Follow Me Read online

  Pretty much everyone I knew growing up was into Pokémon, but as soon as I hit middle school it became very uncool to still like them. We were graduating into our teenage years and most people were desperate to leave their childhood behind and prepare for everything puberty had to offer. It’s a bridge time in anyone’s life, but I didn’t see why I needed to give up something I loved so much in order to cross it. To put it in Pokémon terms, it was an unfair trade. You were considered a loser and super lame if you still held on to any shred of your childhood, even though I’ll bet you anything that a ton of other kids were still secretly playing, too. I had to go underground, but I was still eventually caught. I have no idea how the kid found out—maybe it was just a lucky guess—but this one guy told our whole gym class that I still played Pokémon and everyone laughed and made fun of me. I remember this one girl sneering and saying, “Everyone stopped liking that years ago, what’s wrong with you?”

  Nothing! It honestly sounds so stupid to explain this because I know it’s not even a big deal now. Like, who cares? But at the time it was such a huge deal and I was so embarrassed and sad.

  I know lots of people my age now who are also still obsessed with Pokémon. In fact, it’s considered kind of cool, at least in my circle of friends. I have a ton of toys and stuffed animals, as anyone who watched my videos when I lived with Kian and Jc in Hollywood knows. I always filmed in front of a huge wall of my collection of hundreds of Pokémon. I haven’t set them up in my new place yet, but I plan to get a custom-made shelf built for them, so I can display them like art. Especially since I have so many new ones now! I recently got a chance to go to the flagship Pokémon store in Japan, where you can buy a lot of Pokémon stuff that isn’t available anywhere else in the world. I was like a kid in a candy store, if the candy were a bunch of weird-looking stuffed animals. This is kind of embarrassing, but I filled up four huge bags with new toys and had to buy a whole extra suitcase to fly home with in order to fit them all in!

  I think it’s really important to hold on to things you loved from childhood. Everyone always talks about the importance of listening to your inner child, but I think you should do more than just listen to it. Open up your toy box and dust off some old friends! The best way to grow old is to stay young at heart.

  CHALLENGE

  #TOYSFORRICKY

  I want to meet your favorite toy! Take a picture of it or make a quick video and tell me about the cool imaginary adventures you used to have together. (Or still do!)

  CHAPTER 2

  Bummed Out

  CHALLENGE

  #SOURFACEFORRICKY

  Get as many different sour candy products as you can find and try to eat as many of them in a row as possible.

  HEALTH

  No matter how good you are at something, there’s always a possibility that you will fail if you’re only given one chance to prove your worth. It doesn’t matter if you’re trying out for a school play, a YouTube collab, or band—putting yourself out there can cause even the most confident people to feel like their stomach is churning out ten thousand rabid butterflies. No wonder people choke.

  For me, sports auditions were the most nerve-racking. Athletics were a MAJOR deal at Hoover High. MTV even filmed a couple of seasons of a reality show called Two-A-Days about our football team and some of its players, sort of a true version of Friday Night Lights. (Behind the scenes, things were just as dramatic—it was later revealed that our school’s coach was living a double life with two wives!)

  I spent most of my life playing tennis with my mom and dad. I started to get really into it in junior high, and played in local competitions outside of school. But when it came time to actually try out for my school’s team in eighth grade, I psyched myself out and didn’t make it. Instead of getting depressed, I became all the more determined to make the ninth-grade team. So I spent the entire next year practicing my butt off. I’d play any chance I could get and by the time freshman year tryouts came around I was positive I’d land a spot.

  Like I said, the problem with tryouts is that you only have the one chance to prove your worth. You could be the best around, but if you slip up and make a mistake, which even the pros do, a coach can think that’s all you’re good for. With tennis it was especially difficult—if you’re auditioning for a musical you have the director’s full attention, but with my tennis tryout there were eight different games happening on eight different courts, in addition to other people doing drills. There was so much happening at once, and the coach would walk up and down the length of the courts, watching only one match at a time. So of course whenever I’d show off a particularly awesome backhand swing he’d be off looking at someone else, and only ever glanced over at me when I’d fault on a serve. I think subconsciously I could feel his eyes suddenly swing my way and I’d let my fear of failure get the best of me.

  I couldn’t figure out how he managed to see ONLY my mistakes, though. Not to sound arrogant, but I knew I was good. My friends knew I was good. My family did too. In fact, everyone seemed to know it except the one person who mattered most. So when I didn’t make the team everyone was sort of shocked, especially my friend Mason.

  Mason and I had met in band and become really close. He has dark hair, is just as tall as I am, and we had everything in common—he also played trumpet, we were both really into tennis, and we’d have sleepovers all of the time where we’d watch movies and play video games.

  When he landed a spot on the team I went to all the school matches to watch him play, because I’m not a petty person. I was secretly sad, though. It sucked to watch him out there on the court, having fun. His being on the team was suddenly the only thing we didn’t have in common.

  I refused to let not getting on the team lessen my resolve, though. I practiced harder than ever, determined to make the high school team. Mason helped me a lot, and that whole year whenever we had a sleepover we’d wake up early in the morning and go practice at one of the many, many tennis courts that for some reason are all over Hoover. We had a healthy rivalry in most things we did together, but I’m not too proud to admit that he was better than me at tennis. It was the drive to catch up to him that finally got me on the team. He made me want to get even better, and it worked—I made varsity the next year!

  CHALLENGE

  #SPORTSFORRICKY

  If you’ve never done it, play my favorite game, tennis! If you’ve already played tennis even once in your life, choose a different sport you’ve never attempted and give it a go. It’s totally okay if you’re terrible at it. Or maybe you’ll discover a hidden talent!

  CHALLENGE

  #SHIPFORRICKY

  Ship two characters from your favorite movie, book, or TV show and make a video explaining why they’re perfect for each other.

  MUSIC

  For someone who was as big a band geek as I was, it’s no shocker that I was into all different kinds of music growing up. Because of my age, Britney Spears has always been playing somewhere in the background pretty much my whole life. In fact, I love all the big pop diva queens like Katy Perry and Demi Lovato. But there’s also a side of me that really loves alternative punk bands like All Time Low, Blink-182, and All-American Rejects.

  In fact, I loved All-American Rejects so much that I did my first solo music video ever to them. All of the ones I’d filmed with Shelby were fun and sort of silly, but I decided to take this one seriously. The piece they did for “Move Along” is made up of a ton of fast-cut edits, with the lead singer standing still but changing outfits and locations about a million different times. It’s almost like stop-motion animation, and it was a form of editing that I’d been playing around with a lot in my free time anyway. So I studied it really hard and spent over a week creating my own version and lip-syncing along. That was probably the first time that my passion for making videos hit super hard. I’d always enjoyed it, but working on that video didn’t feel like work. It was playtime for me.

  It had been about a year since I’d stopped
doing videos with Shelby. I was proud of how “Move Along” turned out and I uploaded it to our old PICKLEandBANANA YouTube channel. We only had about forty subscribers, and they were pretty much my family members and people I knew from band. I wanted other people to see my new creation, so I sent out mass Facebook messages with links to the video, and posted it on my own Facebook page as well. You know, Marketing 101.

  That minimal bit of effort backfired, majorly.

  I can’t even put into words how hard I was bullied and harassed about that first attempt at creative expression. Well, okay, I’ll try. Imagine busting your butt for days on end, working on a labor of love that filled you with a sense of purpose and hope and curiosity for the future. Now imagine showing the final product to people and being flat-out laughed at. People trashed that video like a moldy sandwich, and I was humiliated.

  The thing was, I still thought it was good. I couldn’t understand what they saw in it that I didn’t. It was just a video, clearly meant to be lighthearted and fun, and I’d put a lot of time and effort into it. As the online taunting progressed, it started to bleed out into real life. Students at my school would convince teachers to screen it in class on big projectors, under the guise of its having something to do with whatever they were studying. The teacher would hit play, unaware that the entire class was mocking it. Kids made fun of me in the hallway, singing the song and imitating my moves. I was the talk of the entire school for weeks. I realize this might sound overdramatic, and I’m not one to look for pity, but the experience was miserable. I could not escape the ridicule and harassment surrounding the video and it went on for weeks on end.

  During this time I tried to keep my head held high but I felt like I was dying inside. I was not just ready to delete the video, I wanted to delete my entire channel.

  I decided to go and talk to Ms. Pierce, my favorite teacher. She taught history and coincidentally happened to keep moving up a grade every year, so I always had class with her.

  She listened patiently while I explained what had been happening, but refused to let me wallow in my misery. She told me that I had a knack for making videos, and that I needed to stick with it no matter what the student body reaction was. It wasn’t any sort of big speech, and she probably didn’t realize it at the time, but she singlehandedly had one of the most positive impacts ever on my life. She was there during a time I needed someone the most, and hearing some positivity from her meant so much. I still think about it all of the time. I hope she knows how amazing she is.

  “Some people don’t understand creativity,” she told me. “But you do. You clearly have it.”

  I felt a little better after I left her classroom, but it was really Shelby who helped me fully pull through. As always, she was my faithful cheerleader and supporter.

  “It doesn’t matter what people say,” she said. “This could be a big thing for you one day.”

  It was near impossible to imagine that being true at the time, considering the reaction I’d gotten. It was like studying to be a dentist and accidentally getting your hands chopped off and everyone’s like, “No problem! You can still fulfill your dream of scraping plaque off strangers’ teeth!” Okay, not exactly the same, but that’s what it felt like.

  I stuck it out, though. I kept the video up, ate all the abuse, and in the end Shelby was right. Eventually some other poor kid did something that caused the herd to focus its nastiness elsewhere. I was blissfully forgotten and continued making my videos in peace. It took a while for me to get up the guts to promote something I’d made as much as I did that first time, though. I’d been scarred badly, but I kept on going.

  The takeaway here is pretty obvious—don’t listen to haters. But I think the more important thing to realize is that if you are being attacked or bullied, it helps a lot to talk to someone about it. It can be a parent, a friend, a teacher, a sibling, really anyone in your life whom you trust. The important thing is to not keep those bad feelings to yourself. They will fester like an ingrown hair and make you doubt your abilities. Worse, they could keep you from doing the things in life you love. There’s that old saying, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again,” but I think that advice should go a step further when it comes to creativity and imagination. If you’ve managed to actually make something yourself and people don’t like it, the fact that you even took that first step to create is success in and of itself. That’s not to say it isn’t important to practice and hone your craft. And also be sure you don’t fall into the trap of mixing up constructive criticism with ridicule—sometimes there are actually important things you can learn from someone’s not-exactly-positive reaction. But I think the difference between the two is usually pretty clear.

  In the end, I did take the video down, but for a much more lame reason—copyright issues. But it was another important lesson: Always make sure that what you’re posting on YouTube is legal. Back then it was a lot harder to figure out the rules, but now YouTube has a whole library where you can check specific songs to see what their copyright details are and find out whether you can use the song. Most are actually fine now, because YouTube will place ads on the video to pay the song owner, but you should always check first before posting anything!

  CHALLENGE

  #REMAKEFORRICKY

  I officially give you permission to use any of my songs! Make a music video, either singing or lip-syncing, to any one you want, using your own creative vision!

  CHALLENGE

  #POOLFORRICKY

  Jump into a public pool with all of your clothes on.

  FAMILY

  If I have anyone to thank for my creative genes, it’s my aunt Vickie. She was my dad’s sister, and I saw her more often than any other members of our extended family (aside from my grandparents) simply because she lived in Atlanta, so it was pretty easy for her to come and visit us. My mom has siblings, too, but they lived on the other side of the country.

  Aunt Vickie loved to change up her look on a regular basis, and always rocked some new haircut every time I saw her. One month her short hair would be brown, and the next, bleached blond. She had a fantastic sense of style, and I always looked forward to seeing what she’d be wearing when she showed up. Sometimes everything was bright and colorful, and one time she arrived at the house dressed like a full-on cowgirl! She’d never just wear jeans and a shirt. She was flamboyant, funny, and fierce. I adored her.

  She ran a picture-framing business and did her own photography and graphic design on the side, so she was the first person I knew who made a living by doing something artistic. She was an incredible painter and drawer, and we have tons of her artwork hanging in our house. She didn’t have any kids of her own, so she always made sure to spend as much time with Tara and me as possible.

  I had a special bond with Aunt Vickie, and she was around for every birthday, graduation, and holiday. My earliest memories of her are of her coming over for Christmas and decorating cookies with me. We’d come up with fantastic colorful designs that didn’t adhere to any kind of specific holiday rules. I’d pile on seven different colors of icing in swirls and patterns, and the crazier I got with my creations the more she loved them. I lived for making her happy and proud of me, and I always felt like she understood me on a much different level than most people in my life.

  On Easter Sunday of my junior year in high school, she came over for our annual feast. We had always dyed eggs together, but for whatever reason—teenage hormones, a desire to seem more grown-up—I decided I didn’t want to that year. She seemed a little disappointed but quickly brushed it off.

  Not dyeing those eggs with her is one of the biggest regrets of my life.

  One month later, she was diagnosed with soft tissue sarcoma, a type of cancer that forms tumors in muscle and bone. It came out of nowhere, and we were told there was nothing the doctors could do. The cancer had advanced too far for chemotherapy. I was in shock when we drove to Atlanta to see her, and even more so when I laid eyes on her. Just four weeks earlie
r she had been her normal, healthy, full-of-energy self. What I saw when we arrived was a pale, scarily skinny woman with sunken eyes. But her attitude was the same. She knew what was happening to her and accepted it. She reassured us instead of the other way around. She tried to make us laugh and told jokes and acted like nothing was different, even as we moved her into hospice care. Despite her fading looks, she seemed so full of life that I couldn’t grasp she was actually dying.

  Her doctors warned us that the end would come fast, and my parents told me before one particular visit that it would probably be the last. Instead of long tearful good-byes, we pretended nothing was different, because we knew that was how she would want it. There were a million things I wanted to say to her that I felt I couldn’t, but the beautiful thing about our relationship is that I didn’t really need to. She knew how I felt about her, and I felt all that love returned when I looked into her eyes as I said good-bye. A few weeks later she passed away. The last words she ever said to me were “I’m so proud of you,” and she smiled the same bright smile I’d known all my life.

  I was devastated. It was my first experience with death, and I had no idea what to do with all the emotions I had. In retrospect, I think I went through all the normal stages of grief, from denial to acceptance, but each step felt like I was floating through a fog instead of truly experiencing the feelings for what they needed to be.