Thirty-Four
before
Shiloh had been trying all day to get Cary to sign her yearbook. All anybody was doing today was signing yearbooks and fucking
around. The teachers weren’t going to make seniors work on their very last day of school.
Cary put her off until last period, and then disappeared into the darkroom with her yearbook.
Shiloh had signed Cary’s first thing. She wanted to claim a good spot—and she wanted to write something that would kind of
embarrass him when other people saw it.
She’d signed on the theater page, over the background of a photo from A Christmas Carol . She made some crack about Cary joining the Navy and told him that she hoped his hair would always smell like apples. And
then she’d written their favorite line from the fall play, the one they still said to each other sometimes: “And that, Inspector Pierce, is the way the biscuit has crumbled.” Then at the bottom, in small letters, Shiloh tried to write something sincere. Something about how she wouldn’t forget him.
She should have thought it through first, because she was writing in purple ink, and once she’d committed to the first part
of the sentence, she just had to keep going with it. What came out was clunky and earnest and might end up embarrassing Shiloh
more than Cary if anyone else bothered to decipher it—her handwriting was terrible.
Cary stayed in the darkroom for most of eighth period. He had Mikey’s yearbook, too. When he came out, he wouldn’t let them
read what he’d written.
They all went to Zesto’s with a bunch of other seniors, and Cary bought Shiloh a twist cone.