by Emma Lord
Of course, I didn’t know that until we moved here into this whole new ecosystem of other kids. That first day of school, everyone stared at me as if I were an alien, and compared to my Manhattan-bred peers who were raised on Starbucks and YouTube makeup tutorials, I basically was. That day I came home, took one look at my mom, and started to bawl.
It spurred her into action faster than if I’d come home literally on fire—within the week, I had more makeup products than my bathroom counter could hold, lessons with a stylist about blow-drying, one-on-one private tutoring so I could catch up to the elite curriculum. My mom had put us into this strange new world, and she was determined to make us both fit.
It’s weird, that I kind of look back on that misery with a fondness. These days my mom and I are too busy for much more than this—weird post-midnight encounters in the kitchen, both of us already poised with one foot out the door.
This time I beat her to it. “I’m gonna go to bed.”
My mom nods. “Don’t forget to leave your phone on tomorrow, so Taffy can reach you.”
“Right.”
I should probably be annoyed that she thinks Twitter takes priority over my actual education—especially considering she put me in one of the most competitive schools in the country—but it’s nice, in a way. To have her need me for something.
Back in my room, I lean on the mass of pillows on my bed, pointedly avoiding my laptop and the mountain of work still waiting for me by opening the Weazel app instead and typing a reply.
Bluebird
Well look who it is. Can’t sleep?
I think for a moment Wolf won’t respond, but sure enough, the chat bubble opens again. There’s a certain kind of thrill and an even more certain kind of dread—a hazard of using the Weazel app. The whole thing is anonymous, and supposedly there are only kids from our school on it. You’re assigned a username when you log on for the first time, always some kind of animal, and stay anonymous as long as you’re in the main Hallway Chat that’s open to everyone.
But if you talk with anyone one-on-one on the app, at some point—you never know when—the app reveals your identities to each other. Boom. Secrecy out the window.
So basically, the more I talk to Wolf, the likelier the odds are that the app will out us to each other. In fact, considering some people are randomly revealed to each other within a week or even within a day, it’s kind of a miracle we’ve gone two months like this.
Wolf
Nah. Too busy worrying about you butchering Pip’s narrative.
Maybe that’s why, lately, we’ve started getting a little more personal than usual. Saying things that won’t quite give us away, but aren’t all that subtle either.
Bluebird
You’d think I’d have an advantage. Pip’s whole rags-to-riches thing isn’t so far off my mark
Wolf
Yeah. I’m starting to think we’re the only ones who weren’t born with silver spoons in multiple orifices
I hold my breath, then, as if the app will out us both right there. I want it and I don’t. It’s kind of pathetic, but everyone is so closed off and competitive that Wolf is the closest thing I’ve had to a friend since we moved here. I don’t want anything to change that.
It’s not really that I’m afraid he’d disappoint me. I’m afraid I’d disappoint him.
Wolf
Anyway, milk it for all it’s worth. Especially cuz those assholes probably paid a much smarter person to write their essays for them.
Bluebird
I hate that you’re probably right.
Wolf
Hey. Only 8 more months ’til graduation.
I lie back on my bed, closing my eyes. Sometimes it feels like those eight months can’t go by fast enough.
Jack
People should be banned from sending emails before 9 a.m. on Mondays. Particularly if said email is going to wreck my day.
To the parents and eager learning beavers of Stone Hall Academy, it begins. A clear sign it’s from Rucker, full-time vice principal and part-time thief of joy.
It has come to the faculty’s attention that members of the student body are engaging in anonymous chats on an app called “Weasel.” Not only is it not sanctioned by the school, but it is a growing cause for concern. The risk of cyberbullying, the potential spread of test answers, and the unknown origins of this app are all reason enough for us to enact a schoolwide ban, effective immediately.
Parents, we urge you to have a frank discussion with students about the dangers of this app. From this day forward, any student caught engaging in “Weasel” on campus will be subject to a disciplinary hearing. Anyone with information about this app is encouraged to come forward.
Have an enriching day,
Vice Principal Rucker
I shut my screen off, throwing myself back onto my pillow and closing my eyes.
Weasel? Of all the hills I’m willing to die on, this should probably be the last one, but I’m irked by the misnomer anyway. It’s “Weazel,” my slightly cheeky homage to early-era apps that abused z and disavowed vowels (I figured leaning into that second one and calling it “Weazl” was a little too much, even for me).
But more importantly, nobody’s using it to cheat or cyberbully or whatever the hell Rucker thinks teenagers do when they finally find a space to interact without adults breathing down their necks. First of all, if anyone at Stone Hall wants to cut any academic corners, odds are a big fat check will do a hell of a lot more than a list of Scantron answers will. And second of all, I’m so vigilant about monitoring the Hallway Chat and erasing any messages that come close to cyberbullying or cheating that now most people know better than to even try.
My door swings open.
“Did you see this?”
Ethan is fully in my bedroom before I’m even awake enough to properly scowl at him. Naturally, he’s already in his school uniform, his hair gelled, his backpack slung over his shoulder. He always gets to school early to make out with his boyfriend on the front steps, and I guess do whatever it is you do when you’re too damn popular for your own good. Read: being student council president, captain of the dive team, and a star pupil so beloved by our teachers that I heard two of them arguing once in the staff lounge over whether he should win the departmental award for English or math at the end of our junior year, since he wasn’t allowed to win both.
All of which would be annoying if Ethan were just my brother, but are made at least ten times worse by the fact that he is my identical twin. There’s nothing quite as awkward as living in a shadow that is quite literally the same shape as yours.
Not that I’m a loser. I have plenty of friends. But I’m definitely more the class-clown variety of high school clichés than my brother, who is basically the Troy Bolton of our school, minus the jazz hands.
(Okay, maybe I’m a little bit of a loser.)
“Yeah, I saw the email,” I mutter, a pit sinking in my stomach.
The thing is, nobody knows I made Weazel. I didn’t ever mean for it to become such a—well, for lack of a better word, such a thing. Ethan asked my parents for a book on app development one Christmas so he could join some club his friends had started, and when he abandoned the idea by New Year’s, I picked it up and found out I actually had a knack for it. I made a few rinky-dink chat platforms and location-based apps, but was way too busy helping my parents out in the deli to do much more than that. Then the idea for Weazel popped into my head and wouldn’t let go.
So I made it. Polished it up. And then one day in August, after I’d had a beer at some party with Ethan and yet another classmate approached, chatted me up for thirty seconds, and abruptly abandoned me when she realized I was not my brother, I’d decided I had had enough of dealing with our peers face-to-face for the night. Only this time, instead of spending the next few hours feeling sorry for myself the way I usually do when this kind of stuff happens, I ended up making a throwaway account and posted a link to download the app on the school’s Tum
blr page.
There were fifty students on it by the next morning. I had to immediately put safeties on it so you could only make an account with a Stone Hall student email address. Now there are three hundred, which means there are only about twenty-six people in the entire school who don’t have it—which is maybe for the best, because honestly I’m so low on random animal identities to assign them that the most recent user was just dubbed “Blobfish.”
“What email?” Ethan asks. “I’m talking about the tweets.”
“Huh?”
Ethan grabs my phone off my mattress and does that incredibly irritating twin thing where he unlocks it using his own face. He pulls something up and then promptly shoves it under my nose.
“Wait, what is this?”
I squint down at the tweet from what appears to be the Big League Burger corporate account. It’s introducing a new menu item, one of three new “handcrafted grilled cheeses”—the one in this tweet is called “Grandma’s Special.” I read the ingredients and my confusion hardens into anger so instantly that Ethan can practically feel it like a ripple of air in the room, immediately saying, “Right?”
I look at him, and then back down at the screen. “What the hell?”
We don’t exactly have license on the words “Grandma’s Special” or on specific combinations of ingredients that go on grilled cheese. But there’s no way it’s a coincidence. “Grandma’s Special” has been a mainstay at our family deli since Grandma Belly introduced it to the menu, based on a sandwich her grandma had made. And now dozens of years of Campbell family grilled cheese innovation was just straight up stolen by one of the biggest burger chains in the country, down to the name and five of its very specific ingredients.
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
afkgjafldgjalfkjahlfkajgd
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…)
Maybe I should know who she is even without the hints. I barely ever interact on the Hallway Chat, where all the users can post and stay anonymous, and I never initiate any chats with people who do. But at one point I posted a link to a free SAT test prep book online, which was met with a resounding silence from my peers and their $200-an-hour tutors—that is, until about an hour later, a private chat came from Bluebird. It was a picture of The Rock mid-flex at the gym, and a text that read Me after devouring all that sweet, sweet Protein Punch—a reference to one of the first math prep questions about a fictional protein company whose products came in powdered and liquid form.
; Her profile said she was a girl and she was a senior, so that was initially all I knew. That, and she wasn’t chugging so much Stone Hall Kool-Aid that she was above using free test resources. Still, even after all we’ve talked since—first making dumb jokes about the test prep questions, then our teachers, and sometimes things way beyond school—nothing really seems to narrow it down. I can’t think of a single girl at our school who she might be.
Which, to be fair, might not be so difficult a feat if I paid attention to something other than the dive team and my phone every once in a while.
The truly weird thing about this is that I could just blow the whole thing wide open right now. I have access to the emails attached to the different usernames, for one thing. But I’ve never looked, and it feels like cheating somehow to check on Bluebird’s. Like it would wreck it a little bit, in some way, because I’d feel like a liar. Like I’d pulled one over on her. I’d rather us just stay on level ground.
But I guess I already have pulled one over on her. Technically, the app should have given away our identities weeks ago. That’s the whole point of the name—Weazel, for “Pop! Goes the Weasel” (not the most clever reference, but it was three in the morning when I patented it). But I messed with the code and stopped it from happening between us for reasons I’m still not entirely sure of. Maybe it’s just nice to have someone to talk to who gets it—the whole fish-out-of-water thing. At least, nice to talk to someone who doesn’t have the exact same stupid face as me.
Maybe it’s just nice to finally be honest with someone at all. Ethan’s all too willing to pretend we’re as well-off as our peers, but I can’t separate School Jack and Home Jack the way Ethan does—or at least not as easily. It feels like it takes up way too much space in my brain, trying to make myself fit, but when I’m talking to Bluebird, I never have to switch between the two. I just am.