Free Reel Life Starring Us by Lisa Greenwald Page B

live.”
    â€œUm, yeah.” I swallow hard. “So, anyway, I was looking at the yearbooks over the weekend. And I think I uncovered something!” My voice comes out more excited-sounding than I actually feel at this moment.
    â€œReally? What?” Dina pops an M&M in her mouth and moves her chair closer to mine. Her hair smells like papaya or some other fruit, and it reminds me of the shampoo my counselors used at camp. I get a sudden sad feeling, wishing so much that it was still July.
    â€œSomething happened to Sasha when she was at this school. She went from having friends to not having friends.” I open the yearbook. “Here, look at this. In her seventh-grade yearbook, Sasha Preston had lots of friends. Like, a
lot
of them. They wrote messages to each other and everything. And in the sixth grade, too. But then in eighth grade, nothing. It was like she was a total loner—no friends, no messages. How did everything just change like that?”
    We sit and look through the yearbooks as closely as we can, especially the ones from when Sasha was in sixth and seventh grades. We look up all the friends she was in pictures with and then look them up in the eighth-grade one to find them.
    â€œSo they all still lived here and went to this school,” Dina says. “She wasn’t a loner because all her friends moved away.”
    â€œYeah, they were all still here.”
    â€œSo what could have happened? Look, no secret messages to each other in this one. She doesn’t even have an eighth-grade testimonial section. It’s just totally blank under her name.” Dina mushes up her face like she feels really bad for Sasha. I don’t know why—her life certainly turned out okay.
    â€œHere’s my theory. What if she was a really bad friend? Like, she stole the boy her best friend was in love with for years?” I ask. I don’t want to talk to Dina about the whole Ross Grunner thing and Kendall. I can’t let her in on all the drama with them.
    â€œYou think she’d do that?”
    â€œNo idea,” I say. “I mean, it probably happens a lot. More than we realize.”
Stop, Chelsea, stop!
I don’t know why I can’t keep my mouth shut.
    â€œIt’s never happened to me,” Dina admits. “My best friend, Ali, and I had fake crushes. We picked guys we didn’t really know at all. We never, like, planned to do anything about our crushes. But my old school was kind of innocent like that.”
    â€œWhat do you mean ‘innocent’?” I ask. The way she’s describing it, it sounds like she grew up Amish or something. But I know she didn’t, because I saw her at Hebrew School registration at the end of the summer, even though I had no idea who she was at the time.
    â€œBoys and girls didn’t hang out. Or go out.” She looks down at the yearbook. “Clearly, I don’t know what I’m talking about.”
    Suddenly, Dina’s all nervous, and I have no idea why.
    â€œWait, so you’ve never really liked a guy?”
    She starts chewing on the inside of her cheek. “I have. I just never expected anything to happen. And now it definitely won’t since I moved away.” She sighs. “So, you mean to say that people steal their friends’ crushes all the time here?”
    â€œNo. I guess sometimes. But not all the time.” I clench my teeth. I don’t want to say anything else.
    Dina’s about to say something else when I see Mr. Valakis out of the corner of my eye. “We need to look busy,” I tell her under my breath. “Mr. Valakis.”
    â€œSo, we have about twenty minutes of strong footage,” Dina starts. “We need to get more, and focus on the direction we want to go, and then streamline the whole thing.”
    Wow, she’s good. She should be an actress or a spy. I don’t know where she got that from, but it sounded so believable and I really