Chapter Two
Even though Life is one of the worst board games I’ve ever played, it’s still better than the game that Cam Leonardo has decided to make of my actual, real life. While we’ve never spoken directly about it, I assume these are the rules:
Cam infiltrates some key aspect of Ivy’s life.
Cam makes Ivy look like an idiot.
Cam flounces away, scoring all the points.
Ivy’s score always stays at zero.
There was a time when Cam and I used to be on the same team. We were the only two people on our team, really. Us against “the fascist, bootlicking world,” as Cam liked to say.
Then, right before sophomore year, I came out as gay.
And the thing happened.
That’s when everything between us came unglued.
We were hanging out at Duboce Park, one of Cam’s favorite spots for treasure hunting.
All we did that summer was look for treasure.
Once we realized that some of the clues in Gay Treasures pointed to San Francisco, we were hooked.
I was in charge of research. Cam was in charge of digging.
And even though we kept coming home empty-handed at the end of each day, we knew we were getting closer.
We could feel it. Or at least…we could definitely feel something.
That afternoon we were taking a break and lying together in the grass. I remember the way the leaves fluttered in the trees above us. I kept picturing their shadows as little hands shooing me over and over.
Do it. Do it now, the leaves kept saying. It’s time.
I turned onto my side and looked at Cam, whose eyes had been closed, soaking up the warmth of the sun. But as soon as I turned, Cam looked back at me, already grinning. Like whatever I had to say would be something good.
“What is it?”
I took a deep breath. It was going to be okay. Everything would be okay.
“I’m gay,” I whispered.
Cam blinked. And blinked again. “What?”
“I’m gay,” I said again.
I guess I could have added something. Maybe explained how long I’d known or why I hadn’t said anything before.
When you look back, there are always a million things you could’ve done differently.
To be honest, I didn’t realize I would have to explain anything.
There was this stupid part of me that thought…
that was so certain that if I could just find the courage to come out, Cam would come out too.
And then things would be different between us.
But Cam didn’t come out.
Instead, Cam shifted away from me. It was a gesture I should have been used to.
The two of us were exclusive, smartass nerds, so we didn’t mind when classmates at school gave us extra space.
But with Cam, the motion physically hurt.
It was like our friendship had turned upside down in an instant.
I thought that moment was the worst thing that could possibly happen.
Then Cam muttered the four worst words I’ve ever heard. And walked away.
And we didn’t talk a single day the rest of sophomore year.
If you want to know what loneliness feels like, it’s not when you’re sitting at a table with no friends.
Loneliness is sitting at a table and watching your ex–best friend across the room, doing everything possible to avoid eye contact with you.
Loneliness is hiding in the metaphorical closet for another six months because the first person you told completely dumped you from their life.
Luckily, the deepest wounds have a way of hardening into the thickest scars.
Pain makes for good armor. After a while I stopped second-guessing everything I had done wrong when Cam and I were friends.
I stopped thinking about our friendship completely.
When I finally came out in the spring, I didn’t whisper it tentatively to a few classmates.
I took over the intercom at morning announcements and shouted it to everyone.
I joined the Genders it was about organizing meetings and fundraisers, something he had absolutely no idea how to do.
Someone in the room suggested we could both be co-chairs, and for the first time in over a year, Cam turned and grinned at me.
Except it wasn’t his real grin. It was a Cheshire Cat grin, the kind of grin that told me instantly that this was a battle he had just won.
Cam, one point. Ivy, zero.
The game had officially begun.
Cam’s been racking up points on me ever since.
He somehow crashes almost every date I go on.
He tanks nearly every group project we get roped into together at school.
He usurps all my roles, questions every position I take, and generally thrives on being an enormous pain in my ass.
But the biggest con of all is the fact that no one else at school even realizes what he’s doing.
They still think—after everything that’s happened—that the two of us are somehow conspiring together, like a fully out Bert and Ernie.
“Gay royalty,” I’ve heard people whisper whenever they find us sitting outside the principal’s office because someone decided I was serious at the GSA committee meeting when I said we ought to black out every bathroom door label so they’d all be gender-neutral.
But despite what the rest of the student body wants to believe, Cam and I are not some superpowerful queer duo. And we never will be. Which is why, after months of putting up with this new, fake-friend version of Cam…I’ve finally discovered a loophole in his game.
“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 drives filled 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.
The real loophole 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 yearbooks are an 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 along Market Street, tossing out candy to little kids.
Next to that photo is a much older one from the San 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.