In her wildest dreams – or her worst nightmares, for that matter – Rebecca Black never imagined that any of this would happen:

That the music video for “Friday,” her first and only single, would skyrocket from 4,000 views on YouTube to more than 13 million in less than a week.

That this 13-year-old school girl from Anaheim Hills would be accused by thousands of anonymous, cruel and sometimes quite nasty critics for creating the allegedly worst song and music video in the history of pop music.

That her name would become so well-known that “Rebecca Black” would become a trending topic on Twitter for days, overtaking matters both ridiculously frivolous (Charlie Sheen’s rants) and desperately serious (the Japanese earthquake and tsunami.)

“I have been so mind-blown with the whole thing,” Rebecca says in her first interview since “Friday” exploded into the pop culture zeitgeist and thrust her onto a virtual worldwide stage.

A week ago, Rebecca was just a kid like any other. An honor student at her middle school in northeast Orange County. A girl who loved to sing wherever she went. The star of a song and video that she never really expected more than a handful of people to see.

“I didn’t really expect much to come out of it,” Rebecca says of “Friday,” the song and video she made through Ark Music Factory, a Los Angeles-based group, with some of the production costs paid by her family. “Just maybe some friends and some family would see it.”

And when over the first month after its release on YouTube it reached 1,000 views? “I felt like it was so many people. I don’t even know a thousand people. I thought this is so crazy!”

But the craziness had not even started, as Rebecca and her family soon would learn.

* * *

Like many little girls, Rebecca wanted to be a ballerina when she grew up, taking classes from the age of 2, and eventually adding tap and jazz to her studies. But in 2008, she joined a patriotic singing group called Celebration USA, performing at venues from Angel Stadium, were they sang the national anthem, to senior living homes and civic events.

“It was something new, and all of a sudden I wanted to do singing more,” she says. “I’d always been singing in the shower. Now I would sing everywhere.”

Like most elementary school kids, she liked the pop acts that appealed to tweens: Selena Gomez, Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, and, of course, Justin Bieber, a life-sized cutout of whom she keeps in her bedroom. “I’ve always wanted to be like Justin Bieber,” she says.

And for the next few years, she did all the things that kids who want to sing and perform do. She auditioned for her school talent shows and musicals – just two weeks ago she starred as Laurey in a middle-school production of “Oklahoma!” – and spent several summers at the Best of Broadway summer camp at the Orange County High School of the Arts.

Last fall, Rebecca heard about Ark from a friend who’d done a music video with them and thought it sounded fun.

“I was sitting on my mom’s bed with my laptop and I said, ‘Hey, check this out!'” she says of the moment she and her mother, Dr. Georgina Kelly (a veterinarian as is her father, Dr. John Black), first stumbled onto the production company’s website.

Soon after, Rebecca went to the Ark studios to sing a few songs for producers Patrice Wilson and Clarence Jey, sort of an audition, she says.

“And we went down to the studio and they liked my voice,” she says. “They said I looked a little like Selena Gomez” – which she does – “and asked me if I liked Taylor Swift.”

They sent her one song, which she liked, and then they sent her “Friday,” which she liked more. “The other one was like being superwoman for a guy, and being 13, I haven’t really experienced anything like that,” Rebecca says.

A few weeks later, in late December, she and her mom were getting their nails done when an e-mail arrived with her finished song attached.

“We raced home and I got it and really liked it,” Rebecca says of hearing the song for the first time, and then leaving it on repeat for the rest of the day on her computer. “I thought it was so cool!”

The video was shot in early January, at her father’s house with her family and friends recruited as actors.

“It was a lot of work,” Rebecca says of the 12-hour shoot. “I redid that first scene – ‘7 a.m. I’m waking up in the morning’ – I probably had to do 30 times.”

A few weeks later, she got an e-mail that said the video was done.

“I felt so happy and I felt like it went just like I wanted it to go,” Rebecca says. “I put it on my Facebook right away and a bunch of my friends commented and said, ‘Oh, this is so cool, I love your video!’ All the usual friend things.”

As for her expectations? That friends and family would say it, and that maybe eventually it could serve as a calling card to a record label if she should get so lucky.

“We just wanted it to be a great experience,” Rebecca says. “We didn’t think it would go anywhere.”

* * *

Riding home from school with her mom on Friday, March 11, Rebecca got her first inkling that something strange had started when she checked her phone and saw a comment that said comedian Daniel Tosh, host of a Comedy Central’s “Tosh.O,” had posted her video on his blog. “Uh-oh,” the comment read. “Not good.”

At home she went online and saw that her YouTube view stats were soaring, jumping 10,000 or more since that morning.

“I looked at my video and it had gotten all these comments,” Rebecca says. “They were all mean and really nasty – ‘This man has a beautiful singing voice.’ And I was like, ‘Mom?’ – I was almost on the verge of tears – ‘look at this.’ “

Her mother’s first response was to tell her they were just making fun of the song’s very simple lyrics (co-written by Ark’s Wilson and Jey) but many were much more personal attacks: You can’t sing, you’re not pretty, your song is the worst song ever were among the more printable paraphrases of the Internet slings and arrows thrown her way.

“I think I broke down in tears just about then, and I thought, ‘Well, this isn’t good. I’m getting views, but this isn’t the way I wanted them.’

“I really thought, ‘Should I have not done this?’ ” Rebecca says. “‘This is my fault, I should have gone with the other song.’ I haven’t ever gotten that much hate. I thought the world is going to hate me. My self-confidence had dropped down to the ground. I thought I’d get made fun of at school.”

After an hour of self-doubt and sorrow, Rebecca wiped away her tears and went to find her mom, who told her that Wilson from Ark had called and said they’d been receiving offers for TV spots for Rebecca and dozens of other e-mails after the video started taking off that afternoon.

“I’m like, ‘Well, maybe this is a good thing – you never know,’ ” Rebecca says. “My mom said to me, ‘We can either keep it up (on YouTube) or take it down.’

“I said, ‘No, I’m not going to give them the satisfaction of making me take it down.’ I said, ‘No, this is going to work out. I just want to let it go. Let it do its thing.’ “

By 7 p.m. that night, the “Friday” video had reached 100,000 views. “I called my dad and said, ‘I think it’s going viral.’ I was just happy to get to 100,000. I never thought I’d get to 1 million.”

* * *

Rebecca fell asleep that night watching “American Idol” with her mom exhausted from a handful of tests at school day that day and all the drama that arrived after school. In the morning, it all seemed slightly unreal.

“I was still just in that little wakeup phase, like, ‘Did that really happen yesterday?’ ” she says.

She tried not to think about what was happening too much over the weekend – she had a sleepover with her best friend Erika, and did all the usual 13-year-old girl things, pigging out on fun food, talking about boys, but, of course, it was impossible not to check the computer or the phone from time to time.

“Being 13 and always being online, it was hard to miss them,” she says of the comments that kept coming and the articles and blog posts that started commenting on the rising viral sensation of her video.

When they noticed that Rebecca Black was a trending topic on Twitter – a good measure of what the world is talking about at any moment – Erika teased her a little about what that might mean. “She said, ‘Oh my gosh, you’re more famous than Justin Bieber, you’re going to meet Justin Bieber – you’re going to marry him!'”

Monday and Tuesday, she traveled with a group of musical theater kids from her school to Sacramento, for events organized to promote the preservation of funds for arts and music in California schools. It was a fun and welcome distraction, but over the two days, as the video and her fame took off, her privacy started to evaporate.

Kids recognized her even though she had changed her hairstyle to long bangs. Some asked for photos with her. Others could be heard playing “Friday” in the background.

For as much as the song has been attacked, it’s also earned its defenders, and a rising number of “Leave Rebecca Alone” comments that praise her and the song for its simple, catchy, innocuous message.

“I really think that song is so catchy, no one can get it out of their head,” she says.

Her parents have scrambled to get ahead of the rush of attention their daughter is receiving, and the Ark Music Factory crew has helped greatly, her mother Georgina Kelly says after Rebecca leaves the room to talk to a producer for ABC’s “Good Morning America” which was interested in having her on the show.

No one at Ark, both Kelly and her dad John Black say, ever promised them or Rebecca that she was going to become a star or famous, instead cautioning them not to expect anything like that.

“That’s Ark’s philosophy,” Black says. “They throw (the videos and songs) out there, and see if anyone’s interested.”

As for the critics who’ve attacked the family for presumably paying for the song and video, Kelly says that’s only partly the case, and she doesn’t see why it’s their business – or any kind of problem.

“Yeah, we paid for some of it, but what’s wrong with that?” she says, estimating that the family’s contribution was somewhere between a quarter and half of what the video cost. “Why should anybody work for free? People say, ‘Oh, if they ask you to pay, it’s a red flag. It’s a red flag if they want $10,000 for lessons, but this was a lot of work to be done.”

And, she adds, Ark also said the family could opt not to pay anything in exchange for giving up all rights to the song.

“I thought, ‘Well, what are the odds that this will make the money back? None,'” she said. “But I would like my daughter to own the rights to the song – she sang it.”

Smart move, as it turned out. After rushing the song into release on iTunes on Monday by Thursday it ranked No. 54 on the iTunes sales charts, between Florence + the Machine’s “Dog Days Are Over” and Bruno Mars’ “The Lazy Song.” (Rebecca says she even downloaded the song from iTunes herself, not because she needed a copy, obviously, but because how cool is it to be a kid and even have a song on iTunes?)

Ringtones are being sold and plans for different versions – an acoustic take, maybe a Spanish-language one – considered, especially given how many covers, remixes and parody versions already have appeared on YouTube. Reports of a tour of malls around the country that surfaced midweek were a hoax, Rebecca says. (Her family is trying as much as possible to keep life normal – our interview had to be squeezed in before everyone headed to the Little League field where her 11-year-old brother Chase had a game to play.)

Money is being made from the song, she and her parents say, and it will all go into her savings minus the portion she says she wants to donate to the musical theater program at her school and to Japanese relief efforts, too.

As for what Rebecca hopes this whole weird and wonderful week will mean for her in the future?

“I don’t know if my fame will be just this 15 minutes of fame, or like my family says, it will last a long time,” she says. “I just want to be able to keep doing what I love, which is singing.”

And to the critics who continue to flame her and “Friday” she has this to say:

“This is my time to show them how strong I am,” Rebecca says. “That I’m a lot stronger than them. So say what you want, it’s not going to stop me. You’re entitled to your opinion. But I believe in myself.”

&amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;nbsp;&amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;gt;Your browser does not support iframes.&amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;gt;

Contact the writer: 714-796-7787 or plarsen@ocregister.com