Kids’ Table’s Modern Fables

My cousins in my room in October. Faces redacted (and certain details changed below) for privacy.

My cousin Maggie, thirteen and translucent, is a seasoned veteran of the culture wars.

Her brother Quinn, two years Maggie’s senior, prefers to keep a safer distance from the fray—a fact quite in keeping with his comparatively reserved manner. Quinn plays the angsty, sometimes cagey tenth grader to Maggie’s outspoken, idealistic, tell-all eighth grader. He is smart and witty, often good for a biting one-liner, but his sentences regularly trail off with an uncertain grimace at the floor, or, more often, they are trampled over by Maggie’s animated, triple-speed narration of what both siblings view as an impossibly boring adolescence in Chicago’s northwest suburbs. 

They live in a suburb where the two-story ranch houses all look identical, and apparently, the same is true of the people inhabiting them. I have spent many a college weekend there, being pampered and plied with Trader Joe’s snacks by Quinn and Maggie’s mother—my aunt Lizzie—but I’ve never spent enough time outside their house to learn the local demography. It is far whiter, more Christian, and more conservative than anywhere I’ve lived, Quinn and Maggie inform me on a Sunday in October, visiting my Hyde Park studio apartment for the first time. 

They sprawl across my shedding, muted blue carpet, leaning against the foot of my bed and an armchair that goes un–sat in for hours, while I curl up alone on the couch. I am far more shocked than I should be to learn that Quinn and Maggie’s school district is crawling with fledgling fascists, or at least, people whose proclivity for Trump can be attributed to their parents’ politics. Enemy lines regardless, in the battles Maggie wages daily.

“I started an anti-Trump account with one of my friends—wait, can I talk about this?” Maggie asks, turning to me for confirmation. Quinn chimes in with a knowing, “Ohhh…!” setting the stage for what will, indeed, prove an outlandish and disturbing commentary on the intersection of contemporary American middle schoolers, internet, and politics. 

“Please talk about this!” I beg.

“Okay, so, on Instagram, my friend and I—”

“Alexis,” adds Quinn.

“Yeah. So we made this account, where we were basically posting people that went to our school, that were Trump supporters, said the N-word, were homophobic, or [who were] just racist people, um, and, like, maybe that’s not the best way to deal with it,” Maggie admits with a hint of self-aware sarcasm, “But like, I hate these people so much and if I can’t change them, at least I can have the people that are friends with them, who aren’t racist, know that they’re racist. So, within minutes of starting this and following a bunch of people, like seven of the Popular Girls DMed us, saying, ‘Oh my god, I love this account, whoever’s running this, I love you.’ They were sending us their friends, who are Popular Boys, saying, ‘This person said the N-word; this person’s a Trump supporter.’”

 The Popular Kids, albeit not friends or fans of theirs, are frequent characters in Quinn and Maggie’s storytelling. The two of them are at different schools for the time being, as Maggie’s finishing middle school while Quinn’s nearly halfway through high school—and both are learning virtually for the time being, anyway, due to COVID. But the nature of local teen popularity is such that Maggie’s invocation of “the Popular Girls” or “the Popular Boys” is immediately, wholly understood by Quinn, as the Popular People are basically interchangeable. Popularity is inherited; a rite passed down from micro-generation to micro-generation such that the constituent parts of the machine—the names, faces, hairstyles, and sometimes, even, the norms and views—shift slightly from year to year, but the whole that these parts comprise—the Popular Group—is forever.

The Popular Girls were mean to Quinn in sixth grade. They made fun of him, which he initially chalks up to his being “kind of weird” back then, but then he adds that it could’ve been rooted in homophobia, or transphobia, or something. In a largely cis/het/closeted school district, Quinn is still one of very few openly trans students. “I was still kind of figuring out identity in sixth grade,” Quinn tells me. 

Two years later, when she was in sixth grade, Maggie dangled on the outskirts of the Popular Girls’ group. She was a second-choice friend, mostly good for gossipping to when everyone else was busy, then ditching as soon as they weren’t, and she was also trying to figure out her identity. In sixth grade, Maggie had short hair, which was interpreted by everyone as a sure sign that she was gay, and she identified as a lesbian for a time, too. She’s no longer sure about her sexuality.

Maggie used to go to Pride Club, a rare piece of school that she really enjoyed, but she tells me that it’s no longer a thing. “All the Popular Boys, the day after [Pride Club] was announced, would all ask each other, like, ‘Yo, Jake, are you going to Pride Club after school?!’ but in a bullying way.” The Popular Girls are different—as a rule, they loved Call Me by Your Name. Maggie and Quinn haven’t watched Call Me by Your Name—Maggie tried, but found herself too disgusted two minutes in to continue—but both of them rail against what they take to be a truly offensive representation of LGBTQ people, citing the age difference between Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet’s characters, and preemptively dismissing Italy’s legal age of consent as a morally invalid argument in the fictional couple’s favor, though that isn’t something I’d have ever thought to bring up. 

Maggie’s under the impression that Hammer is meant to portray a categorically abusive forty-two-year-old, though I double-checked, and she has the digits inverted. (Hammer plays the twenty-four-year-old lover of a seventeen-year-old Chalamet.) With their newfound love of Call Me by Your Name, the Popular Girls have officially okay-ed (white, cis, stereotypically masculine) gayness, and now find themselves in search of a collective Gay Best Friend who fits those parameters and will look good next to them on social media. 

Maggie professes her aversion to this sickly-sweet brand of Popular Girl Ally with loud imitations of them (“My gay bean!!!” and “I love Timmyyyyyy [Chalamet]!!!”) interspersed with louder sighs of disgust—but I still get the sense that she craves their approval. 

(To Quinn, a natural-born lone wolf in a way that his sister never has been, I don’t know that the same is true, at least not anymore. But I digress.)

Maggie continues her call-out Instagram saga, relishing its building drama. An hour into the account’s existence, she tells me, she and Alexis had racked up 24 followers, and an hour later, they had 40 follow requests pending approval. Immediately, though, “these people—the people that I was exposing—found out, and they tried to dox me—”

“WHAT?!” I ask, blown away by the trajectory of society in general.

“All in one night. Yeah, this was crazy,” Quinn confirms.

“Yeah, so this kid who went to my school DMed me, ‘Who is this?’ and I was like, ‘Um, the point of this is to be anonymous, because some people at my school don’t really like me, so if they don’t really like me they might not support this as much…’ And this kid really wanted to know who I was, so he was like, ‘You know, I could just grab your IP address and find out,’ and he was [also] like, ‘I promise I’m not a Trump supporter,’ and so this whole fight went on, but this absolute idiot kid—it was so stupid—he sent me a link, and it said ‘grabify.com,’ the most obvious link ever, and the link [preview] showed a video [titled], ‘50 Reasons to Like Trump,’ and he was like, ‘This is why I like Trump.’ So I said, ‘Well, first of all, earlier you said that you don’t. And also, this [link] says grabify.com.’” 

Maggie pauses briefly, trying to decide if there’s a version of this scenario in which she reports something like this to the police. She decides that there isn’t. “But I said ‘You know doxxing is illegal, right?’” Maggie confides to Quinn and me that she doesn’t think it is illegal, at least not in every situation. “But this kid’s dumb; he believed it. He started apologizing, and he deleted all of his messages, but I’ve got screenshots of all of them. He just started being like, ‘I’m just gonna kill myself, goodbye.’”

“Jesus!”

“I know… We spammed him with the suicide hotline number, and were like, ‘You okay mate?’ and he just blocked us. I mean, I genuinely don’t think he was really trying to kill himself.” Quinn reaches for his phone, and tries to send Maggie a grabify.com link of his own to test its IP-tracking savvy.

“And then this other kid posted saying that he had my address,” Maggie continues, “so I deleted the account. But I have some evidence of some really weird sh—uh, poop poop—that he did in fifth grade, that also isn’t that big of a deal, but I don’t think that he wants that stuff getting out, so if he ever doxxes me, I can just post about that, because he did some really weird stuff to my friends.” (Later, Maggie clarifies that the “sh—” in question was his sending her friends unsolicited dick pics, and begging them to send nudes of their own. In fifth grade.)

“That’s crazy. So wait, if they were to dox you, that would mean… exposing your identity and giving people your address?”

“Yeah. I mean, it’s just people from my school, but they’d know who I was, and these are the kind of boys that, if they knew who I was, they could probably cyberbully me to like—uh, like, they could really be mean… I wish I weren’t scared of them, but they’re kind of terrifying.”

And then Maggie laughs. She quickly launches into another sub-story, this one about a local fifth grader who also stormed into the account’s DMs with a vengeance and a MAGA-hatted selfie, in which he looks three. Maggie didn’t know, at first, that the kid was in fifth grade, and he didn’t know that she wasn’t. He would spam her with repeated “FUC* BIDEN”s—just like that, with the “K” bleeped. He tried to get her to fight back, but sometimes the most infuriating thing a person can do is staying calm, and that’s what Maggie did. He switched tacks; tried to intimidate her. He kept insisting that, at five-foot-seven, he was probably taller than her. (To his credit, that is far above average for a fifth-grade boy, and Maggie’s only five-foot-six.) “‘I’m eleven, I bet I look older than you,’” he wrote. “I was like, ‘dot dot dot,’” Maggie giggles. “He didn’t threaten to dox me. I don’t think he knew how.”

(Of course, they don’t teach doxxing until sixth grade these days.)

Beyond exposing their peers’ Trumpism and general racism, Maggie and Alexis’s account also reposted “stuff” (petitions and Canva-style infographics), and it helped circulate anti-racist petitions for people to sign. 

“And I got so many nice responses. I’m so mad that I had to delete it!” 

I ask Quinn and Maggie if there’s anybody who they would consider an activist at either of their schools. Maggie says yes. “Some people went to [Black Lives Matter] protests” early this summer, Maggie tells me. “I mean, I went to one…” 

Quinn, though, tells me that “activism culture in [his] school was posting a black square for that one day”—referring to the tide of black that swept Instagram on June 2, 2020, for a supposed “#BlackOutTuesday,” which received flak in its immediate aftermath for being both misguided and disruptive to actual organizing efforts—“and then never saying anything about it again.”

Maggie tells me that she and Alexis and a few other girls at their school “try to post things every day, if we can” (the same sorts of petitions and Canva-style infographics). I don’t think she yet knows the now-ubiquitous term “virtue signaling,” but Maggie assures me that that isn’t what she’s doing with her platform. On the subject of her personal Instagram activism, and the one protest she attended with Alexis, Maggie says, “It’s not like us flexing, like, ‘I'm trying to be cool,’ but yeah, we sometimes do a little bit of stuff. I mean, as much as we can do when we're thirteen-year-olds in a mainly white suburb.”

Maggie muses that she might bring back the short-lived call-out project, this time on Snapchat. She’s still worried about the chance that she could be doxxed, but she predicts that it will be harder for people to capture her IP address over the more instantaneous, mobile-exclusive photo-sharing platform, since it’s harder to share links there than it is on Instagram. She starts ranting about another kid, Phillip, whose Instagram profile picture reads “White Lives Matter,” whiny and nasal as she mourns her deleted criticisms of him, taken down quickly over credible fears of retribution. “And, I really—GOD—I’m gonna start this up again and I’m gonna, like, demolish them all.”

The one problem that remains? Maggie really doesn’t know what she’d use for the account’s Bitmoji, Snapchat’s customizable cartoon version of a profile picture.

“Do you have to have a Bitmoji?” I ask, having happily deleted Snapchat years ago, and consequently unaware of its latest updates.

“It’s sketchy if you don’t,” I am quickly informed.

—

When Quinn was little, he was stunningly precocious, but in a cute way. He was a voracious and early reader. As a toddler, he could serve up esoteric dinosaur facts at a moment’s notice, and his vocal pitch (to my tone-deaf and attention-hungry younger self’s chagrin) was widely praised as “perfect” from the moment he hummed along to his first tune. His ear for music clearly came from Lizzie, a professional violist, but Quinn’s smarts seemed uniquely his own, a golden anomaly in a family of quite average intelligence. As a nine-year-old, I was (slightly) prouder to have a genius in the family than I was jealous.

But now Quinn’s older and a cynic, and the promise of his early youth hasn’t translated neatly to performance in school. Especially while learning remotely, Quinn explains, he’s focused solely on getting through each day, and he can’t bother attending to the quality of his work. His highest grade in any class right now is a C. 

While Maggie loves learning remotely—or not learning, as the case may be—Quinn sees cons (and I suppose, by default, the pros) to both in-person and virtual learning. He has begun to long for the six hours of escape from his family that school once reliably provided. “I think I'm under less stress now, because [school is] online, but also more stress, because Liz is around, and she’s even more… on top of what I'm doing, homework-wise. But it's also nice, because I get to be at home and in a familiar environment, with fewer people that I don't like—only three people that I don't like, instead of a whole school full.” 

Quinn seems stuck. Rationally, he knows these three things to be true: first, that everyone from school still exists even if only in their social media posts, second, that he is still technically aging and advancing through the education system despite spending all of his time in his room, and third, that teenagers do not stay teenagers forever, and therefore he’s due, soon, to experience some crushing pressure to figure out his future. 

But he’s having trouble internalizing any of it.

Music is Quinn’s dream career, if he can swing it. He’s recently picked up bass guitar, and, not one to own up to liking just anything, he cops to enjoying his School of Rock cover bands—first Bowie; now The Who. He has a Spotify playlist of all of his favorite songs that is thirty-one hours long, but he refuses to show me. He’s private about his music. But if he could join a real band eventually, and find some success, and live on the road in between big cities, “that would be cool.”

With his sweep of dark brown hair usually dyed, today streaked an understated red, and half of his fingernails painted teal, and a smile that’s tight-lipped and quick and requires the briefest of upturned chins and subtlest of raised eyebrows, he looks the part. 

But Quinn seems unconvinced, and characteristically underwhelmed, by his own dream of being in a band—maybe it’s not his true dream (insofar as any of us can know our “true dreams,” especially as teenagers), or maybe it’s too far-fetched to believe in. Shrugging in preordained defeat, Quinn tells me, “I feel like I have all these plans of things I want to do and places I want to go, but then the second I can, I’ll probably just be too scared and I’ll be like, ‘Oh, this takes a lot of effort,’ and then nothing will really happen.” 

(Touché.)

Maggie is far more animated than Quinn when describing her life goals, even though they seem less purpose-driven than those of her older brother. Most urgently by far, Maggie plans to find minimum wage work the moment she’s fourteen and legally old enough to do so, and then to squirrel away her earnings from that job for two years, so that at sixteen she can buy a van (à la #vanlife) and have her dad help her “fully convert it.” 

Mark is a handyman of epic proportions, and is currently building a fourth bespoke bed frame for Maggie in the span of just a few years, always using scraps material and machinery at the metal parts manufacturing plant that he owns. The first of this PB Teen parade of beds was a loft, suspended from Maggie’s ceiling and walls, and then briefly from Quinn’s, when Maggie tired of it in just a month or two. Reminiscing on his brief but beautiful loft bed days, Quinn says, “Yeah, I kind of miss that one. That was nice!” To which Maggie emphatically tags on, “Me too!!! God, I’d do anything to have it back.” 

(I am dumbfounded.) 

At my request, Maggie runs through the bed list: “There was the loft bed, the skid, the nice bed frame, and now this one [that’s still under construction].” The “nice bed frame,” which she and Quinn easily agree is Mark’s masterpiece so far, simply didn’t look good in her room, she says. Too many LED lights—the whole place looked too much like “The Backrooms,” Maggie tells me, referring to an Internet-generated horror-fantasy about a series of endless rooms that I had never heard of before today, and doubt I will ever understand. “No one believes me when I say this,” Maggie says, “but genuinely, when I move out and like, have an apartment, I’m gonna bring that thing with.”

Her forthcoming bed frame is based on an Instagram ad Maggie saw once, and, when shown a screenshot of the advertisement alongside a photo of Mark’s progress so far, Quinn and I agree that the resemblance is uncanny. Maggie firmly did not inherit any of her father’s construction skills, she says. Nor was she gifted Lizzie’s musical bent, as Quinn is quick to point out. (The best one can give Maggie is the benefit of the doubt, tracing her nascent passion for [re]decorating back to our grandmother, now a semi-retired interior designer.) Nevertheless, Maggie claims to have “helped build this recent [bed] a lot.” However, she doesn’t believe that it’ll hold up very long under her negligible weight. “It’s not the strongest,” she thinks. “I’m not expecting it to last that long. And when it breaks, I’ll put the other one back in there.” 

(Precisely which other one remains unclear, but two things do seem abundantly obvious: First, the bed frame will not break, and second, before it’s given a chance to even think about breaking, Maggie will simply dream up an entirely new bed and Mark, unable to resist the new design challenge, will build it for her.)

Once equipped with an Insta-worthy itinerant abode at sixteen, Maggie would like to move at least as far as her parents’ driveway. She became obsessed with #vanlife in fourth grade, she tells me, and she performs an indignant pout—but seems ultimately unbothered—whenever her family ridicules her plan, which is daily. 

She hopes, too, that her earnings from two years working part-time at an as-yet-undetermined service industry job will later cover both her college tuition (ideally at any school in London that will have her), and rent money for an apartment like mine. 

Maggie once dreamed of visiting France, too. But TikToks have cautioned her against it. She tells me about a particularly worrisome brand of TikTok whose initial captions usually read something like, “Me going to France,” immediately followed by scenes depicting “My mom telling me to hide my Jewish star or I’ll get shot.” This isn’t to suggest that Maggie wears a Jewish star, or even that she, technically of half-Protestant heritage, looks particularly Jewish. But I suppose that one need not fear a personal confrontation with anti-Semitism to feel unsure about visiting a place where, TikTok (and, admittedly, sometimes the news) would have one believe that anti-Semitic hate crimes abound.

And while their town hasn’t proven to be especially anti-Semitic in their experience, it’s not nearly as Semitic as my East Coast upbringing, or my UChicago present. Maggie guesses that there are about four other Jews at her school—a population still double that of Black students—and she adds that she only knows about one of them because she saw someone wearing a Jewish star one time. 

I am confused (apparently still caught up in memories of Quinn’s low-key 2018 bar mitzvah, which I attended on a rainy October weekend and in fact photographed) so I ask them to clarify the demographics and whereabouts of the other congregants of their synagogue, which is located minutes from their town. “I don’t go to temple anymore!” Maggie is quick to respond. Quinn adds that he doesn’t even say he’s Jewish anymore, normally. This isn’t particularly surprising, given the noncommittal Judaism of our family as a whole, but their mother recently re-committed. In 2019, Lizzie went on a Birthright Israel knockoff catering specifically to Northern Illinois moms, and the trip served its purpose. She became a bit of a born-again Jew. 

(I’d venture to say that Lizzie’s faith has since shifted again—away from organized Judaism and toward Peloton—but she still wears a Jewish star necklace, anyway.) 

After his bar mitzvah, Quinn decided, “‘This isn’t serving me. I don’t feel anything about it.’” Maggie says she still wants to have a bat mitzvah, though her temple-assigned date has come and gone, and her mom cried when the day passed. Maggie says she’s not sorry. Still, eventually, ideally somehow without returning to Hebrew school, she thinks she might like to have a bat mitzvah. For the “experience,” she says—and also the money. “But I’m not, like, blatantly doing it for the money,” she assures me. Maggie says she doesn’t really care that much if it happens, either way. But part of her passive interest also lies in her mother’s Jewish Renaissance; empirical proof that she may, in fact, someday feel called to return to the faith, however unlikely that might seem from where she sits hunched over right now, balling up the lint that she’s been methodically extracting from the fibers of my carpet.

Maggie is exhilarated by the idea of having her own space, and the freedom to travel and live in a city, even one as close to home as Chicago if it comes to that, financially. Ever the young apartments.com savant, Maggie knows that Chicago is more affordable than New York or London, the only other cities apparently on her radar (a fact I’d be more inclined to mock if it weren’t also disturbingly true of myself). Maggie shows me a newly redone Manhattan one-bedroom that she’s had her eye on, drooling over its clever use of so little space; lamenting its unfathomably high price tag. She and Quinn agree that she’s the more likely of the two to remain in Northern Illinois for the foreseeable future.

Maggie is not exhilarated by the idea of actually working the minimum-wage job that she envisions as the key to her future, nor working to pass her classes—middle school, high school, college, or otherwise—nor is she excited about the prospect of working “another boring desk job,” for which, as she sees it, college is a bona fide breeding ground. Most miserable of all, of course, would be her “worst fear in the world” coming true: “Marrying a boring person, moving to the suburbs, and having two kids and a big house. Basically the life that my parents live.” Quinn points out that some people are happy with that. “I would not be happy with that—,” Maggie retorts. 

Quinn, interrupting her with a revised question and in so doing, proving himself a savvier interviewer than I a mere eight minutes into our wandering conversation, asks Maggie, “Are you afraid of being happy living like that? Is that what you’re really scared of?” 

“...Yes.” 

Luckily (???), Maggie cannot quite imagine her worst fear coming true. That stems from the same core truth that I think she’d also blame for her lack of longer-term ambitions: She doesn’t think that she’ll live past thirty. Quite matter-of-factly, without any of the fast-talking fervor that she reserves for topics like van remodeling and the existential agony of living in the suburbs, Maggie blames her impending demise on her poor diet. 

Maggie’s diet is infamously limited to simple carbs (white bread; white potatoes) and simple cheeses (mozzarella; cheddar; American). More recently, she’s added heavy cream to the rotation, sipped in secret and straight from the carton. This general diet—which, as I recall, has stayed fairly stagnant ever since Maggie was weaned off breast milk—has doubtless taken its toll on her health, as well as being a near-endless source of drama for over a decade. Her eating habits have served too many times as unsolicited referendums on her parents’ parenting skills, as children’s troubles so often do, and have caused the (alleged) first defeat of a renowned pediatric food therapist in the area. Maggie, I was once told, was the therapist’s first client too stubborn to be saved. 

Much like Quinn feels that his tendency toward homesickness will have faded by the time he leaves home for good, Maggie thinks that age might expand her taste buds’ horizons, with everything but fruit—whose juiciness causes her psychic pain—seeming like relatively attainable food goals for her (older) self to work toward. Regardless of the possibilities for a future expanded palate, though, a general distaste for aging mixed with a lifetime of unsubtle hints from Lizzie have left Maggie casually convinced that her proclivity for grilled cheese sandwiches with nothing on the side will be the literal death of her. “Probably I’d get some sort of disease—coronavirus, or something—and then I’d just… not live on because of how unhealthy I am,” she predicts, utterly nonchalant. “Peace out!” 

Extremely skinny and somewhat tall; with large eyes and large circles around them; pale-complexioned and with wavy, light brown hair that, like Quinn, she’s always bleaching and dyeing at home, in the right clothes and a certain light, Maggie might look to a passer-by like a miniature model whose work walking grungy, high-fashion catwalks has worn her to the bone. Her front teeth feature an impressively large gap (the largest you’ve ever seen, I’d wager) and are being orthodontized tomorrow. She doesn’t want braces, but she doesn’t have a choice. 

I start to ask Maggie if she’s ever seen those iconically gap-toothed “Get the London look” eye makeup commercials, and before I can finish, she recites the Rimmel tagline back to me in its original British. Quinn pipes up that Maggie has the London look “and more.” 

She says she’d prefer Invisalign, but I don’t quite understand Maggie’s angst surrounding the optics of her forthcoming braces, because she simply won’t be seeing anyone. She’s been only hanging out with one other person, anyway (Alexis, her only consistent friend for the past six years), but now their school is reopening on a voluntary basis for in-person instruction, and Alexis is going back, whereas Maggie and Quinn have chosen to stay home for the rest of the year. 

And while they’re officially required to keep their cameras and microphones on for Zoom class, both Quinn and Maggie prefer to ignore that rule. 

Maggie takes that obstinacy to new extremes, opting to respond via Zoom’s chat function, rather than vocally, whenever she’s asked a question or is otherwise addressed in class. She estimates that nobody from school, other than her teachers during virtual breakout rooms, and Alexis, has heard her voice since March. She tells me that she prefers to fly under the radar; to avoid the prying eyes that necessarily accompany the thin green line around one’s name/profile picture/live video stream when one speaks on Zoom—and I wonder whether her muteness ultimately deflects attention, or accidentally attracts it.

Now that Alexis might be exposed to the coronavirus at school, Maggie plans to stop seeing her, and therefore anybody outside her family, for the foreseeable future. 

—

Neither Quinn nor Maggie has ever had very many friends. Whenever they discuss their past—anything further behind them than a year or so—they rely heavily on describing themselves as weird, or annoying, but they don’t seem to be particularly upset about those versions of themselves. The one exception, maybe, is a semi-secret seventh grade relationship Quinn tells me about. The girl—who would not be named—broke up with him after three months, claiming they needed to take a break, which, three years on, shows no signs of ending. Quinn seems to think that the cause of the split was his innate annoyingness. The whole thing was really bad, he says, “because I didn’t understand what, like, love was.” 

Of the two, Quinn especially relies on the internet for his friendships. He tells me about an Instagram group chat that he’s been in for a few years now, whose participants hail from all around the country and world, and whom he considers his best friends. “I only really talk with them, and like, two other people.”

Maggie’s part of a few similar groups online. One is a Twitter microsphere whose members first found one another on TikTok, and another is a group Instagram DM featuring e-friends with whom she sometimes plays “Among Us,” an online multiplayer game that I hadn’t heard of until today, but which I’m told rivals Fortnite (which I’ve never played but have heard of) in its newfound virality. Quinn says he doesn’t play Among Us, but that it’s somewhat similar to Animal Crossing, which I have also never played.

“No one has Facebook anymore,” my cousins laugh dismissively, confirming what I already strongly suspected. On second thought, Maggie technically holds an account. “I only have it so that I can play Subway Surfers and not lose my progress.”

Maggie seems further emotionally removed from her online communities than Quinn. She brings up the possibility that all of her Instagram “friends” could easily be middle-aged men posing as teens, and she seems completely at peace with that. She mentions with a giggle that one of her interlocutors went inactive a few months ago when he was sent to jail, supposedly for stabbing someone. 

(To be fair, if one of your friends is going to be armed and dangerous, it’s best that he only exists within the confines of your phone screen, anyway.)

Quinn and Maggie emphatically declare that TikTok is ruining their attention spans. I’m denied any real insight into the so-called TikTok “spheres” they fall into, though Quinn does tell me that he and Maggie have similar taste in TikToks, and that the app and its highly addictive content is best described as “a mess.” YouTube videos, formerly sources of inspiration and usurpers of Maggie’s precious screen time, now seem far too long for her to stomach; fifteen seconds has become the ideal timeframe for a shot of content.

“Do you read, ever? Like, reading for pleasure…?” I interject, knowing the answer as I pose the question. Their answers are, indeed, two slightly embarrassed variations on “never.” 

When Quinn was only a year or two old, he began reciting favorite fairy tales as their pages were flipped in front of his face. We all marvelled, and periodically weighed in on whether we thought he was reciting purely from memory, or if he’d somehow taught himself to read. I proudly got him hooked on Harry Potter the moment I deemed him ready for it. He was young; years younger than I’d been when I reached that modern reading milestone. The Harry Potter franchise—particularly its films, audiobooks, and online fandom; not so much the printed books, anymore—is one of the few that’s loomed large for an extended period of time in both Quinn and Maggie’s lives. So many obsessions have come and gone in blinks of their eyes, but Harry Potter, for better or worse, has stuck.

But it’s been tainted now by J.K. Rowling’s transphobia and racism, ugly truths that seem to pop up at the forefront of the online discourse every few months, now. Quinn and Maggie comfort themselves with the knowledge that Rowling’s probably not earning any more royalties whenever they indulge in her audiobooks as a way to lull themselves to sleep, given that the content has long been downloaded on their iPads, and it’s a sunk cost. There’s no getting that money back from Rowling now, so might as well make use of it. Maggie spends a few minutes hate-flipping through an online shop Rowling sometimes promotes; one which specializes in transphobic handicrafts. She passes around her phone, showing Quinn and me a particularly offensive selection of cheap buttons featuring TERF-y cartoons and slogans like, “A woman is not a costume,” and “Biology isn’t bigotry,” and we respond appropriately, in choruses of “ew”s and “I hate her”s.

A pause. “I wanna be that cool…canvas tote always filled with books…like, dark academia, canvas-tote-book-girl. But also, I don’t like books! There’s no good books that I can find,” Maggie complains. 

(What the hell is “dark academia”?)

Harry Potter movies are the only things longer than TikToks that Maggie will watch, from time to time, nowadays. Confused, I ask her what happened to Umbrella Academy, a popular YA Netflix series about (I believe) teen superheroes tasked with saving the world. The last time I was at their house, I’d heard that Maggie, with her ever-agreeable father, was bingeing the series for the third consecutive time, and consequently spent most of her time downstairs in family living room, on the sectional couch in front of the big TV, rather than remaining fully out of sight, upstairs in her bedroom.

“I mean I like it, but I stopped rewatching it!” she tells me. “This is the thing: I get obsessed with things so quickly. I go crazy about them for like, a month, and then I just completely abandon them. Like Star Wars—I usually even create fan accounts to be, like, included in the fandom and the jokes—but the only one that I’ve been obsessed with for that long is the Harry Potter fandom. But it kind of sucks because the author sucks.” 

—

The internet is where Quinn and Maggie spend entire days and weeks, their time in the digital space interrupted only by the occasional bike ride—sometimes together, sometimes alone—often to the gas station in the center of town, where they buy Monster Energy drinks, and then drink them in the deserted upper levels of a nearby parking garage, indulging in streaky sunsets, sometimes smoking tea bags. With Lizzie in my apartment again, back from a grocery run and now humming along to folk rock as she cleans parts of my kitchen that I’d never even thought to check for grime, they won’t confirm or deny whether they ever smoke anything more psychoactive than chamomile or Earl Grey. But Lizzie is also the woman who, little do they know, mere weeks ago read aloud Maggie’s recent search history to make my brother and me laugh—she can access that on Circle, the same Disney-owned app for omnipotent parents that she uses to distribute and withhold WiFi. The Google history, which Lizzie performed for us in the style of spoken word poetry, read something like a weed treatise: “CBD vs. THC; where to buy edibles; green world IL; greens for teens; megamarijuanastore.net; chicago northwest dealers,” and it went on. 

A few months ago, she was forced to flush an expensive bottle of Oregonian weed gummies down the toilet when her children discovered their hiding place and broke in.

I am surprised when Quinn and Maggie insist that they grew up too fast—or at least, faster than their more conservative peers were ever allowed to—online. They both warily refer to “that part of Tumblr” like it could reach out of any nearby device and hurt them if they weren’t careful, and I don’t press the subject, unsure if I actually want to know what went on in “that” particular corner of cyberspace. 

For the past three or so years, Quinn estimates, he and Maggie have been subject to Circle. It can limit devices’ screen time and betray untoward search histories, but it can also filter out certain websites that are deemed inappropriate. Now that they’re finally filtered on the internet, Quinn and Maggie complain, it’s far too late for them.

In between anecdotes proving how barely restricted internet access since infancy taught them everything they know, Maggie and Quinn vehemently lambast their public school health education curricula. Quinn confirms that “middle schoolers are insane now.” He firmly believes his peers’ claims about their crazy sex lives; is steadfast in his confidence that “pretty much everyone was on coke last homecoming.” I don’t believe that, but I remember the embarrassment of being thirteen, and showing my cooler, older friend Ben a video that one of my classmates had posted on Vine, in which she purported to be snorting cocaine, only for Ben to laugh and reassure me that it was just flour. I nod gravely, and ask Quinn to continue. He is adamant about the need for earlier, more comprehensive, sex education. 

School is not Maggie’s forte. Though I’ve heard through the grapevine that she’s secretly a very strong writer, the only academic successes that Maggie recounts for me come from health class. Last year, in seventh grade, her health class played “drug bingo.” Maggie handily won the game, having answered every single question correctly, and she earned a rainbow eraser for her efforts. But her success came at a cost: A classmate in both health and Spanish class, Bennett, took to constantly accusing her of being a drug (Juul and weed) addict. “One time, I was walking in the hallway during a class break, or something. And I had really bad posture, just slouching—like, swimming along in the hallway. I looked blazed out of my mind. I wasn’t, but I looked really high. [Bennett] was like, ‘Daydreaming about buying weed?’” Quinn snickers, and Maggie pauses for dramatic effect. “And like—I was, that’s the thing.” Bennett was so weird about it, Maggie insists, rolling her eyes. “Like, fan behavior, Bennett!” 

(Fan behavior. Noun?: “Someone who is always stalking your social media’s [sic] and wanting to know your business. They may even want to be like you and begin to copy your style/moves despite not liking you. They don’t want the best for you and are typically jealous of you and/or your success. They talk about you/think about you/lurk on you/copy you/are in your business as if they were your biggest fan.” – Urban Dictionary)

In the more sex-based units of health class, too, an unfiltered childhood on the internet made Maggie the resident expert, much to her classmates’ displeasure and confusion. In this instance, like so many, “People always thought I was really weird,” Maggie says. She consistently got the spicier anatomy reproduction questions right (think “nocturnal emissions,” not just “ovaries,” she explains). She found herself unable to keep quiet, unthinkingly declaring aloud, “YES, I got them all right!” whenever she got them all right.

A regular—if fairly unbothered—victim of shaming herself, Maggie consistently goes out of her way to qualify her reflections on the peers she considers harmless with very genuine disclaimers of “no judgment.” Referring back to her call-out Instagram page, Maggie explains, “Another service I offered was, ‘Give me a Trump supporter’s @, and I’ll bark at them in their comments.’” By way of explanation, Maggie says, “I just sometimes bark at people—but I’m not, like, a furry,” referring to a community of people who adopt  “fursonas,” anthropomorphized animal characters, per furscience.com. Quickly, she clarifies her stance on the matter: “I’m not anti-furry, unless they sexualize animals.”

Maggie, who, like Quinn, fancies herself a bit of a stoner—in fact, she’s steadfast in her belief that one basically needs to be, in order to survive the monotony of the suburbs—is similarly quick to reassure me that she has nothing against people who she describes as “drug-active,” though she and Quinn are both slightly worried for their peers who do cocaine and recreational Xanax. And when it comes to both of their former obsessions with super-popular Korean boy band BTS, Maggie says, “I feel so sorry for anyone who was friends with me during that time, ’cause, like, I’m not gonna bully anyone about their interests, but… it’s all [BTS stans] post about.” 

(Stan. Noun/Verb?: “The terms [sic] means a very very overzealous and obsessed fan of a celebrity/band/cast of a tvshow [sic] or movie.” – Urban Dictionary. I knew this one.)

I ask Quinn and Maggie if anything’s cropped up in the past seven years to replace Ask.FM, an anonymous online question forum that dominated the cyberbullying scene when I was in eighth grade. They describe, to my mounting horror, “YOLO,” a Snapchat add-on that functions on peoples’ smartphones more or less how Ask.FM once did on our parents’ bulky, white-hot laptops—but which caters to a Gen-Z infinitely more cruel and sexually explicit than I could’ve conceived of back in the early 2010s. Girls known to struggle with mental illness and self-harm, including a friend of Maggie’s who everybody knows spent time in a psychiatric ward last year, are routinely coaxed into public “wrist reveals.” On the heels of demands to see girls’ mutilated wrists come incessant requests for their nudes, and for hook-ups. “Oh yeah, every time a girl posts a YOLO, everybody’s asking—” Quinn says, and Maggie cuts him off: “It’s like, ‘I wanna see your tits,’ or something. Like, ‘Send me pics.’ It’s horrible. It’s really gross.”

“Ewww,” I begin, physically nauseous. But Maggie cuts in again. “I’m not, like, shaming these people for being sexual,” she clarifies. Let the record show.

Asked about cancel culture, Quinn and Maggie equivocate. “There’s a difference between ‘canceling’ someone for saying something wrong,” Quinn points out, “and calling out people who’ve done horrific things, and are awful people.” Maggie agrees, adding, “I wasn’t gonna be like, ‘CANCELED!’ I was gonna be like, ‘’Kay, do better.’ Like, ‘Stop doing this, or face the consequences—deal with the fact that people aren’t gonna really want to hang out with you if you’re racist.’”

Later, though, she seems to amend that position: “If they’re not gonna change, I might as well attack them.” 

“[Fighting] is a good way to educate yourself,” Quinn agrees.

“And if it doesn’t work, then it’s just a pastime, I guess,” Maggie admits, unbothered.

—

Omegle, a website whose sole purpose is to automatically pair its users with strangers to talk to (or worse) over video or text chat, has been around at least since I was a middle schooler who sometimes had sleepovers with friends who had their own computers. Given its bizarre functionality and enormous potential for harassment, the site has enjoyed a longevity that would be shocking to me if it weren’t so deeply not. 

Alexis, Maggie says, frequents Omegle—alone!—to video chat with strangers, expressly intending to pick fights with those who support Trump. Alexis was fighting with a Trump supporter called Trevor just last night, actually. But Trevor is no far-off forty-year-old. He’s just one of the local cast of characters. He had a crush on Quinn in sixth grade, before Quinn came out; also in sixth grade, he openly bragged to Quinn about having seen his mother’s nudes (flirty and fun!); he was creepy toward Alexis when she was eleven and he was thirteen; he almost definitely sold Alexis’s fifteen-year-old sister Bailey the Xanax she took at homecoming and didn’t enjoy.

Maggie lovingly reads aloud from Alexis’s text messages to her from the night before: “[Alexis] said, ‘gave [Trevor] a quick grammar lesson then blocked him, catch me coming home days early to commit a murder.’ She’s in Michigan right now,” Maggie explains. “And he wasn’t using the right ‘yours’ or ‘theirs.’” The Trump supporters she and Alexis pick fights with, Maggie’s already told me, are notoriously bad at grammar, and the girls delight in correcting their mistakes.

“I might start DMing him tonight,” she muses.

“Just to argue with him? Just for fun?” Quinn asks.

Yes.

Trevor’s the kind of guy who posts fishing pictures and runs cross country, Quinn and Maggie tell me.

“Yeah…,” decides Maggie. “I think I’m gonna inform him a little bit tonight. See what’s gonna happen. I’m not that scared of him.” 

—

I ask Quinn and Maggie whether either can imagine a world in which they’ve deleted all their social media accounts.

“I think about it every day,” Quinn admits. But he already deleted his public Instagram, he explains, so now the one Instagram account that he does use is fairly intimate anyway. And, he adds, “I don’t have anything else to do.”

“I mean, I could [delete social media] if I had more things I was involved in. But I just have nothing,” Maggie tells me. “I did singing for a little bit, but it’s really hard to do that during corona. I just don’t really exist anywhere else except on the internet.”