The snooze alarm goes off, ending my pity party. I blearily pull out my phone and see Wolf never got back to me last night. It feels, for an irrational moment, like he knows what I did. Like this is the universe’s way of punishing me for aiding and abetting pettiness on social media. Or maybe he’s just bored of talking to me.

Or worse—maybe I said something specific enough that he knows it’s me, and he’s already disappointed.

I’m being paranoid, and even I know it. He’s probably busy. Doing stuff like AP Calc homework that doesn’t look like it was written while hanging upside down from a ceiling fan. Or whatever it is teenagers do when their parents aren’t dragging them into Twitter wars.

At least the stupid hashtag is over. Or at the very least it should be.

After I finish brushing my teeth, my mom unceremoniously opens the door to the bathroom and shoves her phone screen into my eyeline.

It’s a picture of the new Grandma’s Special grilled cheese in a BLB wrapper, sitting in a puddle on the sidewalk. tell me i’m pretty #GrilledByBLB, the caption reads. It was sent from that deli—Girl Cheesing—just a few minutes before.

“Got a sec?”

Mom’s already decked out in her outfit for the day, a sleek black dress with black tights, and a navy jeweled statement necklace to match her navy boots. Her hair is already blown out, her makeup perfectly applied. Standing next to her in the mirror makes me look like I’ve stumbled out of a crypt.

“Can’t Taffy handle it?”

“Taffy won’t be in until nine, and she wasn’t built for these kinds of tweets anyway. Not like you are.”

I hand her phone back to her, spitting my toothpaste into the sink. “Mom. The recipes are really, really similar.”

“It’s grilled cheese. Don’t be silly.”

But it isn’t silly, really. The recipe alone might have been a coincidence—sourdough bread with muenster, cheddar, apple jam, and honey mustard—but BLB branded it with the exact name as theirs. It’s enough to make any copyright lawyer do a double-take, if we’re unfortunate enough that this deli really does have some kind of legal position to come at us.

“Who even had this idea in the first place? I feel like you should talk to whoever it was.”

She bites the inside of her cheek. “You’re right. And I will. But first, let’s come up with a response to this tweet.”

I shake my head. “The hashtag is over. It was just for the day. It’ll be weird if we keep going now.”

“It’ll take you like two minutes.”

Two minutes to draft it, sure, but then an hour of compulsively checking it to see how it’s being received, and a day of feeling weirdly guilty about it, and by then, she’ll probably ask me to write more tweets that will “take two minutes” and the whole thing will start all over again. A point I have every intention of making to her, except she beats me to the punch.

“And if you see Landon today, could you ask him about dinner? His father and I are scheduling a sit-down here for when he gets back from Japan in a few weeks, and I’d love for him to join us.”

My mouth practically unhinges. “Landon can’t come here.” Not here, with my bright pink Pepto-Bismol bedroom and the watercolors of Big League Burger menu items my mom commissioned and hung on the wall. Not here, where I’d have even more space and time to make an ass of myself in front of Landon than I already do.

“It’ll be good for you. You’ll get a front seat to business negotiations.” She raises her eyebrows at me conspiratorially. “With the kind of jobs you’ll be fielding after college, you’ll need it.”

Before I can protest, her heels are clack-clack-clacking down the hall, her keys are jingling, and she’s out the front door.

I don’t tweet right away. The miniature rebellion doesn’t count for much, but it’s just enough to rub me the wrong way. I take my time getting ready before I send it, so much time that I’m too late to make myself toast and end up digging through the fridge to find my leftover Monster Cake to eat on the way to school.

I notice a bit of it is missing and smile despite myself. Some things, at least, never change.

Pepper

I hit Park Avenue, nodding at the doorman on the way out, and pull the corporate account back up on my phone. It will honestly look stupid for us to respond to this barb. We’re already in hot water for the way we responded to the last one. But it’s either tweet now or get a bunch of semi-terrified texts from Taffy later.

Big League Burger @B1gLeagueBurger

Replying to @GCheesing

OMG! Finally! The public knows the secret ingredient grandma adds to your grilled cheese. Thanks for the pro tip guys but we’ll pass for now

7:03 AM · 21 Oct 2020

I’m still half asleep by the time I get to homeroom, but not half asleep enough I don’t notice Jack and Ethan muttering to each other in heated voices in a corner of the room. I sit at my usual desk, trying to ignore it, but the room is empty enough it’s hard not to hear them.

“… going to kill me. He thinks I sent that stupid picture.”

“So what? I’ll tell him it was me. I don’t care. It’s not that big of a deal.”

“He’s already texted me like seven times. He told us to drop it—”