Too Cool for School
The secret of senior superlatives.
As one does during a randomly-felt-like-it deep clean, I recently stumbled upon my senior yearbook. It’s a huge, hulking thing, far bigger than little Tavares High warranted, and it’s got a thick hardcover emblazoned with one of those lame design templates they buy from whatever lame company makes yearbook templates. In other words, it’s heavy, ugly, and difficult to store — exactly what I want in a keepsake.
I graduated in 2014, so this wasn’t exactly like unearthing some ancient, cursed tome. But it was enough of a “huh, look at that” to make me crack it open for what might have been the third time ever.
I don’t know what I was expecting. Maybe a trip down memory lane? What I got instead was a “Greetings from Memory Lane” postcard sent by the cool kids. You know the ones: the varsity athletes, the class clowns, the theater kids, the honor society dweebs, the extracurricular-everything tryhards whose moms are all collectively President of the PTA. The cool kids — it’s their yearbook. The rest of us are just ordinary extras.
Nowhere was this more evident than the Senior Superlatives section, the most on-the-nose retelling of what made the cool kids cool. If they didn’t fit the bill for something worthwhile like Most Talented or Most Likely to Succeed, they got some dumb vanity prize like Nicest Eyes or Cutest Couple (ours had broken up by the time the book got printed, that was awkward). Then there are the prom and homecoming courts, the unofficial superlatives for “Finished Puberty Soonest.”
Boring. Not relatable. Where’s the superlative for Most Easily Injured? Best Boxed Lunches? Most Time Spent Making Out with Their Secret Boyfriend in the Girl’s Bathroom? A little intrigue would go a long way. If they had Most Likely to Have a Humor Column in a City Magazine, as a random example, I would’ve been more interested.
But that’s only the Rheya of today talking. As a card-carrying introvert and perpetual square, High School Rheya never got invited to any cool after-school hangouts, never got offered any cool illicit substances. Her superlative would have been something like Most Likely to Repeat Self Over and Over, Most Time Spent Bullshitting On iPad, or Most Unrequited Love Letters Written to One Boy. (I was 15, okay? I’m lucky I only did it twice.) Suffice it to say I wasn’t surprised when I flipped through nearly a dozen signature pages and found them all completely blank.
I didn’t have a seat at the cool kids’ table. You probably didn’t either. But we also weren’t really vying for one, were we? No, while the cool kids were out there cooling in front of the camera, I was cozy in my room, drawing, content with my own company. While the superlatives were busy being all superlative and junk, we, the uncool masses, were somewhere else — anywhere else, any one of a million places we’d rather be.
If I knew then what I know now, about who I would become and how the next 10 years would turn out, I don’t think a single photo in this yearbook would look any different. The only thing I might have done was save $150 and some closet space by not buying the damn thing.
