For my bubble and zeyda. Helen and allyn greewald: grandparents. cheeprleaders. and publicists
Video tip: Use an L-cut–introduce a scene with an audio cue
a second or two before the scene actually starts.
I'm standing in the second-floor bathroom, shaking crunched-up potato chips from the bottom of my backpack into the garbage can.
Anywhere else potato chips are considered good-delicious, even.
Here it doesn't seem to be that way.
This whole starting-a-new-school thing would be easier if I had a T-shirt that stated the truth, or a removable tattoo on my forehead, or something, just so people would know: I was cool at my old school. Really, I was. Yeah, it was a private school with fifty kids in the grade. Everyone was artsy in his or her own way. And it wasn't very cliquey. But I was cool. People liked me.
Shouldn't it be automatic that if I was someone there, I'd be someone here, too?
"Chipped already?" the girl at the sink asks me. "On your first day?"
"So it's, like, a thing?" I ask her. She looks at me, confused. "Being chipped, I mean?"
"What do you mean it's 'like, a thing'?" she asks, shaking her hands dry.
"I don't get it. I almost thought it was an accident that all these chips landed in my backpack." I pick the last few remaining chip crumbs out of the zipper.
"Nope. You were chipped. Someone saw you and decided that you were a good target." She takes one last look in the mirror and smoothes out the sides of her hair. "Good luck."
See, if I had the shirt, I wouldn't have been chipped. It would be known. If you were cool in your old school, you're cool in your new school, too.
I leave the bathroom and go to gym. I'm waiting in the bleachers, looking around to see if I can find the culprit-the person who chipped me.
Does anyone have a smug look on her face? Is anyone glaring at me?
So far, no. No one even notices me.
It's hard to concentrate on this because everyone's sneakers are making that annoying rubbing sound against the floor. Ms. Berger, the gym teacher, blows her whistle every other second, which is way more often than she needs to.
We're playing badminton, not basketball. I don't know why anyone needs a whistle for badminton. I haven't even played yet. I've been sitting in the bleachers this whole time.
And that's when I notice her. Three rows below me. She's probably not the one who chipped me. She has too many other things going on to do that. She's the one who's surrounded by her best friends, the one who's happy and confident. The one who just loves school.
That's where I should be sitting. With her. Chelsea Stern.
Her friends have a cheer for her. "Go, Sea-Sea! Go, Stern! Go-go, Sea-Sea Stern!"
They keep saying it. It's catchy. I almost join in, just because that's what happens when I hear something over and over again. It'll echo in my head for the rest of the day.
I turn my attention back to the gym floor. I've never seen anyone take badminton as seriously as everyone does here. To be honest, the only badminton games I've ever seen were in the backyards of Sheffield, where I used to live. The nets drooped; we hit the birdie only every tenth shot or so. People usually got bored of the game after about five minutes.
But here badminton is a real sport.
"Dina Gross, you're up!" Ms. Berger calls, looking all around for me. The way this gym class is structured, only eight people actually participate at any given time. It doesn't seem like people really build up a sweat.
Chelsea's friends look at me. They don't smile. Were they the people who did it? The chippers?
"Do you play tennis?" the girl I'm playing against, one of Chelsea's friends, asks me as I'm bending down to pick up the badminton racket.
"Not really," I say. "You?"
"Yeah, so does mostly everyone. That's why we're bizarrely good at this sport." She smiles. "You kind of look weirded out."
I don't understand how she can tell that. But she's right. "Well, yeah, a little, I guess."
The girl serves and I swing. Of course I don't get it over the net-because going that fast, the birdie is impossible to hit.
"Good game," she says after clearly beating me. And beating me bad.
In the locker room, when we're changing back into our regular clothes, I keep a careful watch on my backpack. Maybe the secret is that you never leave your backpack unattended, like you can't leave bags unattended at an airport.
There should be a rule book for this kind of stuff. Something I could follow so I could avoid more potato chip incidents.
After gym, I'm walking to my next class when I notice more. More chipping. Kids emptying their bags of crumbs.
How do the kids here even have that many bags of potato chips? Where do they store them? And why do they want to waste them dumping them into other people's bags when they could be eating that crunchy deliciousness?
It's all over the place. When the person's not looking, when the person is looking. Bags left in the hallway, bags on people's shoulders.
There's no rhyme or reason.
It just keeps happening.
I'm tempted to take out my camera and record this. I could e-mail the video to Ali and show her what things are like here. She'll never believe me if I don't.
So I take out my camera. No one really knows me yet anyway. I could be some foreign exchange student who's never coming back, for all they know. I could be some kind of undercover reporter doing a story for the local news.
I could be shooting a movie about middle school. Some guy in Korea shot a whole movie on his iPhone. I would try that too if my parents were nice enough to buy me one.
As I'm walking to social studies, I shoot videos of this whole potato chip thing.
People don't really notice me. They just say "Oh, man," and "Ugggh, again," and "Seriously? That's the third time this week." And then the person who did the chipping just laughs and walks away.
Does the principal know about this? The teachers?
No one gets hurt, really, so it's not the worst thing ever. But it's messy. It took me twenty minutes to get all the crumbs out just now and I'm not even sure I got all of them.
And it's a waste of perfectly delicious chips, too.
These aren't the no-frills brand you find in gigantic bags in the grocery store. These kids are using every brand you've ever heard of: Kettle chips and "Dirty" chips and Baked Lay's. Barbecue. Salt and vinegar. Olive oil. Every kind of potato chip in the universe.
So I keep videoing, and I'll admit some people are looking at me strangely. Like, who's this girl who's just going around videoing stuff?
But it's weird-this whole chipping thing. I want to figure it out.
And it's not like anyone's talking to me, so what else do I have to do?