“I know,” Sunny says slowly, “that you didnotwake us all up at eight in the morning to come to school and talk about whether or not the yearbook is telling a story. So what are we doing here, Ivy?”
Gabriel and Julia look at Sunny, then turn again to me.
“Umm…” I stare up at the page layouts splashed over the wall across the room. I’m so used to seeing the entire yearbook crammed into my little laptop screen that, for a moment, the work really does look completely different. The old photos are so blurry and pixelated that seeing them blown up like this makes me cringe. Suddenly, the once invisible lines dividing the archival images from our own become stupidly obvious.
And that’s all this is, I realize with horrendous, sinking clarity. It’s old photos and new photos spliced together. It’s the equivalent of the guy on the internet who holds up movie stills in front of the same film locations years later.
I’m the movie guy, I think miserably.
My mother’s voice rings in my head:I’m sure you have some nicely written paragraphs on something like the past and the present intermingling—
That’sexactlywhat I had written, I growl back.
There’s nothing like seeing a pool of endless depth in your own work and then having someone else throw in a rock that just bounces off the surface to show how utterly shallow it all is. And yet…
I keep clicking through the page spreads.
There’s this strange, tingling feeling I get every time I open these files. Even if Mom is right, even if what we have is shit…then why do I keep wanting to come back and look at it over and over? Maybe there really is a story here, and I haven’t figured out what that story is. Maybe it’s just not my story.
Or maybe it’s not my storyyet.
Gabriel makes a loud, obviously fake cough. I pause on the dedication page to Mr.Torres, the school’s head janitor.
“Sorry,” I say with a jolt. “I got lost in my head.”
“Uh, no,” Gabriel says. “I’m pretty sure you took us along with you.”
“Who’s the movie guy?” Julia asks, scanning her notebook. I look over and see that she already has a page filled in. “And what exactly did you write?” she adds, circling another line. “And why isn’t it your story?”
“Damn it!” I slap my forehead. “Was I just talking out loud the whole time?”
“Not the whole time,” Julia says, at the same moment Gabriel answers, “Yeah, pretty much.”
Sunny gives a barely perceptible smile and takes another long sip of her coffee.
Julia points the end of a purple pen toward me. “Is thisa riddle? Or one of those fill-in-the-blank puzzles? Does the movie guy have a story you stole for the yearbook?”
I groan and turn toward the projector screen, where we’ve superimposed Mr.Torres dancing over a 1970s party along Castro Street. My eyes get lost in the blurry background. “No. I’m just realizing that my mission statement isn’t what I…”
My eyes skim across the photo until they land on a partial flyer pasted over a building in the background:
My jaw goes slack. I forget how to breathe.
Holy shit.
I grab my laptop and roll the cursor over the screen. “What is this?” I ask.
“What’s what?” Gabriel pushes his hair to one side.
“This,” I say again. The cursor arrow is now flying in little circles as I highlight the specific words:
btwn 17th & 18th Streets
A GIANT BTWN STREETS.That had been the final clue in the treasure hunt. The one Cam and I never figured out. And the answer’s been right here this whole time—cryptic “btwn” abbreviation and everything! I’ve had this image onmy computer for months. I just never looked at it on a big screen until now.
“Thisis my story!” I say. I can already imagine the professors at the Paris College of Art opening up my portfolio and reading the title:
Foray into San Francisco’s Past Turns Up Literal Gold
