Yearbook by Peter Demarco
In the cafeteria, kids randomly passed around yearbooks as if the accumulation of signatures was evidence for their future selves that they once existed. One book made its way to me and I didn’t recognize the person. In fact, I didn’t recognize most of the people on that page. It’s like I was an extra on a movie set that would be deconstructed after graduation.
After my mother died of leukemia, my father showed me his yearbook from the 1950s, looking like the Declaration of Independence, dozens of signatures, everyone signing it to a ‘swell guy,’ and there was something wholesome about the book, students in suits, looking respectable, even if some of them might’ve been bullies. He’d pause at a photo and say, I wonder what happened to him, before flipping through the pages and stopping again. Sometimes he’d smile.
My goal was to get one symbolic signature, a person who’d meant something to me in a small way. I decided to ask the shy girl in math class because she always lent me an eraser. I was terrible in math, constantly making mistakes and had to erase so much it wore the paper away.
The school bully, who sat next to me, a pack of cigarettes on his desk, notebook never opened, watched me erase once and said, let me sit next to someone I can at least copy off. The class laughed.
The girl had the distinction of being voted Most Shy and I wondered how she felt about being featured in the yearbook when she’d spent her school years hiding. She always had a pile of books next to her like a wall and kept her face close to the desk when writing. Even in grade school she was like that. I wasn’t even sure what her voice sounded like.
On the last day of school I took the book out of my locker and brought it to math class. She was writing in what looked like a diary, so I went to the bathroom to give her time to finish. When I returned my yearbook was on the bully’s desk. I signed your book, he said. He passed it back.
Written over my face were the words, try to erase this, moron.
I brought the book over to the garbage can but then stopped and went back to my desk. I asked the shy girl for an eraser. The bully laughed. That ain’t coming out, he said.
She passed me a fresh one, the last one she’d ever give me, and I put it to my nose and closed my eyes, the comforting scent of rubber and clay conjuring up other grade school smells, ditto sheets and construction paper, plastic three-holed pencil cases for your loose leaf binder, and then a forgotten memory, one of the rare times I heard the shy girl speak, in junior high, after I’d been absent from school because of my mother’s funeral and we went on a field trip to an environmental center and she gently took a furry caterpillar off a tree and said caterpillars had two lives, one on the ground and one in the air, and wondered if it was like that with my mother, and she said all of this looking into my eyes, the only eye contact we’d ever had, even when she passed me an eraser her eyes never strayed above my hand, so I began erasing, an impossible task, as if the bully’s scribble was etched in stone, but I kept at it, then the bell rang and she picked up her books and I kept rubbing, the image of my face fading, the bully staring at my hands going back and forth in a furious motion, but he didn’t say anything, he just watched as I swept eraser debris from the page, then he looked out the window for a long time, and when he finally turned back, I had disappeared.
Peter DeMarco is a retired New York City high school English and film teacher. Before teaching, Peter had a career in book publishing and spent a considerable amount of time acting in regional theater and attempting to be funny on the stand-up comedy amateur circuit. His writing has appeared in The New York Times (Modern Love), New World Writing, trampset, Maudlin House, New Flash Fiction Review, BULL, Hippocampus, SmokeLong Quarterly. Read more at: peterdemarcowriter.com
