by Barry Lyga
Me: I’ll think about it.
Aneesa: Nothing to think about
Me: It’s late. I’m tired.
Aneesa: Dream of success!!!
I dream of nothing.
In the morning, though, I’m convinced the late-night text interlude was nothing more than a dream itself, until I look at my phone and scroll the evidence.
In the cold light of day, what seemed like a moderately ridiculous notion has become…
… surprisingly…
… possible.
“No,” Mom says when I broach the topic at breakfast. It’s Saturday and she’s home and I’ve emerged from my room for a rare morning meal with her, a token of affection that I thought might sway her to my side, but instead she favors me with a withering, exasperated look and says, again, “No.”
“But, Mom—”
“No. Did you not understand the first two times?” She stabs at her omelet; it bleeds melted cheddar. “I want you to do something productive with your time. Not have fun with your friends goofing off online.”
“It’s not goofing off! It’s a business!”
“On YouTube.” She says YouTube the way a snooty gourmet says fast food.
“It’s not just for cat videos anymore.” And I have to stifle a laugh because it is quite possible I just invented YouTube’s new slogan. “People make money on it.”
She snorts. Someone has offered the gourmet the latest Happy Meal.
“Mom, seriously—”
“Seriously, Sebastian. I’ve given you a lot of leeway. If you don’t come up with something this weekend, I’m going to come up with something for you.”
Me: Now what?
Aneesa: Don’t worry. I’ve got this
Me: Got what?
Aneesa: Trust me. Moms love me
Aneesa shows up that afternoon, all business, wearing a very conservative pair of pants and a professional-looking blazer over a button-down shirt. She has an iPad and a serious expression on her face.
“What are you up to?” I ask her as I lead her to the kitchen.
“Trust me.”
Mom is waiting at the kitchen table. There’s a moment of silence as they sort of size each other up. I want to laugh because it’s Aneesa and Mom, not a couple of Bond villains.
“It’s nice to meet you,” Mom finally says, “but I’m not sure what you can tell me that Sebastian hasn’t already.”
Aneesa smiles smoothly. “Mrs. Cody, I’m just here to explain how having his own YouTube channel is actually pretty productive for Sebastian. I know you’re skeptical, and we thought that maybe if you heard it from a neutral third party, you might be a bit more receptive.”
Aneesa, it turns out, speaks excellent Adult.
“Neutral third party?” Mom says. “You’re his friend.”
“Yeah, but I don’t really like him that much.”
Despite herself, Mom chuckles. “Fine. Fire away.” She leans back in her chair, arms folded over her chest in that way that communicates her mind has already been made up.
I nearly tell Aneesa to forget it, but she’s already propped up the iPad on the table and launched her presentation. I sit silently and let her work her magic. This is her show, and besides, I have nothing to contribute other than, “I like making pizza, and Aneesa thinks this is a good idea.” Both are facts already in Mom’s possession.
Aneesa begins with a quick précis of YouTube itself, starting with its humble first video way back in 2005. Mom smirks a little, but politely says nothing. Then Aneesa shows a chart of YouTube’s growth since 2005, titled “Eyeballs Grabbed” and featuring an animated set of blinking cartoon eyes. Mom reacts not at all, arms still folded.
Then Aneesa overlays a graph showing the decline in broadcast television viewing. It’s still high, but it’s dropping, while YouTube’s graph seems to have no upper limit.
Mom grunts something noncommittal and her arms relax a bit.
Now Aneesa accelerates, with quick screens proving the growing financial power of YouTube. First, a graph of ad revenues, labeled “Bucks Earned” with—of course—dancing animated dollar signs, euros, pounds, yen, and more. It’s more than quadrupled in the past four years.…
“… and that’s still not even a quarter of all video revenue,” Aneesa says. “Broadcast and cable are both declining, but online is only rising. It’s an accelerated growth curve, and it’s not breaking anytime soon. All the momentum is with online video services, and YouTube is the biggest.”
She then goes on to invoke a litany of YouTube megastars: Michelle Phan and PewDiePie and Grace Helbig and more, concluding with the holiest of holies—the Vlogbrothers.
She wraps up with a quick skim over the current online video cooking market, then shows a graph of “Projected Eyeballs and Bucks Earned” that mercifully lacks any numbers on the Y-axis. It shows rapid if reasonable growth over the next year, though, which warms my heart until I remind myself that Aneesa is making all of this up.
The last slide is a mock-up of a logo: SEBASTIAN’S PIES, in a cursive font curved upward like a smile atop a cartoon pizza crust, with two pepperoni slices for eyes to complete the smiley face.
And there’s a URL at the bottom just like on a real ad or commercial: YouTube.com/sebastianspies.
“It looks like it says ‘Sebastian Spies,’” Mom points out.
I groan. Yay, Mom.
There’s barely enough time for Aneesa to have gotten home when she calls me.
“Well? What did she say?”
“You just left. Give her a minute to think.”
“Well, what do you think she’ll say?”
“I don’t know. My mom’s a pain. She’s not cool like your parents.”
She huffs a too-sarcastic laugh. “My parents? Cool? Are you kidding me?”
I think of Mr. Fahim’s Xbox, of Mrs. Fahim’s lemonade, of their easy, laconic smiles and the way they welcomed me into their home without a moment’s hesitation. “I think they’re cool.”
“You’re welcome to them.”
“Come on.”
“I guess they’re not that bad. Compared to some of my other friends, they’re okay. They try to be as cool about things as they can. But they’re always walking a line, you know?”
“I actually don’t.”
“I’ve stumped you!” she chortles. “I’ve stumped the genius!”
“Are you going to celebrate or…?”
She sighs heavily. “I don’t expect you to get it. I mean, it’s a mixed marriage, right? Which is cool, but sometimes there’s a tension. Because Dad is religious and Mom isn’t. And I feel like I have to balance them, even though they don’t put that kind of pressure on me. And we… never mind.”
There are two ways of saying never mind. One way means never mind. The other means I want to keep talking about this, but it’s getting to me and I’m not sure I should, but if you encourage me, maybe I’ll keep going.
Aneesa’s employing the latter.
“Keep going,” I tell her, and she does.
“It’s tough to talk about this stuff. But I guess if I don’t, no one will learn. You wouldn’t get it. You don’t know how lucky you are. Both your parents were born here and their parents and their parents, and you don’t have this stress of ‘We’re not really welcome here.’ And ‘We have to honor our past, but also be a part of the place where we live.’ And sometimes that seems impossible.”
Replace honor with live with and I almost understand.
“I didn’t mean to vent like that,” she says quietly. “It’s just that we’re the Muslims no one thinks exist and we’re right here and it’s frustrating sometimes.” There’s a long silence filled with expectation, and I realize I haven’t said anything.
“I didn’t mean to go all quiet,” I tell her. “I’m sorry.”
She chuckles. “You’re apologizing again! All is right with the world.”
That night, Mom knocks on my door. She doesn’t actually come in, but rather lean
s against the frame. I realize that I can’t remember the last time she came into my room.
I’m on the bed, flipping through a copy of Replay, a book from 1986 that I reread at least once a year. It’s about a man who dies and wakes up to discover he’s in his own past, able to live his life again. I consider it the me-equivalent of the Bible—most likely full of nonsense, but comforting to fantasize about.
“You can do it,” Mom says.
It takes me a moment to connect her words to Sebastian’s Pies.
“Are you serious?”
“I think you should change the URL or the name of the… it’s not really a company, is it?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Well, you should change it. But go ahead, Sebastian. Do it.” She grimaces for just a moment. “But you really need to commit to this. This isn’t just a hobby now, or something you do when you’re hungry or bored. You need to commit.”
“Got it.”
She nods. “It’s good to see you smiling.”
I hadn’t realized I was. I widen it a little, just to see how it feels. Then I grab my phone to text Aneesa, but an idea occurs to me. Before Mom can get away, I make her stand in the doorway, and I record her saying, “Hello, Aneesa. That was a very persuasive presentation. I hope you and Sebastian enjoy your little venture.” She’s a good sport about it and says it with more enthusiasm than I believe she actually feels.
It takes a couple of minutes for the video to shoot over to Aneesa, but then I get back a flurry of emoji, one of which is a pair of kissing lips, and I think, Really? Maybe?
And that night, I don’t bother asking the voice if it’s time yet. Because for the first time that I can remember, I don’t want to know.
We figure we’ll do a video each week, which seems manageable.
Right. The first week on YouTube is something of a disaster.
Our first pizza—a pesto sauce with homemade whole wheat crust infused with basil—is a massive success. Our first video, less so.
Other than shooting short blurts of video to send to friends and family, neither Aneesa nor I have ever recorded anything of any substantial length. We quickly realize that we need to learn how to edit, not merely for length, but also for pacing and clarity. Aneesa finds an online tutorial (on YouTube, of course) about editing video and stays up late figuring it out.
By mutual agreement, we change the name of our channel to “Sebastian Cooks,” both to avoid the spying connotation and to make it sound more active, more urgent. I also insist that we not show my face—there’s no point to it. The focus is supposed to be on the pizza, so we show only my hands as I go about prepping and cooking. Besides, this way, whenever I fumble in my improvisational recitation of my process, it’s easy to lay in a new soundtrack in editing.
Aneesa reluctantly agrees and takes long, lingering shots of the ingredients, as well as dropping in the occasional slo-mo of my hands kneading the dough.
“It’s called ‘food porn’ for a reason,” she points out.
Week two’s video is much better. Our second pizza is a cornmeal crust with pepper jack, grilled jalapeños, and onions; a real mouth-burner. In one week, Aneesa has mastered the camera and the software, and the video looks great. We post it and get precisely zero views, despite sending out the link on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
“We need velocity,” Aneesa says. We’re sprawled on the floor of her living room, laptop open before us to the Sebastian Cooks page. It’s been a couple of days since we posted the second video, and a whole lot of nothing has transpired. She idly taps REFRESH over and over, hoping to see the view count increment. No luck. “John and Hank Green posted videos every single day when they started Brotherhood 2.0.”
“I can do every day,” I tell her.
She shakes her head. “There are only so many combinations of ingredients. I don’t want you to burn through your repertoire before we get any traction.”
“It’s pizza. There’s an infinite number of things you can do with it. Don’t worry about that. But look—school starts in, like, a month. We’ll have to cut back on this then. Now’s the time to go nuts, right? So let’s do a pizza a day.”
She clucks her tongue, deep in thought. Her brows come together like two waves cresting at each other, or like the top half of a heart.
“Will your mom be okay with pizza every day?”
I shrug. Mom’s paying for the ingredients, so technically I guess she has to okay it. “If you look at it a certain way, this was all her idea. She’s the one who wanted me to do something with my time this summer. Besides, who could get sick of pizza?”
And so we begin cranking out pizzas and videos every day. Despite my confidence in the unlimited variety of pizza permutations, I am—inside—a bit worried that my pizza-crafting mojo might falter or wane as time goes on. In order to pace myself, I alternate inventive—white pizza with roasted artichokes, sun-dried tomatoes, and Bella Vita cheese on parsley-infused crust—with faithful standards—mozzarella and pepperoni with margherita, the pepperonis cut into wedge shapes to make them stand out from the usual.
I narrate each step as I go along, and Aneesa inserts herself and her phone into my workspace to catch the close-up details. We still have some difficulties to overcome—I’m not used to someone in my space while I cook, and she isn’t sure how to capture everything without interfering. But by our fifth video—a white pizza with sliced summer squash, arugula, chiles, and fontina cheese over a basic Neapolitan crust—we have a system down that works for us, with Aneesa devising an on-the-fly series of taps on my side to indicate if I should slow down, speed up, or do something again.
Our follower and viewer counts begin to grow the tiniest bit, but nothing beyond low double digits. Each night, I sink into bed and into a confusion of emotions. Baking new pizzas every day is tiring but energizing at the same time. Working with Aneesa is intoxicating (or so I assume, having never been intoxicated), but the lack of attention paid to Sebastian Cooks frustrates me. If I’m going to do this, I want to do it well. And I want people to acknowledge that.
It’s all just a distraction, says the voice one night.
It catches me off guard. I’d almost forgotten the voice. Is it speaking the truth? Is this all just a distraction? A pleasant diversion before the gruesome finale, what they call in opera the Grand Guignol?
Just a distraction.
But a good one.
At the beginning of the third week of our endeavor, Aneesa comes over early, a very grave, worried expression on her face.
“What’s wrong?” I guide her into the living room.
“Don’t be mad,” she says, plopping her laptop down on the coffee table.
“I’m not mad.”
“Don’t get mad, is what I mean.”
“Why would I get mad?”
“Promise.”
She’s so serious and so earnest that I have to throat-clear a chuckle into oblivion. “I won’t get mad.”
With a half-unconvinced sigh, she opens the laptop and plays a video. It takes me a moment to realize that it’s our most recent episode, in which I assembled an admittedly too-bitter pizza topped with radicchio. It takes me another moment to realize that there’s no sound, but before I can tell her to turn up the volume, it happens.
A voice.
The original sound is gone, muted, in favor of a new vocal track. A voice speaking in a calm, measured, yet somehow breathless tone all at the same time, like a golf announcer. A voice with the slightest trace of an accent that could be British. Maybe. Or maybe not.
Finally, I realize—it’s Aneesa.
She’s dubbed over the entire episode, using some strange variant of her own voice. It changes the nature of the show—suddenly, it’s not some kid telling you how to make a pizza, but rather an admiring onlooker who encourages others to peek in and see something wonderful happening. The whole operation transmogrifies from a simple process story to an appreciation of the labor and the love and the
art.
“… now watch as Chef Sebastian dices the onion,” faux-Aneesa purrs with satisfaction. She calls me Chef Sebastian throughout the episode. “I really respect such skill with a knife, don’t you? So deceptively simple. And now… into the pan, to sauté! I wish you could be here to smell the olive oil and the onion.…”
Silent and amazed, I find myself caught up in the moment. Even though those are my hands on the screen, and I know exactly what they are and will soon be doing, I can’t help but admire the craft and the precision on display. I’ve watched my own videos before, of course, but always with my own voice narrating, always acutely aware that This is me. This is me. Now, though, it’s an entirely different experience.
The video ends and Aneesa turns to look at me, worrying her lower lip. “Well? What do you think? I just thought”—she rushes on—“that maybe a different kind of narration might, I don’t know, change things up a little, but if you hate it, we don’t—”
“I love it.”
“You do?” Her expression goes from worry to delight at light-speed, with no intervening steps. Even if I didn’t love the new narration, I would fall in love with it right at this moment from the sheer joy my approval brings to her face.
“It’s just what we needed. It takes the focus away from the guy making the pizza and puts it on the pizza.”
“But it also makes you sort of mysterious!” she says excitedly. “It’s like, ‘Who is this mysterious Chef Sebastian?’ And that will get people thinking and talking and watching. I can go back and reedit the old ones. There aren’t that many of them, and no one’s really watched them yet.”