In Real Life: My Journey to a Pixelated World Read online

  I thought the movie was the best piece I’d ever done when I made it, but watching it now makes me want to pluck my eyeballs out. Brittany and I shot it in the middle of winter, on a day of freezing rain. The basic premise was this: A girl disappears a few days before two high school students venture out into the woods to shoot photographs of trees for extra credit (hence the movie’s name, “Extra Credit”). A murderer in a faceless white mask is on the loose, hunting us down in the woods. Brittany gets butchered, but I escape to the car, only to find that the killer is waiting for me in the backseat. Fade to black.

  The acting was pretty horrendous, and one of our camera tripods even shows up in the background at one point. But all I saw was my ticket to the school of my dreams.

  I didn’t get in. And I was devastated. Actually devastated isn’t a strong enough word. The rejection felt like a crushing attack on my abilities, and for a while I thought my creative life was over. I figured that if Emerson didn’t like me, I wasn’t worth anything. I’d put so much stock in that school being the driving force that would dictate my future, and after the admissions department basically let me know that I wasn’t good enough for the college, I didn’t think I was good enough for anyone. Obviously that didn’t end up being the case, but I often think about that period of my life whenever I get down about something not working out the way I’d planned. The fact is, I got over it. I picked myself up, brushed off my shoulders, and kept moving forward. It wasn’t the end of the world, even if it felt like it at the time. No matter how much a situation can suck, it’s ultimately your choice as to whether you’re going to let it drag you down.

  I had applied to four other schools as backups and ended up getting into Fitchburg, a state school about forty minutes away that has a film and video concentration. My friend Amanda ended up getting in too, so I’d have someone there I already knew, and we were excited to start this new part of our lives together. We knew that college was going to be the best thing ever (even if it wasn’t Emerson). And though we couldn’t be roommates, we promised to hang out as much as possible.

  Brittany decided to go to a nearby community college, and we pledged to keep working on WSP even though we’d be apart. Despite getting rejected by my top-choice school, I was starting to really believe in myself again based on all the positive feedback we continued to get on our videos. And besides, I knew I could always reapply to Emerson the following year and transfer.

  • • •

  College started out great, with the best part being my newly found freedom. I was finally on my own and able to make my own schedule. And not only was Amanda with me, I’d already made a new friend before the first day of classes from a Facebook page that was set up for incoming freshmen. I started chatting with a pretty girl named Chloe who mentioned that she was also going to do the film and video concentration.

  Fitchburg isn’t located in the greatest neighborhood, but the campus has lots of green lawns and old brick buildings that look like mansions. My dorm room was a forced triple—basically a double that the school added bunk beds to in order to squeeze one extra person in. I arrived first and got to call dibs on the bunk bed that had an empty space beneath it. I moved my desk under it and created a little home office for myself. I plastered the walls with Futurama posters and made up the bed with a new bright green comforter and matching pillows.

  My roommates were classic male college stereotypes—the football player and the stoner. Their idea of decorating was slapping a Bob Marley poster and a giant ad for Jack Daniels on the wall. Since I was finally away from a place where I’d been teased my entire life for being feminine, I decided that this was time for a New Joey. So for the first two days, every time I spoke, I dropped my voice down two octaves and made sure not to wave my arms around when I talked like I usually did.

  The football player got transferred to a different dorm after the first week, and since I got along better with the stoner, I felt that I could drop the dude act and just be my normal self. Although I was totally not into weed, we got along pretty well. He was really mellow (OBVIOUSLY) and basically let me be. But our suite had three other rooms in it, so I was still stuck with six other guys, all of them jocks, whom I had to share a bathroom with. The guys were disgusting. The bathroom had a permanent stench of beer, mold, and barf, and after just one week, the sink was plastered in mysterious thick goo. (To this day I refuse to live in a place where I have to share a bathroom with another person.)

  The other big problem was that after I introduced the stoner to Amanda, they almost immediately began dating. Every night I’d have to fall asleep to the sound of their lips smacking in the dark.

  Amanda also really got along with Chloe, the girl I had met on Facebook. The three of us became a team, almost like what Amanda and I had with Brittany in high school. In the beginning, we spent a lot of time together and formed a little family, since we all felt lonely being away from our actual ones. Every night we’d get dinner together, and then we’d either play video games or go off-campus to check out parties. But I grew tired of going out really fast. Being stuck in a packed room full of smashed strangers in a trashy apartment was not my idea of a good time. Every time I saw someone stumble, all I could think about was my mother. One night after a party, Chloe came back to our dorm and started throwing up in the bathroom. Instead of trying to take care of her, I just stayed in my bed and didn’t even offer to help hold her hair back. I felt really bad the next morning, though, like I was a bad friend. But seeing her act so helpless was a major trigger for me that brought back too many memories of my mom acting the same way.

  Amanda’s fling with my roommate didn’t last very long. I kept noticing that he was spending an awful lot of time chatting on Facebook. It’s not that I was spying, but it was hard not to notice, even from across the room, that whoever this other girl was, she was sending him nude photos of herself. I didn’t want Amanda to get hurt. Just like in high school, we had each other’s backs, and I wasn’t about to let the scumbag screw her over. At the same time, I also didn’t want to be the one who openly ratted him out. It could make our living situation pretty awkward. So I started dropping subtle (quickly followed by very obvious) hints to Amanda about how he spent so much time talking to people on Facebook, and she eventually got curious enough to sneak a peek at his computer. She ended the fling immediately, and since it had been going on for only a few weeks, no one was too devastated. Even better, I no longer had to hear them going at it every night.

  Chloe and Amanda continued to go out and get drunk a couple of nights a week, and I started staying in more to work on WSP videos, since I was still traveling home each weekend to film new ones with Brittany. By that point, we had enough subscribers that we were earning close to one thousand dollars a month on ads, so I was taking our channel more seriously than ever before. But Amanda and Chloe started giving me a lot of crap for not going out with them. “Come on, Joey,” Chloe would say. “Enjoy your college life!”

  But I enjoyed my YouTube life more, and they started getting on my case about it. One night they were trying to get me to go out while I was in the middle of editing a video parody of Justin Bieber’s song “One Time.” We had reworked all of the lyrics so that it was about the game Farmville and got other YouTubers like iJustine to film parts for it too. It was silly, but I knew that, and I was really proud of the video.

  “Joey, turn off your computer already and come out with us,” Chloe whined.

  “I’ve got to get this video finished. Here, watch this clip!” I played them a little bit of me lip-synching to the new lyrics while acting like Bieber. I smiled, waiting for them to start laughing, but Amanda didn’t even look at the computer and stared intently at her phone instead.

  That hurt. Amanda was one of my closest friends from high school. She had even been in a bunch of WSP videos, but she was suddenly acting as if she was too cool for them now in order to suck up to Chloe, who had never been that interested in them. I was confused by this s
udden shift in our relationship. I wondered if she was embarrassed by me, or if maybe she was just trying to give me some sort of tough love about the video. Maybe it did suck and she just didn’t want to say it out loud. I also think that I was a little jealous about how much she was bonding with Chloe. I felt that I was being excluded. (I was vindicated in the end. The video went viral after we posted it and now has over 10 million views.)

  But the end result of that night was that nothing was ever the same between us. Chloe and Amanda started to hang out alone more and not include me, and when we did get together, Chloe constantly pointed out that she didn’t think I was very smart. If I didn’t know about a subject she was talking about or if I mispronounced a word, she’d call me out on it. She’d do it in a joking voice, but in a way that I could tell there was some genuine malice underneath. It made me start believing less and less in myself.

  I didn’t want to be totally friendless, though, so I put up with them, and one night they finally persuaded me to go with them to a party.

  “It’s going to be amazing,” Chloe said. “You can’t miss this one. I refuse to let you.”

  “Fine,” I said with a sigh, and before I knew it, I was standing in yet another gross apartment surrounded by all the usual drunk frat boys.

  “I’m not really comfortable here,” I told Amanda.

  “I don’t care. Just relax, get a drink,” she said. “Come on, Chloe, let’s go find some boys.”

  I stood in a corner, totally miserable until out of nowhere, a familiar face appeared. It was a girl named Shanisa whom I’d casually known since the second grade. We had ridden the same bus together for a while, and we had even had a few of the same classes when we were older. Maybe I was about to make a new friend.

  “Hi!” I said excitedly. “You know, I thought I recognized you on campus the other day. That’s so cool that you go here too!”

  “Yeah,” she said, sort of listlessly. “So you’re gay, right?”

  “No,” I stammered. “Who told you that?”

  “Oh, no one. I just thought you were. My bad.” She took a sip of her drink. “But are you sure, though?”

  RUDE! I couldn’t figure out where her question even came from, much less how it was appropriate to ask someone you barely knew. And here I’d thought that one time I’d let her sit next to me on the bus in second grade meant something. What a bitch, I thought as I turned away from her, but suddenly I got nervous. Was that still how people saw me? I’d thought I’d left that persona behind in high school. Maybe I should have kept making my voice sound deeper after all.

  I was done with the party, and right then Amanda and Chloe showed up.

  “Ugh, there are no cute boys here. Let’s go to Randy’s party,” Chloe said.

  So we trekked a few blocks over to another house party that was exactly like the one we had just left. There was a repeat of what happened at the last place, with me standing in the corner while they searched for boys to talk to. Chloe finally came to get me.

  “This place sucks. Let’s go back to the other party.”

  At this point, the two of them were fairly drunk, and I had had enough. I told them that I was going to go home instead. We got to an intersection at a main road where I could turn back to school and they could head to the other party.

  “Okay, bye,” I said. “Have fun!”

  They stopped dead in their tracks. “Are you freaking kidding me?” Chloe asked.

  Amanda joined in. “You’re just going to leave us here? Two girls alone?”

  I was dumbfounded. “I told you I was leaving. And besides, you guys wouldn’t even talk to me at either of those parties.”

  “It’s not our fault that you’re so socially awkward, Joey,” Chloe said.

  “I’m just not having fun,” I said. “But you guys go on without me.”

  “Wow, what a man,” Chloe said with a sneer. “Leaving us here all alone in the street.”

  I looked around. There were tons of kids from the college wandering the sidewalks, party hopping.

  “You guys go out all the time without me,” I said. “You’ve never said anything about not feeling safe!”

  “You’re just being a little bitch!” Chloe screamed.

  That was the last straw. I turned around and walked back to campus. I could still hear them screaming about what a coward I was from a block away.

  I was so furious that I called Brittany as soon I got back to my room and told her what had happened. She felt bad for me but couldn’t come over and comfort me because she lived so far away. I called my sister next. “I don’t think I can take this anymore,” I said, on the verge of tears. “I’ve had it. They are so mean to me!”

  “You don’t need that in your life,” Nicole said. “Do you want me to come pick you up?” She was in college too at the time and wasn’t as far away as Brittany.

  I glanced at my computer screen and saw that Amanda had just logged on to AIM.

  “No, that’s okay. Thanks for listening. I love you,” I said. Just hearing Nicole’s voice had managed to calm me down. Once I hung up with her, I started typing a message to Amanda:

  Joey: I’m not going to take any more shit from you two from here on out. You’ve been treating me like I’m an idiot all the time just because Chloe does.

  Amanda: I’m pissed as hell, Joey. You don’t leave two girls out alone at night.

  Joey: You were both being so mean!

  Amanda: What, because I told you for the millionth time to get off YouTube and come hang with us?

  Joey: No, it’s that whenever I say something, you don’t care. Tonight you literally said, “I don’t care.”

  Amanda: Whatever. I still can’t believe you left us. You are so selfish. What kind of guy does that?

  Joey: Amanda, you were fine. There were tons of people out.

  Amanda: I know, but you don’t know what could have happened.

  Joey: You were like four houses away! Big whoop.

  Amanda: You are such a dick. You never do anything anymore. All you do is sit at your stupid computer all day.

  Joey: Speaking of, how about when I show you something I’m proud of, like my video, and you ignore it? Do you know how much that hurts?

  Amanda: Well, I’m sorry, but I hate that stupid song. I don’t care what the video is but anything with that song is shit. What do you want me to do? Sit there and tell you it was godly? You just sit at your lame computer, and you are a lazy piece of shit. Face it, you will never be anything in life and you will never get into Emerson.

  I blocked her immediately and signed off AIM. I was shocked about how much hate she was spewing. I tried to keep things in perspective, knowing that she was drunk. Still, it was no excuse. She took it way too far—she knew how much getting into Emerson meant to me. As far as I was concerned, my friendship with both of them was over. I had a really brief text exchange with Chloe that was basically a rehash of the same conversation I had with Amanda.

  The first few days without them were fine. I continued with my normal routine, and since I spent so much time working at my computer on WSP to begin with, I hardly noticed my sudden lack of friends. But after my fourth solo trip to the dining hall, I began to get depressed. Fitchburg was already cliquey to begin with, and now that we were a couple of months into the semester, none of them were taking applications for new members. I became a lone sailor and started to eat my feelings. I had the same meal day in and day out. I’d slink over to a table in the corner, sit by myself, and scarf down my dinner—a hamburger, a hot dog, a cherry Coke, and a vanilla/chocolate swirl ice-cream cone for dessert—as fast as I could and then race back to my dorm room.

  I quickly got sick of eating alone in public, though, and eventually gave up on the dining hall. I’d get pizza delivered to my room or eat a bowl of cereal rather than have to face another lonely meal in front of a roomful of friends laughing with each other. I didn’t have any classes on Fridays, so every Thursday night my dad would pick me up and brin
g me back home so Brittany and I could work on more videos.

  My mom had started drinking again, but because I wasn’t living with her full-time, I tried to turn the other way and pretend nothing was happening. But it was hard because I worried so much that Jett might be experiencing some of the same things that I had experienced with her. And I suddenly started to wonder why no one in my family ever did anything to help get me out of the situation. Living with an alcoholic was certainly not easy, and it’s not that people hadn’t known what was going on. I had felt trapped.

  My mom was like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—there were two sides to her. I never stopped loving her, even when she was at her worst, because I still craved the moments when she was good. I just had to wait for her to sober up and get back to her nice self. It was an extremely unhealthy relationship. I knew that Jett was getting the good parts of our mom, but I was so scared of him ever having to deal with the bad parts too that I ended up having a conversation with Bob, asking him to make sure that Jett was being well taken care of. He assured me that he was, and I felt a little better.

  I always dreaded having to return to school on Sunday nights and face another lonely week. I felt that I was living a double life. Online, I had friends across the world, and it seemed that my life was so fun when looked at through the lens of WinterSpringPro—full of dancing and laughing and collaborations with friends. But in real life it was the exact opposite.

  I finally got so lonely that I called my sister and asked her how to make friends. “You just have to go out and meet people,” she said. “Is there anyone at all that you’re even talking to right now?”

  There was one person—a guy named Todd from one of my film classes who seemed pretty cool. He had a YouTube channel of his own, and he’d stopped to talk to me a few times after our class together to ask questions about how to promote his videos. I’d give him some advice, but then he always rushed off before we could start up any sort of conversation. Whenever I’d see him around campus, he was always surrounded by a huge group of friends, so I never felt brave enough to approach him and try to develop a real friendship. But after talking to my sister, I screwed up all my courage and walked up to him after class one day.