In the fairy tale, it took a small child to cry out that the emperor had no clothes.

In our real-life horror story, it’s teenagers who are spitting truth to power. We adults watching them are holding our breath. Is this what it’s finally going to take? After we tuned out the pain of parents whose babies were slaughtered in classrooms, will we listen as the kids who survived the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting march and beg for their lives?

You better believe America is listening.

It’s the honesty, moral clarity and raw emotion of these students’ message that is a gut punch: Their friends were murdered. They nearly died. They want action.

“The people in the government who are voted into power are lying to us,” survivor Emma Gonzalez said in a speech that shook the nation. “And us kids seem to be the only ones who notice and are prepared to call BS.”

Any parent who has argued with a teenager can tell those politicians what they’re up against.

Teenagers own righteous indignation. They don’t believe you when you tell them something can’t be done. They have a fierce loyalty to their friends. And most of all, teenagers have amazing BS detectors. They can spot a phony so easily because they spend most of their days in high schools surrounded by preening and posing.

These kids couldn’t bear to hear the phonies start their “thoughts and prayers” chorus after the nightmare they escaped.

Parkland Strong decided Never Again.

We should get familiar with some of their names: Emma “We call BS” Gonzalez, David Hogg, Sarah Chadwick, Cameron Kasky, Delaney Tarr, Jaclyn Corin, Alfonso Calderon. Some of them are too young to vote, but they are changing the debate. They’ve focused their grief into fighting for gun reforms that the vast majority of Americans support, like universal background checks.

And they’ve given the cause a voice that should ring awfully close to home for any parent.

Unbelievably, a right-wing smear campaign has started against these young survivors. Their principal had to issue a statement confirming they are his students and not paid crisis actors, like nutjob conspiracy theorists have alleged.

Hey, kids: They’re freaking out because they’re scared you might actually change things.

These survivors traveled to Tallahassee and watched while Republican lawmakers refused to even consider a bill that would ban assault weapons, like the one used to murder their friends. They’re planning a nationwide demonstration, a March for Our Lives, on March 24.

I hope they focus on a date even more critical than that march: Tuesday, Nov. 6, around 250 days from now. I hope they ask groups like the League of Women Voters about countering voter-suppression tactics, and that they create massive voter registration drives and make plans on how to get voters to the polls.

This is Generation Z, which makes up a quarter of the U.S. population. They are a larger cohort than the baby boomers or millennials. They will be a tsunami at the polls when they hit 18, but they are realizing their power even before that.

It’s because they know firsthand how outrageous it is that an expelled teenager could legally purchase a semiautomatic weapon that killed 17 of their classmates and faculty. They know how much the NRA donates to their legislators. They’ll find out that President Trump’s budget proposal cuts $12 million from existing background check systems. They may already know that Trump signed the repeal of an Obama regulation after Sandy Hook that would have kept some mentally ill citizens from buying guns.

They are fighting in the immediate aftermath of trauma. They are fighting alongside the memory of their friends. They can spot a phony a mile away.

You know who’s listening and watching them even more closely than those hoping they fail? Mothers ready to defend them, like Rebecca Kerley, a kindergarten teacher in suburban St. Louis whose daughter is a junior in high school. Kerley received a terrifying text from her last week when rumors of a threat floated around the high school, causing panic. School officials determined it was not a credible threat, but that didn’t ease the fears of many students and parents so soon in the aftermath of a mass school shooting.

“They’re not doing enough to keep us safe,” Kerley’s daughter said. “Something else needs to be done. I shouldn’t be scared to go to school every day.”

Kerley, who’s had to practice intruder drills with her 5-year-old students, knows this is true. She has her eyes on the students around the country stepping up and saying “enough.” She knows this constant fear of mayhem and death in schools is not OK. None of this is OK.

These high-schoolers’ bravery will make us braver. They are inspiring us to speak louder and demand action. We can’t protect them in their classrooms, but we can defend them from the trolls and internet bullies trying to tear them down.

Right now, these teenagers have our attention. Right now, they are getting headlines.

We won’t let their voices fade.

Get ready, NRA-bought politicians: They can see you.

And they’re calling you out.

When Phillip Stallone asked his future father-in-law for his daughter’s hand in marriage, he faced an important question.

“Do you have any debt?” he was asked.

Stallone, 29 at the time, confessed to carrying a gasoline credit card and a house account at Bissinger’s, a gourmet chocolatier. It was an unusual answer, but Stallone’s appreciation for fine chocolates started young.

As a young boy, his father used to take him along when he visited a car dealership in St. Louis’ Central West End. Bissinger’s was across the street, and his dad would drop him off there while he chatted with the dealer about old cars. It was the only Rolls Royce dealer in the state, Stallone remembers.

Stallone would tell the sales clerks in the shop that he was just hanging out, waiting for his dad, and they would offer him a free sample from their bowl.

“What do you think?” they would ask.

It was the best chocolate he’d ever tasted. It was a smart strategy: Exposing a young child to the finer things in life is a good way to create an expensive lifelong habit. Stallone never forgot the taste of those treats.

Years later, when he was a teenager and had his first job, he went back to buy a sample pack as a gift for his mother. The box cost more than he was making at the time. The store clerk said he could come back and pay for it on Saturday -- payday.

The glory of a house account was realized that day.

There was something great about being able to walk into a chocolate shop, indulge in gourmet dark chocolate and say, “Just put it on my account,” he said. (Recently, a store clerk asked him if it was possible to just pay with a credit card.)

He worked at Stallone’s Formal Wear, which had been established by his grandfather in 1899. There was a dry cleaner next door, and a young woman stopped by to visit her friends who worked there. They struck up a friendship over the years, and he took her to his favorite chocolate shop during their courtship.

“When you are eating a box of chocolate with someone you dearly love, it makes a difference,” he said.

There’s a scientific explanation why this melt-in-your-mouth treat feels so good. Eating chocolate releases a host of delightful neurotransmitters. First, there’s the caffeine that causes a quickening of the heart rate. There is also another stimulant, theobromine, in chocolate. Then, add a bit of serotonin, a natural mood-lifter, which the body makes from the amino acid tryptophan. Chocolate contains both serotonin and tryptophan. You can also find anandamide in the fat in chocolate, which activates a receptor that causes dopamine production.

With this rush of feel-good chemicals flooding our system, it only makes sense that romantic love would be intensified. And Stallone loved giving good chocolate as much as eating it. Once he gave his 6-year-old niece an 11-pound chocolate bunny for Easter.

“Her mother and father were about ready to skin me alive,” he laughed. “But talk about a head-turner.”

In the late ‘80s, he bought his wife a three-pound box of chocolate for Valentine’s Day. He brings the original heart box into Bissinger’s every year, where they refill it and write the date on the back. One year he nearly forgot, until a store clerk left a message saying she needed his heart. His secretary was a little concerned by the note.

“She thought I had a medical problem,” he said. But he raced down to the shop the morning of Feb. 13 and watched while they filled his heart box on the spot.

He had a hunch his wife would share his love of sweets, based on her father’s reaction to his debt “confession” many years ago. His future father-in-law hugged him and gave them his blessing.

Stallone married Candace Dower 42 years ago this July.

He calls her Candy.

I deliberately tried to draw attention to what I was about to say.

“I have been thinking about something,” I announced.

Dramatic pause.

“And, after thinking and reading about it for a long time, I’ve come to a decision,” I said. My husband perked up and seemed interested in what was about to go down.

“Yes?” he said, putting aside whatever he was doing in the kitchen.

“I want us to only bring humanely raised meat into the house,” I said. I explained that we should know the source of any meat that we buy, and that I don’t want to eat chickens that have been raised in crowded cages, or beef from factory-farmed cows. I’m pretty sure most of the meat we cook with is of higher quality than that, anyway, but we still get deli meat for school lunches, and cans of chicken noodle soup from chicken of unknown origin. It doesn’t seem like it should be that difficult to buy meat that has been ethically raised by workers who were treated fairly.

My husband seemed to lose interest in my big announcement once he realized it was about groceries, but he nodded in general agreement. That was easy, I thought. I had expected more resistance, since my husband is wary of pronouncements that increase our grocery bill.

The next day, he brought home lunch meat purchased from the local grocery store’s deli counter. I was irritated, but let it slide. Maybe there needs to be an adjustment period, I thought. Two days later, he brought home dinner from another grocery’s hot deli bar, including barbecued chicken of undetermined provenance. This time, my irritation was aggravated by hunger and my inability to eat the chicken due to my previously stated ethical boundary. So I just yelled something about my values not being respected and stomped upstairs.

Perhaps this was not the most mature approach, but hangry is a dangerous mood.

I’m pretty sure something was yelled in return about the confusion and hypocrisy of said values, since I was still willing to eat meat at nice restaurants.

Thus commenced the Cold War of 2018. Long-term couples know of what I speak. It’s when you’re too mad to rationally discuss the issue at hand, yet too tired to get into an argument, so you reduce your spoken exchanges to transactional conversations about kids and household logistics. It is an immature way to try to settle a disagreement, but these things can happen when you’ve been married for a long time.

After a few days, the Cold War fizzled out because we are too old to have the energy to sustain it. But it did give me time to think about what was at the core of my feelings about this issue. Ostensibly, it was about respect. But what was it really about?

Like I said, most of the meat purchased for the house is up to ethical standards, so why did I lose it over sandwiches and takeout? This might have something to do with it: In the past year, several close friends have been struck with life-changing diagnoses. These are healthy people living active lives, randomly hit with cancer and other serious illnesses. It’s a scary, close-to-home reminder of how much is out of our control. And our modern commercial food-manufacturing system makes it difficult to know what is truly healthy to put in our bodies and feed our children.

My newfound focus on meat “origin stories” had something to do with my anxiety about keeping everyone healthy. From my husband’s perspective, the fight was really about personal autonomy and not being forced to follow an edict without discussion about all the gray areas. Like, is it OK to bring home takeout from a restaurant we both enjoy, even if we aren’t sure of how they source the meat?

A week later, once we each had time to simmer down, we talked (at times loudly) about the contrasting research we had read on meat suppliers and standards at various grocery chains.

My friends who have been committed to clean, ethical eating for far longer advised me that the best solution was simply to eat less meat. My 12-year-old son, who witnessed all stages of the feud, finally weighed in: “This argument is so dumb.”

Yes, the initial stomping and yelling and subsequent silent treatment was dumb. But the argument was useful. It made us do more research, be more intentional about our grocery choices and talk more deeply about issues that matter to us.

I just have to figure out the best way to unveil Meatless Mondays.