The Yearbook (2 page)

Mom had all kinds of names for dad. When he got into his frequent story-telling moods, he was Homer, after the ancient Greek narrator. When he dressed up, he was Adonis, the handsomest Greek god. When he sang, he was Apollo, the god of music (although he sounded like Jerry Lewis on a bad day). When he was mad, he became Zeus.

Too bad she wasn’t right. If he were a god, he could come down and explain what I had seen in the Ramble.

I threw my pants in the sink. Then I turned the shower up to full blast and hopped in.

The water sent red rivulets down my calves, cleaning out a bruised crosshatch of cuts and scrapes on my legs.

The shower water was soothing. The harsh bathroom light flooded my mind with rationality: The body wasn’t real. Couldn’t have been. It was a mannequin, a latex dummy. Stolen from a store window as a prank. That was it.

Simple.

But there were a few problems. Mannequins didn’t have skin. And fingernails and eyes. They were not squishy and caved in. The one in the river wouldn’t have sold too many clothes.

It was real.

I had seen a dead body. A dead,
filleted
body.

I knew I was different now. Changed forever. All because of this one event. And it wasn’t just what I had seen. Something had gotten inside me; I could feel it. Something cold and sticky and slightly nauseating. Could fear itself take root in a person’s body, like a virus?

At that moment, I hated Ariana. Hated her for making me want her so much.
That
was the reason I had joined the yearbook in the first place. If I hadn’t done that, I’d never have gotten stuck with proofreading, never seen the body. I’d be the same happy but screwed-up kid I’d always been.

Which brings me to the beginning of this whole fiasco. The day I met Ariana.

The day of the Great Wetherby Earthquake.

N
OW,
I
KNOW EARTHQUAKES
are no big deal in some places, like California. But they are in New England. They just don’t happen. We are not in the “earthquake belt.”

Well, the belt was loosened on a gray and windy afternoon in February. The seventh, to be exact. I was walking home from school the fun way. Fun because Ariana Maas was a half-block in front of me. (If you could see her body move, you’d know what I mean. Real slow and lazylike, with lots of … well, movement.)

Sounds pathetic, I know. But I was obsessed, okay? Don’t tell me you don’t know what that feels like.

It started when she looked at me with her hazel-green eyes in the school cafeteria. It was in November, I think. I was mopping up this chocolate shake I had spilled, and when I glanced up, she was watching, with kind of a sneer. There’s this scene in
Dr. Zhivago
where the two lovers see each other on a trolley for the first time. Suddenly the camera cuts to sparks on the electric wires overhead (duh, get the message?). Well, that’s how it felt when Ariana looked at me. Only the sparks were DC, not AC. They went only one way.

I vaguely knew she was editor in chief of the
Voyager,
and that Smut was an editor, too. Smut, by the way, is six two and 180 pounds. He also finished seventh in our class (out of 179), was a wide receiver on the football team, played the lead in the school production of
Carousel,
got into Yale early admissions, and is friendly to everyone.

You can see why I hate him.

It was a warm afternoon for midwinter. As Ariana crossed Cass Street, the wind tossed her thick hair like flickering flames. Cass borders the Ramble, and its trees were bending and groaning in the gusts. Chipmunks chittered, birds argued, crows cawed and traced crazy patterns overhead. The Wampanoag River, which is pretty far in from the road, sounded like a crashing surf.

When I heard thunder, I said good-bye to Ariana in my mind and began to hightail it home before the storm.

I didn’t get far.

The world went suddenly silent. Like a pulled plug on a stereo. Absolute nothingness. You never know how
loud
plain old nature is until it shuts up.

The woods were motionless, the sky blank and gray as slate.

I stopped in my tracks. I could see Ariana looking toward the Ramble, then toward me. I quickly tried to think of something clever to say.

When my knees buckled, I thought it was nerves. Then I felt a vague queasiness. Around me, things got blurry then sharp again, as if some giant were twanging the world like a guitar string. I heard a low rumbling underground that reminded me of the Boston subway. Finally everything sort of
jittered,
side to side, and I felt as if I were a fly on the back of an angry nine-acre bull.

I ran to the nearest tree, as if holding it would somehow stabilize me.

The silence broke with a cracking sound, like a bat hitting a baseball.

Then Ariana screamed, “Look out!”

I felt a blow to my chest. My feet flew out from beneath me. I tumbled to the ground, my face buried in the folds of a pink-and-turquoise L.L. Bean anorak.

I was flat on my back, my body wrapped up in Ariana’s. It was a moment I’d dreamed about for months. I’d planned it, rehearsed every word I’d say, every move I’d make. I should have been prepared.

“Oww — ” was my clever opening line.

“Sorry,” Ariana said, untangling herself. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah, I think.”

We both stood up and brushed ourselves off. I felt stable again. A bird screeched, and I saw a squirrel making agitated circles in the woods. Behind Ariana an enormous branch rocked slowly on the pavement, leafless and broken off at one end.

It was lying right where I’d been standing.

“Oh my God, you saved my life,” I said.

Ariana smiled at me, and I felt a second earthquake. This one started inside me, and stayed there. “That was amazing, huh?” she remarked. “I wonder how strong it was — like on the Richter scale.”

I shrugged. “I don’t think they make them out here.”

“What?”

“Richter scales.”

Ariana laughed. I nearly had a heart attack, it sounded so beautiful.

Rain had started to fall, heavier by the second. “Come on over to my house,” Ariana said, turning to go. “You can fix your hand up there.”

I looked down and noticed for the first time that the palm of my left hand resembled freshly chopped hamburger.

I ran after her, my blood pounding. All right, an invitation inside for a Band-Aid wasn’t exactly a moonlight skinny-dip on a Mexican beach, but it was a start. I had to take what I could get.

After I was bandaged up, Mr. and Mrs. Maas invited me to stay for dinner, but I felt too nervous. If Smut showed up, he might get the wrong idea, and I didn’t want to end up on the wrong end of a carving knife. So I politely refused.

As Ariana and I passed through the living room to the front door, her mom, dad, and younger sister were staring at the TV.

“… Damage to area homes, as far as we know, was limited to a few broken plates and glasses in private homes,” the announcer was saying. “At 5.1 on the Richter scale, the quake would seem mild to a San Franciscan, but it baffles local experts. It far surpassed the tremor felt in this area in 1950. Is there an active fault below Wetherby? Impossible, says Dr. Paul Bascomb, of the County Meteorological Institute. But don’t try to tell that to the students of Wetherby High School.…”

The camera cut to our school. An ancient maple tree was lying across the front lawn, its top branches embedded in a parked car.

The Maases all gasped. But Ariana smiled and blurted out, “Hey, we’ve got an event!”

“Ssshh,” her sister said.

I must have been giving Ariana a weird look, because she immediately turned to me and explained in a whisper, “I mean, for the yearbook. Every year we have a theme, based on some major event. We try to tie all the aspects of the yearbook together with it. We can have an earthquake theme!”

I thought it was a dumb idea. “Great idea,” I said.

“Only problem is, I have to find another staff member. Sonya Eggert was supposed to work on the theme, but she moved.” Then, for the first time, Ariana looked at me with something like interest. “Do you write, David?”

I’ll give you three guesses what my answer was.

And that is how I joined the Wetherby High School yearbook. As something called Theme Coordinator.

I was in charge of a little one-page introduction to the book, blurbs and funny captions about the earthquake, and appropriate photos.

Me, who had never gotten higher than a “Shows Improvement” on any English paper in my life.

I didn’t care. I was going to spend a large part of the rest of the year with Ariana. Smut or no Smut.

“S
MILING OR SERIOUS?”
A
SKED
Mark “Rosie” Rosenthal, the
Voyager
photo editor. He peered at me through his Minolta.

It was an April morning, about a week before I found the body. Rosie’s basement felt like the Arctic. “Serious,” I managed to croak before letting out a huge sneeze. My Groucho Marx glasses lurched down my nose. They tugged at my white fright wig, which slipped forward and unseated my hat. The hat clattered to the ground, sending a couple of plastic grapes rolling across the floor.

“You’re losing fruit,” said Rosie.

I scooped up the grapes and reattached them to their stem, right behind the bunch of fake bananas and to the left of an apple and a plum. “Whose idea was this, anyway?”

“Yours,” Rosie replied. “Now, can we take this shot?”

“Go for it,” I said.

I donned my fruit-hat, sat straight in the portrait chair, and looked at Rosie grimly through the fake glasses, nose, and mustache. He managed to get in a few shots before he exploded with laughter. Rosie is a giggler. He’s constantly trying to look at the odd side of things — and he was having no trouble today.

The Bananahead was just one of my many brilliant concepts for the Wetherby
Voyager.

You see, after Ariana had popped the fateful question to me that day in February, I had transformed. I was no longer meek and mild David Kallas. I had become Mr. Yearbook.

The
Voyager
was on a late schedule this year, because the print-shop owner was off in Tibet studying meditation till April. (Don’t ask.) So for two months, I lived and breathed the yearbook. I drove Rosie crazy about getting quake photos. I infiltrated the school newspaper and convinced some of their staffers to write funny captions for us.

And when twenty-three kids didn’t show up for their
Voyager
photos, and Ariana called them “bananaheads” —
voilà
— I thought of a way to get even. My plan was to put a photo of the Bananahead above each of the no-shows’ names in the yearbook. Just a joke. Nothing too offensive.

Our faculty advisor, Mr. DeWaart, hated the idea. But the rest of us outvoted him.

Over the weeks, Ariana began looking at me with respect. (I would have preferred lust, or even mild carnal interest, but respect was fine.)

“Okay, I can’t take any more,” Rosie said, still red from laughter.

I pulled off my disguise. “Good. It’s freezing in here. When can you have the prints?”

Rosie shrugged. “This afternoon, I guess.”

“I’ll come by on my way back from the library.”

“The
library
! It’s Saturday!”

“Hey, I have a date, okay?”

“Fine. Don’t get testy. I just thought you lost your mind. I’m not the first.”

“Nor the last. See you.”

My date was with Edna Klatsch. She was the town librarian.

We had our rendezvous in the lobby of Lyte Memorial Library — but I had to share her with another man.

He was an artist, repairing a mural that had been damaged in the February quake when a tree fell through the glass entrance.

The painting was faded and awful. It showed a bearded white man, dressed in formal clothes, shaking hands with an African slave in front of an open trapdoor in the ground. The slave looked bewildered, and a dozen or so equally dazed-looking slave families stood behind him.

The mural was labeled
JONAS LYTE, WETHERBY RESIDENT, HERO OFTHE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD.

Jonas Lyte’s self-satisfied smile had been turned into a white plaster gash by the fallen tree. The artist was trying to recreate it.

“You’re making him into a clown!” Mrs. Klatsch scolded. Then she turned to me and said, “Hello, David. I’m very busy today. Follow me.”

She led me inside, into the locked area that contained the library’s rare and most-likely-to-be-stolen books.

Mrs. Klatsch raised an eyebrow. “You’re looking for — ?”

“Pictures of the 1950 quake, for a ‘then-and-now’ feature for the yearbook,” I replied.

She pointed. “Try the big maroon book. I’ll be back to help you. If you steal anything, I’ll have your head.”

The book was called
Our Town: A Wetherby History from 1634 to the Present.
I flipped to a section on the ’50 quake. The school actually had caught fire, so I could use some incredibly dramatic shots. But I loved the “candids” the most — stiff, sober-looking kids pointing to fallen trees and broken windows. High school students from 1950 all look about forty years old, I don’t know why.

I kept paging through, stopping to read whatever interested me. Near the beginning, I saw something else I wanted to use. It was a drawing, labeled
Witch Hunt, Spuyten Duyvil (Wetherby), 1686.
In it, a young and innocent-looking “witch” was being burned at the stake. Next to her the devil was rising out of a crack in the ground, shrouded in mist.

“The burning of Annabelle Spicer,” came a voice from behind me. “Spuyten Duyvil means ‘spitting devil’ in Dutch. That was the name of an area of Wetherby. Shameful … but rather a hilarious engraving, don’t you think?”

I’d known Mrs. Klatsch was approaching before she had said those words. It was the smell of Ben-Gay, mixed with some perfume that only elderly women seem to wear. Eau de Old Lady. Mrs. Klatsch was probably not around at the founding of Wetherby, but she didn’t miss it by much.

I couldn’t help laughing at her comment. The picture was pretty ridiculous. “Which area was it?”