Tweet Cute: A Novel

When my alarm clock goes off the next morning, it almost feels like a joke. So does the fact that I may be the first person in human history to have a Twitter hangover.

Just as I predicted, the moment I walked in the door, my mom thrust her laptop in my face and asked for help answering more #GrilledByBLB selfies, undeterred by the backlash we’d gotten for our response to that deli that only seemed to be ramping up by the second. Sitting there and getting all the notifications from people tweeting at the corporate account was the internet equivalent of sitting in a dunce chair and having rotten tomatoes chucked at us all night.

I barely even got a chance to text Wolf back, and my AP Calc assignment looks like a drunk person scribbled on graphing paper. I didn’t even get to my college apps. Let that be my mom’s big punishment for dragging me into this—as determined as she’s been to help me blend in here, nothing will look quite as bad as me not getting into a single top-twenty college because she had me tweeting GIFs at strangers all day.

For a moment, I just lie on my pillows and wonder what would happen. We’ve never really talked about it—me getting good grades to get into a good school has always been the expectation. I guess it started around the time she and Paige really started going at it. Mom was so stressed about Paige’s antics, the arguments and the way she refused to make friends with anyone here and was always wandering around the city, pulling the I’m 18 now card like a party trick. But Mom was happy, at least, when I came home with good grades. When teachers were telling her what a delight I was to have in class. When I made varsity swim team.

And when Mom was happy, it was harder for Paige to pick fights—when Mom was happy, it was infectious. I forget, sometimes, that the three of us have good memories in this apartment. That Mom was the one who helped us start our baking blog in the first place. That we watched Gossip Girl reruns and flipped out whenever we recognized an exterior. That every now and then, there was this glimpse of how it could be, instead of how it was.

But then something else would make Paige snap. Dad’s flight to visit us would get canceled for weather, or she’d have a rotten day at her new school. Then she’d do something to get under Mom’s skin, and Mom would push back, and the apartment would go from Hello Kitty to hell on earth in the time it took for me to take out the recycling and come back.

The thing that still doesn’t make sense to me is why Paige even came here in the first place. She could have just stayed in Nashville with Dad, finished senior year with her friends, and avoided this whole mess altogether.

If you can even call it a mess anymore. It’s been so long since Paige started cold-shouldering Mom that it’s more normal than not.

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.