Nice and Mean Read Online Free Page B

Video now—that I didn’t want to go through Jacobs known just for my grades, or being Nicest Girl. The boys who had made the video last year—everyone was talking about them after the Arts Assembly. I wanted that to happen to me. “I really want to be in Video
now
.”
    Then I noticed that there were only two minutes left until homeroom—time to speed things up. “Look,” I said, “if you keep it a secret, I’ll let you have the computer first every day for a whole month.”
    â€œYou think I’ll lie to Ma and Papa just to use the computer?” She started walking toward the stairs, fast. “Ha.”
    I wanted to cry, but I had to keep going. “Okay,” I said, struggling to keep up with her, “I wasn’t going to say this, but if you tell Ma and Papa about Video, I’ll tell them that when you went to the movies this summer, it wasn’t just with the cousins.”
    She whirled around. “You wouldn’t!”
    I shrugged, trying to seem cool for once in my life.
    â€œFine,” Priyanka said. “Take Video, see if I care. If you end up going to a bad high school, don’t come crying to me about it.”
    I itched to crack my knuckles but restrained myself. “You won’t tell them?”
    She pursed her lips. “Fine. But you’d
better
use my books. If Ma and Papa find out you ditched Test Prep, I don’t want them to blame
me
for letting
you
get a bad score.”
    â€œFine.”
    Priyanka stepped up the stairs two at a time, which I recognized as the sign that we were done. I let her go for two paces, then scrambled on up. I didn’t want to be late to homeroom on top of everything else.
    But, I reminded myself as the air burned in my lungs, she had said yes. And that meant—
Video.

MARINA’S LITTLE BLACK BOOK, ENTRY #3
    * Most Likely to Be Booted Out of Video by Marina Glass: Everybody in the Video Lab
    Who are you, and what have you done with the hotties?
    * Most Likely to Become a Sleeping Pill: Mr. Phillips
    Next time I have trouble falling asleep, I’ll imagine his voice and . . . zzz.
    I pressed so hard against my Little Black Book that I dented my lavender Pilot Precise Rolling Ball’s extra-fine tip.
    â€œCrap,” I muttered, but nobody heard. They were alltoo busy drooling over Mr. Phillips, leaning forward in their desk chairs like he was giving out swag instead of obvious rules about how to handle equipment. Like, oh, wait,
don’t
throw the video camera? Forget about Tall, Dark, and Handsome—Mr. Phillips was Tall, Dark, and Boring. And why was he shuffling through his papers again? He wasn’t going to give us another handout, was he?
    â€œSo I decided,” Mr. Phillips said, “that to simplify things, I would assign partners.”
    My pen tumbled onto the carpet.
    As I dove down to pick it up, I thought,
partners
? How could he do that to us? He didn’t even know us. And I knew—I just knew—that he would put me with the biggest squeegee in the room.
    â€œSqueegees” were what my friends and I called nerds after the school counselor outlawed words like “geek,” “dork,” and “nerd.” You could outlaw a word, but you couldn’t outlaw a nerd, and the circle of kids in the video lab was proof. Exhibit A: a boy who looked like he’d chopped his bangs with safety scissors. Exhibit B: another boy who shot up his hand to answer questions before Mr. Phillips had even finished asking them. And Exhibit C: that Indian girl from homeroom who was actually taking
notes
.
    How could there not be even one hot guy? Just one, totalk about while Rachel mooed over Julian and his arm-flinging technique—was that so much to ask? I’d thought video would be woo. Instead, it was poo.
    Mr. Phillips sifted through the papers on his desk. I gripped my pen. Partner time.
    â€œEli and Trevon,” said Mr. Phillips, reading