Mostly silly, very fluffy. Chapters will be pretty short. Hope you enjoy!
Charlotte was coming over in about a half an hour so they could film their very first video. Lizzie had spent the last few days studying examples of just about every vlogger on YouTube, so she had a pretty good idea of what she was going to do. Still, she felt like something was missing, some kind of unique element that would distinguish her video from thousands of others.
Maybe props? She scanned her bookshelves, looking for something interesting or striking. Nothing really stood out. She crossed the room to her closet, digging into the back where she kept the clothes she never wore but couldn't throw away. Like that horrible t-shirt her mother gave her. Lizzie pulled it out with a grimace, but then it turned into a smile.
She had just found her opening line.
Lizzie checked the time. Still twenty minutes. What other props could she use? There might be something useful in the attic. There was always tons of stuff up there that her mother was too sentimental to get rid of.
She dug through a few boxes, sneezing at the dust she was disturbing, but she didn't find anything promising until she came across a container simply labeled Hats. It was a veritable treasure trove of ridiculous headwear, from the floppy-brimmed sunhats her mother collected to the various caps her father had preferred at one time or another over the last forty-plus years.
The idea came to her in a flash. Costumes.
She dug deeper until she found the perfect one, bright blue and flamboyantly huge. Pair it with a colorful shawl, and she'd have the perfect encapsulation of her mother. Now, what about Dad? She had narrowed it down to two choices, one in each hand, until finally deciding on the one in her left. She scampered downstairs, leaving the newsie cap behind. There was just enough time before Charlotte showed up to scrawl out some kind of script for her costumed versions of her parents. This was going to be fun.
A few weeks later...
Lizzie was in no mood to make a video. She'd already said all she wanted to say about the wedding in her last video, and that was the good stuff with Jane and Bing. Well, mostly good. Mom's fist-pump was pretty awful. But anyway, one episode about the wedding was enough. She did not want to talk about the massively unpleasant experience she had had. It was just a bad memory that needed to be forgotten. Talking about it on her blog would be the opposite of helping.
Trouble was, she couldn't think of anything else to talk about.
Grumpily, she climbed the steps to the attic, hoping she'd find some random thing up there to base a video around. It was a long shot, but she had to think of something pretty quick. Lydia was begging to be in the next one, and Lizzie figured it was easier to throw her a bone than keep trying to fend her off. She just had to come up with a nice, reasonable topic.
She scanned the boxes without much hope of seeing anything useful. Then her eyes fell on the newsie cap, still resting where she had left it on the day she made her first video. And a grin slowly spread across her face.
Maybe she could talk about Darcy after all. Maybe she even wanted to talk about Darcy, if it meant making fun of him and his stiff, robotic, stuffy doucheyness. Oh, yes. This was perfect. If only she still had that velcro-fastening bowtie from the time she dressed as Thomas Edison for a school report – but wait, it might still be in the attic too.
Ten minutes later she emerged, covered with dust and grime, but triumphantly bearing her Darcy costume. "Hey, Lydia!" she called at her sister's door. "Get ready. As soon as I clean up, we're going to make my video."