Nice and Mean (9 page)

“Should I sit?” Tessa pointed at the interview chair I'd set aside.

“Yes, please.”

I shivered. This was really happening! The bargaining with Marina—the questions I'd prepared by flashlight—I was like an Olympic gymnast when it all came down to one big moment. I grabbed my clipboard of questions and hoped I could stick my landing.

“Ready?” I asked Tessa.

She nodded. Good.

Now, how should I start exactly?

Suddenly, I remembered a TV special I'd seen about filming the news. Just like the cameramen had said there, I said, “And five, four, three”—mouthed
two
,
one
, and pressed “record.” My video had begun.

I tried to make Tessa comfortable by asking a few regular questions—her best subject in school, her favorite lunch. Then I started on the ones from my clipboard. “So,” I said, “how do you decide what to wear?”

She frowned. “Do you mean, in the morning? I guess I look at the weather, and then—”

“Oh, not that,” I put in. “I mean, when you're buying clothes. How do you decide what to buy?”

She hunched her shoulders. “I don't know. I guess I buy whatever's in the stores I like.”

It didn't seem to mean much to her, but of course—stores! People went shopping together. Sometimes even after school, when I had to take care of Pallavi.

“How do you decide which stores to go to?” I asked.

“Just . . . wherever my friends and I go.”

“But you don't buy everything.” I hoped I could edit myself out of the interview, because I was talking way too much. “You must have a reason why you choose some
things and not others.”

She looked off to the side, and I started to worry that she wished she hadn't agreed to be interviewed. “I guess I just buy what looks good on me.” She smiled. “And what my mom says I'm allowed to wear.”

I smiled too, relieved and feeling brave enough to go on to the next question. “Do you try to be unique or to fit in? And why?”

“Um.” Tessa chewed on her lip. “A little of both, I guess.”

That made sense. Today she was just wearing a green shirt under a navy hoodie, but I'd seen her wear a gold-sequined belt like the other African-American girls in her clique. I was kind of hoping she'd say something about that, so I asked, “What makes you decide you're going to wear something trendy? Is it, like, a special day, or a certain thing you want to wear?”

“I don't know,” she said. “I just do.” Beside me, Phoebe had started texting. I knew I had better hurry it up.

“So, how do you think people decide some things are cool and some are not?” I asked.

“Um . . . maybe they read about it somewhere?”

“Okay!” I thanked her and pressed “stop.” Phew! That was way harder than I'd thought it would be. But Tessa had always been kind of shy. Phoebe, who was next, wasn't shy
at all. I hoped she would talk about the clothes she'd brought back from Japan. She had lots of things that no one else had.

I asked Phoebe a few of the regular questions. She had a really hilarious story about wearing an apron to school one day, and the interview was going so well that I started making up questions as I went along: “Have you ever noticed that people think some nationalities are cooler than others?”

Phoebe froze, like she did whenever a ball came toward her in P.E. “What do you mean?” she asked.

“Like, those Manga comic books are cool, but”—I had to laugh—“comic books about the Hindu gods are definitely
not
cool?”

She pulled her hands into the sleeves of her sweater. “I don't know. I'm not really into Manga.”

“Oh gosh, I shouldn't have even . . . never mind.” How could I have asked that? Hadn't Priyanka and I hated when people used to ask us to dance bhangra, since neither of us was a good dancer? “I just thought it was interesting that people are so interested in Manga,” I told Phoebe, “and I wondered if you ever thought about it.”

“Not really,” she said. “But ever since I was, like, eight, people have been like, ‘Ooh, bring me stickers when you go to Japan!' It's so weird that Japanese stuff is so popular. I mean, I like it, but hello, I'm Japanese! I kind of want to
say to people, ‘Get your own stickers!' But it's also kind of cool.”

I nodded. I kept having to remind myself that we weren't supposed to be having a conversation with the person we were interviewing.

Phoebe squinched up her face. “Is that it?” she asked.

“Oh—” I tried to come up with another question, but couldn't. “Yeah, that's it,” I said. “Thanks.” I switched off the camera.

Just then, the auditorium erupted in noise, and Flora and Lainey bounded up the aisle. “A break, finally!” said Flora, fixing her ponytail. “I thought we'd never be done with that scene.”

I smiled. “So,” I asked them, “who's going first?”

“Me!” called Lainey.

Flora stuck her tongue out, and they both laughed.

“Okay,” I said. “Have a seat.”

After I warmed up Lainey, I summoned my courage to ask her the question I'd been dying to ask her. “So. How do you choose what to wear?”

She shrugged. “I don't know. Some things just seem cool, so I wear them.”

“Okay. Do you try to be unique or to fit in? And why?”

“I definitely try to be unique,” she said. “Life is too bor
ing when you dress like everybody else.”

I wished I could be as confident as she was! “I was wondering,” I said, making it up as I went along, “how did you decide to buy pink high-tops?”

Lainey was one of the only people in our grade who wore those sneakers, but they didn't look dorky, like Priyanka's old Reeboks. I really wanted to find out how people knew when originality was cool and when it was doomed.

She shrugged. “I don't know why I decided to buy them. People know that I wouldn't take pink seriously, so it's kind of like a joke.”

A joke? Talking tofu was a joke, sure, but sneakers? “If another person wore them, would they be cool?”

She fiddled with her bracelets. “It depends on the person. If they were, like, babyish or trying to be cute, I wouldn't think they were cool, but maybe that other person would. I think it's all in how you look at things.”

It was the perfect quote to end with. “Thanks.”

“Whoa.” Flora was staring at me with her mouth half-open, spiky hairs falling out of her ponytail. “What was that?”

“What do you mean?” My mouth suddenly felt dry.

“Those questions,” asked Flora. “What is your video about, anyway?”

“Um . . . just . . . how people decide what to wear?”

“But . . . why?”

“Well . . . because that's what Marina's video is about. She's doing that show,
Victim/Victorious
, and I kind of had to do something like that. It's not what I would have chosen, but”—I threw a glance at Lainey, in the hopes that she might understand—“I sort of didn't have a choice.”

Flora nodded slowly. “Okay.” She took her seat on the interview chair. “I just . . . that's kind of weird for you, you know?”

I knew what she meant, but was I really too uncool even to wonder why people wore what they wore? Lately, talking to Flora felt like negotiating with a second Marina.

Once we started filming, though, she was great.

“I think people at our school get, like, these secret e-mails,” said Flora, looking sly. “You have to subscribe on a website called Clones.com. Or Snobs.com. You have to have at least six Hollister purchases to get the password, and once you do, you get special e-mails telling you what's in and what's out.”

I smothered a laugh. Still, how interesting! I had always thought that, like me, Flora couldn't afford to dress like the popular girls, or wasn't allowed. I never knew that she thought people who did it were dumb.

“. . . and if they ever send me one of those e-mails,” Flora was saying, “I won't be excited. I'll put it right where it
belongs: the trash.”

Talk about a great ending. “Cut!”

Flora grinned. “You're so official!”

“Thanks!” I checked the tripod, which had wobbled throughout her interview. Wait, I should have asked why she wanted to be different. Drat! Well, I could sit her back down again, right? Maybe
that
wasn't official, but—

“Sachi?” Lainey said.

I looked up. To my astonishment, three other girls I only sort of knew were leaning on the row of chairs, waiting to be interviewed!

“Hey,” said one of them, chewing on a nail, “can we be in your movie?”

I flexed my fingers, dying for a good knuckle crack, while the next person took her seat. I was thrilled that people kept wanting to be interviewed, but no one was giving me any answers I could use. The video from last year hadn't had people stumbling over their words. Maybe they just had had an easier topic. But still, Marina's friends had had to memorize lines, and they'd done a great job! Marina and Sachi's video would come to be known as Partly Funny with Pretty Eighth-Grade Girls and Partly Boring with Lots and Lots of Talking.

“All right,” called Ms. Mancini, “I need everyone up here
for scene five.”

“Oops.” Lainey jumped up. “Showtime.”

The crowd of girls scrambled down the aisle. “Meet us in the lobby later,” Flora called.

I started packing up the video camera, looking around for Marina, when a familiarly scratchy voice behind me said, “Oh, so you're only interviewing girls? I see how it goes.”

My stomach dropped into my feet. “Hi!” I said brightly as I turned to face Alex, who was leaning against the seats and grinning. “I didn't see you there.”

“Yeah, the tech crew is pretty much invisible,” he said, “but we have our ways.”

“Um, that's cool,” I said. I didn't really know what tech crew did, but I didn't think I was supposed to ask.

“So, can I?” he asked, gesturing at something.

“Can you . . .” Was he asking what I thought he was asking? “. . . be in my video?”

He nodded.

“Of course!” My cheeks felt hot again. Had I written any questions that boys would want to answer? “Have a seat.”

As he walked over to the chair, I tried to ignore how incredibly cute he looked in his dark green sweatshirt, so I could figure out what on earth to ask him. Did boys even
think about their clothes? Did they talk about what was popular? I didn't know much about boys, but I was pretty sure they didn't.

“Is everything okay?” Alex asked.

I set down my clipboard on the chair next to the tripod. “Yup, everything's fine! So, I'm just going to . . .” Why could I say “And five, four, three, two” in front of girls I barely knew, but not to the boy I sat next to every single day? “I'll press ‘record,' and the red light will go on, and then I'll point to you—”

Alex crossed his legs. “Yeah, I'm good. I've been videotaped before.”

“Right.” I tilted the camera downward, my fingers numb. What was I going to say?

“Um . . .” I pressed the “record” button. “So, I'm making this video about how people know what they like, and I wondered, how do you know?”

Alex chewed his lower lip. “I'm sorry, can you say that again?”

Not for a million dollars, it sounded so stupid. “People like all different things, right? Some guys dress like rappers”—yes, like anyone in our school dressed like a rapper!—“and some are more preppy, some are . . .” How
did
guys dress? Our school wasn't like a Nickelodeon show, where one guy
was sporty and one was skatey. “Anyway, I guess I'm just wondering, how do you decide”—what to wear? That was like asking him about being undressed!—“what look you want?” I finished lamely.

He hunched his shoulders. “I don't know,” he said. “I just—if it's cold, I put on a sweater. If it's hot, I put on a T-shirt. I don't, like, think about it.”

Maybe he didn't. But couldn't someone have given me an answer?

“Okay, cut,” I said, letting out a breath. “Thank you, that was great.”

His mouth was half-open, his green braces visible. “That's it?”

“Yup.” Unable to stand the humiliation another moment, I switched off the video camera and clicked it off the tripod. “That's it.”

“Okay, well, thanks.”

“Thank
you
.” I pretended to be incredibly involved with the tripod. My whole body seemed to be glowing with heat.

Somehow I made it back up to the video lab without dying of embarrassment. The Alex part of the day wasn't over, though. When I met Flora and Lainey in the lobby after the end of Video, something about their grins told me
that the misery had only just begun.

“Sachi!” Flora bumped me with her hip. “Were you interviewing Alex Bradley?”

I checked my bag for my history folder, which I thought I'd forgotten. “Um. Yeah.”

“Oh my lord,” said Flora, “that boy has to butt into everything.”

“No he doesn't.” I found my folder and zipped my bag.

Flora shook her head as we pushed open the school doors. “You should see him in math. He has to raise his hand for every problem, even if he's wrong.”

“Well, in English he writes really funny stories,” I said, a sweat starting up on the back of my neck. Why did Flora think she was right about everything?

“Ooh!” said Flora, looking at me across Lainey. “Sachi, do you
like
him?”

“Yeah, do you?” Lainey asked.

“No!”

But I said it too quickly, and they both laughed.

Flora chanted, “Sachi has a boyfriend, Sachi has a boyfriend.”

I hiked up my backpack. “You sound like Pallavi.” And I had just sounded like Priyanka.

“Okay, never mind!” Flora rolled her eyes as we stopped
at the light. “We were just joking. God, you're so cranky these days.”