“Just one more bite?”

I grin into my locker door, so he can’t see. “You sound like a junkie.”

“I might be one now, and it’s kind of your fault. So you have a responsibility to keep supplying. Or I’ll go into withdrawal.”

“What are you even talking about?” Paul asks, standing on the tips of his toes to look into my locker, even though we’re the exact same height.

I rip off another piece for Jack, and then, in a moment of Monster Cake benevolence, hand some to Paul too. I might as well stay on good terms with as many members of the dive team as I can, now that we’re apparently sharing lanes.

“Oh my god. You’re my new favorite person.”

Jack ribs him. “How easily your loyalties shift.”

Paul salutes us both. “Gotta head to my internship.”

I pause mid-chew. So maybe Landon’s not the only person I know who ducks out of school regularly.

I try to imagine it. Paul awake late at night by the dim light of his phone, texting me terrible puns about Great Expectations, making fun of our chain-smoking PE teacher for her aggressively hypocritical lectures on the dangers of cigarettes. Telling me about his family, listening to my woes about mine.

“Still on for grabbing some grub after practice?”

It doesn’t feel quite right, but that’s the problem—I can’t really imagine anyone being Wolf. Like there’s some kind of mental block, every time I try to give him a face. Sometimes he feels more like some bodiless entity than a person.

And sometimes—like yesterday, when he was upset about that thing with his parents—he’s so real it’s like we’re huddled in a corner together somewhere, so close I could reach out and touch.

I blink up at Jack, mentally replaying the last few seconds of whatever he was saying to me. “Huh? Oh. Yeah, I’m good for after practice.”

“Ethan said your coach sent you a meet calendar, if you want to forward it to me.”

“Oh, yeah.” I check to make sure the hallway is clear, then pull the attachment up on my phone and hand it to him. “You can airdrop it to yourself.”

Jack fumbles for a moment, trying to hold both our phones at the same time. “Your screen just went black.”

My hands are too occupied trying to wrap up the leftover Monster Cake. “The password’s just 1234.” My dad set up our phone codes for us when we all upgraded last month, and the only reason I tell Jack is because I have every intention of changing it when I have time.

Jack lets out a low whistle. “You realize that’s like the phone equivalent of leaving your keys under your mat.”

He hands me back my phone, and then the warning bell rings and Jack salutes me, heading off with a Monster Cake–induced skip in his step, and I can’t help the slight skip in my own.

Pepper

I spend the next few hours attempting and ultimately failing to ignore the texts coming in from my mom and Taffy. Once the final bell rings, I take a few minutes outside of the locker room to attempt to string together a timeline of Twitter events. It turns out Girl Cheesing’s account—which now has a whopping eleven thousand followers compared to yesterday’s three digits—responded to my tweet from this morning pretty fast.

Girl Cheesing @GCheesing

Replying to @B1gLeagueBurger

still tastes better than unoriginality though amirite

7:17 AM · 21 Oct 2020

And maybe that would have been the end of it—nobody asked me to respond to that during school. Odds are my mom might have just let Taffy ignore it, and we all could have moved on with our lives and maybe settled this in small claims court instead of on Twitter, the way I just kind of assumed adults did.

Enter Jasmine Yang, famous YouTuber and host of the popular vlog “Twitter Gets Petty.” In a three-minute video posted about an hour before school let out, she detailed the few tweets involved in our “feud,” essentially narrating the nightmare of the last twenty-four hours of my life.

“I think it’s safe to say these two accounts are pretty cheesed with each other. So who’s it gonna be, Petty People?” she says at the end of the video, addressing her followers with a cheeky grin. “Team Girl Cheesing or Team Big League? Let me know in the comments, y’all. I know who’s getting my vote.”

The video shows a screenshot, then, of her responding to a Big League Burger tweet with the word COPYCAT all in caps, alongside a flood of cat emojis.

And somehow, in the hour between her posting the video and me getting out of school, the idea has taken off so aggressively that hundreds of Twitter users are doing the same. Every tweet, every Instagram post, every Facebook announcement that BLB has made in the last few months is just a sea of people commenting with the cat emoji.

It would be funny, if I were literally anyone else on the planet. But I just happen to be the person who is going to be chained to a phone until I find some way to fix it.

My brain is practically churning by the time practice is over. I’m so preoccupied with what on earth our next tactical move can be I don’t even notice Vice Principal Rucker standing in the lobby of the gym where we hold practices until I hear his unmistakable nasally voice saying, “Excuse me, Miss Singh, but what exactly am I seeing on your phone screen?”