Read Online Generation Next by Oli White - Free Book Online

traffic our way. Austin’s gut feeling was that we shouldn’t put the video up right away, but give it a couple of weeks until we started gathering a good amount of views and then hit them with it full throttle. In the meantime, I did a blindfolded football skills tutorial with Miles and a couple of boys who played for the Watford FC youth team, and appeared with some up-and-coming YouTubers whose subscribers were starting to go through the roof and who were happy to help us out.
    The funniest thing we did in those first few weeks was have Ella follow one of the coolest new local bands around Asda while they went food shopping, interviewing them about what they were buying, and why, with a GoPro on her head while Ava replaced the junk food and ready meals in their trolley with healthier choices: music and nutrition all in one video—what’s not to like? OK, OK, so our ideas were a little bit left-field, but that was the idea, wasn’t it? That was what made us original and was going to make us stand out . . . I hoped. It was early days, yes, but I felt like GenNext was potentially off to an auspicious start.
    There was only one thing bugging me during the final ten days leading up to the launch of the site, and that was a distinct lack of Ella. Although she’d worked herbutt off with the rest of us for the previous few weeks, suddenly she always seemed to be busy doing something else—at least that was how it appeared to me. Even on the odd day she was around she seemed distracted and somehow . . . well, different, I suppose. Even the texts and WhatsApping action dwindled to almost nothing.
    “I’ve just had a lot of family stuff on, and I’ve really got to step the revision up after all the time I’ve spent on GenNext,” she told me when I asked her—as casually as I possibly could, of course—what was going on. We were eating lunch in the school common room on a Monday, and I felt like it was the first time we’d sat down and talked in days.
    “But you are still interested in being part of GenNext, right? You’re not bailing on us already, are you?”
    “Oh God, Jack, no way,” she said, pushing her prawn salad away and looking me in the eye. “Please don’t think that. It’s just . . . well the thing is—”
    At that moment we were rudely interrupted by Ava, who threw herself down on a chair and slumped across the table complaining for the next ten minutes about how tired she was. Eventually Ella grabbed her things and got up to leave, cutting our conversation annoyingly short.
    “Look, we’ll speak later, Jack,” she said. “I’ll be down at HQ tonight so we can catch up then.”
    “Cool.” I watched her walk away, hoping I might finally get to the bottom of what was bugging her.
    Only she didn’t come down to Austin’s that night, or the night after. And I felt lost.
    It was all a bit weird, really. I mean, for quite a few weeks we’d been pretty much inseparable, working together on projects in and out of school, but now it suddenly felt like she had somewhere more important to be whenever I was with her. That was especially hard because it always felt so good being close to Ella. There was a connection between us that I’d never felt with any other human being, and I absolutely knew she felt it too. When I laughed, she laughed, and if we were working on something together and I had what I thought was a genius idea, it was like I could somehow telepathically convey it to her, because she’d be right there with me, having the same thought at the same time.
    So you can just imagine how frustrating this new development was; even more so because deep down I felt like it was all my fault. Yes, we were the best of friends, but so far there was nothing more and that was down to me. I don’t know why, but it was like there was some invisible force stopping me from taking that one step further and turning our friendship into a romance. Yeah, I hear you; maybe I was just a coward, but it