by Lele Pons
“What are you doing for the rest of the day?” I ask, thinking we could hang out, chillax, etc.
“Homework and then dinner with my family,” she says. “See you tomorrow.” Then she heads off abruptly without another word.
Wait, so we are school-only friends then. Darcy was right. Darcy is always right.
• • •
The weirdness gets weirder about five hours later, around eight at night, when I go out with myself to Ben & Jerry’s, a tradition I’ve had for as long as I can remember. It’s actually not so much a tradition as much as it is me going to Ben & Jerry’s as often as I possibly can. Anyway, so I’m walking up the street toward the mothership when I see none other than Yvette Amparo strolling toward me. She’s wearing the cutest dress I have ever seen: pale pink jersey-fabric bell skirt attached to a black spandex top with a scooped neck and off-the-shoulder sleeves. I’m wearing sweatpants.
“Lele?”
“Yvette?! Hey, what are you doing here?”
“Oh, this is kind of weird, but I always go out for ice cream when my family is driving me crazy,” says Yvette.
“Whoa, me too. Which is always,” I tell her.
“Same. I have a gigantic family and they’re all nuts.”
“I’m an only child, but my parents are pretty intense.” Yvette smiles knowingly, follows me inside.
On our way out of Ben & Jerry’s we hug good-bye and voilà! Our outfits are magically switched. I’m in her adorable outfit, she’s in my sweatpants, and by the time she’s realized what’s hit her I’m running down the street.
Fast.
Okay, fine, so that last part didn’t happen, but with Coachella approaching I really have a one-track mind, and that track is outfits.
31
When My Friend and I Ask to Go to the Bathroom During Class
(5,000,001 Followers)
Coachella Coachella Coachella!!!! What a magical name for a music festival. Legend has it if you say it six times in a row your skin will turn glow-in-the-dark and you’ll never be heard from again. Fine, so I made that up, but someone’s gotta make up the legends and it might as well be me. Ohhhh my God, I can hardly contain my excitement as I write this, but here we go:
Steve Tao has invited me to fly out to California to hang out with him in the VIP tent and backstage. Me?! In California?! What if I explode from excitement on the plane and then the flight attendants have to clean my brains off the windows? And the chairs . . . you can’t get anything off those.
Darcy has ever so kindly volunteered to come with me, and at the very last minute Alexei announced that he’s had plans to go to Coachella since before he even moved to America, which I think sounds suspicious. He probably made that up just so he could spend time around me without seeming desperate. You know, since he’s in love with me and I’m going to have his babies or whatever.
We’re missing school for this, which would count as unexcused absences, which means we’d have to make up the time we missed in detention, which is why we plan to keep this excursion under wraps. And as much as it pains me, that means no Vines. I mean, yeah, we’ll tape some there, but we can’t post them until we leave. That’s right, we’re going off the grid, into the wild . . . we’re just like Lewis and Clark navigating the wilderness of the West with nothing to sustain them but each other’s company and faith that everything is going to be okay. Okay, so it’s not quite like that, but you get the picture. When we get home we’ll forge doctors’ notes and be welcomed back with open arms. After literally seven straight hours of debating and convincing, my parents decided that “you’re only young once” and that I should go, as long as I promise not to do drugs or get myself killed—which are both very fair rules. Alexei’s parents don’t seem to care what he does with his time, and Darcy’s happen to be on vacation, which is completely and totally fate, in my humble opinion.
It’s like the universe wants us to go to Coachella.
The flight is uneventful: Alexei and Darcy take sleeping pills and, out of sheer, torturous boredom, I draw things on their faces. Nothing vulgar, just mustaches and glasses and a Harry Potter scar on Alexei’s forehead. I spend hours staring at the bathroom door wondering how people manage to have sex in there and why they would even want to. First of all, it can barely fit one person, let alone two people bumping up against each other. Second of all, it smells like a combination of sewer water and chemical lemon Pine-Sol and I can barely spend two seconds in there without throwing up. But hey, whatever floats your boat, who am I to judge?
Our hotel in Palm Springs is called Ace Hotel and it is the coolest hotel in the world. It has this very desert-y Native American feel to it with shabby chic beds and antique maps on the walls and a pool where you can lounge and order food and drinks from hot waiters. But that’s not what we’re here for.
For those of you who don’t know, Coachella is a three-day music and art festival where anyone who is anyone goes to hear their favorite bands and take ecstasy and get naked and take pictures and we are here, in the middle of it all, in the eye of the storm! In reality, it’s not as savage as all that, but it’s an overall let-loose good time.
The three days are a whirlwind I won’t soon forget:
Outkast, Arcade Fire, Lana Del Rey, Lorde, Dum Dum Girls, Ellie Goulding, Muse, Haim, Sleigh Bells, Kid Cudi, Krewella, STRFKR, the Naked and Famous, Cage the Elephant, Little Dragon, Toy Dolls, Skrillex, Girl Talk, Chvrches, AFI, and the 1975. Kendall and Kylie Jenner and Selena Gomez and Justin Bieber and Emma Roberts and Paris Hilton and Katy Perry and Leonardo DiCaprio and Jaden Smith and . . . David Hasselhoff, who I had to surreptitiously Google as to not give away how young I really am.
A gigantic spaceman towering a hundred feet above us and an animatronic robot and jacaranda trees the size of buildings made of lights that blended from orange to pink to yellow to blue to green and miniature architectural designs set up for you to go inside—a gingerbread house and a lifeguard stand and a house made of Popsicle sticks (which is cool to look at if you’re hallucinating, I heard, but I didn’t take any Molly, are you kidding?)—and green and purple palm trees and an illuminated kaleidoscopic rotating portal that you could walk through and a room-size caterpillar growing an entire garden on its skin and a forty-five-foot tall knot of twisted metal tracks covered in canvas containing multicolored lights that interact with shadow to create a dramatic spectacle and a field of cardboard sunflowers and a roadrunner made of metal scraps that holds a swing in its mouth and a completely mirrored tower that turned everything into a cube like a chunk of space had been cut geometrically into facets and we discovered that the whole universe is really a diamond.
We danced and we sang our hearts out and we never slept. We’d never done anything so beautiful.
• • •
The fantasy life comes to an abrupt end on Sunday night when we’re boarding the plane back to Miami.
“Oh man, I got so many dope pictures for Instagram,” Alexei says.
“No, you can’t post anything, remember? We said no photos so we don’t get in trouble.”
“Oops. I, uh, sorta already posted some.”
“Alexei, you beautiful creature, I am going to murder you.”
32
Lele’s One True Love: iPhone
(5,199,900 Followers)
“Welcome back, you three,” Mr. Contreras says the next day, all snarky and snide. “How was Coachella?”
“Ermmmm . . .”
“Uhhhhhh . . .” The whole class is glancing between us and their Instagram feeds, practically green with envy. You know how jealous people are, they want to ruin everybody’s fun.
“You know what, screw it,” I say. “It was the most incredible thing I’ve ever done in my life. We hung out with celebrities and saw all our favorite bands and just went totally wild and I don’t regret it for one second. So sound the alarms! Bring out the guillotine! You can take away my life but you can’t take away Coachella!”
“Okay, I think yo
u took it a little too far,” Alexei says.
“Fine,” Mr. Contreras says. “As a punishment for skipping school I’m taking away all your phones. For a week.”
“Nooooooooooo!!!!!!” I holler—this is much worse than the guillotine—then, “Wait a second, you can’t do that, you’re just our English teacher.” Good thinking, Lele.
“So I can’t keep it all week. But I can take it away right now, for this hour.”
“Noooooooooooo!!!!!” It hurts, it really does. We hand them over and he puts them on his desk, WHERE I CAN STILL SEE MY PRECIOUS BABY. It’s like he’s taunting me on purpose.
As Mr. Contreras, a.k.a Hitler, a.k.a the Devil, lectures about literary devices (hyperbole, alliteration, foreshadowing, etc.), I catch myself drifting into a lovely daydream, and I don’t stop it from happening:
I’m brave, I’m an adventurer, I climb up on my desk and take big, teetering steps from desk to desk while Mr. Contreras is scribbling on the board, all the way to the other side of the room, where I snatch up my phone and hold it over my head like I’m an Olympic champion!
Snap back to reality, oh there goes gravity: I am alone, without my one true love, without my sunshine. Mr. Contreras took my sunshine away, and I’ll probably never forgive him for that. Doesn’t he understand my phone is my life? Without it I would literally be nothing—or, I at least wouldn’t have achieved internet stardom, that’s for sure.
Once I have my phone back I cling to it like a mother reunited with her long-lost child. I make a vow to never let it out of my sight again.
• • •
The next morning a highly sleep-deprived Lele is sleeping through her alarms. I apologize for speaking about myself in the third person, but that’s the sort of thing that starts to happen when I’m so deliriously out of it.
“LELE! Get up!” It’s my mom, shaking my feet poking out from under the blankets. I kick her away. “Get up, get up, get up! You’re going to be late for school and you already missed so many days of school from your crazy shenanigans!” Zzzzzz. Also, Mom and Dad let me go to Coachella, so it’s sort of her fault too, right? “Lele, if you don’t get up right this minute you’re grounded!” I can hear her voice in this distance but I just don’t care.
“Five more minutes,” I mumble.
“No more minutes! If you miss any more school you might get suspended, is that what you want?”
“Sure. More time to sleep.”
“Agh, Lele, I’ve had enough of you.” She leaves the room; for a second I think I’m in the clear, but when she comes back she has a small cupful of water that she THROWS ON ME.
“Mom, you’re crazy,” I slur, eyes still closed. “I’m gonna get you back for this.”
“Oh, okay, I know what will get you up.”
“Nothing.”
“I’ll think of something,” she says, super proud of herself. “I’ll just take this.” Oh no, it can’t be, anything but that. I hear her scoop my phone off the nightstand and start to walk away.
“No!” I jump out of bed and beat her to the door. “Hand it over and no one gets hurt.”
“Yep”—she practically pats herself on the back—“works every time.”
• • •
That was the beginning of a very weird phone day. By that I mean my phone went through some weird stuff. I guess God is also punishing me for skipping school by antagonizing my most treasured possession. I never would have thought that God and Mr. Contreras were in cahoots.
First, during gym, I have my phone secured into my underwear elastic so I can keep tabs on it at all times. While I’m playing tennis against Yvette, my phone goes flying into a nearby tree and falls to the ground. I run to it, cradle it, and am ecstatically relieved to see that it is still fully intact, unscratched and unharmed.
Then, as I’m walking through the field where the guys are playing golf, I accidentally drop my phone and some bozo whacks it with his golf club! Again, it goes flying, and again it is magically uninjured.
On my way home from school, walking with Darcy, I say something funny (like I often do, no big deal) and it makes Darcy laugh so hard that she bumps into me and knocks my phone out of my hand. It spirals into the street just as a car is coming. I consider jumping in front of it but reluctantly opt to let the car run over my phone. This is the naïve part of my day when I start to feel like maybe I’m being protected by angels: my phone has survived its third attack of the day. Not a scratch! Miracles do happen, and they happen to me!
But it looks like my luck just ran out. When I get home after my long, trying day and set my phone lightly on the dining room table, INSTANT SHATTER.
The poor thing finally caves under the weight of the world and erupts into a million slivers.
I worry I may never love again.
33
Better Grades / White Girls at the Movies
(5,850,551 Followers)
But I do love again. As it turns out I am due for an upgrade, and the iPhone 6 is super dope. I get it in white and gold because I’m feeling like a straight-up rock star these days. I don’t even get a case, ’cause I’m a badass bitch and I don’t learn from experience.
In third-period calculus, we get back the results from a recent pop quiz and to my dismay, but not surprise, I have received a D minus. Yikes. I’m a smart kid even if I don’t pull straight A’s, but a D is D-pressing. Still, pop quiz?! Come on, people, how am I supposed to do well on a math test if I don’t know about it enough in advance to write all the answers out on my hand? Seems unreasonable, TBQH. Of course Darcy, who is sitting next to me, gets an A. Why’s this girl gotta be so smart all the time? I bet she barely even studied. School just comes naturally to her. I want to be proud of her but I’m just jealous.
“What did you get?” she asks.
“D minus.”
“Oh, I got an A.”
“Yes, Darcy, I can see that. You’re literally holding it up in my face.”
She laughs, I laugh, she laughs, I laugh, all the while I’m holding a lighter up to her test. She doesn’t notice until it catches fire and the smell of burning paper fills the room.
Oops. I’m immediately sent to the principal’s office and, as it turns out, lighting fires in class is a very serious offense.
• • •
“Lele, what were you thinking?” The principal, Mrs. Lombardo, is sitting behind her desk littered with Doctor Who bobbleheads and pictures of what I presume are her children. She has short grayish brown grandma hair and is wearing a beige pantsuit. There are posters of cats in human outfits on the walls and one of Garfield hating Mondays.
“Do you have any idea how dangerous lighting paper on fire in a classroom is? What if it had gotten out of hand? What if you set the whole class on fire? The whole school? Did you even consider that for one second? I could have you expelled, permanently. I could even call the cops, Lele, do you understand that? Do you think you can just do whatever you want because you’re a little bit famous? I mean, I honestly want to know what you were thinking.”
My first instinct is to tell her that I’m not a little bit famous, I’m almost a lot famous at this point (closing in on a billion loops viewed!!!), but I bite my tongue. Note to self: “Almost A Lot Famous” is a great idea for a Vine.
“Well”—I sigh deeply—“to be really honest, I let jealousy get the better of me. Darcy Smith, the girl whose test I lit on fire, is a good friend of mine, and she’s a lot smarter than I am. Maybe not in every way, but definitely when it comes to school. And that makes me feel bad about myself.” I let my eyes get a little watery; the last thing I need is getting arrested for setting a small fire, and you can’t send a girl to jail who is being open and vulnerable with you about her emotions, right?
“So when Darcy started bragging about the A she got on this pop quiz even after she knew I got a D minus, I went a little crazy. I put my lighter under the paper as a joke at first but then I realized how easy it would be to actually set the thing on fire. But t
hen I felt terrible. I’m so ashamed of myself, Mrs. Lombardo. I just want to be happy for my friend. I didn’t think I was being cruel, I thought of it as a practical joke, but now I see how wrong I was to do what I did. I don’t know who I’ve become. I feel so pathetic!” At this I burst into tears, half of which are dramatized and half of which are real.
The dramatized tears come from me wanting Mrs. Lombardo to feel extremely sympathetic and take pity on me. The real tears come from my realization that I really don’t feel confident in who I am or comfortable in my own skin. I’m achieving internet success at such a young age, and that is super cool, but it doesn’t mean I’m any closer to knowing what I want from life or feeling loved. As I cry I realize it’s mostly because until that moment I hadn’t realized how insecure I’d been feeling for so long.
“Oh, honey.” She hands me a box of flamingo-pink tissues and leans in like she wants to pat me on the head. “I remember when I was your age, I was so insecure. We all were so insecure, that’s part of what it means to be a teenager. Most people don’t start feeling good about themselves until they’re in college. Or right after college when they get their first job. For some people it’s not until they’re in their thirties. Or forties. For some it’s not until retirement. I think most people never feel good about themselves, to be honest. Or, TBQH, as you kids say these days.” Wince. “But hey, in a way that should make you feel a little bit better, you’re not alone! Feeling bad about yourself is something almost everyone struggles with at one point or the other, and the people who don’t are probably psychopaths. Like my ex-husband, for example.” Grimace. “I think a great way to start feeling better about yourself is to celebrate your peers for who they are and realize that you’re different than they are, but that doesn’t mean you’re any less special. You’re special for being you, and they’re special for being them. No two people are the same, and that’s what makes us all beautiful! I know this is all very Dr. Seuss, but trust me! I’ve been around long enough to know these things.” Oh my God, could she be any more oblivious? “I guess what I’m trying to say is, don’t compare yourself to other people, focus on your strengths, and love yourself unconditionally, even when you’re feeling weak. Well, that speech went on longer than I thought it would. Did I get through to you at all, Lele?” At least her intentions were good. And I do want to avoid being expelled.