We may not be some massive corporate name, but Girl Cheesing has been an installation in the East Village for decades. Every New Yorker worth their salt knows about our legendary sandwiches—particularly “Grandma’s Special,” our top-selling grilled cheese, and its prolific secret ingredient. There’s literally an entire wall of pictures of people posing with it and Grandma Belly, including a photo of some pop star from the eighties that I’m fairly certain my mom prizes more than the photos of me and Ethan taken moments after our birth.

“Dad says to just ignore it,” says Ethan, his nostrils already flared in that way I know mine are too. I can see the gears turning in his head, his fingers curling into fists. I’m right behind him, the rage jolting me awake faster than any stupid email from Rucker ever could.

The world can mess with me however it wants, but I draw the line at it messing with Grandma Belly.

“Yeah, well. He didn’t tell me to ignore it.”

Ethan’s lips quirk upward. “That’s what I was hoping you’d say.”

For all of our differences, at least in this regard, we’re always agreed. Ethan may have begged off most of his shifts at the deli over the last few years—the summer before high school he opted into some volunteer trip to build houses with a group of the more popular kids in our class, and basically came back their new king—but no matter how in demand he is outside of the deli, the loyalty is always there. It’s so bone-deep in both of us that it feels more shared than anything else, even more than being each other’s spitting images.

I pull up the Girl Cheesing Twitter account from my phone. We’re both logged into it, mostly because our parents can’t be bothered keeping up with any of the deli’s pages. If my dad had his way, we wouldn’t have any social media presence at all.

“We’re a word-of-mouth establishment,” he’s constantly saying, with that same stubborn pride he’s always had. Which is all well and good, except that “word of mouth” has not exactly been helping us stay afloat lately. He and Mom haven’t talked about it much, but I’m in the deli practically every day after school—and by virtue of the insane private school education they’ve insisted on, I’m no idiot. Our loyal customer base is aging or leaving the city. The lines are shorter. Our sales are dwindling. We need to get people in the door.

It’s not like I haven’t tried to pull my dad into the twenty-first century. I even pitched a few ideas for social media pushes or apps that we could develop to try to generate more buzz. But before I could tell him that was something I could do myself, he said we needed to put our energy into the store, and not waste it on all the “background noise.”

“Apps, websites—that’s all useless to me,” he’d said at the time. “You’re what matters to this store. This whole family. We just need to work a little harder, is all.”

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

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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…)