Yearbook Read online

  I wrote for hours. I wrote about most of the things that were important to me. When I say “most,” I mean just about everything that didn’t involve my crush on Ethan, which has existed in some form ever since he was the new boy in my kindergarten class, looking little and serious and wearing a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles T-shirt. I saw the way he smiled and the way he colored very carefully, always staying in the lines. I saw the way he played every game well at recess, and I knew he was the boy I loved. I think it’s the combination of familiar and surprising that intrigues me most about Ethan. I know him, but there is also a lot more to him than what I know.

  I wish that Ethan showed up in the pages of my autobiography as more than just a friend. But, just because I wish that we were dating doesn’t mean anything. You can’t pick who you want to be your friend or your boyfriend. They have to choose you too. There’s such a complicated interplay of how you affect other people and how they affect you and what you all decide to do about it. It made me wonder: Exactly how much of our lives are really just our lives, and how much are connected with others’ lives? That’s probably part of what Mr. Thomas was trying to point out when he was talking about our stories affecting one another.

  Another thing that I didn’t write much about at first was my testimony or my church. It felt a little bit fake to mention it, like I was showing off or something. So I left it out.

  But then, when I was partway through, I got a feeling—it felt like sitting in church and knowing that you need to bear your testimony or you’re going to regret it. My little brother once described it as, “My insides started to feel like Sprite,” which I think is the best description I’ve heard. You feel all sparkly and clear and like you want to overflow with what you’re feeling—with what you know. I felt that way as I sat at the computer, so I decided to mention it after all. Mr. Thomas said to write about the things that were important to me, and my testimony definitely is one of those things.

  I wrote about my baptism, and the way I felt when I came out of the water and saw my father smiling at me. Everything seemed so clear and beautiful—the light on the water, the light in my father’s eyes, the brilliance of the warm feeling running through my veins. I wonder what it would feel like to stand at the side of the font and see someone get baptized and know that you had helped them learn about the gospel. I wrote about how my grandparents were part of many baptisms in Korea, and how they wrote about each new member with so much love in their letters. I wondered if Mr. Thomas had ever been baptized, or been to a baptism.

  Sometimes, in the back of my mind, I’ve wondered about sharing the gospel. How do you know how much is enough and how much is too much? I decided to start praying every night that I would be guided to the person the Lord wanted me to share the gospel with and that I wouldn’t be too chicken to bring it up when I did find someone to talk to about it.

  At the end of my autobiography, I wrote, “It is true that many people impact our lives, for better and for worse, as Mr. Thomas told me when I was writing this. We’d be in a lot of trouble if everyone judged us by our picture in the yearbook. I need to remember that there are stories behind the faces and the appearances. I need to remember that my decisions, good and bad, affect other people all the time. I need to live the way my religion teaches me to live, and the way I know the Savior wants me to live, so that my testimony shows in all the ways it can, little and big. Writing this autobiography has reminded me of all these things.”

  I shut down the computer and felt much better. I wondered what Mr. Thomas would think, and that made me nervous, but I felt like I had done the right thing by writing what I had. I read it again the next day and felt the same way. My autobiography was done. I could start thinking about other things again. And I did.

  I finished well in a race, I failed a trig test, and I found my shake from that night at the restaurant with Ethan. It was still in the freezer, frozen to my spoon like a giant popsicle in a Styrofoam cup. I thought about saving it, but that seemed too weird, so I ate it instead. Partway through, I found a rock-solid yellow gummy bear that someone had snuck in there when I wasn’t paying attention.

  That night, I prayed about being a missionary. I also prayed for Ethan—not that he would ask me on a date, although that thought did cross my mind, but that he would have a good day the next day. Small things like that.

  When it was time to hand in my autobiography, I printed it out, put it in a blue folder, and handed it in before class, before Mr. Thomas even called for them. I’ve always liked handing in assignments, even though I don’t like doing them very much. It feels good to say, “Here you go—it’s your problem now!”

  When I handed the folder to Mr. Thomas, he looked at me with those gentle blue eyes of his and thanked me. There’s both comfort and stress in knowing that he will read every word. Teachers who don’t are both easier and more frustrating. I wondered what he would think about the last paragraph.

  As I was walking back to my desk, Ethan, who sits behind me, said, “Mikey, you already handed it in?” I nodded.

  “Here’s mine.” He held up a bunch of notebook paper stapled together. “My printer ran out of ink at midnight, so I had to write it all out by hand. I couldn’t get on the computer until then to print it out because Andrea has been working on her stupid college applications night and day.” He shook his head in disbelief. “At least I started with kindergarten, because that was the first thing I could really remember enough to write about, so I only had eleven years to cover instead of the whole sixteen.”

  “Can I see it?” I wanted to see if Ethan had written about our kindergarten teacher, Mrs. Crenshaw, and the day she bent over and her orange sherbet pantsuit split along the seams. That was what I remembered about kindergarten. That, and eating paste in the corner with the boys when Mrs. Crenshaw wasn’t looking.

  “Sure,” he said, handing me the sheaf of paper. Ethan has pretty decent handwriting, for a boy. I read the first two lines in his paper: “When I started kindergarten, I was in Mrs. Crenshaw’s class. I don’t remember very much about it except the day her pantsuit split.”

  I looked up and laughed. “I wrote about Mrs. Crenshaw’s pants splitting too!” I started reading again. The next two lines were, “I thought kindergarten was going to be terrible, until I found out where I was sitting. It was by Michaela Choi, the cutest girl in the class.”

  I was getting very interested when Ethan yanked the paper away from me. I looked up into his face, startled, and I could see that he was embarrassed. “Uh, there might be some personal stuff in there that I didn’t want anyone to see,” he said, and I could tell that he had just remembered what he had included in that first paragraph.

  “Oh, I understand,” I said, smiling inside. I didn’t want him to be embarrassed, so I pretended I hadn’t read any further. The bell rang and I turned around and sat in my seat, still beaming.

  Mr. Thomas called for everyone to hand their papers forward, and I turned around to take Ethan’s from him. I passed it on to Avery Matthews, who sits in front of me, and then felt a tap on my shoulder.

  I turned around to face Ethan. His face was a little red, but his gray eyes were as bright as ever. He leaned forward and said very, very quietly, “I still think you are the cutest girl I know.” Then he sat back, turned a little redder, and pretended to pay attention to what Mr. Thomas was saying. I turned around and stared at Mr. Thomas too.

  And right then I had a strange feeling. It’s not that I thought Ethan and I were going to get married or something. But, I suddenly thought, Ethan Beckett, I think I’m going to take a chance. I think I want to let you know how I feel about you, and see what you and I decide to do about it.

  I glanced back at Ethan. I looked right into his eyes and gave him the biggest smile I could.

  Chapter 2

  Late September

  Mr. Thomas

  I have been grading eleventh grade autobiographies for over thirty years. You would think that I would be tired of readi
ng the trials and tribulations of today’s troubled youth, but they are still interesting, endearing, shocking, and revelatory. Usually there are several things that surprise me.

  Usually. But after reading fifteen of them this evening and preparing to read approximately fifty more, I contemplated taking my retirement immediately instead of when school ends in June. It was hard to care enough to correct, once again, the same grammar mistakes I’ve been correcting for what feels like eons. I hadn’t come across a particularly dazzling autobiography yet. I started wondering why I had even bothered to make the assignment. That often happens when I’m grading. I was having a bad moment. When I have one of those bad moments, I take a break.

  I left the dining room table where I had been working and went into the kitchen to get a drink. The fridge that was once full of gallons of milk and bushels of fruit and tubs of cold cuts now has just enough for two. It used to be that this room was full of boys. Boys eating, boys yelling, boys laughing, boys doing dishes at a very high decibel level, boys stealing extra dessert. Now, the youngest one is gone to college, the oldest has a baby of his own, and the middle one, Owen, is living with me and teaching choir at Lakeview. They are all good boys. They all make me proud. In fact, I remember grading Owen’s autobiography. Owen was—and still is—our most difficult, prickly child, and I had been pleasantly surprised in my reading when he mentioned that he thought that he was lucky because he had “especially cool parents.” It felt good to read that. I showed it to my wife.

  I stood by the kitchen window and closed my eyes. One of the last papers I’d read belonged to Michaela Choi. A good girl, one of the skinny, bright-eyed, hard-working types. She is a good writer—not a brilliant one, but decent, and, thank goodness, not the kind that tries too hard to be dark and serious and profound. Although, in their own way, those student writers are touching too. Michaela looks a little like my boys—dark eyes, dark hair, tall and thin. I always thought it was a little bit of a shame that the boys looked so much like me. Their mother was beautiful—thick blonde hair, elegant facial features—but I guess a boy would rather be told that he looks like his father than his mother, no matter how much he loves her. They do all have her eyes, though.

  At first glance, Michaela’s paper had been a perfectly average paper about a perfectly average teenage girl. But there was something about the end of it that had caught my attention. There was an earnest, if clichéd, paragraph about making decisions and realizing that you may impact others, not just yourself—and that your decisions and the decisions of others are all intertwined, as are your stories. She mentioned her religion, which I thought was rather courageous of her, and her belief that she needed to live like Christ to help others as she interacted with them. I suppose she took my little speech at our lunchtime meeting to heart.

  I believe what I told her. How could I not? The decision that some teenager made almost a year ago affects me every day, a thousand times a day, because it killed my wife. His bad decision one night became our reality every night for the rest of our lives.

  What I felt like writing in the margin of Michaela’s paper with my pen was, “What is the point of going on when everything you do can be wiped out by one bad choice? Why even try? How do you know that Jesus wants you to do those things? How do you even know he’s there?” But you can’t ask those kinds of questions of a junior in high school, not when you yourself are an adult and can’t figure out the answers. Can you?

  I put my head in my hands.

  The door opened, and I straightened up. Owen walked in, whistling. “Hey,” he said. “How are the autobiographies coming?”

  I made a thumbs-down sign. “Remind me again why I assign these things every year,” I said.

  “Because you like to torture kids. And because you like to make them think about their lives—where they’ve been and where they’re going.” This second sentence was delivered in his best James Earl Jones voice.

  I had to laugh. It was exactly the line I’d delivered this year and the one I’m sure I delivered when Owen was in my class seven years ago. “Owen,” I asked, “whatever happened to your autobiography?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Mom probably put it somewhere in a box. She liked to save all our stuff.”

  “I know,” I said. “I haven’t really cleaned things out yet, especially not in the attic.”

  There are pictures of my wife all over the house, even some of her clothes left in the closet, many of her files left in the filing cabinet. Sometimes people ask if it isn’t too painful for me to see her everywhere. I don’t bother explaining to them that no matter what I do, I would still see her everywhere. The obvious reminders are a small fraction of those things. I see her in the tulips in the front yard, in the colors of my boys’ eyes, in the paint she chose for the living room. Those same people who want me to get rid of the pictures would say, “Then why don’t you move?” But then I would still see her in the mountains, in a brand of ice cream she liked at the grocery store. I would still hear her in a song on the radio or in the sound of a lawn mower cutting grass, which is what she did every Saturday. To be honest, I don’t want to escape her memory. I would rather feel the pain of seeing remnants of our life together than have emptiness instead.

  “I could help you do that,” Owen said. “If you want to go through the attic, I could help you with it.”

  “I don’t think I’m ready yet,” I said. “But I would love to have you help me when I am.”

  “What I won’t help you with,” Owen said, “are those autobiographies. Look at me and learn. Give assignments sparingly. I taught today, and now all I have to do is write a lesson plan. No papers to grade, because we sing. Assignments and tests only occasionally. It’s the life, Dad. You should give up English and follow my lead.”

  “It sounds like it.”

  “I’ll make you a deal, Dad. Grade five more autobiographies and then we’ll go get something to eat.”

  “Agreed.” Neither of us bother to make dinner very often. Last night, we ran into each other in the kitchen at midnight in our pajamas with bowls of cereal. We hadn’t remembered to have dinner until then. I can only imagine what my wife would have said about that.

  “I’m going to go upstairs and change into some jeans. Yell when you’re ready.” Whistling, he went upstairs. It must have been a good day.

  After he left, I broke my end of the bargain a little. I didn’t grade right away. I thought about Owen, and my two other sons. I am connected to the boy who killed my wife, but I am also connected to these boys, her boys, whom she loved, and that connection is everything to me. Our best hope of being all right is to keep moving, keep trying, keep caring about each other. Keep moving, I told myself. Maybe you can ask Michaela for the name of her minister or someone, and ask him where they find the answers to their difficult questions. I heard the floorboards creak upstairs as Owen walked down the hall.

  “All right,” I muttered and reached for the stack of papers. I took the cap off my grading pen. I picked up the next paper: Avery Matthews. I kept moving and began to read.

  Chapter 3

  Late September

  Avery Matthews

  Sixteen

  “Take your backpack,” my mother tells me.

  I ignore her.

  “How can you go to school without a pen, a piece of paper?” she shrills.

  I pick up the backpack and walk out the door.

  She smiles, satisfied.

  What she doesn’t know is that the backpack is empty.

  I am empty.

  It’s easier to let yourself drown.

  Why struggle and slip and swim and choke?

  Better to let go now.

  The water is black and cold and deep and dark

  I slip beneath.

  It’s so easy.

  Teachers sk for assignments.

  Gossip and whispers surround us.

  Teams lament losses, exult in wins.

  I swim below everything.


  I see only their ripples on the surface.

  Nothing moves me here below.

  There are monsters here in the deep.

  Dark, some of them.

  Beautiful and terrible, some of them.

  I can swim around in my own sorrow, in my own anger.

  No one notices, or if they do, they understand and swim by.

  Better to feel anger than to feel sorrow.

  Better to feel nothing than to feel sorrow.

  Better not to feel.

  But something in me still wants to rise up out of the dark water.

  Wants to feel the sun on my wet, cold skin.

  Something inside of me wants to put my feet on hot, grainy sand

  And run along the beach.

  Even though there is glass that might cut me buried beneath.

  Chapter 4

  October

  Ethan Beckett

  The very best day of my life was today, and I really can’t believe that so much happened so quickly. I want to rewind, replay, and relive it a million times. I bet I’d never get sick of it. Who knew that one day could be such a big deal?

  Today was the State cross-country race. I was ranked fourth in the state, which was huge for me. I don’t mean to sound cocky, but running has been going really well for me. It has been a surprise, in a way. Last year, I ran track, and it was great. I didn’t make the soccer team the fall of my sophomore year, so this fall, the fall of my junior year, I figured I would try cross-country instead. You don’t get cut in cross-country. That’s pretty appealing, if you ask me.