Chapter Four
Me: EMERGENCY YEARBOOK MEETING.
I send the SOS text out to Sunny, Julia, and Gabriel early the next morning. Seconds later, my phone pings.
Gabriel: You do know it’s Sunday, yes?
Me: …and?
Gabriel: Sunday is the Lord’s day, fool. Day of rest and relaxation. No work allowed.
Me: Tell that to the American school system.
Gabriel: UGH. Say less.
Julia: Where are we meeting? And who’s bringing coffee?
Sunny: IVY BETTER BE brINGING THE COFFEE FOR ACCOSTING US AT THIS UNGODLY HOUR.
Gabriel: I thought we already established that the hour was, in fact, extremely godly.
Me: I’m on the coffee. We’re meeting in the Bat Cave.
Julia: Uh…it’s Sunday.
Gabriel: Have we not gone over this?
Me: I copied the janitor’s key in December. Meet me at the field by nine.
Julia: We’ll be there!
Sunny: BUT ONLY IF THERE IS COFFEE.
Twenty minutes later, the four of us assemble next to the Sixth Avenue entrance of Sunset High.
Gabriel slumps near the chain-link fence, his hands tucked into the pockets of his giant hoodie.
The hood rests over his thick mop of hair, which already covers the top of his eyes so most of the time he resembles a sheepdog.
Julia bounces up and down on the balls of her feet.
She’s dressed in a short-sleeved button-up shirt and the just-above-the-knee shorts every parent desperately wishes their teenage daughter would wear.
Her notebook is out, along with a handful of different-colored pens.
Sunny, the tiniest member on our staff, stands in an actual pink fuzzy robe with her arms firmly crossed.
She’s wearing sunglasses light enough to reveal her closed, pinched eyes.
I round out the group with my usual ensemble of rumpled black jeans, Doc Martens, and some thrift store sweater LeVar Burton probably rocked in the eighties.
The four of us look like Greta Gerwig’s fever dream version of the Avengers.
“What the hell?” Sunny says as I join the circle.
“Sorry.” I thrust the cardboard tray into the center. “Coffee took forever.”
Everyone grabs their order and takes a sip.
I march us over to the custodian door near the basketball court and usher the others inside.
We creep down into the basement. Julia turns on the hoard of discarded holiday twinkle lights we got at a yard sale a few months ago, just after winter break.
We thought it would cheer the place up considerably, but with all the computer towers humming and lights blinking…
the twinkle lights overhead have the effect of making us feel like we’re inside the bridge of a spaceship on Star Trek. Which isn’t all bad, actually.
Gabriel and Julia sit at their usual spots. Sunny stands next to my desk and stares at me while I open my laptop.
“Hey, Sunny,” I say as I sign in to my accounts. Her stare is so menacing that I mess up my password twice.
She flips her sunglasses up. “It’s Sunday.”
I look at her and smile. “You know, I think you’re the third person to point that out.”
“So, what’s going on?” Julia asks. She and Gabriel have their spinning chairs twisted to face me. Sunny eventually backs into her own chair and plops down. She takes a huge swig of her coffee, and I make a mental note to get her another as soon as that one’s empty.
I plug my laptop into the projector. Instantly, my home screen lights up the large screen hanging over the back wall. I click open the yearbook document.
“It’s fucked,” I say.
Gabriel chokes on his coffee. “What? Did the files become corrupted?”
“No, but…”
The next words get caught on my tongue. I’ve never really talked about my mom to anyone but Cam.
I know how she comes off to other people when she’s sending food back or commenting on someone’s outfit or décor.
It might seem easy to dismiss her criticisms as bitchy and move on.
But my mom is the worst kind of bitchy. She’s both bitchy and right, meaning it’s all but impossible for me to ignore her.
I also, of course, haven’t shared my Paris plans with anyone at school either.
I feel like there’s little point, seeing as my one real friend dumped me and there’s not enough time to make good friends again before taking off.
The yearbook crew and I are all about business.
We get shit done and we do it well, and that’s the foundation for whatever pseudo-friendship it is we have.
But the deadlines here are too much for me to vault on my own. We’ve been working on the yearbook throughout the school year. And now we have less than a month left to salvage it into a good portfolio before classes let out for the summer.
“There’s…no story here,” I say finally, despising how much I sound like Mom.
The others stare at me.
“I know,” Sunny says slowly, “that you did not wake 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’s exactly what 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 story yet.
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 this a 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 on my computer for months.
I just never looked at it on a big screen until now.
“This is 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
“All right,” Sunny announces. “I’ve had about enough of this Ivy-flavored nervous breakdown, or whatever it is that’s happening. Give us a reason to stay or I’m going back to bed.”
“You already drank an entire cup of coffee,” Julia says.
Sunny sniffs. “Bold of you to assume that was my first cup.”
I whip around to face the others. “You want a reason to stay?” I ask Sunny. I march up to the projector screen and smack my palm over the flyer. “How about digging up an actual buried treasure?”