My Life as a Youtuber

by Janet Tashjian

  “I bet a show about challenging yourself to be a better reader would really catch on,” Mom continues.

  I’m about to ask her if she’s kidding but her slow smile tells me she is.

  I’ve fought my parents on reading programs for years, finally coming up with one that works for me—drawing my vocabulary words in my sketchbooks to understand them better. I’m what’s known as a visual learner, meaning I need to SEE things to learn them. I’ve done thousands of stick-figure drawings, which have definitely improved my reading skills. I know Mom well enough to realize she’s not putting me down, just acknowledging all the hard work I’ve done since kindergarten.

  Mom motions to the two jars in my hand. “Mustard or mayo? Paper or plastic? Truth or dare? Sometimes life just comes down to one thing or the other, right?”

  Mom’s semi-annoying observation gives me another idea. Instead of blending a ton of stuff together, what if my friends and I dare ourselves to complete challenges where BOTH options are disgusting? Would you rather have a booger sandwich or a dandruff shake? Would you rather go to school wearing your dad’s pants or your mom’s high heels? (Not that my mom wears high heels—she stands for many hours at work, so she usually wears clogs.)

  By the time the counter’s cleared, I’ve thought of twenty revolting dares we can film immediately. I text my friends that it’s time to make more videos.

  With the camera on this time.

  TAKE TWO

  Now that Mr. Ennis is our teacher, we watch every video on his channel a million more times. In the episode he uploaded yesterday, he plays Latin music to a tomato plant until it gives him a cup of salsa to eat with his chips.

  Carly, Umberto, Matt, and I watch it several more times before we begin today’s filming. Mr. Ennis’s editing is so seamless, no matter how hard we look, we can’t see any signs of his cuts.

  “Are we ready to shoot?” Umberto asks. He’s got two hours until his van driver, Bill, picks him up from my house.

  Mom’s relieved we’re not recording anything food-related and gives us her consent to film anywhere in the house as long as we clean up. It seems like a fair deal, considering my friends and I are still unsure exactly what we’ll be shooting.

  “I like the whole ‘Would you rather have choice A or choice B?’” Carly says. “I just don’t want the choices to be gross.”

  “They HAVE to be gross,” Matt answers. “Otherwise what’s the point?”

  I agree and hold up the clipboard with the list I came up with.

  “Would you rather wear your best friend’s underwear or use their toothbrush?” I ask the group.

  Carly scrunches up her face, clearly unhappy with the way this is going. “Clean or dirty underwear?” she finally asks.

  Matt and Umberto look at her like she’s crazy. “Dirty, of course,” Umberto answers.

  “That’s easy,” Matt continues. “Use your friend’s toothbrush. I use my brother’s when I can’t find mine—doesn’t bother me at all.”

  “Yeah, but does it bother HIM?” Umberto looks to me. “Underwear, inside out—done.”

  “Should we turn on the camera and try to catch some of this magic on film?” I ask.

  “Nobody uses film anymore,” Umberto says. “Even blockbuster movies are shot on digital now.”

  “I know that!” Yet another friend who’s a zillion times smarter than I am. Carly opts out of the challenge and decides to record us instead. I’ve got my cell hooked up to Dad’s tripod and after modifying the height, Carly tells us we’re good to go.

  “Three.… two … one … action!” she calls.

  Matt, Umberto, and I stand there, unsure of where to start.

  Finally, Matt nudges me and I talk into the camera. “Hello, everybody! Welcome to the WOULD YOU RATHER challenge with Derek, Matt, and Umberto. This is our first video and I’m really nervous!” Spittle actually comes out of my mouth as I talk.

  Carly presses pause. “Should we try again?” she asks nicely.

  Matt’s a bit more forthright. “Derek, that was TERRIBLE! Are you trying to drown our viewers?”

  “Then YOU go first,” I answer. “We didn’t even write anything down—I was winging it!”

  “Should we make some cue cards?” Carly asks. “We can prop them up behind me on the couch so you can read them.”

  “I DON’T WANT TO READ CUE CARDS!” I shout at her. “I want to make a YOUTUBE VIDEO! IS THAT SO HARD?”

  Carly picks up her bag and heads to the door. “Apparently, yes. See you at school.”

  I feel bad she’s leaving, especially after our conversation this morning. When I asked her at our lockers how it went at the orthodontist, she told me she has to get braces. Carly’s one of the smartest, most fearless kids I know but she actually looked scared when we discussed it. Maybe I should’ve been a little nicer to her today.

  I try to catch up with Carly but the only person in the driveway is Umberto’s driver with the van.

  Bill, Matt, and I help Umberto down the stairs in his wheelchair. Last time Umberto was here, Mom suggested getting a ramp that matches the one on the other side of the driveway for her patients. In all the times and different places Matt and I have lifted Umberto in his wheelchair, we’ve never dropped him. But I can’t say I don’t worry about it every time.

  I go upstairs and drag Bodi out from his favorite spot—underneath my bed. Frank’s in Mom’s office, so Matt and I give up on our video and walk over to get him.

  Nothing takes the edge off failure like hanging out with your pets.

  A CHANGE FOR CARLY

  Lots of kids in our class have braces; it’s not like getting them is a big deal. But Carly must be especially sensitive to having a doctor poke around in her mouth because she’s in full anxiety mode today.

  “The orthodontist says the first month might be painful.” Carly looks ready to start crying outside science class.

  “It’ll probably only hurt for a few weeks,” I say. “Think of all the ice cream you’ll be able to eat before you can chew again.”

  My comment obviously makes things worse because a tear forms in the corner of her eye.

  “You’re tough,” I tell her. “Nothing ever gets you down!” I have to admit I’m a little surprised at how difficult this is for her.

  “I’m a baby when it comes to pain,” she confesses. “Getting braces is all I can think about now.”

  My first thought is that maybe Carly will be so distracted by her braces that she won’t be able to do her homework and I can get a higher grade than her—for once. But even I know taking advantage of Carly’s anguish isn’t what a real friend would do.

  “It’ll be like lots of things,” I tell her. “It’ll stink in the beginning but then you’ll get used to it and it won’t stink so much.”

  She smiles at my weak attempt at explaining how the world works and the tear in her eye doesn’t fall down her cheek.

  “You’ll still be pretty,” I say. “Even with all that barbed wire in your mouth.”

  Turns out that tear was ready to trickle down after all.

  I apologize ten times but Carly ducks into the girls’ room, successfully avoiding me to go cry.

  I can be such a moron sometimes.

  A SURPRISE

  The rest of the day isn’t much better. I barely pass my English lit test, and Mr. Demetri took a nosedive into a mud puddle outside the gym and I missed it. (Matt DID get to see it and fell over laughing.)

  YouTube class to the rescue! Not counting recess when I was little, I can’t remember the last time I raced to anything at school.

  “Welcome, welcome, welcome!” Mr. Ennis opens his arms wide like a ringmaster at a circus. I’m guessing he feels especially happy because the video of him making salsa already has a hundred thousand views.

  I take my seat and notice the two empty spots where the Johnson twins usually sit.

  “Melanie and Melissa won’t be able to join us for the rest of the course,” Mr. Ennis says. �
��I guess their dad’s a bigwig in the computer industry and just got transferred to Palo Alto. Too bad—I thought they had a lot of potential.”

  I stare at the empty desks. Two students on the class waiting list are going to be THRILLED. Matt and I nearly jump out of our own desks when Umberto and Carly enter the room.

  “No way!” I shout.

  Mr. Ennis just laughs; it’s fun having a teacher who doesn’t care when you yell.

  When I last saw Carly she was crying, but now she’s grinning ear to ear.

  “Why didn’t you tell me you got in?” I ask.

  She shrugs like it’s no big deal, when actually it’s a gigantic deal. “I wanted to surprise you.” Carly takes the seat closest to me.

  I may have upset her a few hours ago, but one good thing about Carly—she never holds a grudge. With her and Umberto here, this class just went from amazing to off the charts!

  “Today, we’ll be laying the foundation for our own channels, so get out your phone or your notebook—however you take notes—and let’s begin.”

  I pull out my sketchbook filled with hundreds of stick figures as well as notes for most of my classes.

  “There are lots of steps you have to take to set up your own YouTube channel and the first thing you each have to do is come up with an original username,” Mr. Ennis says. “There are millions of people already on YouTube so a lot of names have been taken.”

  When Matt pulls his desk over to mine, Mr. Ennis looks confused, then nods. “Everyone in this class is going to create their OWN channel. You may team up for projects in other classes but in this class, you’ll be working alone.”

  Matt, Umberto, Carly, and I whip around to face each other. We’ve already put in so much work together!

  Matt raises his hand. “How about if we WANT to work with someone else?”

  Mr. Ennis laughs. “When I was your age, I hated working in pairs and groups. I was such a nerd, I always ended up doing all the work. Consider it a gift that you get to do your own thing.”

  Matt harrumphs as he drags his desk back. Working alone is a definite setback but part of me is relieved. Some of Matt’s ideas for our YouTube channel were good, but a few of them were definitely NOT my first choice. Bobbing for bologna instead of apples? Or challenging Bodi to a farting contest? Maybe getting to work by ourselves in this class will end up being okay after all. (Not that I tell the others; I put on a show and act as disappointed as they are.)

  We all work on our own while Mr. Ennis scrolls through his phone, probably checking how many new views he has. Will any of us find the same kind of YouTube success he’s found?

  I’m usually not much in the planning department—DUH!—but I’ve been giving my username a lot of thought.

  “Okay,” Mr. Ennis says. “Who wants to share?”

  Matt’s hand shoots up. “The UltiMATT Challenger!”

  Mr. Ennis types into his phone so fast, it’s like his fingers are caffeinated. “Already taken,” Mr. Ennis answers.

  “Super Girl,” Carly volunteers.

  “That’s taken too.”

  Since there are a zillion people on YouTube, choosing an available username is harder than we thought. Half the class has to come up with different names.

  “What about you, Derek?” Mr. Ennis asks.

  I slump in my seat, now unsure of what I’ve come up with. “Derek’s Corner?”

  “You asking me or telling me?” Mr. Ennis asks.

  “Telling?”

  Mr. Ennis laughs. “It’s maybe a little—”

  “Infantile?” Carly asks.

  The rest of the class laughs and Carly shoots me a smile. I was worried the title might be a bit too Sesame Street and Carly just confirmed it. She’s also doing something else—getting me back for making her cry this morning. Touché.

  Mr. Ennis takes a giant pack of stapled papers from his bag and starts to hand them out. “I planned to send you a PDF to save paper but your principal wanted me to hand out physical copies of what we’ll be doing here too.”

  Tyler turns around in his seat to give me a handout as thick as that thing they used to call a telephone book.

  “Turn to page one,” Mr. Ennis says.

  Everybody follows his instructions, but you can tell a few of us are puzzled because this is now beginning to sound like every other class in school.

  “Before we get into what you guys will be doing on YouTube, we have to go over the things you can’t do on YouTube.”

  I look down at the full-page list of restrictions.

  “It even goes onto the back?” Umberto asks.

  Mr. Ennis nods. “Everything you make here has to be one-hundred-percent original, G-rated, and approved by your parents before it goes online.”

  Gulp. I wasn’t expecting so many rules.

  “YouTube does not play around with material under copyright.” Mr. Ennis continues. “If you use a popular song or clip from a movie or TV show without permission, not only will YouTube take it down, I’ll remove you from class.”

  Suddenly I’m nervous. “How can anyone be creative with this much structure?”

  Mr. Ennis takes a seat on his desk. “You’d be surprised what you can come up with. All the videos on my channel obey the same guidelines I’m giving you. I also want to make sure your expectations are reasonable—I don’t want anyone thinking they’re going to end up an Internet sensation just because they’re taking an after-school class in making YouTube videos.”

  I hate to pop Mr. Ennis’s bubble, but every single kid sitting here thinks just that!

  For the next half hour, he talks about the pitfalls he and his friends faced when they first started on YouTube. “We had sports channels, epic-fail channels, LP channels, fake-instructional channels—believe me, we tried EVERYTHING. I hate to say it, but there’s a huge amount of LUCK involved. I know people who work their butts off, putting out quality content, and they’ve never gotten any recognition, and friends who shoot something in two seconds that ends up going viral. There is absolutely no way to know.”

  Shouldn’t Mr. Ennis be giving us a pep talk instead of telling us what a downer YouTube can be?

  He then goes into what he expects from us in this class. We have to work on the layout of our channel—complete with banners and a logo—set up playlists of our videos, create a short trailer for our homepage, get a custom URL, schedule our uploads—not to mention creating tons of original content.

  It sounds incredibly exciting but I don’t know how I’m going to have time to eat or walk Bodi, never mind keep up with my other classes. I guess that’s the price you pay for fame.

  “Then there are your viewers,” Mr. Ennis continues. “You need to turn viewers into…”

  He waits for someone to respond, and we all us do.

  “Subscribers,” we announce.

  “That’s the name of the game!” he says. “You need to engage with your viewers, answer their comments, maybe do a blog or newsletter, promote your channel on social media, share your videos outside of YouTube, study your analytics—in short, optimize your channel any way you can.”

  In SHORT? That sounds like in long to me.

  “By next Friday everyone has to send me a basic outline of their channel, along with the rest of the details we talked about.”

  We all mumble, “Yes,” and gather up our things.

  “I can’t believe how thick this handout is,” I complain as we head to our lockers. “Even Ms. Miller doesn’t give out this much work.”

  “We’re making our own YouTube channels,” Umberto says. “Who cares how much work it is?”

  Suddenly Matt starts laughing. The rest of us want to hear what’s so funny.

  “Derek’s Corner?” Matt laughs. “Really? Sounds like story time at the library. You’ve got a LOT of work to do, my friend.”

  Back to square one—a place I’m pretty familiar with by now.

  QUESTIONS, QUESTIONS

  Mom is in the living room binge-watching
a show on Netflix. She hits pause when she sees me.

  “We need to schedule a call with Mary Granville from Helping Hands,” Mom says. “Like it or not, we have to talk about giving back Frank.”

  She doesn’t hit play, just waits for me to answer. I want to have a conversation about giving up Frank like I want to puncture my eardrum.

  “Now?” I finally ask. “You’re in the middle of a show.”

  “This can wait.”

  I pull out something I know she’ll buy. “I have to do my homework.”

  She smiles. “Glad to see you’re prioritizing,” she says. “If it’s not too late, we’ll call her when you’re done.”

  I stomp upstairs. I don’t want to do homework. I don’t want to talk to that lady. And most important, I don’t want to give up Frank.

  I take refuge with Bodi on my bed. Frank is a lot of fun but when it comes to comfort, there’s nothing like lying next to your dog. My reverie is disturbed by texts from Matt, Umberto, and Carly all working on their YouTube assignments.

  A message from Carly comes in. Maybe we’re just not cut out for YouTube.

  Umberto responds. Oh, like a cat playing piano is? Or a rat carrying pizza? If ANIMALS can star in hit videos then we can too.

  Umberto’s idea is GREAT. He’s calling his channel Roll a Mile in My Shoes. It’s a vlog where viewers will follow Umberto around while he goes to the store, to the beach, to the doctors. To people who can walk, that might seem like an ordinary itinerary but when you’re in a wheelchair, there are lots of obstacles to overcome. Wearing a GoPro, Umberto will act as a tour guide for the viewer to see what it feels like to be in a wheelchair. Talk about virtual reality! We text Umberto our approvals.