Reel Life Starring Us

by Lisa Greenwald

  “Why not?” she asks. “You know everyone at school, you’ve lived here awhile, you’re perfect for ‘a day in the life of a Rockwood Hills student.’ I’ll do all the shooting and editing and putting it all together. You’d just have to be you!”

  “I said no.” Dina doesn’t even know me. How does she know I’d be a good star for the video? I can’t look at her, so I look at my phone instead. Kendall sent a text about how they’re all going to Ross’s house to order in sushi and play video games and I should meet up with them. I don’t want to be here, but I’m not sure I want to be there, either. I’m sure everyone is already talking about their plans for winter break and if they’re flying first-class. And I’m a little sick of Kendall and Molly trying to convince me that I like Ross. I’m not sure I do. “Okay?”

  “Okay,” Dina says under her breath, like she knows she’s been defeated, and she stays quiet for a few minutes.

  “It just wouldn’t be good to focus on one person in the video,” I say as an excuse because I feel bad but also because I can’t stand the awkward silence anymore. “I know it’s a day in the life, but we should focus on more than one person.”

  There. That’s a good explanation, if I do say so myself, and I bet she’ll be into that idea because she probably wants to meet people around here. Yeah, she’s only been here two days, but she barely talks to anyone, not even to the girls she eats lunch with.

  “Oh!” she yells suddenly. “I have an idea! I can just get random shots of the school and kids in the hallways and we can put upbeat, fun music over it, and it can show all kids in their natural school environment. It’ll be all B-roll.”

  “B-roll?” Right when I start to feel bad about being rude to her, she gets way too excited about something and starts using weird video terms and I feel myself getting annoyed with her all over again.

  “Yeah, it means, like, background shots, shots of the surroundings, and people walking around and stuff. But I think it would be neat for this,” she says.

  I text Kendall that I’m stuck at school working on the video and can’t come to Ross’s house, but that she has to tell me everything that happens as soon as she’s home. “That could be okay, I guess.”

  Dina huffs. I guess she senses my lack of enthusiasm. “Well, you’ve lived here a long time, haven’t you? Don’t you have any ideas?”

  My phone vibrates again, a text from Molly this time.

  “Um.” I crack my knuckles, praying something will come to me. Molly thinks I’m lame, and she knows something’s up, but she hasn’t figured out what it is yet. Even though I’m not sure I like Ross, it still feels good to know he likes me, or at least that’s what Kendall thinks. I wonder if he told them anything about what he said to Dina at lunch. “Nope. No ideas.”

  Dina sighs, and twirls a pen around her fingers like a miniature baton. “Well, we should do a good job, right? Aren’t there going to be a ton of people there? Like, the whole school and parents and everyone?”

  I nod. “Yeah, I think so.”

  “So think about my idea of background footage and candid shots,” she says. “The parents will be excited to see glimpses of their kids’ lives at school, and the kids will be excited to see their friends.”

  She’s trying so hard to convince me, but I just don’t really care that much. I want to get it done as quickly as possible. Lately, all I want to do is get through things and have them be over with so I can move on to the next thing.

  It can be kind of nice to have someone try really hard to get you to agree, or try really hard to get you to like them. Sometimes it’s really pathetic, but other times it’s pretty flattering.

  Right now it’s one of the flattering times.

  “Okay …” I smile slowly. “Let’s do it.”

  The thing about this Dina girl is that you want to hate her but something about her makes you not totally hate her. There’s a shred of likeability in her. And she doesn’t even feel weird about being new. It’s like she’s from some alternate universe where people don’t worry about what others think of them. I’m not going to lie—I’m a little jealous. I want to go to that universe sometimes. A lot of times, actually. Especially now.

  “I know how we can get started.” She caps her pen and closes her Curious George notebook. “Ready?”

  I nod.

  “Let’s look at yearbooks. Since you know everyone here, you can tell me about them, and maybe there are some people better than others to sort of focus on. Maybe I can even pan the yearbooks in the shots. That’d be so cool-looking, and it would help highlight the history of the school! It’ll help show the transformation from the school of the past to the school today. And who doesn’t like looking at yearbooks?” She jumps up. “It’ll be fun!”

  “Okay …”

  “And if we look at really old yearbooks, it’ll be fun to see people’s crazy hair. People always had the weirdest hairstyles back in the day. Didn’t they?”

  “Totally. But I don’t know how far back the yearbooks go. I’ll go find Mr. Singer.” I wonder if I’ll see that kid again, and if I do, I hope I remember his name.

  “Who?”

  “Oh, the librarian. He’s actually kind of cool.”

  When I get back from looking for Mr. Singer, I realize what I’ve done—something totally careless and stupid. Like an absolute total idiot, I left my cell phone on the table, just sitting there, not even with the keypad locked. The screen on my BlackBerry is bright, and on it there’s another text from Molly.

  Dina looks at the phone and then up at me and back at the phone again.

  Things just went from bad to worse. Why did she have to see that?

  Yeah, I don’t want to be working with her, but I’m not like Molly, someone who’s totally fine with insulting other people. But in all fairness, even Molly didn’t expect that Dina would see it.

  I’m the moron who let that happen.

  “Sorry,” I mumble. “It’s just Molly. She doesn’t realize what she says half the time.”

  “I get that you guys don’t know me, and I’m new and that automatically makes me uncool, even though I sort of thought that would make me stand out kind of in a cool way,” Dina says all in a rush, “but what I don’t get is why you’re all so weirded out with the video thing. You have a video camera on your BlackBerry right there, the one that just vibrated and insulted me.”

  She’s pointing at my phone, and I cover my mouth because I’m about to crack up. Dina’s actually kind of funny sometimes. “It’s just—I don’t know—unusual, I guess.”

  She nods like she’s trying to understand what I’m saying. She doesn’t say anything for a few seconds, and then she asks, “Did you find the librarian or the yearbooks? I have to go soon, and we’ve accomplished nothing.”

  “I’m sorry you saw that, okay?” I say again because I don’t know what else to do. And then I hear Mr. Singer’s unmistakable whistling. “I’ll make it up to you, I swear. Right now, actually. I’ll get the yearbooks.”

  I head over to the circulation desk, but before I can ask Mr. Singer for anything, Dina yells from across the library.

  “I actually have to go,” she says. “My mom forgot my brother has a dentist appointment, so she needs to pick me up now. I’ll meet you here after school tomorrow.”

  At least she says she’ll meet me here tomorrow. That’s kind of a good thing because now that I think about it, talking about the project for a few minutes was actually kind of fun. It was a little chunk of time when I wasn’t thinking about things at home or worrying about my friends finding out about everything.

  And I got to see that cute kid with the libary cart.

  Dina doesn’t wait for me to say anything back, she just leaves, her oversized mom-looking tote bag slung over her right shoulder. That’s what I get for offering to make it up to her, even though I didn’t really say the mean thing—Molly did.

  Maybe I should text Molly and tell her she shouldn’t have said that, but the truth is, the only
reason I’m mad is because Dina saw it. If she hadn’t seen it, it wouldn’t have even fazed me.

  But that’s how I feel about everything lately—once it’s out in the open, it’s much, much worse.

  Video tip: Use the eyes to draw emotion.

  Cut on the blinks.

  Even after a few days, that text message lingers in my brain. Why did I have to see it? It’s not like I couldn’t guess what they were saying. But seeing it makes it a million times worse. I couldn’t even tell Ali about it. And forget about telling my mom—that would crush her. It would be like I told her I was I moving to the moon or converting to another religion or something.

  But seeing that text message struck something in me. My situation is dire. I need to make Chelsea realize I’m cool. I know that if I were truly cool, I wouldn’t care about making her and her friends realize it. But oh, well. I guess I’m only moderately cool. But moderately cool is still something.

  We’re in the library after school, Chelsea’s sitting at the table texting and I’m reading an article online from the Berkshire Eagle. It may be weird that I still read the newspaper from where I used to live, but I like to keep up to date about what’s going on there. The big Berkshire arts festival is this weekend and all these famous photographers and musicians are coming. There will be food vendors, too, selling fancy croissants and exotic cheeses and this amazing butternut squash soup. It’s painful to even think about it—this is the first arts festival I’m missing.

  Mr. Singer brings a huge stack of yearbooks over to the table, and I close the library laptop and return it to him. The yearbooks smell old, but it’s that good old smell, antique and special and delicate.

  “I’ve spent the past few days looking for other yearbooks for you girls, but I’m sorry to say we don’t have yearbooks going back all fifty years,” Mr. Singer tells us. “I think some got lost in the renovation.”

  “Oh.” That seems sad to me. How can you lose a yearbook? It’s like a piece of history. I bet the Smithsonian never loses anything. “Isn’t there, like, a school archivist or something?”

  Mr. Singer sighs. “Not that I know of. Anyway, this should be a good start.”

  “It’s so sad that all the yearbooks aren’t here,” I say out loud and then feel kind of pathetic that this upsets me. Since it’s only my first week at the school, I’m really not sure why I care so much. Getting sad about old yearbooks isn’t going to help convince Chelsea of my coolness.

  “You’re probably the only one who cares this much about yearbooks,” Chelsea says flatly.

  See what I mean?

  “Well, I guess we should put them in order by year, and then we can get a better idea of the history.”

  “I’m so tired,” Chelsea says, putting her feet up on one of the library chairs and then looking around like she’s scared someone is going to catch her doing it. “Maybe we can start working on the project fully on Monday. I mean, it is Friday afternoon. All my friends are at the mall right now.”

  “Oh, yeah.” My first Friday without Ali plans. Without ice cream at Bev’s and Baba Louie’s pizza for dinner and a sleepover.

  It feels too sad to think about. “I forgot it was Friday when I agreed to meet with you,” Chelsea says, looking at her phone like she’s waiting for a text or a call.

  “Well, my mom’s picking me up at five, so I might as well stay here,” I say.

  “Can’t you just call her on her cell?”

  I shrug. “I could, but there’s really no rush for me to get home. All I’ll find there is more unpacking to do. Kind of depressing.”

  Chelsea leans her elbow on the table and then rests her chin in her palm. “Yeah, well, I don’t really have anywhere to go, either.”

  “You just said all your friends were at the mall.”

  “Yeah, but there’s no point in going now.”

  Chelsea may be the most popular girl at Rockwood Hills Middle School, but she’s kind of nuts. I don’t know how to read her. One minute she’s all gung ho and the next minute she’s not interested at all. And then she switches again.

  She opens the yearbook on the top of the pile. It’s from only a couple years ago. She starts flipping through the pages haphazardly, responding to texts every three seconds. You’d think she would lie low on the text messaging after the debacle from the other day. Apparently not.

  I’m looking at the pages over her shoulder when I spot her. “Oh my God.” I can’t believe what I’m seeing.

  “What?” Chelsea asks.

  “Did you just see who was on that page?”

  Chelsea turns back a page and squints.“Um … Mrs. Matrizzi, the computer science teacher who looks like a real-life version of the mom from The Family Guy?”

  “Oh, well, yeah.” I laugh about that for a second, then point to what I saw. “But no, look at her. That’s Sasha Preston. Like the Sasha Preston, from Sasha Says So. She went here? Oh my God. Did you know that? That’s so, so, so coo—”

  Chelsea rolls her eyes for the billionth time. At least that’s how it feels. “Are you serious? You didn’t know that?”

  I’m tempted to lie, because admitting I didn’t know Sasha Preston went here will probably decrease my coolness level even further. But I’m a bad liar. “Nope. Had no idea.”

  “Yeah, she graduated from here four years ago. She left here, got discovered, and then her show started. She has private tutors now and doesn’t go to high school.”

  We’re still looking at her picture in the yearbook. She looks pretty similar to how she looks in the show—except her hair is a little longer and not really styled at all in the picture. She looks normal, average, like any girl you’d see at any school in the country. I wonder if anyone could have predicted that she’d become a star.

  It’s hard to imagine her having to play badminton and having to stand on the hot-food lunch line and having to change in the gym locker room. Did she get chipped?

  Sasha Says So is about this girl who runs an advice column in the school paper that gets to be so popular she sets up a booth where people can come and ask for advice. It’s cheesy but funny at the same time. It’s the kind of show you like more the more you watch it, so it’s better in reruns. But it’s really popular—it wins the Kids’ Choice Award every year.

  Looking at her picture in the yearbook makes me wonder what her real life is like. Or was like when she went here. Did she like the school? Was she popular? Was she a Chelsea? Or a me?

  Chelsea and I keep flipping through the old yearbook. We’re looking at everything but mostly looking for pictures of Sasha Preston. We find her in the index, and she has at least twenty page numbers after her name. Most people only have two or three.

  “I can’t believe you never looked for pictures of her in the yearbooks before,” I say.

  Chelsea shrugs.

  “Oh my God, this is it!” I scream.

  “What?” Chelsea says as she puts her hair up in a ponytail. Her phone keeps vibrating, but she ignores it.

  “What we’ll do for the video! A day in the life of a Rockwood Hills student? Well, hello! Here’s one! And a famous one.” I take a deep breath. Finally, a good idea is coming to me. “Even if she’s not the whole video, we can put Sasha in it somewhere!”

  Chelsea shakes her head, not even looking at me. She finally picks up her phone so it stops vibrating. I can tell from where I’m sitting that she has three missed calls. “Are you kidding?” I can’t tell if she’s talking to me or to her phone. “You don’t get it. She doesn’t live here anymore. She’s, like, famous. I know you came from Massachusetts, and you don’t know that much about pop culture, but she’s not just going to be in our video.”

  Okay. Did she really need to insult where I’m from?

  “First of all,” I say, “I’m from the Berkshires. It’s like the cultural capital of the world. Okay, at least the state. But that’s not even the point.” I stop talking and wait for her to look up from her phone. She finally does. “I know Sasha doesn�
�t live here. But that doesn’t mean we can’t find her.”

  Chelsea closes the yearbook and pushes her chair back from the table. “Look, my parents know everyone around here, and they don’t know Sasha and they don’t know her parents, so there’s no way we’re going to just find her.” She leans down and grabs a bottle of Vitaminwater from her bag. After an extra-long sip she says, “So can you just stop being weird and tell me what we have to do to make a decent video for this thing?”

  “Well, you have to care about it just the littlest bit,” I say. “Can you at least do that? I don’t know what’s so hard in your life that you can’t just do your part on this project.”

  I don’t know why I said that. My whole plan was getting Chelsea to like me, and getting her friends to realize I’m cool and like me, too. Criticizing people never really gets them to like you. That’s one thing I know.

  Chelsea starts sniffling. It seems like she might cry. Making someone cry definitely isn’t a way to get them to like you.

  She’s going to cry. I know it. Then I won’t just be weird. I’ll be mean, too.

  “Fine, I’ll try,” she says at last. She doesn’t cry. At least that’s something. “I’ll take the recent yearbooks and I’ll put Post-it notes on the pictures of kids we should try to get in the video.” She huffs and then starts making a pile of the yearbooks. “Is that good enough?”

  “Fine.” I open the next yearbook in the pile, the one from last year. “So who would be good on this page?” I start at the beginning of the alphabet.

  “Um …” Chelsea scans the page. “I don’t know any of those people.”

  “Haven’t you been going here since kindergarten?”

  She nods.

  “You don’t know anyone in our grade?” I ask.

  “Okay, I know who they are, obviously, but I don’t talk to them.” She huffs again. “Let’s just go to the next page.”

  We get to the next page, and the only people she picks out are her friend Kendall and this boy Ross, who I actually know because he randomly came up and talked to me the other day in the cafeteria. He’s pretty much the only person I know here, besides Chelsea.