“I’ll be with Tessa,” Caylee offered.
“Okay, okay. Fine. Tessa and Caylee on the bouncy seesaw. Mia to the swings with Anusha and Jasmine. Steffy—monkey bars. Lily, Rosa, and Amelie—jungle gym. Are we cool?” Thankfully, everyone nodded.
Cleo was just about to yell, “Passion Clips ad—take one!” when two boys about Jay’s age ran onto the playground. They chased each other around. A couple of women who looked like their moms lagged behind. They talked and sipped coffees, not paying attention to the boys.
“Excuse me!” Cleo shouted at the boys. “We’re using this site for an ad shoot. We need you to stay off the playground—just until we’re done.”
The boys kept running around, as if they hadn’t even heard her. “Just a minute,” she said to the others. She made a beeline to the two moms. “Excuse me,” she said as politely as she could, “my friends and I are shooting a commercial for my business, and I’m wondering if you could have your kids play on the grass or somewhere else until we’re done? It won’t be too long.”
One of the women cocked her head. Her eyes were narrowed and one eyebrow was raised. She definitely wasn’t sold.
Before Cleo had a chance to woo her with Persuasion Power, the other woman jumped in. “Shooting a commercial! How cool!” She looked at her friend. “Can you believe kids today? So enterprising. And talk about technologically savvy. Way ahead of where we were as kids. Don’t you love it?”
The tough-customer woman still looked skeptical, but she murmured agreement. That was all Cleo needed. “Thank you so much! We really appreciate it. You’re totally welcome to watch. Do you have daughters, or nieces, perhaps? Because if you do, you might be interested in our product, Passion Clips, to tell the world who you are!”
The women weren’t really listening. They were calling and motioning to their sons to come with them. The mom who had been agreeable from the start pulled a football out of a big bag and held it up like bait. The boys zoomed toward her, one of them grabbing the ball as he passed, and they were off to the field to play catch.
“Thank you!” Cleo called after them.
“Good luck with your commercial,” the friendly mom said, walking away.
Cleo scanned the playground. Her friends were mostly just sitting around. Steffy was hanging upside down on the bars. Mia, Jasmine, and Anusha were swinging.
“Okay, everyone, we’re ready.” No one moved. “Places, people!” Girls lumbered to their feet, looking suddenly tired. They had been awoken early that morning. She felt irritated again that her parents hadn’t taken care of their little rodent problem sooner.
But that was then. This was now. And right now, she needed to make a commercial that would knock Fortune’s socks off!
She wished she had one of those clapper things to get the camera rolling (and the talent moving). She envisioned herself wearing a pair of clapper barrettes. Yes! Caylee could make her a pair of clapper Passion Clips. Moviemaking was officially one of her new passions.
“What about you?” Caylee asked. “Where are you going to be?”
Cleo chortled. “Oh yeah. I almost forgot myself!” Of course she needed to be in the ad. She wanted Fortune to see her too! She climbed onto the jungle gym and positioned herself at the top of the slide.
“What are we supposed to do?” Lily wanted to know.
“Just look like you’re having fun,” Cleo answered. “And try to keep your Passion Clips aimed at the camera at all times.”
“Isn’t it the cameraman’s job to make sure he gets shots of our hair?” Rosa pointed out.
Cleo bristled. Why was this girl telling her how to direct her ad? She puffed her chest. “Actually, it’s the director’s job.” She turned to Ernie Junior (who could be called that only in her head—he’d punch her if she said it out loud). “Lots of close-ups of the clips, cameraman. Got it?”
“Got it.” He had his handheld video camera ready to go.
“We could dance,” Rosa suggested, breaking into the Nae Nae on the wobbly bridge.
Amelie almost fell over. “Hey! Careful!”
This wasn’t supposed to be commercial-making by committee, but Cleo had to admit dancing was a good idea. “Okay. But only dance if you aren’t going to look like a dork.”
“That’s not a very nice thing to say,” Lily said.
The pancakes and whipped cream seemed to be wearing off. Time to get this show on the road!
She was shouting, “Passion Clips commercial for FortuneTube, take one!” when E.J.’s cell phone rang. Cleo expected him to silence it—he was on the job, after all—but he answered.
Cleo clapped her hands to her head and let out a low growl.
Flapjacks and Facebook! Time was ticking! They didn’t have all day. Parents would be arriving at Cleo’s house in just over an hour.
While E.J. talked, the talent got antsy. Rosa took on the role of the mouse in Cleo’s house and started chasing everyone around the playground. Girls were screeching and jumping off and onto the jungle gym. Any minute, more random people could show up and Cleo would be back at square one, trying to convince more adults to keep their kids away while they filmed.
Cleo widened her eyes in exasperation, but E.J. just turned his back, plugged his ear, and walked farther away. She wished she had one of those director’s chairs. The picnic table would have to do, but she couldn’t sit—she was too short. She stood on top, summoning all of her directorial powers.
“Back to your places, everyone! Let’s run a rehearsal.” Hadn’t Lexie said they had to rehearse before shooting the Sunshine Sparkle commercial? A lot, if Cleo remembered right. They were going to do this like the professionals.
“We are rehearsing,” Jasmine said. “You said to look like we’re having fun and that’s what we’re doing!”
“What is there to rehearse?” Lily said. “We’re just going to dance around.” She did a silly dance move, making everyone, except Cleo—and Ernie Junior, who was still on the stupid phone—laugh.
“I’m the director!” she yelled.
“Dictator is more like it,” Mia snapped. “You don’t need to be so pushy.”
“I’m not being pushy! I’m trying to film a commercial!”
“Well, it’s not very fun.” Mia jumped down from the jungle gym steps.
“I agree,” Amelie said.
The others looked around uncomfortably. No one came to her defense. Not even Caylee. Ernie Junior’s voice rose and fell as he laughed and talked with whoever it was that was more important than Cleo’s ad shoot.
“We have a lot of clip orders to fill before tomorrow, Cleo,” Caylee said. She shrugged apologetically. “Maybe we should be making those instead?”
Cleo felt her insides starting to unravel, but she steeled herself and kept pressing forward. “But this is going to be on FortuneTube!” She didn’t like the sound of desperation that had crept into her voice. “It’s super important!”
“To you,” Steffy said. “We’re your friends, remember? Not your employees.”
“Yeah, last time I checked, no one was paying me two thousand dollars to be here,” Mia complained.
Cleo’s temper flared at the comparison to Lexie Lewis. “But you were all excited about it. You wanted to do it.”
“We did,” Amelie said, “until you started bossing us around.”
Tessa looked at her watch. “Sorry, Cleo, but I have to get back soon. My dad is picking me up for my horse-riding lesson in fifteen minutes.”
“Already?” Cleo hadn’t realized Tessa needed to leave earlier than the others.
“Me too,” Steffy said. “Gymnastics.”
Cleo was losing two of her three most outgoing, charismatic, willing-to-dance-around-and-be-silly girls. The other one, Mia, still looked sour. Cleo didn’t particularly feel like hamming it up for the camera herself. “Fine. We won’t do it.”
E.J. got off the phone as the girls drifted from the playground. “
Hey, where’s everyone going? We haven’t shot anything.”
“The shoot’s over,” Cleo said. And the party, she thought. And probably all of my friendships too.
Cleo was distraught. Everyone had left her house amid uncomfortable silence and short good-byes. Mom tried to get Cleo to talk about what had happened at the park, but Cleo didn’t want to, and fortunately (with Dad’s encouragement), Mom didn’t push it.
She lay on her bed, wondering what had gone wrong. Persuasion was her superpower! Why hadn’t it worked for her that morning? She looked up at Fortune, her thoughts leading her this way and that.
Okay, so she’d gotten a little intense. She got intense sometimes. Maybe she’d even let the power of directing go to her head. The ugly truth reared up like a sea serpent from the depths of a murky lake. She’d been seeing her friends only as useful in helping her to achieve her ends. Again.
Ugh. She would have to say she was sorry. She hated saying she was sorry. But it was the only way to make things better. She hoped people would forgive her, and not so they would buy more clips or be in her commercial (which she was determined to try shooting again), but because she wanted to be their friend.
She quickly wrote an apology to Caylee (notes were better for apologies than face-to-face, at least initially), loaded it into her Canine Carrier Capsule™ and called for Barkley. She attached the capsule to the Velcro that Mom had helped her sew onto his collar and sent him off. “Take this to Caylee. Go!” She pointed up the street and Barkley trotted down the porch steps and out the front gate, not as speedily as she wished, but the message would get there, eventually.
Twenty or so minutes later, Barkley came back with a reply. I forgive you ♥ ♥ ♥. Want to come over and play with Tye-Dye?
So Cleo asked her parents and went over to Caylee’s. They still had most of her church family’s orders to fill and a few from Saint Bart’s. But first, she held Tye-Dye, who was softer than Josh’s blankie, Mom’s hair, and Cleo’s lucky rabbit’s foot combined. Cleo could have held him all afternoon, but she remembered he could only handle a few minutes at a time and put him back for his sake. She didn’t want him to get stressed.
By the time she left, Cleo felt a whole lot better. First, she had told Caylee about the prospect of meeting her birth father, and Caylee, as usual, had listened really well and said all the right things, like, “No matter what happens, you know I’ll still be your BFF.” It felt good to have someone besides her parents sharing the load of her big news, at last.
Second, not only had they completed eight sets of clips, they had come up with a new product line: Friends Forever!™—clips personalized with the names of two forever friends. They’d even created a prototype: interlocking hearts, featuring their names, of course. Not bad for a day’s work.
*
Monday came and Cleo had more apologizing and explaining to do. First, she had to tell Mr. Boring about the tragic end that had come to her mealworms. Even though all the girls already knew, she waited until recess to bring it up with her teacher because she didn’t want the class to make a big deal of it. She’d experienced enough embarrassment over the whole thing.
He understood but she would still need to do a report based on whatever data she’d collected before the worms’ untimely end. Then he sent her outdoors to get the “ants out of her pants.”
“And the mealworm squiggles out of my middle!” Cleo called as she left the room.
When she got outside, she realized she didn’t want to have to repeat her apology multiple times and she definitely didn’t want to write it out eight times. The only thing to do was to ask everyone to meet on the hillside after lunch. She would talk to them all at once. Caylee offered to help spread the word, which meant they each had only four girls to find.
Cleo found three of her four girls easily. Anusha, Rosa, and Lily were hanging out together. Everything seemed about the same as it had before the sleepover, which meant they didn’t have much to say. But they agreed to meet her on the hill.
Next she had to find Mia, the one who had spearheaded the walkout. Cleo spotted her doing flips on the high bar. Lexie Lewis sat on the bar right below. Great.
Caylee appeared at Cleo’s side. “Done,” she said. “They all said they’d be there.” Her eyes went to where Cleo was looking. “You could find Mia at lunch,” she suggested.
“She’ll probably be sitting with Lexie there too,” Cleo said. “They always sit together.”
Caylee let out a long breath. “Yeah. Want me to come with you?”
Cleo nodded and charged ahead. “Hey, Mia,” she said, walking up on the opposite side from where Lexie sat.
“Hey.” Mia’s eyes didn’t meet hers.
“I was wondering if you’d come over to the hill after lunch. Me and the others …” She shut her mouth. It wouldn’t be considerate to mention the sleepover in front of Lexie, if she really did feel left out.
“The others?” Mia asked.
“Yeah, you know … from Friday night.” She avoided looking at Lexie.
“Not if you’re planning on trying to get us to shoot your ad again.”
Lexie, still perched atop the bar, barely stifled a laugh.
“Well, I was going to see …” Mia didn’t look in the “buying” mood. Cleo changed course quickly. “But that’s not really why I want to meet. It’s for … um, something else.” She definitely wasn’t going to mention her planned apology in front of Lexie.
“Can’t you just tell me now?” Mia flipped around the bar once and landed on her feet.
Feeling on the spot, Cleo did the thing that came most naturally to her. “Actually, I think this is something you might both be interested in,” she said, looking at Lexie for the first time. “Caylee and I are introducing a new line of Passion Clips: Friends Forever!—trademark.”
“You can’t trademark that.” Lexie crossed her arms. She wobbled and grabbed the bar again. “Everyone says it all the time.”
“Doesn’t matter. If it’s not been claimed, I can claim it. And I looked it up last night, and it hasn’t been claimed. So the name is all mine. I mean, ours.” She and Caylee exchanged smiles.
“You act like you’re an actual company president, but you’re not,” Lexie said, jumping down from the bar. “You’re just another fifth-grader selling homemade stuff. And that tooth-pulling business … what’d you make before you barfed all over everyone and attacked me? Fifty cents?”
Ooo … this girl. It took everything Cleo had not to slug her again.
“Fifth-graders can run companies.” Caylee’s eyes were fierce, her fists clenched, her head cocked with a definite attitude. “We saw a girl on Fortune whose natural-hair-care products are sold in thirty-five stores across five states, so there!”
“Was she ten?” Lexie challenged.
“No, she was fifteen. But that’s technically still a kid. And anyway, you act like you’re a TV star and you’re just another fifth-grader who’s done a commercial. So why don’t you just leave Cleo alone already?”
Go, Caylee! Cleo was seriously surprised … and impressed. And she had just gotten a fantabulous idea!
“Look, Lexie, couldn’t we just call a truce?” It was how Dad got the boys to make up: calling a truce. It was another way of saying, “Wipe the slate clean, start fresh.” Or as they said at church, “Every day is a new beginning.”
Lexie hadn’t laughed in her face, or turned and walked. Cleo forged ahead. “We both have our dreams. Maybe we could help each other achieve our goals.”
For a second, it looked like Lexie was choking on a mealworm. “And how would we do that exactly?”
“Well … I want to make a commercial. You want to be in commercials. Maybe you could … be in my commercial?” She said the last part fast before she chickened out.
There was an uncomfortable silence. Cleo rushed to fill it. “I’m submitting it to FortuneTube.”
Cleo couldn’t read Lex
ie’s expression. Would she mock her again? Grab Mia and walk away?
“Why would I do that?” Lexie asked.
The pitch of Cleo’s voice rose with her eyebrows. “It could be seen by”—she stretched out her words—“thousands of people.” More silence.
“Maybe.” The word popped from Lexie’s mouth like a clown from a jack-in-the-box.
“No, definitely! It could be seen by thousands of people,” Cleo urged.
“I mean, maybe I’ll do it.” Lexie folded her arms.
“What? Oh! Okay.” Honestly, Cleo had been expecting an automatic “No way!”
“When are you going to do it?” Lexie asked.
Cleo turned to Caylee. She didn’t want to leave her partner out of a business decision, but Caylee just shrugged.
“How about this Saturday? Wilson Park,” Cleo suggested.
“I have to check with my mom to see if I have any auditions that day. But if I’m free”—she let out a big sigh—“I guess I’ll do it.”
“Great!” Maybe she shouldn’t have sounded so excited to work with a girl who’d been mean to her in the past, but Cleo couldn’t help it—she was an enthusiastic person.
As they walked back to class, Cleo linked her arm with Caylee’s. “Thanks for standing up for me, Jelly. That was amazing.”
“I thought I was going to faint.”
“You didn’t look like you were going to. You were awesome! And I hope you didn’t mind me announcing our new product line before running it by you first. I just sort of flip into selling mode sometimes, like Diana Prince becoming Wonder Woman.” Dad loved all those corny old cartoons.
Caylee laughed. “Of course I didn’t mind. It’s your superpower!”
After lunch, Cleo stood before her sleepover guests sitting on the grassy hill and apologized. She asked them to consider joining her for take two of the ad shoot—completely voluntary, of course. Then she told them about Friends Forever Passion Clips, took three orders on the spot, and declared that she would be “friends forever” with all of them!
That week, Mom helped Cleo and Caylee get set up on the crafters’ website Artsy, since they didn’t have time, money, or the expertise to create their own website just yet.
Cleo Edison Oliver in Persuasion Power Page 11
