Bayside High School in Malibu, California was pretty much the standard high school in Southern California. It was as old as some of the others to have turned out stars like Tom Hanks or Reese Witherspoon, but it had its few claims to fame. A few students had made their attempts to reach for the stars, like young beauty Becca Weller, who had eight commercials under her resume and two supporting parts as an older sister to Dakota Fanning in one movie and a young sister to Haley Joel Osment in another. Another would be up-and-coming was Amber Addison, one half of the school fashion zombies known as Amber and Ashley who were so much in love with themselves that anyone who wasn't them wasn't worth their effort. Amber had auditioned for American Idol and had been rejected by the British judge on the end. Her warped sense of reasoning was that Paula Abdul was jealous of her, any excuse possible than to face the truth that her personality was lousy. Yet, when Christy Vaughn made it through to Hollywood and was let go during the final cuts, Amber didn't bat an eye. To her, how could Christy get through and not her?
Bayside did have one already prominent star in its halls even if it didn't know it. Hidden beneath her real identity, one auburn haired beauty was secretly entertainer Hannah Montana to the rest of the world. Loved by fans, a peer to pop stars and a young fashion mogul by the age of fifteen, this vivacious young girl hid her secret dual identity much tighter than comic book superheroes. It gave her a chance for a regular life in the real world. Only her family and closest friends knew her secret, an earth-shattering secret that she was not sure she'd ever reveal. Sure she could have anything in the world of she let loose with her identity, but the consequences of revealing it would be a price to her privacy. If but one person knew the secret of…
"Miley!!" Oliver Oaken dashed into the school and swung around a corner for his friends. Miley Stewart clutched her books tightly and closed her locker. Running past classmates but slowing in the presence of teachers, the mop-topped brunette class clown screeched to a stop before Miley and Lily Truscott. Lily was the blonde tomboy with the skateboard hanging from her backpack of notebooks. Ramming into the lockers before them, Oliver stopped turned to face them and caught his breath in an instant.
"Miley…" Oliver spoke in hushed tones. "I need your help. I ordered an autographed picture of Hannah Montana for my cousin's birthday next month off Ebay and it arrived yesterday not signed. Could you sign it?"
"How can you ask her that here?" Lily lowered her voice and looked round to see if anyone was listening.
"Oliver," Miley pulled him close to force him to face how stupid he was at times. "Why would you order an autographed Hannah photo when I can give you one for free?"
"Because you were on a European tour last month when I ordered it!" Oliver forced her to face the truth. "Something else you didn't invite me to!!!"
"Man, we had so much fun!!!" Lily had tagged along as Miley's guest on that tour.
"Oh…" Miley snatched the photo of herself in her blonde Hanna wig and turned to her locker. With Lily blocking her view, she pushed the photo to Lily's back and signed it in her usual signature. Feeling the pen writing into her back, Lily caught sight of a cute boy she wanted to meet. He had short dark hair like Ricky Ullman and dreamy brown eyes like George Clooney replete with striking eyebrows and an athletic build. Garbed in a dark blue shirt, baseball jacket and faded blue jeans with an old weathered fedora on his head, her future conquest was carrying a large military backpack for his books to class. Judging by his unfamiliarity with the school, he had to be new as he searched for his new high school locker. Miley finished her Hanna autograph and secreted it back to Oliver to hide away, but her boy radar went up and she locked on to the young stud for herself. She realized Lily had seen him too.
"I saw him first!!!" They screamed together and jumped forward to stake their claims. Leaving Oliver behind, the two girls once again proved that where boys were concerned, there was nothing sacred. Lily tried to bar Miley from getting past her, but the quicker Tennessee native ducked her arm and slammed against the lockers next to the new boy.
"Hi……." Miley grinned dreamily to the guy as Lily groused and grumbled for being too slow.
"Hi." The new boy did not understand this response from girls.
"I'm Miley…"
"And I'm her best friend, Lily!!" Lily interrupted her with a dreamy beaming grin on her face. Miley grumbled a bit herself and looked to Oliver. He loved their competing for this guy's attention. It was always funny to see them trying to screw each other up. "You must be new here!" Lily quickly observed.
"Is it that obvious?"
"Yeah…" Oliver interjected. "They already fought over the all other cute boys here. They need fresh meat." Lily and Miley both grabbed and twisted his chest to keep him from embarrassing them.
"I'm Jesse… Jesse Samms. I just moved here from Nashville." The new boy introduced himself as he unloaded his pack.
"You're from Nashville!!!" Miley saw a place to grab him up: they had something in common. "So am I!! I'm from Ridgetop in the North, you?" Lily was already groaning realizing he had nothing in common with her unless he liked skateboarding.
"Belle Meade…" Jesse was already taking a shine to Miley.
"What a small world…" Oliver grinned sarcastically and looked to Miley hysterically happy then panned over to Lily rolling her eyes upset.
"My mom works for Capitol Records…." Jesse continued.
"Really, that's my…." She caught herself about to reveal her secret identity. "My… my favorite singer's recording label, Hannah Montana?"
"I love Hannah Montana!!!" Jesse confessed.
"Crap!!!" Lily was growing ticked off and invisible by the minute with the stuff Miley and Jesse had in common. Oliver was laughing at her so she hit him in the shoulder.
"These lockers aren't very big out here, are they?" Jesse was trying to get more things in his locker than his schoolbooks.
"You can keep some stuff in mine." Lily started flirting to Jesse with a big happy grin on her face despite the fact it was against school rules for two students to share lockers.
"How much room do you need, dude?" Oliver stood watching this encounter before him.
"I need room for my merchandise." Jesse placed his fedora on his locker's top shelf and squeezed his jacket in on a hook in the back then leaned forward clandestinely. "You know how a lot of your friends wait till the last second to do book reports and term papers?"
"Yeah…" Lily was carefully listening in disbelief.
"Well, that's where I come in…" Jesse pulled out a stack of reports, term papers and boxes of pencils and supplies from his pack. "I got science papers, book reports, history lessons, binders, math tests, concert tickets, celebrity photos – doctored and undoctored, celebrity merchandise… if I don't have it, I can get it. Get the word out to your friends." He paused looking out for teachers. "I was very successful back home." He beamed like the junior entrepreneur he was, and reached into his jacket pocket. "I got Jessica Simpson DVDs, Kelly Clarkson hair clippings, Hillary Duff photos…. Here, have some official complimentary Hannah Montana guitar picks…"
Forgetting her attraction to this boy, Miley dropped her jaw and shock and stopped smiling. Oliver seemed to love his franchise and Lily started wondering how Jesse could pull this all off.
"Where do you get this stuff?" Lily took the guitar pick and noticed it was embossed in the name of Hannah Montana. She started wondering if Jesse had been expelled from his last school.
"My mom gets a lot of free promotion stuff from her company which she gives me to share with my friends," Jesse admitted. "But I realized a long time ago I could make a lot of money selling the stuff and it sort of spiraled out from there. Where can I break a hundred around here?"
"Man, dude…" Oliver couldn't stop grinning. "Your old friends must have hated to see you go. Do you have a book report on Great Expectations?" He hadn't read the book.
"I just got to print it." Jesse waved his master CD.
"How can you get away with this?" Miley was deeply offended by his profiteering. "You're… you're stealing from all those people. Do you know how many people are supposed to get residuals from all that merchandise?" As Hannah Montana, she had been upset before that creeps like Jesse sold a lot of bootleg merchandise with the name of her alter ego on it.
"Miley, Miley, Miley…." Jesse took her aside and placed his arm across her shoulders as a friend. "Look at it like this… Hannah Montana lives somewhere in a big mansion sipping fruit drinks by the pool and being served by twelve beefy pool boys. She ain't going to miss a few paltry cents from a few silly guitar pics."
"Oh, brother, buddy, have you got it wrong…." Oliver started chuckling at Jesse's perception of Miley's life when she was not Hannah. All she received from her fortune was a paltry $100 allowance and the rest went to a bank account to be invested for her until she came of age. Her father and manager, Robby Ray Stewart, handled her more extreme requests, but it was from a twenty-year old beach house and not a large mansion with a pool. Miley shot Oliver a look realizing how close he was to busting her secret identity.
"You are like the coolest guy on the planet!" Lily was shining up to him again, but Jesse just humbly mugged and turned away to his locker as he perused his new school schedule and hoped to get around Bayside as easy as Knox Miller High School back home in Nashville. He still had orders to fill to his clients back home.
"Lily…" Miley turned and whispered to her best friend. "What he is doing is wrong. He is going to get us in a lot of trouble!" She noticed Oliver giving Jesse a ten-dollar bill. He was buying something?
"Oliver?!"
"It's actual hair from Ashley Simpson from his mom's car…" He held up a clear plastic container with strands of blonde hair in it.
"Oh, wait a second…" Jesse was correcting himself as he fumbled with other containers. "That's from Britney Spears… here's the Ashley…."
"You got anything from Jesse McCartney…" Lily asked as Miley shot her a look.