Reel Life Starring Us Read online

  “I won’t listen. Just call her.”

  “I’ll go upstairs.”

  “Dina. Call her now.”

  My mom is a half a minute away from screaming. I do not want her to scream. Because then my dad will get involved, and he’ll be mad at me. Nathan will be late to his game, and it will all be my fault.

  I take my cell phone out of my jeans pocket and dial Chelsea’s number. The only reason I have it is because Mr. Valakis made us exchange numbers so we’d be prepared to work on the project together. Rockwood Hills Middle School isn’t the kind of school to have a phone directory, and I wouldn’t have one anyway since I came a month late.

  Please don’t be home. Please don’t be home. Please don’t be home, I pray. And then I realize how dumb I am because even if she isn’t home this is her cell phone number. Please don’t answer. Please don’t answer. Please don’t answer.

  “Hello?” a male voice answers on the fourth ring.

  A male voice? On her cell phone? Does she have a boyfriend? Or is this her dad answering her phone? I absolutely forbid my parents from answering my phone, and they obey my request. Usually.

  “Um, hi, is Chelsea there?”

  “No, she’s at the movies with her friends.” A pause. “Who’s this?”

  Oh, God, clearly this person knows I’m not her friend, because if I was her friend, I’d be at the movies with her. And everyone else. So who am I talking to? And why doesn’t Chelsea have her cell phone with her? Why did my mom make me do this? And why is my life so unbelievably embarrassing?

  “Oh, um, I’m Dina.” I swallow hard and debate just hanging up.

  “Did you try her cell?”

  “I thought this was her cell?” I say and feel even worse than before. What is worse than an utter living hell? Whatever it is, I’m experiencing it.

  “No, this is the home line.” Pause again. “I’ll tell her Dina called, though. She should be—”

  “No, that’s okay,” I interrupt. “Um, thanks. Bye.”

  I hang up while he’s still sort of half-talking, something like Are you sure?

  “So?” my mom asks. I was so focused on how absolutely awful the call was that I forgot my mom was still in the kitchen.

  “Don’t ask.” I squint even though it’s not even sunny in here and try as hard as I can to keep from crying. “I’ll go get my sweatshirt and meet you guys in the car.”

  “Dina. You’re my daughter. I know when you’re about to cry,” she says as I’m already out of the kitchen and in the hallway.

  She’s right. She does know. And I do cry. Up in my room, into my pillow, like some pathetic girl who doesn’t get what she wants. But I’m not pathetic. I just don’t have any friends here, and now even Chelsea’s dad knows that.

  And Chelsea’s at the movies with all those girls who did the “Sea-Sea Stern” cheer during badminton, and I bet Ross and all the boys that sit at the table next to them during lunch are there, too. And I bet they’re all slurping Cherry Cokes and eating mega bags of popcorn with greasy liquid butter. And they’re all laughing and wearing their cropped leggings and their long cardigans. All of the girls’ hair is straight and perfect and they look like models from the Delia’s catalog.

  And I’m at home wearing last season’s Gap jeans with a zip-up sweater I got for Hanukkah two years ago. And I won’t be going to the movies. I’ll be going to my brother’s stupid Rockwood Hills Soccer League game, where I’ll probably see other kids from school.

  Not the Chelsea Sterns but the Katherine Fellsons and the Maura Eastlys, the girls who aren’t popular, who live in the Spruce section. The girls who are just normal, who don’t worry about being seen at their brothers’ soccer games because they have friends.

  I suppose I could try to be friends with them. They let me sit with them at lunch. They’re acceptable. They’d probably welcome me more than Chelsea would. But I don’t want to. I don’t want to be someone who just fades into the background, someone who’s friends with people by default.

  “Dina,” my mom yells to me from downstairs. “Come on. Now. We’re going. Nathan’s going to be late.”

  “Coming,” I yell back. I can’t believe this is how today’s turning out.

  Forget this. Forget trying so hard to be friends with someone who doesn’t want me. I never thought I’d be someone like that. I don’t want to be that person. I don’t want to be so desperate. I’m changing my mind. I’m going to become friends with Katherine and Maura. It will be fine. Katherine and Maura are fine. They’re more than fine; they’re good enough at least. There are extra seats at their lunch table. And they let me sit there.

  They accept me. I accept them. They’re the Acceptables.

  And that’s all I really need right now.

  Sasha Preston piece of advice: If you’re

  tired, wear something red.

  My parents always used to be the type to go out on Saturday nights. Fancy places, too. My mom would wear nice pants or a dress, and my dad would wear a shirt and jacket and sometimes a tie.

  Lately, not so much.

  And I can tell my mom wants to go out because she’ll drop not-so-subtle hints like, “The Cohens are going to Riverbay on Saturday. They said we’re welcome to join them.” Or “The Steinfelds have a subscription to this off-Broadway show series. We can get discount tickets.”

  In the beginning, my dad would go along with it. Up until about a month ago, he’d even still go out to the fanciest restaurants and order bottles of wine, and it seemed like nothing had really changed at all.

  Until mid-September. It was like he flicked a switch, or someone flicked a switch for him. That’s when he started working out for hours and staying in his workout clothes all day and making every day feel like every other day.

  These are the cues I hate, the cues that tell me things are bad and getting worse, and they make me wonder how bad things will end up getting. I wonder what rock bottom is and when we’ll hit it. And I’m scared of what will happen when we do.

  I was happy to be sleeping at Kendall’s on Saturday night just so I could get away from it, but even though I wasn’t home, all the feelings were still there. They were stuck at the back of my brain, and as hard as I tried to get rid of them, they stayed stuck.

  Even all the talk about Ross Grunner wasn’t getting my mind off of things at home. And it was good talk, too. Molly and Kendall convinced me that Ross really does like me, and they tried to convince me that I really like him, too.

  So I called him and we talked for forty-one minutes, and it was a good conversation that flowed normally. We decided we’d hang out one day after school, and he even offered to help with the video. He’s good with that kind of stuff. And truthfully, it would be good to have some help and to have another person to work with us. Being one-on-one with Dina for that long can make you crazy after a while.

  There were even parts of the night when I felt like I could maybe open up to them about stuff, and maybe it wouldn’t be so weird. They were my friends, after all, and they liked me, so they’d understand.

  But then they’d say something like how sad it was that AJ Marcuzzi had to move away because his house was going into foreclosure. But they didn’t say it like they were sad and they felt bad for them—they talked about it more in a gossipy way. I know for sure they heard their parents gossiping about it just the same way.

  And I joined in on the conversation saying, yeah, it was sad and all of that. Because as long as they didn’t know the truth about me, then I was just like them, the way I always was.

  And at least they didn’t bring up the carrot video again.

  So now it’s Monday morning and I’m sitting in homeroom, feeling tired and thinking too hard. All my friends and I are in the same homeroom this year. At first, I thought this was a good thing, but now I’m beginning to think it’s not. They surround me.

  “Chels, you seemed so quiet on Saturday,” Molly says. “We all want to talk to you about it.”

  A
nd Kendall says, “We’re very worried about you. You have to talk to us.”

  “Guys, I’m fine.” I laugh a little to prove my point.

  “Yeah, right,” Kendall says. “You didn’t even freak out about Ross Grunner.”

  “Guys,” I say again, looking around to make sure he’s not listening to us. “I mean, what’s there to say? We’ll see what happens.”

  He’s sitting in the back of the room, wearing a gray button-down and dark jeans. His hair’s always a little messed up on top, but I know he tries to get it to look that way. Some girls think that’s cute. I’m not sure.

  “Okay, quiet, quiet, quiet,” Mrs. Feder says, already sounding annoyed as she walks into the classroom. “Attendance, and then silent homeroom. It’s way too early for all this noise.”

  She says this every morning. Homeroom is always the same time, so it’s obviously always too early for all that noise. But today I’m actually thankful for Mrs. Feder because it means I don’t have to talk to my friends.

  Which is kind of sad, actually.

  After homeroom I’m walking to math when I spot Dina. I don’t know what to do. Should I say anything about how she called my house? My dad told me about it when I got home on Sunday. He’s really good at giving messages, especially now that he never really leaves the house.

  Dina’s looking down as she walks past. I can’t tell if she’s trying to avoid me or not. I didn’t call her back, mostly because I didn’t really have much to say. The weekend had been so tough, even the excitement about Sasha Preston had worn off.

  She looks up for half a second and our eyes meet, and I casually wave, but no words come out of my mouth.

  She probably thinks I hate her. I may not like her, but I don’t think I hate her. At least, I don’t want her to think I hate her.

  I’ll talk to her at lunch. That’s what I’ll do. I’ll just casually tap her on the shoulder on the lunch line and say that my dad didn’t give me the message until really late last night and I wasn’t sure how late I could call her house. Yeah, that works. I’ll say that my dad is really bad with messages. She doesn’t need to know the truth. It’s not like she’s ever going to come over to my house. At least, I hope not.

  But when lunch rolls around, I see her walking around the cafeteria with the video camera again, and I’m too nervous about what my friends are going to say if go up and talk to her. So I don’t do anything.

  Maybe she forgot that I didn’t call her back—maybe it just slipped her mind. That could happen.

  But to make up for it, I get to the library a little early and get out all the yearbooks, even the ones behind Mr. Singer’s desk. And I get her a bag of Peanut M&M’s from the vending machine.

  The library helper hasn’t been here since last week. He must help out other places or something. Or maybe he’s finished with his community service requirement for the semester. I get all my community service hours picking up trash in the park around the corner from my house. You’d be surprised at how many people litter. It’s pretty shocking how much trash there is even after I’ve cleaned it all up just the day before.

  I don’t know why I’m going so out of my way to be nice to Dina. I guess it’s because I feel bad, or maybe I just feel like it’s one thing I can kind of control in my life. And I feel like it’s one good, positive thing that I can do. I don’t feel so bad lying to my friends if I’m nice to Dina. It’s a ridiculous theory, but it makes sense in my head. And the thing is, I don’t have to worry about Dina liking me—I know she does, so it’s one less thing to worry about.

  Wow. Since when did I become a psychoanalyst? That came out of nowhere.

  “Hey,” I say to Dina as she’s walking in. I’m a little loud for the library, but I want to get her attention. Luckily, Mr. Singer doesn’t say anything.

  “Oh, hi. You’re early,” she says.

  “And I brought you Peanut M&M’s.” I hand her the bag and pat the chair next to me, motioning for her to sit down.

  “Thanks so much,” she says.

  “Did you have a good weekend?” I ask her, and then regret it because now she’s going to bring up the fact that I didn’t call her back.

  She shrugs. “It was kind of boring. I had to go to my brother’s soccer game. You have a sister, right? Does she play in the league?”

  “Yeah, she’s in fourth grade. I think she’s on the Super Stoppers this year.”

  “My brother, too. I mean, about the fourth-grade thing. I have no idea what team he’s on. They all sound the same to me.”

  I roll my eyes. “Yeah, that soccer league stuff is nutso. The parents think they’re, like, training Olympians or something. My dad used to coach.” I pause. Why, why, why did I just bring up my dad? She’s going to ask me why he doesn’t coach anymore.

  Dina nods. “Did he get too fed up with the politics to continue? I feel like that happened all the time where I used to live.”

  “Um, yeah.” I swallow hard. “So, anyway, I was looking at the yearbooks over the weekend. And I think I uncovered something!” My voice comes out more excited-sounding than I actually feel at this moment.

  “Really? What?” Dina pops an M&M in her mouth and moves her chair closer to mine. Her hair smells like papaya or some other fruit, and it reminds me of the shampoo my counselors used at camp. I get a sudden sad feeling, wishing so much that it was still July.

  “Something happened to Sasha when she was at this school. She went from having friends to not having friends.” I open the yearbook. “Here, look at this. In her seventh-grade yearbook, Sasha Preston had lots of friends. Like, a lot of them. They wrote messages to each other and everything. And in the sixth grade, too. But then in eighth grade, nothing. It was like she was a total loner—no friends, no messages. How did everything just change like that?”

  We sit and look through the yearbooks as closely as we can, especially the ones from when Sasha was in sixth and seventh grades. We look up all the friends she was in pictures with and then look them up in the eighth-grade one to find them.

  “So they all still lived here and went to this school,” Dina says. “She wasn’t a loner because all her friends moved away.”

  “Yeah, they were all still here.”

  “So what could have happened? Look, no secret messages to each other in this one. She doesn’t even have an eighth-grade testimonial section. It’s just totally blank under her name.” Dina mushes up her face like she feels really bad for Sasha. I don’t know why—her life certainly turned out okay.

  “Here’s my theory. What if she was a really bad friend? Like, she stole the boy her best friend was in love with for years?” I ask. I don’t want to talk to Dina about the whole Ross Grunner thing and Kendall. I can’t let her in on all the drama with them.

  “You think she’d do that?”

  “No idea,” I say. “I mean, it probably happens a lot. More than we realize.” Stop, Chelsea, stop! I don’t know why I can’t keep my mouth shut.

  “It’s never happened to me,” Dina admits. “My best friend, Ali, and I had fake crushes. We picked guys we didn’t really know at all. We never, like, planned to do anything about our crushes. But my old school was kind of innocent like that.”

  “What do you mean ‘innocent’?” I ask. The way she’s describing it, it sounds like she grew up Amish or something. But I know she didn’t, because I saw her at Hebrew School registration at the end of the summer, even though I had no idea who she was at the time.

  “Boys and girls didn’t hang out. Or go out.” She looks down at the yearbook. “Clearly, I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

  Suddenly, Dina’s all nervous, and I have no idea why.

  “Wait, so you’ve never really liked a guy?”

  She starts chewing on the inside of her cheek. “I have. I just never expected anything to happen. And now it definitely won’t since I moved away.” She sighs. “So, you mean to say that people steal their friends’ crushes all the time here?”

  “
No. I guess sometimes. But not all the time.” I clench my teeth. I don’t want to say anything else.

  Dina’s about to say something else when I see Mr. Valakis out of the corner of my eye. “We need to look busy,” I tell her under my breath. “Mr. Valakis.”

  “So, we have about twenty minutes of strong footage,” Dina starts. “We need to get more, and focus on the direction we want to go, and then streamline the whole thing.”

  Wow, she’s good. She should be an actress or a spy. I don’t know where she got that from, but it sounded so believable and I really wish it were true.

  “Hi, girls,” Mr. Valakis says. “I was looking for you. I just want to get a sense of your progress—so we can help you if we need to. You still have some more class time to work on this, but, as you know, it’s hard to get good material when classes are in session.”

  “Uh-huh.” Dina smiles.

  “So?”

  “We’re working on it, Mr. Valakis,” I say.

  “I’m just looking for some kind of progress report here,” he says, sounding a bit confused.

  “Oh, we’re doing fine,” Dina says. “But you know how it is when you’re in the thick of a project. It’s hard to discuss it with people.”

  I cover my mouth and try as hard as I can not to crack up. The thick of a project? Where does she get this stuff?

  “Well, I’ll need to see something soon. Next week or the week after, at the latest. Good luck, girls.”

  He walks away.

  “Next week?” I say.

  “Whoa.”

  “We’ve got serious work to do.”

  “I know.” She looks at me like she’s debating about saying something, not sure if she should or not. “But I have to ask you something.”

  Oh, no. She’s heard a rumor. That’s what someone says when they’ve heard a rumor and they want to know if it’s true or not. It’s all happening, everything’s falling apart, and it feels like it just snuck up on me. “What?” I ask tentatively.

  “Why didn’t you call me back?” She crumples up the M&M’s wrapper in her hand. “Because in my old school people called me back. In my old school, I was actually someone that people liked.” She stops talking, probably because she realizes how pathetic she sounds.