The Truth Behind the Gas App

Perhaps during your most recent excursion to your Mandarin class, you passed by the Sophomore Bar and heard your fellow schoolmates utter the word “gas.” Despite your confusion, you didn’t stop to bother your infinitely cooler schoolmates and instead continued on, merely hoping they weren’t planning to e-mail the school about a gas leak threat. However fun the last evacuation was, you weren’t in a hurry to have to evacuate outside in the cold again, especially with all the fights that broke out and the impromptu basketball games that were held.

Well, dearest ignorant schoolmate, let me enlighten you. To the best of my knowledge, those particular sophomores were not, as a matter of fact, planning on e-mailing a threat to the school. (Shocking, I know! Perhaps the sophomores aren’t so bad!) Rather, they were talking about the newest craze, the Gas app. Now, there’s no need to Google—I will explain.

This is how it works. After downloading the app, you join your school, add friends (optional, if you have any), answer polls, and get flames when you are picked. According to the App Store, “Gas is where friends tell you what they love about you.” And it’s all for free! “What a nice idea!” you must be thinking. “This seems like such a cool app; I should go download it right now!”

But wait, dear schoolmate! How is it possible for something this amazing to exist, for FREE?! To answer your question, I have stopped going to my first period gym class and have used the period to search for answers instead.

As a result of my investigation, I have arrived at the following theories:

Theory 1: Jealous Tech-Heads

Stuyvesant is well-known for being a school for depressed children who know they are good for nothing. As you rush through school, you hear cries of “I’m so stupid!” and “My grades are awful!” Though many older and definitely well-intentioned adults may find this concerning, we students all know that this is just an act. We secretly love our reputation and do everything we can to fit into the archetype of the “classic Stuy student.” All those “I’m so stupid!”s are fake—we know we’re really dang smart, but we pretend to be depressed to keep our reputation. It’s part of the oath all Stuyvesant students signed with our Big Sibs at Camp Stuy.

However, Gas has recently started to boost the ego of Stuyvesant students. The past few days, I have seen people beaming and saying things like, “The amount of people who think I have a nice smile is crazy, I’m actually so happy right now!” This is absolutely ATROCIOUS. Few people realize what a danger this is. If Stuyvesant students become less depressed, we will lose our reputation as the hardest, most challenging school in New York City, and then the cutoff score for Stuyvesant will go down! We’ll be even easier to get into than BROOKLYN TECH! This has led to suspicions that Gas was developed by Brooklyn Tech students who wanted Brooklyn Tech to rise in the rankings.

Theory 2: Inflation is Always the Answer

The Gas app was actually developed because of the rising gas prices. That’s why they make you pay money to see who picked you—all that money is used to pay for the gas the developers use! How ingenious!

Theory 3: Gas is GASlighting You

Remember when gaslighting people 24/7 was a thing—wait, what? You don’t know what gaslighting is? Naahh, stop gaslighting me. Anyway, it seems that the developers got such a kick from gaslighting people that they thought, “Why not gaslight the entire WORLD?” Thus, Gas was created. According to Gas, you have a nice smile? Haha, pstuych! That’s a lie! No one voted for you; your smile looks more like the look on a cat’s face when it’s dropped into a pool of water.

Theory 4: Polyatomic Gases?

Gas is actually about chemistry. A few AP Chemistry nerds attempted to explain to me how Gas actually teaches students about titrations, but I didn’t understand a word they said. If you would like to understand how Gas is related to chemistry, go to the Stuyvesant basement after school on any Tuesday. Rumor has it that AP Chemistry students built a lab there, where they explode things for fun—classic mad scientist behavior. If you make it, good luck getting them to explain to you the connection between all the Hess’s Law problems they are doing.

Theory 5: Love From Your Teachers

A junior was hiding in the auditorium from her APUSH teacher when I found her and asked her about Gas. She told me, “Oh, you silly sophomore. Gas was created by teachers who wanted to get to know their students better. I heard my physics teacher talking about how he gave better grades to the students who get picked more on Gas.” Her APUSH teacher found her at that moment, so I fled from the scene before she had the opportunity to finish talking to me. I attempted to look for her after that day, but I was unable to ever find her again. I hope she is well.

Theory 6: Ms. Alonso’s Star Student

I heard from several computer science students that a student in Ms. Izagma Alonso’s Intro to Computer Science class coded the app as an extra credit project and automatically received a 100 in the class. The students refused to tell me the identity of this student, afraid that he would get upset at them and then not help them with homework, so unfortunately, the identity of this student is currently unknown.

Despite all these possibilities, many questions still remain unanswered. Who makes these questions? Who chooses them? Is it true that Stuyvesant teachers have joined to see what students are really thinking of them? Is Principal Yu actually going to ban the app? If you have any more information or any answers to these questions, please reach out to humor@stuyspec.com.