“Hey, Ivy,” Julia says from her desk.
I slink into the yearbook office, which also happens to be the basement computer lab at Sunset High. It was the only computer lab until the library installed a brand-new set of computers two years ago. Now the yearbook staff gets to call the old lab home. Although, technically, we call it the Bat Cave.
Sunny and Gabriel look up from their computers and give little waves. I nod and park myself in my usual spot at the head of the room. The majority of our yearbook crew doesn’t meet daily. There’s around fifteen of us in total, but most members are photographers, tramping in and out, dumping flash drivesfilled with photos onto our desks. Julia, Sunny, Gabriel, and I are the editors. We’re the ones who put everything together. Because I’m editor in chief, I’m the one who has the final say.
Yearbook is an underrated club. For the four of us, it’s our version of a digital arts club, which Sunset High apparently doesn’t have the “resources” to support. But we’re just as much artists as the students who meet to do still-life paintings and figure drawings at the school’s official Art Club.
A lot of classmates look at Yearbook Club and think we’re just doing this to pad our college applications. Or, worse, they think we’re a cohort of nostalgic idiots who want to glorify high school like it’s the best four years life has to offer. What no one realizes is that, actually, yearbook editors are the ones writing history. We decide how to tell the story of the school year. Piss us off, and seven months later you’ll be handed a permanent, bound book with a photo of you halfway through a sneeze. Or, you know, we can at least threaten as much.
But catching Cam mid-sneeze isn’t even my brilliant loophole. Therealloophole is that, as editor in chief, I get to submit the yearbook as my portfolio for a study-abroad digital arts program at the Paris College of Art. Good yearbooksarean art form, and ours is brilliant. The program is strictly for high school seniors, which means—if I do my job right over the next month—this could be my chance to cut out of high school a whole year early.
And get off Cam’s game board entirely.
“Ivy, look at this.” Gabriel calls me over to his screen.
He’s pulled up one of our photos from the Halloween parade last fall, where various clubs dressed up and walked alongMarket Street, tossing out candy to little kids. Next to that photo is a much older one from theSan Francisco Chronicle. It’s a Pride parade shot from 1977, and Gabriel has managed to match the angle of the background buildings nearly perfectly to the photo taken just six months ago.
“Damn,” I say, clapping his shoulder. “Nice find!”
This is our yearbook’s theme. Well, technically it’s the theme I introduced to the club this year. We’re tying Sunset High’s present to the neighborhood’s past. But it’s not just a simple compare-and-contrast where we’re mashing up new and old photos. I’m trying to make a much bigger statement.
Back in the 1970s, San Francisco was a place where one of the most oppressed groups in the country congregated together and showed how much power and influence they could really have. No one got elected in San Francisco without earning the gay vote, which was composed of thousands of young people. And even though the world feels like it’s careening into a shithole right now…young gay people could totally have that level of influence again. We just have to find the path that history has already laid out for us.
Gabriel digitally cuts the foreground students from our photo and moves them to the archive, keeping several of the background characters from the Pride parade in frame. We’ll have to zoom in afterward and check carefully to make sure there are no visible boobs or asses in the final product. I already landed myself in a fair bit of trouble for missing some 1970s butt cheeks that showed up on the midyear teaser reel we submitted to our faculty sponsor.
Julia pulls out a box of slightly crumpled flyers.
“I scanned these last night for our bulletin board page,” she says.
She clicks on a file and I see a mash-up of random events and announcements from Sunset High all mixed in with meeting, boycott, and protest flyers we’ve spotted in old photos around the Castro and Sunset districts.
After months of planning and research, it’s incredible to see our ideas finally taking shape in front of us on page after page. We’ve planted random Sunset High graduates from 1976 into the senior class. We’ve mixed together club rosters, sports teams, prom queens, and even swapped out some current faculty photos with versions of their younger selves. We’ve blurred the lines between past and present so thoroughly that on some work nights, when we’re already high off sleep deprivation and caffeinated sugar rushes, the four of us feel like real-life time travelers.
I return to my computer and the project I’ve been working on: the introduction to the yearbook concept. It also happens to be doubling as my mission statement for my portfolio application to Paris.
History isn’t forgotten, I type into the document.
We may want to believe that it’s all in the past, or that we know so much more now than people did then. But in the end, history will always have a way of catching up with us. Even if we try to put it away in a dusty book on a high shelf. Even if we pretend like it didn’t happen at all.
But something powerful can happen if we let history in. We can see a much bigger picture of ourselves, maybe even something that we didn’t see before. History doesn’t have to be just a snapshot of what people have already done. It can be a reflection of what we’re doing now. Or a lesson on what to do differently.
It can even be a map leading to our future.
I pause and look around the computer lab. Julia and Sunny are swapping printed shots and checking over the backgrounds. Gabriel is still clicking away at his computer, his telltale sign of making sure his digital cut is seamless. It feels good to have a group, even a small group, that’s just mine—that only I belong to. Cam may think he can invade every part of my life, but he can’t stop me from tunneling my way out.
This yearbook project will be the thing that finally gets me away from my own personal history with Cam Leonardo for good.
Chapter Three
San Francisco is, if nothing else, a city of perspective.
Our steep streets might be a pain in the ass to drive on, but they also allow for some of the best city views anywhere around the world. The darkest alley can spill right onto a front-row view of the Golden Gate Bridge. The most unassuming house can reveal the full downtown skyline through a kitchen window. In a lot of ways, real estate prices in the city are based more on what you can see rather than where you can walk to. At least, that’s the mantra that keeps renovation architects like my mother constantly in business.
She glides through the front doors to Chez Moi, the French-style bistro she always suggests when I meet her for lunch. If you ask me, the chairs here are way too stiff, and the food portions are never big enough. But Mom never asks me.
“Ivy!” she says loudly as she reaches the table. I stand, and she pulls me into her arms for one of those big, tight hugs usually reserved for a good friend you haven’t seen in forever.
I love these hugs. I never get them at home. By the time Mom walks through the door in the evenings, she usually kicks her shoes straight across the room of our narrow apartment and heads directly into the bathtub. At home we’re always drained and worn out and all too eager to disappear into our own corners. These lunch dates get to be a kind of fantasy for both of us, where we each pretend we’re something different.
