After the Van Johnson video I was back to dreading school, even though no one knew my last name. I was fully in the yellow feeling zone when I walked in today. You might have forgotten our feelings colors since you were always in touch with how you feel. A refresher: Yellow zone is when you’re afraid or upset. Red zone is angry and maybe even having a tantrum. Blue zone is when you’re sad, sick, or bored. Green zone is happy and chill. Before we moved here, I thought I was comfortable with all the zones. What’s that called? Emotionally regulated or something? Well, I’m not anymore. When a person gets stuck going from yellow to red to blue and back to yellow, it gets tiring. You never want to see yellow or red or blue ever again. You miss green!

When I opened the front doors of Stony Butte Elementary, I was so yellow I was like a nuclear banana. But I also tried to use the rules. Rule #3: Never Show an Unlucky Hand, #7: Don’t Chase a Losing Streak, and #8: If Your Cards Keep Coming Up Bad, Change the Deck. But it was hard, because the rules are for poker and this wasn’t poker.

I was afraid to even look at other people in case…well, in case they watched the video and somehow knew that J. Crederman was my dad. Thinking about how unfair it all was gave me a flash of red, but then I went back to yellow.

No one looked at me or noticed me, and I put my stuff in my locker and went to homeroom to wait for Mrs. Russo, our homeroom teacher. She is not Circle Square material, at all. It seems like she’s just waiting for class to be over so she can go back to sleep. She’s not mean or anything. She just seems extremely tired of being a teacher. She sighs about eight hundred times a class. It’s actually sort of relaxing. She talks in this very soft, sleepy voice that makes it hard to stay awake. Lots of kids in my class sleep during homeroom, and I think that’s how she wants it.

Dave waved me over, so I sat next to him.

He showed me the score he got on Villainous last night. It’s this new game that everyone here is playing. Every character is a villain, such as a pirate or a demon or a serial killer, and they battle each other.

No one looked at me funny or said anything about Van Johnson, and I remembered that the internet isn’t real life and Van Johnson is just some guy who makes videos in his basement. Of course he wasn’t going to ruin my real life in the world.

My mood turned green for the first time since I saw the video. Sweet, sweet green!