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silence anymore. “I know it’s a day in the life, but we should focus on more than one person.”
    There. That’s a good explanation, if I do say so myself, and I bet she’ll be into that idea because she probably wants to meet people around here. Yeah, she’s only been here two days, but she barely talks to anyone, not even to the girls she eats lunch with.
    â€œOh!” she yells suddenly. “I have an idea! I can just get random shots of the school and kids in the hallways and we can put upbeat, fun music over it, and it can show all kids in their natural school environment. It’ll be all B-roll.”
    â€œB-roll?” Right when I start to feel bad about being rude to her, she gets way too excited about something and starts using weird video terms and I feel myself getting annoyed with her all over again.
    â€œYeah, it means, like, background shots, shots of the surroundings, and people walking around and stuff. But I think it would be neat for this,” she says.
    I text Kendall that I’m stuck at school working on the video and can’t come to Ross’s house, but that she has to tell me everything that happens as soon as she’s home. “That could be okay, I guess.”
    Dina huffs. I guess she senses my lack of enthusiasm. “Well, you’ve lived here a long time, haven’t you? Don’t you have any ideas?”
    My phone vibrates again, a text from Molly this time.

    â€œUm.” I crack my knuckles, praying something will come to me. Molly thinks I’m lame, and she knows something’s up, but she hasn’t figured out what it is yet. Even though I’m not sure I like Ross, it still feels good to know he likes me, or at least that’s what Kendall thinks. I wonder if he told them anything about what he said to Dina at lunch. “Nope. No ideas.”
    Dina sighs, and twirls a pen around her fingers like a miniature baton. “Well, we should do a good job, right? Aren’t there going to be a ton of people there? Like, the whole school and parents and everyone?”
    I nod. “Yeah, I think so.”
    â€œSo think about my idea of background footage and candid shots,” she says. “The parents will be excited to see glimpses of their kids’ lives at school, and the kids will be excited to see their friends.”
    She’s trying so hard to convince me, but I just don’t really care that much. I want to get it done as quickly as possible. Lately, all I want to do is get through things and have them be over with so I can move on to the next thing.
    It can be kind of nice to have someone try really hard to get you to agree, or try really hard to get you to like them.Sometimes it’s really pathetic, but other times it’s pretty flattering.
    Right now it’s one of the flattering times.
    â€œOkay …” I smile slowly. “Let’s do it.”
    The thing about this Dina girl is that you want to hate her but something about her makes you not totally hate her. There’s a shred of likeability in her. And she doesn’t even feel weird about being new. It’s like she’s from some alternate universe where people don’t worry about what others think of them. I’m not going to lie—I’m a little jealous. I want to go to that universe sometimes. A lot of times, actually. Especially now.
    â€œI know how we can get started.” She caps her pen and closes her Curious George notebook. “Ready?”
    I nod.
    â€œLet’s look at yearbooks. Since you know everyone here, you can tell me about them, and maybe there are some people better than others to sort of focus on. Maybe I can even pan the yearbooks in the shots. That’d be so cool-looking, and it would help highlight the history of the school! It’ll help show the transformation from the school of the past to the school today. And who doesn’t like looking at yearbooks?” She jumps