“Right.”

“It’ll be good for you, Pepperoni. See some more of what this great big city has to offer.”

The idea of it somewhat terrifies me. It’s all well and good to say straight shot on the 6 train, but it’s so much more complicated than that. There’s wrangling a MetroCard, and making sure you don’t get on the wrong train, and making sure you get on one going in the right direction, and I’ve heard sometimes they just decide to go express, and if you’re not paying atten tion, you can end up in the middle of Brooklyn, and then what on earth happens to you?

“We can smuggle you in if you want,” says Jack. “I think I have a wig leftover from when Ethan was the Joker for Halloween.”

I’m being ridiculous. The subway isn’t going to swallow me whole. I’ll be eighteen in a few months, and in this city for at least seven more—I can’t be totally helpless forever.

“What day do you think we should—”

“Did you see this?”

It’s Paul and Pooja, blurting the exact same words at the same time on either side of us. They pause and look up at each other in alarm like they just ripped a hole through the matrix, and then they’re shoving phone screens into our faces, without any caution for Mrs. Fairchild five feet away on the other side of the door.

I take Pooja’s phone from her. I’d recognize the Hub Seed logo anywhere—what I’m having trouble processing is the picture of my face on it.

“Oh my god.”

Twitter’s Most Iconic Brand War To Date Is Being Spearheaded—Fittingly—By The Teens

“The teens?” Jack is muttering next to me. “I didn’t realize we spoke for all of Gen Z, but okay.”

“How did they get my picture?”

“Your mom?”

“Oh, hell no.”

It had to have been Taffy. My mom would never have sanctioned this. Hell, I wouldn’t have sanctioned this. And yet there I am—identified as “Patricia,” dear God—in my yearbook photo from junior year with the massive zit on my chin, and there’s Jack, cropped badly out of a shot of the dive team from last season.

If you’re a breathing human with a Twitter account, there’s no way you’ve missed #BigCheese, this month’s epic battle between fast-food chain Big League Burger and their unexpected adversary, a locally beloved deli by the name of Girl Cheesing.

Their respective tweeting has hit an internet already accustomed to the snarky, audience-targeted kind of tweeting we’ve seen from plenty of brand accounts in the past few years, from Wendy’s to Moon Pie to Netflix.

Those accounts may have just laid the groundwork for the kind of war that BLB and GC are waging—a war that has earned a small-time deli a whopping half a million followers and counting, and launched more hashtags than there are things on their menus. But the most surprising thing about this year’s #GrilledCheeseGate?

It isn’t being run by social media managers. This is a war waged by teens.

Embedded in the article is another video of Jasmine Yang, who seems to have done most of the sleuthing before the Hub Seed reporter wrote about us. Apparently a new vlog of hers went live late last night, and the amount of stalkery involved in it puts any research I’ve ever done for the debate club to shame. It introduces Jack first, with a smattering of information from his Facebook account and Ethan’s. Her bit about me is much shorter, but anyone who knows me would recognize me on sight—in addition to the yearbook picture, there’s an old one of me, Paige, my mom, and my dad, posing in front of the first Big League Burger in Nashville, some ten years ago. All four of us are holding burgers. Paige is beaming from behind a pair of braces, and my hair is pulled into astronomically high pigtails.

Any teenager in their right mind would probably be humiliated. But I can’t stop staring at the four of us, at the proof I didn’t just gloss over the memories in my head—it really was this simple, once upon a time.

The article mentions we live in New York, even says we go to the same school, although it does us the small mercy of not mentioning which one. The article pivots then into a summary of everything Jack and I have tweeted at each other so far, a weird little digital scrapbook of our clashes. I see the first ever tweet he sent, the quote retweet about our new menu items, and see he’s paused to look at it on his screen too.

“The tweet that launched a thousand other tweets.”

“To think we were only mildly sleep-deprived, then.”

The article shifts into all the repercussions of our tweets, some of which I am already aware of, and others I decidedly am not. For instance, I’d seen the hashtags, even responded to a few of them—but I had not seen the literal fan art depicting Girl Cheesing’s and Big League Burger’s mascots fighting each other in comic panels, the freckled little girl and cherubic little boy fighting by chucking food at each other.

We get to the line about the joking-but-not-quite-joking fan fiction shipping an older version of the mascots and both of us react so viscerally, several heads swivel to stare at us in the hallway.

“They’re shipping them?” Jack blurts.

I shake my head. “They’re minors, for god’s sake. This is unholy.”

“Forget shipping them,” says Pooja, taking her phone back from me and scrolling down to the comments section. “Now they’re shipping you.”