Play Me Backwards by Adam Selzer

Author:Adam Selzer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

17. PERMISSIONS

I came to realize that the yearbook staff was a regular hotbed of Machiavellian maneuvering. Paige kind of thrived there; there was something about girl-world drama that really brought out a different side of her than what I usually saw, but which sort of made her come alive. If someone said something about someone else, she would get right up, pick a side, and start fighting.

At the yearbook meeting after the dinner with my parents, there was an argument about whether they should include a couple of pictures that showed two different girls wearing the same outfit. It seemed like a stupid thing to be concerned about to me and a few other people, but I didn’t want to get involved. It meant a lot to Paige.

“They’ll both want to kill us all,” she said. “They’ll go down in history as people who copied each other. Is that how any of us want our class to remember us in fifty years when they look at the old yearbook?”

“Well, it’s their fault for dressing like that,” Leslie said back. “We’re not here to create a legacy, we’re here to create memories, and we have to tell the truth about people, or we’re just creating false memories.”

“So what? No one’s going to want to remember the way things really were. That’s why people like my dad think high school was great. They blocked out the way it really was.”

I just ignored this. I wasn’t there to make decisions. I just laid out the pictures they chose.

This sort of shit consumed the yearbook staff. Paige would be fuming about it for hours. And I would smile and nod and try to tune it out, because she got really upset when I laughed or tried to tell her that in fifty years our yearbooks would mostly be gathering dust in storage lockers and basements, not inspiring memories. They weren’t going to be a source of real nostalgia and no one would think of them as a legacy. Not really. It was just a bunch of bullshit, if you get right down to it. I suppose yearbooks always are.

For instance there was this one picture of Mr. Larson, the science teacher, and the caption the committee picked was (get this): “Mr. Larson imparts his daily dose of wisdom to a batch of eager minds.”

I could think of two things wrong with that caption. First, you’ve got your “eager minds” shit. Then, you’ve got the very notion that Mr. Larson had any wisdom to impart in the first place. The man wasn’t even wise enough to get his nose hairs trimmed before operating a Bunsen burner. The day when his nose hairs caught fire was bound to come one day; I always imagined that the flame would work its way up the hair, like a fuse, and then there’d be a little explosion and he’d end up standing there with his face covered in soot, like a cartoon character who’d just bitten into a carrot that turned out to be dynamite.

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