Read Online Nice and Mean by Jessica Leader - Free Book Online Page A

The pencil pouch, a birthday present from Pallavi, had pictures on it from the
Jabber Monkeys
cartoon, and now was not the time for Marina to sniff at one of my fashion choices. Still, that was just a mini-worry. The bigger worry was this: Whatever I did for my interviews needed to be really, really good.

MARINA’S LITTLE BLACK BOOK, ENTRY #7
    * Biggest Sneaky Kiss-Up Video Ruiner: Sachi Parikh
    The teacher may love you, but that only gets you so far.
    * Least Likely to Play Video Assistant: Addie Ling
    But here she is.
    * Most Embarrassingly Desperate: Marina Glass
    Tell anyone and you’re toast!
    It wasn’t until I’d looked through half the photos on my computer that I realized how late it was. Four thirty! I had wasted too much time updating the categories in my LBB. Addie would be here at my house in less than an hour, and I needed to get to work.
    I opened my editing software and began adding the photos I had dragged into my “Video” folder. The pics of Crystal and Chelsea were nothing to slow down for, but allthe ones of Rachel made me laugh.
    The first was from the week before school started, with Rachel’s hair bunched in pigtails that were
not
as cute as she hoped they’d be. I’d snapped the second just the other day—Rachel in crazy-tight pants and a nutty red belt that was big enough to be a Hula-hoop. The biggest prize, though, was Rachel in a loud-print halter top at sixth-grade graduation, looking down her nose like she was on the cover of
Vogue
. Those were the three best, and judging from the
Victim/Victorious
clips I’d watched on YouTube, three was what I needed. It was funny—I couldn’t even count how many episodes I’d seen, but I’d never thought about how they put it together before. Now I knew that they showed exactly three photos of past outfits worn by the main star of each episode. It wasn’t the kind of info that would help me pull up my English grade, but it was kind of cool that I’d figured it out.
    When I’d dragged my three photos into the slide show, I got to choose: Should the photos fade into each other, tile, or cartwheel? Cartwheel sounded like the most fun, but as I now knew from
V/V
, fading was the real way to do it. I clicked “fade” and sat back to watch the Victim-a-Thon.
    Forty minutes later, Addie was sitting on my beanbag chair on the floor, iMovie was up on my computer screen, and everything was in place for me to hit “play.” So whywasn’t I showing her my video?
    â€œIt’s just a rough cut,” I told her, my hand hovering above the mouse. “I mean, I haven’t even put in the sound.” Addie didn’t know it yet, but next weekend, when we went over to her place to get dressed before Caleb Rosenheck’s Bar Mitzvah, she was going to hook me up with her brother’s sound effects CDs. “I’m just saying, everything’s not, like, completely perfect.”
    â€œâ€™Rina.” Addie elbowed my legs. “You know it’s going to be good.”
    â€œNo, I know, I’m just saying—” I know some parts are bad, and I’m working on them. “I haven’t had time to—” Figure out when to start the music, or make sure I’d gotten the title color right. “You just need to remember that . . . Oh, forget it.” If I couldn’t show my video to a plebe, how could I show it to everybody in the Arts Assembly? “Here.”
    The video started black to be dramatic. Then, from either side of the screen, hot-pink letters faded in, reading “Victim/.” Then, burning in slowly in bold, came the word “Victorious.”
    Addie clapped. “I love it!”
    I bit my lip. So far, so good.
    The screen flipped back to black. Red letters appeared, saying, “Starring your hot, HOT, HOTTTT hosts . . .”
    Pictures of Elizabeth and Julian faded onto the screen.
    Addie squeezed her hands into