ve stood here staring at Paul’s phone with my mouth unhinged, it’s gotten another 250 retweets.

I tap on her profile and see there’s another tweet she sent herself, right after her retweet. “Shame on Big League Burger!” it reads. “Girl Cheesing perfected Grandma’s Special before that punk was even born.”

By “that punk,” I assume she is referencing the Big League Burger mascot, a cartoon of a chubby-faced, freckled little boy in a baseball cap with a melting ice cream cone in his hands. In commercials he’s always hamming it up to the camera, getting into some kind of annoying shenanigans and saying, “Welcome to the big leagues!” The commercial ends before anyone bothers disciplining him for anything. I better figure out what the secret to that is, and fast, because my parents are going to be none too pleased when I get home.

“You’re famous,” says Paul, elated.

“I’m doomed.”

I hand him back his phone, scanning the hallway for Ethan, wondering if he’s seen. Not that it matters—nothing is going to get me out of what is sure to be another long lecture in our dad’s roster of them. I’m thinking this one will be in the patience is a virtue variety, subsection you need to think before you act. And admittedly, I do have a slight habit of opening my mouth before my brain fully filters what is and isn’t appropriate to say (or, y’know, tweet).

But if I’m bad, our mom is way worse. She once scared a guy with a literal knife trying to hold up the deli by throwing a ham and screaming at him. It’s not like my hotheadedness is some kind of anomaly.

Still, this is one of those moments I wish I’d taken Dad’s advice. It’ll be a miracle if I get out of this unscathed—thanks to Marigold, I’m about to be the level of grounded that will make me flinch at every “Best of the ’80s” playlist for the rest of my life.

Pepper

Wolf

Haven’t heard from you all day, so I’m going to assume you’re among the chosen few and Rucker confiscated your phone. Godspeed, soldier.

I press my forehead to the locker of the changing room. The final bell rang ten minutes ago, and by then Taffy had texted me a whopping total of thirty-two times.

What about this one? reads her latest message. I squint at the screenshot of a tweet she’s sent me. It’s a selfie of a guy holding up a full McDonald’s bag, his mouth crammed with fries, captioned grill this, bitch. It’s one of a few thousand tweets we’ve gotten, tagged to the corporate account for the #GrilledByBLB initiative, but we’re trying to respond to at least two hundred of them with funny comebacks today.

And by “we” I really mean me, because Taffy does not have a sarcastic bone in her entire body.

I draft a tweet and send it to her so fast that I don’t even have to break my stride: it’s illegal to burn trash.

Taffy has it up within the minute, which means it’s going to be another five minutes before she finds another contender, and another ten minutes after that for her to give up on thinking about a tweet on her own and text me. By then, though, I’ll be in the pool—something I’m actually looking forward to for once, since it is the only definitive way to make myself unavailable these days.

It’s not that I don’t like swimming. Paige and I swam in summer leagues growing up, and even as young as six, I was swimming laps around all the other kids. It was fun back then—less about racing and more about playing Uno in the grass between races and begging my parents to let us get those massive baked potatoes at the food truck down the street after swim meets. Once we moved, though, there was no more swimming for fun. People are only here to collect the varsity letter they get every season and slap a line about it on their college apps. Hundreds and hundreds of hours and sweat and chlorine-bleached hair and occasional tears, all reduced to a few printed words.

“Hey, Pep? You want me to run warm-ups or are you gonna be out in a sec?”

Pep. I hate that nickname. Possibly even more than Pepperoni, another Jack Campbell original.

Or maybe it’s less about being called Pep and more about the person who’s saying it.

“I’ll be right out,” I tell Pooja, shoving my backpack into one of the lockers. It feels like I’m shoving Taffy in there with it. Wolf too.

Pooja pushes a lock of hair into her swim cap, then gives me a thumbs-up. “If you’re sure!”

I wait until she’s turned the corner to roll my eyes. The whole exchange was innocuous enough on the surface, sure, but I know Pooja—the two of us have been neck and neck with everything since my first year at Stone Hall. We’re constantly within one point of each other on exams, within milliseconds of each other on our racing times, in all of the same teachers’ office hours. Competing with her has become such a constant in my life that I’m pretty sure on my deathbed, I’ll get a call from her casually bragging about how she bets she’s going to get to die first.