It was a day later, and there I was: waiting on the never-ending lunch line in the cafeteria (srsly, why couldn’t they just hire more staff?). Felicia and her friends were up ahead, loudly talking about how many followers they had on something called the SoFamous app.
I wasn’t surprised that I had never heard of SoFamous—I was pretty much out of the loop on EVERYTHING—but I was surprised that they weren’t freaked out by being “followed,” especially since we’d just had that school assembly about “stranger danger.”
I decided to look up SoFamous on my phone. It turned out to be a social network that tracked your popularity based on how many people followed you. Back to the present again, I heard Felicia scream dramatically.
“I can’t believe it! I just hit ten thousand followers!” she exclaimed.
“No way! You’re so famous, Felicia!” replied Melinda.
“World-famous!” said Belinda.
“Galaxy-famous!” Berry added.
Galaxy-famous…Wow, I thought.
That would be a dream come true. I could already picture it….
I downloaded the app immediately. When I got to the front of the line, I asked the lunch lady if she wanted to follow me. But she was pretty confused, so I just paid and walked away with my head down, trying not to make a scene.
Finally, the last bell of the day rang. I was free to focus on what was important: how to become popular.
On the bus ride home, Felicia plopped down in the seat in back of me.
“How many followers do you have on SoFamous, Babymouse?” she asked.
I looked at my phone. After the reaction from the lunch lady, I hadn’t tried to get anyone else to follow me.
“Uh…” I pulled up the app, praying that I had miraculously increased in popularity in the last three hours.
Felicia looked over my shoulder.
“You have NO followers?” she laughed. “That’s like you don’t even exist, Babymouse!”
But Felicia was wrong. I existed on the Internet! I knew I did!
So I searched myself.
Then again, maybe not.
Le sigh.
I was determined to get more followers on SoFamous. I started by friending Gramps—only to find out he had over 400 followers! I sent him a message to see what his secret was.
Well, that was depressing—but still not as depressing as my social status! (Or lack thereof.) There must be a trick to getting followers. I needed to figure it out ASAP.
I texted Wilson.
After school, I followed every cool person I could find. Though my definition of “cool” started to get a little looser after the first hour or so.
All that following became super tedious. After an hour, I only had ten followers! So I decided to bring in reinforcements.
“Hello, favorite brother of mine,” I said, with my voice as sweet as a cupcake.
“Only brother of yours,” Squeak corrected. “What do you want?”
I cut to the chase.
“I want you to get me as many followers on SoFamous as possible by tomorrow morning,” I told him.
Squeak mulled it over. “What’s in it for me?” he asked.
“A whole dollar!” I said enthusiastically.
“Five dollars and I’m in,” he replied. Talk about supply and demand.
“Fine. But you get half now, and the other half tomorrow morning when I see my spike in popularity,” I said, and dug ten quarters out of my change jar.
He nodded and pocketed the coins.
“And no funny business,” I warned.
“Funny business,” he giggled to himself, in a way that made me a little nervous. He took my phone and disappeared into his room.
The rest of the night, I kicked back and enjoyed myself.
