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.
"You're picking your friends," I say. "We can't just do a video of your friends."
"I can't work with you!" she says, and throws down the yearbook. "You're insane. You're more insane than I thought at first."
"Really?" I ask. I'm not offended, just genuinely curious. What did I do that was so crazy?
"Really." She picks up her bag and makes a pile of the yearbooks.
"Girls, if you're using the yearbooks for the project, feel free to take them home," Mr. Singer tells us from the circulation desk, interrupting our conversation.
"Thank you so much!" I say, and then realize I probably shouldn't be this excited about taking a bunch of dusty old yearbooks home.
Chelsea takes a few yearbooks and puts them in her bag. She raises her eyebrows like she also thinks it's cool that we can take them home.
I want to get back to our conversation. "Well, what would you say if I told you I could find Sasha Preston? And I could get her to talk to us?"
"You can't find her. I just told you that. So I'd say the same thing-you're insane." She picks up her bag and walks out of the library, reading something on her phone instead of looking ahead. Then she stops and looks back at me. "But, fine, find her if you can. What do we have to lose? Just more time when we could be working on this dumb thing."
I nod.
"Tell me when you find her," she yells back to me as she's leaving the library. "I'll be holding my breath."
I smile even though she can't see me anymore.
After finding Sasha in that yearbook, and taking a few yearbooks home, I think I can consider today a success. Now all I have to do is convince Chelsea of the same thing.
