Nice and Mean

by Jessica Leader

  Why would I do that? I wondered. “No,” I said. “We didn’t even really edit together in school. Was I supposed to help her more?”

  “So you don’t know anything about this business with Rachel Winter?”

  “She was in the scene Marina filmed . . . I’m not sure what you mean.”

  He shook his head. “We’re just trying to see . . . what’s going on.”

  “Okay.” What was going on?

  “You can go back to homeroom,” he said, and picked up his bagel again.

  “Um.” I wondered if he’d forgotten that I was the one who had come to him. “I need to give you something.”

  He tore the bagel away from his mouth. “Oh, sorry, right. Let’s see.” He wiped some cream cheese off his fingers and held out his hand. I passed him the letter, already sad for what he would say.

  He read. “Hunh,” he said. “Oh, wow. Hunh.”

  What did it say? And why “Oh, wow”? Watching him was making me squirm, so I looked over at the laminated instruction sheets on the walls. I’d almost memorized them, down to the marker colors. And the posters—I loved the one of the women directors looking tough, with the big letters that said direct this. Would I ever set foot in the video lab again? Even the posters of movies I hadn’t seen felt as familiar as my own wallpaper. The video class felt more like home than home did.

  “Well,” he said when he was done reading, “that’s too bad.”

  My insides unknotted a little. He wasn’t mad. I guessed my parents hadn’t written, Sachi has lied to you and us and is a terrible person.

  He felt around the computer for a pen, scribbled something on the letter, and handed it back to me. I glanced down and saw that he’d written his signature on a typed line. How sneaky! If I hadn’t shown him the letter, I wouldn’t have known I was supposed to give it back to them signed. How humiliating, to have parents who knew more tricks than I did.

  He leaned back in his chair. “I guess your parents care a lot about where you go to high school?”

  Talk about stating the obvious. “Yeah.”

  He picked up his bagel. “My parents were like that too.”

  “Oh.” A teacher had never told me something about his personal life before! Was this what I would miss, dropping out of Video? I couldn’t stand it.

  “They didn’t want me to become a filmmaker,” he continued. “Every time I came home, they’d tell me, ‘The world needs black doctors, not black directors.’ But I stuck to my guns, and I won some awards for my short films, and finally they’re starting to soften up.”

  “Oh. That’s great.” Were there any awards for people my age? Maybe if I won an award, my parents would change their minds too.

  “So keep trying,” he said, pulling his chair up to the computer. “I know you will.”

  I swallowed hard so I wouldn’t cry. Sometimes when people were nice, it made me sadder than if they were mean. “Thanks.”

  MARINA’S LITTLE BLACK BOOK, ENTRY #13

  * Most Annoying and Unexpected Visitors: Mr. and Mrs. Ling

  Of all the people I did not feel like seeing today . . . yikes.

  * Most Annoying Mother:

  You know this one. Ugh. No comment.

  * Biggest

  * Worst

  Forget it.

  Of all the things that were annoying me that morning, my sweater was numero uno. I’d thought the white cashmere had been such an excellent, chic choice. Check me, guys. I’m glowing bright and you can’t stop me. I hadn’t thought about the fact that the weave was too thin for early November, especially since my hair had gotten wet on the walk down the block, so I was spending the day shivering, which, unfortunately, gave people the impression that I actually gave a woo.

  They were all such drama queens! I couldn’t believe I’d ever been friends with any of them. Madison and Chelsea, pulling at each other’s sleeves and whispering as I passed them on the way to English. Rachel marching toward me with her head held high, pretending she didn’t see me before social studies. What-ever. She obviously hadn’t been in a popular group long enough to know that no one truly popular ever really stayed down. I just had to wait it out long enough, or figure out how to bounce myself back to the top.

  In the middle of third period, math for almost dummies, and a quiz I had completely forgotten about, Mrs. Ramirez’s classroom phone rang.

  Everybody went, “Ooh.” A phone call usually meant someone was going to the office.

  In front of me someone giggled. I looked up to see the two girls who sat in the next row looking at me as if to say, It’s for you.

  “Yes?” How dare they? I didn’t even know their names. “Do you need something?”

  But I had barely gotten the words out before I realized that Mrs. Ramirez was walking over to me, then bending down so low, her knees cracked. “Marina.” She whispered it so loud, I was sure everybody could hear. “Ms. Avery wants to see you.”

  One of the girls in front of me snickered into her hand.

  My skin crawled with goose bumps. Rachel had told on me. She’d told the school about a video she wasn’t even supposed to watch, and I was getting hauled up to the Head of House when this was all her fault. Hers.

  “You can finish the quiz at lunch,” Mrs. Ramirez added.

  Gee, thanks for that bit of icing on the cake.

  I threw my stuff into my backpack and walked out of the room without even looking at a single one of them. Stupid plebes.

  The halls were empty enough that I could warm my arms on my way to Ms. Avery’s without worrying what I looked like. Still, I made sure to stop once I turned the corner to the offices, because I needed to stay cold enough to look a little pathetic. I could play it just like I had with the poll: It was a mistake, I didn’t think about my actions, I’m sorry. I’d watched Angelica beg enough to work the puppy-dog eyes. I’d be in and out of there in five minutes, then spend the rest of the period in the bathroom with my iPhone. No math quiz for me today, thank you very much.

  When I got to Ms. Avery’s office, two grown-ups in coats and umbrellas had already beaten me to it. Yes! Guess I’d have to come back later. But then they turned, and—

  “Oh, hi.” It was Mr. and Mrs. Ling! What were they—

  Oh, Lord. Addie was standing in front of them, her face red and puffy like she had been crying. Ms. Avery had called them all here too.

  “Hello, Marina,” said Addie’s dad. I always thought he and Addie looked alike: the same shiny black hair, although his was a comb-over. He was short like Addie, and mostly bald, with the same kind of squishy pink skin. Usually I liked him, but today he did not look happy to see me. Addie’s stepmom, taller and wearing a brown pantsuit, only looked at me and nodded, her arm curled tightly around—

  Oh my God. I knew that yellow sticker. It was Jake’s laptop.

  Ms. Avery was going to make me show everybody the video.

  My breakfast seemed to be rushing up to my throat.

  “Marina,” said an angry voice. I looked toward the stairs to see my mother stalking over to me, her high heels clonking against the checkered linoleum.

  “Hi,” I said, and rubbed my arms. The door to the stairs had brought a burst of cold.

  She bent her head toward mine, her perfume burning my nose. “I cannot believe I am talking to Ms. Avery again. This has got to stop.” Then she straightened up and nodded at Addie’s dad and stepmom. “Hello.”

  “Hello.” Mrs. Ling’s arms remained folded.

  Mr. Ling nodded back. “Hello.”

  I turned back to my mom. “Where’s Dad?”

  “At work.” Her lips were a tight line. “I talked to him before I came here. This did not happen at a convenient time.”

  Well, excuse me. I wasn’t in charge of the Yell at Marina Social Calendar. In fact, I’d be just as happy if we could skip this event and go back to our regularly scheduled program.

  “Hi there.”

  Ms. Avery was standing in her doorway, her long, blue teach
er sweater dangling as she reached out to shake everybody’s hands. “Thank you all for coming on such short notice,” she said. “Why don’t you come in?”

  We filed in and took our places at the chairs laid out in front of her desk—Mr. Ling, Addie, Mrs. Ling, my mom, me. When Rachel and I had been in here to talk about the poll—which seemed like ages ago—there had been only two chairs. Maybe Ms. Avery kept some hidden for when kids got in serious trouble, which I guessed this was. Oh, joy.

  “So.” Ms. Avery inched her chair up to her cluttered desk, her dirty-blond curls shuddering with each scoot. “As you know, I got a call this morning from a very upset parent. She said that Marina and Addie had made a damaging video about her daughter.”

  Damaging?

  “Of course,” she said, “when I hear about something like this, it is my job to investigate, which is why I’m grateful that you brought the video. I assume that’s it?” She nodded toward Mrs. Ling, who was resting the laptop on her knees.

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Ling, her lips all pinched, “and I don’t think my stepson will appreciate that I’ve taken it from his room. I guess Marina and Addie used a disc that they couldn’t eject.”

  Not that I’d had any real hope for something to happen between me and Jake, but I was pretty sure having his laptop kidnapped would not speed up the process of him becoming my hot older boyfriend.

  “I’d like to say something, if you don’t mind.” Mr. Ling’s collar was too tight for his neck, and you could totally tell where Addie got her plebeness from. “We’ve just been talking to Addie here, and she assures us that she was not the instigator of this project. She said that Marina started it all and tried to get her involved so she could”—he looked at Addie—“use Jake’s sound effects CD, was that it?”

  Sniffling, Addie nodded. Was she auditioning for an acting award?

  “Addie is not the kind of girl to make a cruel video,” Addie’s stepmother put in. “I hope you know that. She gets good grades—she cleans her room. She’s never been in trouble a day in her life. This is not the kind of thing she’d be involved in.”

  She cleans her room? Oh, yeah, like that had anything to do with anything.

  “Marina?” asked Ms. Avery. Three heads swiveled toward me. “Is this true, what Mrs. Ling says?”

  She did not just put me on the spot. Beside me, my mother was breathing through her nose. Loudly.

  What was I supposed to do? In front of Addie’s parents, say, Your daughter is a total follower who would do anything if she thought it meant people would like her, plus she never said for absolute sure that she didn’t want to do it? That wouldn’t get me anywhere except deeper on Mrs. Ling’s List of Poo. From the looks on their faces—frowny, sniffly, and murderous—they were probably going to slam me no matter what I did. I might as well just get it over with.

  “Yeah, it wasn’t her idea,” I said. “It was mine.”

  Mrs. Ling gave a short nod. “You see?” she told Ms. Avery. “I think this was just a misunderstanding.”

  Not that I expected a medal, but I at least thought someone might have thanked me for sticking up for Addie. I guess everybody was too busy thinking about themselves.

  “You’re sure, Marina?” Ms. Avery asked me, her thin eyebrows arched high on her forehead. “I don’t want you to feel pressured to say anything here.”

  Oh, right! “No, I’m sure,” I said. “It really wasn’t Addie.”

  Big exhale from the mom on my right. Addie blinked, and tears ran down both sides of her face. Oscar! Oscar!

  Ms. Avery smoothed a stack of papers on her desk. “I suppose I won’t need you in here much longer,” she told the Lings, “but Addie, I do want to know how it was that the video ended up at your house, in your computer.”

  Her cute older brother’s computer, I thought, but didn’t say anything. And I couldn’t even deal with listening to their conversation about resisting peer pressure and speaking up about what you knew was wrong. If Addie was just going to nod and say “Yes” to everything Ms. Avery told her, didn’t that show she was still a follower, and that she should get in just as much trouble as I did?

  Eventually, after Ms. Avery swore she’d get Jake’s laptop back as soon as possible, the Lings got up to leave. Mrs. Ling shot my mom a nasty look, and my mom pretended to cough—then it was just the Glasses, the Avery, and the laptop. I shivered again—this time, not from cold.

  “So, Marina,” said Ms. Avery, sitting back down, “I think we need to see this video.”

  Yeah? Because my thought was that we didn’t.

  “Now I’d like to say something,” my mother put in. “I talked about it with my husband, and he said that if the video is on another student’s laptop, there may be no proof that it was done for a school project, which means that it’s not under the school’s purview of discipline.”

  I didn’t know what that meant, but from the look on Ms. A.’s face, it probably translated into something like this: Busted.

  “My impression from the Winters is that it’s very strong material,” said Ms. Avery, and somehow I had the feeling that it wasn’t the same kind of strong that got your work posted in the hallways. “And the assistant principal is concerned that it may constitute harassment.”

  “The video isn’t finished,” I broke in. “I was going to take stuff out. I know it’s not, like, the nicest video on the planet, and I’m sorry that Rachel found it, but we weren’t going to show that version to people. Addie and I were just playing around.”

  My mother and Ms. Avery started arguing about what was school equipment and what was harassment. Even though I knew some of the vocab from Law & Order, I gave up trying to figure out what they meant and stared at Jake’s stickers. What was Skate Wax? And what was Siren Virus? A band? I’d have to play around on Google.

  I did look up when I heard the word “consequences.” What kind of consequences? I didn’t think they could expel me for making a video. Would they suspend me? Woo-hoo—vacation! Even if my mom made me do something awful with the time, it would be better than hanging around in Plebeland. And hey, if they did expel me, Jane Jacobs was the only good public school in the neighborhood, so they’d have to send me to private, and all my dreams would come true. Not that I wanted Rachel to win, but I sort of wanted to tell my mom not to bother fighting.

  My mother’s irritated voice brought me back to earth. “All right, all right,” she said, “we’ll watch the video.” She crossed her arms and looked to the side as if to say, This woman is an idiot.

  “Marina, I’m not very good at finding files on my own computer, let alone a student’s.” Ms. Avery smiled at my mom like it was some joke between them, but I doubt she smiled back. “Can you show us the video?”

  The laptop hovered in her hand, half-open, like jaws about to bite. I wanted to ask, Do I have to? But I knew what the answer would be.

  I took the laptop from her—so heavy, it bent my wrist back—and pressed the “power” button. With the DVD stuck in there, the computer took forever to wake up, but finally it blinked its way to “on.” And then, since I had no other choice, I put the laptop on the desk and pressed “play.” The screen went dark, the letters faded in, all the same things I had seen millions—no, trillions—of times.

  Maybe it was the difference of seeing it a few feet away from my face, or maybe it was because I had taken two days off from editing, but for whatever reason, the video looked better than usual. Yeah, there were the barfing noises, which I totally didn’t need, but the pan of Rachel’s outfit looked just like the way they panned on TV, and even though the sound was kind of tinny without speakers, there was no dead air—people were talking every second. I wished I could play with the light meter, because the glare off the shades was so bright, it was painful to look at. But even with that—wow. I was actually kind of proud of myself.

  The sound faded out, and the screen changed to the first scene from the credits, frozen with the “play” triangle on top of it. Ms. Avery had her
eyebrows raised as if to say, Well? But my mom was just sitting there, staring at the keyboard. Wasn’t anybody going to say anything?

  “Well,” my mother said finally, “obviously this is in questionable taste.”

  Hey!

  “And you can be certain that we will have a long talk with Marina when we get home.”

  Ugh.

  “I can see why the Winters are upset, and we will make sure Marina gives them a full apology.”

  What, compared to a half apology?

  “She will also be apologizing to the video teacher and yourself.” The way my mother said it, I could tell she was really telling me, not Ms. Avery.

  “But there’s no proof that Marina planned to show this around,” she continued, “and I can tell that many of the photos were taken in these girls’ homes, not on school property, or using school equipment, so I think that answers the questions of the assistant principal. Still, I do want you to rest assured that nothing like this will ever happen again.”

  Oh, really? Because the way I saw it, Rachel still had something coming to her.

  “I’ll be discussing this further with the assistant principal,” said Ms. Avery. “In the meantime, Marina, I want to be clear.” She leaned across her desk and stared me down. “The video you made is unacceptable, and you will no longer have a place in Mr. Phillips’s video class.”

  Oh. Well, whatever. I should have expected that.

  “In addition,” said Ms. Avery, “this type of behavior has to stop now. Not with the next incident, or the one after that. No more videos or websites that tell people what you secretly think of them, or not-so-secretly think. I don’t even want to hear about any gossiping. You need to turn over a new leaf—a new, positive direction for the year—and you’ll start that with a week of detention, where you will spend some serious time thinking about what you did.”

  More detention? That office had no windows. Fifteen minutes in there after school and you forgot what your life was like. But hey, it wasn’t like I could do anything to change their minds. Would they let me go now?

  “I also want to ask . . .” Ms. Avery scooched in closer. “Marina, this is not the first time this year you’ve been called in for an incident involving Rachel. The online poll, the vocabulary test . . .”