“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
