Time for Change

by Varian Johnson

  it was like its own prayer.

  Ballet was church but this was—

  I didn’t know what it was

  but it was legit,

  like my soul had forgotten

  what a whisper even was,

  And yet …”

  I stopped moving altogether and put my feet back in first position.

  “There was a whisper inside me. It said:

  That dream of going en pointe?

  It’s no longer the point of your dreams.”

  I snapped my feet together so my toes touched. Then I crouched down on the edge of the stage like I was smelling a flower.

  “But these pretty petals of my pointed feet—

  could I bear to uproot them now

  when they were poised to bloom so soon?

  I couldn’t do it,

  wouldn’t do it,

  until one day I realized—

  there wasn’t room in the garden

  to grow two dreams at once.”

  I motioned like I was picking a flower from the stage beside me, then stood up.

  “And so, today

  I gently dig up my dream

  of dancing on my toes.

  I hold it right here, in front of my heart

  and do a tendu or two—

  a prayer for safe journeys ahead.

  Then I gather all my bravest thoughts and blow.”

  I did a big exhale, like blowing a dandelion away.

  “I watch as the seeds fly away with the breeze.

  Who knows?

  The wind could blow them back someday.

  But for now, I clear my throat, I grab my pen.

  I’ve got stanzas and verses to write!

  I’ve said my good-byes

  and they’re all good because,

  I’m surer than ever before—

  if I have a dream that demands room to grow,

  I also have the courage to let another one go.”

  I stood there for half a second, then bowed my head to show I was done.

  There was a moment or two of silence, and then from somewhere, an “mmm-hmm!” broke the spell. The audience erupted with stomping, clapping, and hollering. Mama and Amelia were both smiling so big it looked like their faces might break.

  Teagan wrapped me in a bear hug as soon as I got back to my seat.

  “That was so great!” she whispered, wiping her eyes. “But you’re giving up ballet? I can’t believe it!”

  I nodded. “I’ve got some other dreams that are more important to me—big ones and little ones,” I said. “I’ll tell you more later, okay?”

  She nodded, and we turned our attention to the stage for the next poet.

  “You were amazing!” Aaliyah said to me over the DJ’s music after Round Five was complete. We had some time to kill while the judges finalized the scores.

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’m so glad you came.” I gave her a big hug, then looked around. I wanted to reintroduce Aaliyah to Teagan, but Teagan had disappeared.

  I spotted her at the rear of the auditorium, talking to a skinny kid I didn’t recognize.

  “Hey, you ran off,” I said, when Aaliyah and I got back there.

  “Oh, sorry,” she said. She looked back at the boy. “I wanted to say hi to Aaron. We’re friends from school. He’s the one who made that drum program.”

  “Oh, cool!” I said, nodding at Aaron. Then I gave Teagan a look that said you didn’t tell me Aaron was coming! She replied with a look that said you didn’t tell me Aaliyah was coming!

  We both smiled.

  A few minutes later, the music died down.

  “It’s time!” Teagan squealed. She grabbed my hand and squeezed hard.

  “Time to not break my hand,” I said, shaking it out and waving to Aaliyah and Aaron. “We’ll see you guys later!”

  Jackie called each group back to the stage, where our team linked up like we had before. Isaiah was right—win or lose, I was glad to be here with my friends—the poetry group, and Aaliyah. And Mama and Daddy, too. And even Teagan’s new friend, Aaron. This was Little Dreams coming true.

  But would my Big Dreams come true today?

  The emcee took a clipboard from the scorekeeper. Behind us, the DJ played a drumroll loop. I squeezed my eyes shut.

  “And third place goes to … Rhyme Time!”

  A few feet away from us, one of the groups started jumping up and down and hugging each other. I let go of Teagan and Red’s hands long enough to wipe the sweat from my palms. My stomach was all twisted up.

  “Second place goes to … The McKenzie Mauraders!”

  I hollered for the McKenzie team. Their awesome-sauce performances had already given me so many ideas on how I could improve my own poems. But they were really good. Did that mean we hadn’t—

  “And first place goes to … Land of the Free Verse!”

  I was sure I could hear Mama yelling all the way from her seat. Red thrust his fists in the air and started running around. I started jumping up and down with Teagan. Red and Bria did a little dance. And Isaiah started yelling, “I knew it! I knew it! Here we come, Pittsburgh!”

  “And,” Jackie continued, speaking over all our screams, “there are two special announcements I’d like to make.” We all quieted down. “We’d like to recognize a poem that scored higher than any poem performed by a sixth grader in the history of this competition.” She looked behind her. “Gabriela McBride, could you come up to the front?”

  What?!

  “Gabriela,” Jackie said. “We’ve never seen a performance like that from a poet your age. Am I right, audience?”

  All the snaps, stomps, and cheers proved she was. I beamed.

  “We hope we see you—and your team—at many slams to come. We can’t wait to see how your dream grows.” She winked at me, then nodded to let me know I could return to my group.

  “We’d like to recognize another outstanding poet,” Jackie said as Teagan embraced me in a silent hug.

  “This poet’s performance scored a 9.8, which is the highest score we’ve ever had at this event,” Jackie continued. “Red Knight, would you come forward?”

  Red stood there, frozen, his mouth hanging open. I nudged him. “Did you hear that, Red? The emcee is calling you!”

  He shook his head. “My poem scored the highest?” His eyes started tearing up. “But how … that’s so …”

  “For a lean, mean, flowing machine, you’re really struggling with your words,” I said. I pushed him again. “Now go up there.”

  But instead of walking to the front, Red took a second to wrap me in the biggest, bestest hug he’d ever given me.

  “What about your rep?” I teased.

  He shook his head. His face was wet with tears. “Thanks, Gabby. I wouldn’t have scored like that without your help on the choreography, I’m sure of it. Thank you so, so, so much.”

  You know what?

  It feels good to achieve your own Big Dreams.

  But it feels just as good helping someone else achieve theirs.

  “So, cuz,” Red said to me in the car on the way home, “you ready to show Pittsburgh how awesome Land of the Free Verse is?”

  “You bet,” I said.

  Then I dug my DREAM BIG notebook out of my bag and turned to a brand-new page.

  Varian Johnson is the author of several novels, including The Great Greene Heist, which was an ALA Notable Children’s Book, a Kirkus Reviews Best of 2014, and a Texas Library Association Lone Star List selection; To Catch a Cheat, which is another Jackson Greene adventure; and Saving Maddie. He lives with his wife and daughters near Austin, Texas.

  With gratitude to Leana Barbosa, M.S. CCC-SLP, for contributing her knowledge of speech therapies and language pathology; and Sofia Snow, Deputy Director at Urban Word NYC, for guiding Gabriela’s poetic journey and contributing some poetry.

  Z Yang is an expert at making stop motion movies, but now she has to make a documentary. Where to start?! And will her ideas be good eno
ugh for a real film festival?

  Keep reading for a preview of Z’s first book!

  I took one last look through my camera viewfinder.

  This was it.

  My favorite moment in every video I shot.

  Two seconds before I pressed RECORD, my palms usually began to sweat, my heart beat out of my chest, and I got more excited than my dog, Popcorn, when she knew she was going for a walk.

  With my eye still glued to the viewfinder, I asked, “Lauren, can you raise Kit’s hand an inch?” Lauren McClain, a.k.a. my best friend, production partner, and all-around amazing prop designer, was sitting on my bedroom floor posing my Kit Kittredge doll in front of a prop mountain as we worked on a video about the California gold rush for social studies. She moved Kit’s tiny hand carefully and I zoomed in on it.

  “Now can you turn the pencil she’s holding so it really looks like she’s writing on the pad?” Lauren adjusted the pad and pencil, which she had made out of sticky notes and a straw. I squinted harder as I stared through the camera lens and looked at the shot of Kit again. “Perfect! We’re ready.”

  I pulled my purple knit beanie down on my head—I couldn’t press RECORD without my good luck charm—and got ready to say my favorite word.

  “Action!” I shouted. I snapped a photo of Kit. “And cut!”

  I turned to my two computer screens—one was a larger monitor that I used to view all the stop-motion shots I had taken—and the second was my laptop with my webcam recording the whole shoot. I wanted to post the video for a new segment I’d been trying called “On Set with Me, Z!” The videos were a how-to guide to doing stop-motion videos like the kind I made. (Which meant I was shooting a video inside a video—how cool is that?) “Okay, Z. Crew, so maybe that wasn’t the most exciting two seconds of filming in the world, but guess what? Every shot in our stop-motion videos is important,” I said to my webcam.

  “Especially when we get a close-up of those award-worthy props,” Lauren chimed in, off camera.

  Lauren is not a huge fan of being filmed, but she loves working on AGSM (American Girl stop-motion) videos with me. We got the idea to do an AGSM video for our social studies assignment—a class presentation about a pivotal point in history—during lunch. Making videos is what we did for fun, which meant now we could have fun doing our homework.

  I adjusted the webcam to focus on Lauren’s prop work. “Look at this, Z. Crew. Lauren made a papier-mâché mountain out of some recycled newspaper she painted brown with flecks of gold. She is a total genius!” Lauren grinned. “She’s going to win an Oscar for set design one day, right, Popcorn?” I asked my dog.

  Popcorn barked and wagged her tail happily and jumped up on my legs. She was always jumping, like popcorn when it pops, which just happened to be my favorite snack in the world. It was also how my dalmatian got her name.

  My Kit doll was standing on the fabric background that was our set—dark green, to represent trees in the distance—and a box light drenched the scene in warm, bright light. My room looked like a mini movie studio. The special equipment was all I wanted for my thirteenth birthday, and I’ve used it a ton since then.

  I turned back to my camera, focused on the scene, and Lauren raised Kit’s hand as if she was waving. I snapped a shot. Then she raised it again a bit higher. “Each time we move Kit, we take another picture,” I explained. “When we edit all the shots together, it will look like Kit is moving. But if we move Kit too quickly, the stop-motion will look really jerky. We want the scene to look seamless.”

  “Show them how we map out our stories,” Lauren said, sounding excited. She was getting as into our vlogs as I was.

  I pointed my webcam at a dry-erase board in the open cabinet attached to my desk. “Stop-motion videos need twelve pictures per second. So for a one-minute video, that’s more than seven hundred shots! It’s easy to get off track or forget something. That’s why I map it all out first.”

  I zoomed in on a second whiteboard, which had lots of words written in different colors and pictures I’d cut out from magazines.

  “This is my Brainstorm Board,” I explained. “It’s where the magic happens. You never know when inspiration will strike! Once I have my ideas and my storyboard, I put together a list of all the steps I have to take—like making props, sets, costumes, and editing—to create an awesome video. Just remember: A good director is nothing without her crew. Sometimes they look at things in a way you didn’t even think of.”

  I reached over and grabbed a piece of caramel popcorn from the bowl Lauren was holding. “Like this,” I said. “Lauren had the idea to use caramel popcorn for ‘gold.’” I popped the piece in my mouth.

  “After we’re finished with our last few shots today, we’ll layer in Kit’s narration on how the gold rush led to the creation of the state of California.”

  “The movie is only five minutes long, but we’ve been working on it for three weeks,” Lauren said.

  “Making videos takes time,” I told our viewers, “but it’s worth it when the video turns out awesome!”

  I caught a glimpse of myself on the monitor and suddenly had one of those “I can’t believe I’m doing this” moments. A year ago, I never imagined I’d be a vlogger. Or that I’d have thousands of subscribers watching my AGSM videos or my “On Set with Me, Z!” videos. It all started one day when my friend Mariela was over. We were watching a video of a cat doing somersaults and a WATCH NEXT link popped up. I clicked on it and it was a stop-motion film featuring American Girl dolls. Lauren, Mari, and I had been making up stories with our American Girl dolls for years, but we’d never thought about filming them before. I showed my mom, who is a filmmaker herself, and she agreed I should try it.

  That night I made my first stop-motion video. It was called “Samantha and the Saga of the Dropped Ice Cream Cone.” After that, I was hooked. Now my American Girl stop-motion videos have hundreds of thousands of views, and Mom says not a day goes by without me filming something—even if it’s just our mail carrier making a delivery!

  Crunch, crunch, crunch.

  What was that sound?

  Lauren and I turned around. Popcorn’s head was buried in our gold. She’d eaten every last kernel! She looked up and wagged her tail. Lauren and I burst out laughing.

  “Oh, Popcorn!” I scratched her behind her ears. “You’re calling break time, huh?” I turned my webcam back toward myself. “I guess that’s a wrap. Z. Crew out!”

  After dinner, I would do a quick edit of the vlog footage from the shoot and then show it to Mom and Dad. They viewed all my vlogs before I posted them. “Once you put something online for everyone to see, you can never take it back,” Dad was always reminding me.

  I helped Lauren pick up the props and put them safely in my closet so Popcorn couldn’t trample (or eat!) them again. Kit got a place of honor on my bookshelf with the other dolls who’d already had their star turns in my AGSM videos.

  Ping!

  A new e-mail notification popped up on my computer. I slid into my purple desk chair and clicked on the e-mail. “No. Way,” I said aloud.

  It was from the CloudSong Seattle Film Festival. The festival had a young filmmaker contest that I’d entered on a whim last month just to see if I could get in. I could feel my heart race. “Lauren, pinch me!”

  “What’s wrong?” Lauren’s voice was panicked. “Did today’s video not save?”

  That was always her biggest fear. It was one of my mine, too, second only to a movie critic someday giving one of my films only one star.

  “The video is fine, but read this e-mail and tell me if I’m dreaming!” I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.

  Lauren leaned over my shoulder. “We are pleased to accept Suzanne Yang into the CloudSong Seattle Film Festival Young Filmmakers’ Contest to create a short documentary film for this year’s festival!” she read, using my real name, Suzanne. Everyone calls me Z, but I use my full name for report cards or contests that require your legal name—like this one!


  “Z! This is HUGE!” Lauren clapped my shoulder. “It says they want you to create a ten-minute film about your life in Seattle and the top two films will be shown at the festival.” She kept reading and then poked me. “First prize is fifteen hundred dollars!”

  “I can’t believe I got in.” I felt dazed. “I get to make a real movie.”

  Lauren gave me a look. “You already make real movies.” She motioned toward my camera and Brainstorm Board. “You’re a great filmmaker.”

  I grinned. “We’re great filmmakers,” I said, because, after all, we were a team. “But this is legit!” I quickly read more of the e-mail. “It even says the CloudSong Festival gives you a grant: three hundred dollars to rent film equipment for my video or to get permits for shooting around Seattle.”

  Lauren’s eyes widened. “How long do you have?”

  “Six weeks.” It wasn’t much time, but I could already see the movie coming together in my head. I knew I could do this, even if a teensy part of me was panicked because I’d never been part of anything this big before.

  “I bet you can do it in five,” Lauren said confidently.

  Lauren was not only my best friend: She was my own personal cheerleader. And her whole soccer team’s. She was our middle school’s star player, but she also always made sure everyone she played with knew they were MVPs, too.

  “I guess I should go downstairs. My dad will be here any minute. I still have math homework to do, and I am not looking forward to two pages of multiplying fractions.” Lauren’s mouth curled into a deep frown. I knew how hard she worked for her good grades.

  “Want to work on our math homework together?” I asked.

  “It’s okay. I’ll wait till I get home.” Lauren hefted her backpack. Her favorite soccer ball, a neon-green-and-black one, hung from the mesh sack on the front. She grinned suddenly. “Want to send a quick video message to Mari, Gigi, and Becka to tell them your big news?”

  “Let’s do it!” I answered, grabbing my cell phone. The two of us sat down on my bed. Popcorn bounded up behind us and stuck her nose between our shoulders. The three of us just fit into the small frame. I hit RECORD, and then we made a series of funny faces and poses (well, Popcorn didn’t). “Lauren and I are celebrating! I have something major to tell you guys when we chat tomorrow!” Then I sent the video to our group chat.