Friendship Famous
5th grade # 1 award winning story
Written & Illustrated by Twisha Shah
“Annabelle!” I screamed. “I have the best idea! What if we start a YouTube channel?” I was at Annabelle’s house today because my parents and her parents were hanging out like they did every few days. We were always home alone on these days, either at her house or mine. We’ve had nothing to do the past few weeks of meeting each other.
“What?! You’re crazy. I’m not starting a YouTube channel with you, Brooke. You know I don’t feel safe revealing my face to strangers,” Annabelle replied.
Why wouldn’t she want to start a channel? It would bring me fame, which I’ve always dreamed of! “Think about it this way. I’ll get really famous and you’ll get money for the dog you want to get! I’ll be the one in the videos, and you’ll record my videos for me!” It sounded perfect to me.
“True, the money would be useful…Fine, I’ll be your editor and cameraman,” Annabelle said, unsure.
“Great! We’ll start right now! Get your camera and we can record a video!” I said, my stomach bubbling with excitement.
With that, Annabelle got her camera. After a few attempts, we finally made a four minute video about what I’d be posting: challenges, pranks, etc.
For the next week, we checked our phones every ten minutes to see if we were successful, but we had only gotten eleven views.
* * *
We published prank videos as much as we could for the next month. When Annabelle showed me a recording of a video a month later, she showed me one of my classmates walking in the background, picking her nose.
“Should we delete it?” Annabelle asked me.
I replied, sadly, “No. No one watches our videos anyway.”
The next day I awoke early to Annabelle calling me.
“Brooke! You won’t believe this! Our last video got 3,472 views! We got 111 comments on the girl in the background!”
“That’s amazing! Annabelle, this is going to sound really weird, but does that mean if we embarrass people, we’ll get more views?!” My voice got higher as I spoke. “Annabelle, today we can record a video at school about someone else embarrassing themself!”
With that, the call ended, but I couldn’t fall back asleep.
When it was finally time for school, I ran outside for the bus.
After two classes, we found our first subject. She was another middle schooler, like us. She was screaming, “There’s a wasp in my hair!!” Annabelle immediately brought out her camera, and recorded the girl for about three minutes. At the end, I did an introduction, and she posted the video.
The next day, the girl whom we had recorded the day before stormed up to me with her phone in her hand. She held up her phone and showed me the video that had 1.6 million views!!! “What is this?!” she screamed.
“A video of you,” I said, smiling unintentionally.
“Delete it! Now!” the girl said.
“I’m sorry, but it’s already out,” I said.
“Why, why would you do this to me?” she asked, sadly.
“Look, I’m sorry, but I can’t do anything about it. Please leave,” I said.
“I will. I just want to let you know, though, that you have a bad heart,” she ended, storming off, her eyes teary.
The next few weeks went by like that: Annabelle and I secretly recorded people, and they came up to me, angrily. On the other hand we got as many as 7.473 million views and 187,962 subscribers! Unfortunately, not many people wanted to hang out with me, scared I’d embarrass them.
One day, Annabelle and I were at her house and Annabelle was trying to open a yogurt container but wasn’t able to and was struggling. I had been in the bathroom, while she was in the kitchen. When I got out, I grabbed her camera from her windowsill and switched it on. After about five minutes of having difficulty with the yogurt jar, Annabelle finally opened it, and she happily did a… “dance.”
That day, before I left, I took Annabelle’s camera and published the video. Annabelle had taught me how to publish videos once before, and it came in handy. At the moment, I hadn’t really thought about the results. The next day, Annabelle ran up to me crying and we had a big feud.
“What the heck, Brooke? How could you? I now realize how bad it feels to be embarrassed in public. What we’re doing is horrible, Brooke. Take this video down now!”
“I’m sorry, Annabelle, I won’t take it down. Besides, you can take it down yourself,” I said.
“I won’t take it down. I want to see if you’d do that for me, if you’d stay loyal to a friend.”
“Well, I won’t,” I said, with a pang of guilt.
“Well then…you’ve lost a friend,” Annabelle said, quietly.
The next few days, I was miserable without Annabelle. So, I did the best thing I could. I tried recording a video embarrassing myself, which was REALLY hard for me, but I hoped my friends would see it, so I could get them back. Even though my channel got me thousands of subscribers, I realized life was much better with my friends, and certainly NOT a channel.
THE END
About the Author
Twisha Shah is an eleven year old girl who loves writing stories.
She enjoys sports, such as soccer, basketball, gymnastics, and swimming. She wrote this story to prove that popularity has no value if you don’t have friends to share it with. Writing this story was to show that fame is not nearly as important as friendship and that no one should do anything that would hurt their family or friends.
Twisha, I’m so proud of you! Keep up the good work 🙂
Thank you! It’s SO sweet of you to comment on my blog. Of course, I couldn’t have written this story at all if it weren’t for you, Mrs. Jimenez!! 😊
Twisha you are literally so slay so yass slay .