The Yearbook, page 29
Getting to the Most Likely to… page.
And then…
Imagine being Lily Welsh and finding that.
Imagine being Chad and seeing that.
I opened my eyes and yelled into the empty newsroom. The pain this would cause. Instant searing pain. Unimaginable humiliation and confusion. Everyone you’d grown up with would see this. Everyone had this page in their own yearbook. This was your legacy. This was how they had decided you would be remembered…
They…
The bell rang and I jumped up, rage squealing through me. Noises of lunch-being-over echoed under the door as everyone rushed to their afternoon lessons.
Why?
Why had they done this?
I could never understand.
Or maybe I could.
To feel important.
The bell rang again. Somehow five minutes had already passed in this dark room with this dark discovery.
I was late.
And I only had that evening to decide what the hell to do.
“I feel like I’m in a Choose Your Own Adventure book,” I told Elijah that evening, in his bedroom. Pacing up and down, vibrating with angry energy. “But I don’t want to choose my own ending. I just want to set the book on fire. The whole thing. Burn it all. Burn the stupid yearbook.”
I’d just about made it through the afternoon without eroding with emotion. My guts felt like they’d been glued together, and I’d randomly yelled “What the hell are you looking at?” to some Year Seven in the toilets. That page of Most Likely to…was imprinted on my brain and swarmed into my consciousness whenever I blinked. I sent an SOS message to Elijah and he met me at the gate after school, looking concerned. I’d collapsed into his arms.
“I hate them, I hate them,” I couldn’t stop saying into his warm shoulder. “What’s wrong with people? What the actual hell is wrong with people?”
“Shh, shh. It’s okay. Well maybe it isn’t. What’s happened? Tell me and we can try to fix it.”
I’d filled him in as we walked to his, with his arm over my shoulder, steering me there, like the stable captain steadying a wayward ship. When I explained what I’d found, his face registered actual shock for the first time since I’d known him.
“Christ,” he said. “That’s dark.”
“I know.”
“That’s really, really dark.”
“I know.”
“Like, I’m in disbelief.”
“I know. Well, I’m not. And I only have tonight to decide what to do. What the hell do I do?”
An hour of pacing Elijah’s room later, and I was none the wiser. I kept thinking of poor, oblivious Lily Welsh, walking home from school, totally unaware of what was coming her way. Of Chad, laughing with his friends as he tried to make one milkshake last all afternoon in McDonald’s, blissfully ignorant. It hurt me to think about it. All my emotions were too strong, undiluted, burning.
“Okay, so I have three options,” I told Elijah, turning on my heel as he watched me from the bed. “One, I could just leave it. Behave like a freaking…nature documentary maker where you have to just stand back and let the baby elephant die that’s stuck in the mud pit, otherwise you’re interfering.” I counted it off on my finger. “Two, tell Ms Gordon and dob them in. They’ll get in trouble, but the school will hush it up. That, I guess, is the right thing to do.”
Elijah turned over onto his stomach. “Right?”
“Well, the proper thing to do.”
Elijah wrinkled his nose. “And when has the proper thing to do ever been the proper thing to do? If you know what I mean?”
He smiled his knowing smile and it did things to my stomach – loosened some of its iron grip. I leaned over to kiss him, so thankful to have him there to help me un-mess this mess.
“Okay, three.” I leaped up, and continued where I’d left off. “I could just change it back to how it was? Nobody would know apart from me and them… I’m leaving school anyway so they can’t really come after me. That way, nobody gets hurt.”
Elijah made a steeple with his hands and leaned his chin on them. “You could do that, yes. I guess those are your only three options…”
Some cogs began whirring in my mind. The first two would get the girls some kind of comeuppance. They were clearly too inflated with their own self-importance to believe their little prank would get them suspended…though school was basically over. Was that enough though? And it wasn’t just this cruel thing, it was all the cruel things they’d done. Unpunished.
“Or…” I said.
Elijah smiled again. “Or?”
“I could…” The cogs whirred faster. Clicking things into place. Getting in touch with the part of myself that wasn’t passive any more. That didn’t just let things happen and say nothing. I had never stood up to these people, not really. I’d been too scared, but I was getting braver every day, and this was just too awful. People needed to know how evil they were. “I could tell the truth?” I said slowly. “About what they’ve done. But not just tell Ms Gordon. Tell everyone?”
Because I couldn’t stop thinking about Lily Welsh opening that book and how that would feel. That pain rippling through her life. Because school matters, I’d realized. It wasn’t just something you could beige your way through. What happens to you, the stories people tell about you, it all matters. If you do unforgivable things when you’re sixteen, they’re still unforgivable. The stain of what you’ve left on people still blemishes the fabric of their life story. I had a chance to tell the truth. I had a chance to alter the legacy. To make it reflect what actually happened, instead of what the more powerful decided to tell us. But was I brave enough?
I sat back down on the edge of Elijah’s bed and put my face into my clammy hands. “What do I do?”
“You know I can’t tell you.” He trusted me to choose my own adventure, to narrate my own life. He peeled a hand off my face and kissed it. “I guess a good question to always ask yourself in life is…what would you regret more?”
“Regret?…”
The word unleashed more whirring cogs. That word…where had I heard it before?
No space of regret can make amends for one life’s opportunity misused.
The sentence I’d found in A Christmas Carol. How much I regretted all the years I hid away because I was scared of the stories people would tell about me. Then I’d found the red pen, and followed it, and got out my own red pen, and found love, and courage, and myself again. Elijah had taught me to challenge other people’s stories – even the stories of people I loved. He taught me I could argue back with the world. That I had my own unique view, based on the intricate, original story of my own life, and I should tell the truth about what it meant to be me. People could argue back. People could take out their own red pen and scribble all over my story – but at least I’d told it.
Should I take out my red pen now, and scribble over these people’s stories? Tell the truth from the margins?
“What if the truth hurts people?” I asked Elijah, still on the edge of the cliff, not sure I had the guts to jump.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, isn’t it cruel? To expose people? Grace and co?”
“I don’t think they were worried about cruelty when they changed that page.”
“Yeah, but if I meddle with this, if I expose it – won’t I be as bad as them? I don’t want to be cruel,” I said, leaning my face into his hand. “But I also don’t want people to get away with being cruel either.”
I thought of all the notebooks, heavy in my bag. Chock to the brim with terrible things I’d let pass. I’d lurked in the margins but never been able to fill them. Not once had anyone red-penned these people. Until now…
I let go of Elijah and took a long, hard look at the ceiling. There were only hours left until the print deadline. If I was going to do what I thought I was going to do, it was going to be a long night.
Tell the truth, the ceiling whispered.
Tell the truth, my heart urged me.
I closed my eyes and jumped, holding my nose as I plunged, because it would take time to resurface into these waters of the new me. Or maybe it wasn’t a new me. Maybe this part of me had always been there. The me who made notes, who’d been on the school newspaper, spent my lunchtimes in the library, who noticed everything and refused to forget what I’d seen. Maybe I was finally ready to accept who I was, and who I wanted to be, and what I wanted to stand for.
“Elijah?”
“Yes.”
“I’m going to need your help.”
“I’m here.” God, the way Elijah looked at me.
“In my rucksack. There’s a pile of notebooks. Do you mind getting them out?”
We worked until it got dark outside. Rifling through the pages of all my notebooks from over the years – working out how and where to blend them into the yearbook. Elijah’s mum came home from the lab – tired and wilting and surprised to find me still there. We told her we were busy revising and she ordered us a pizza in a burst of unusual motherly care. I messaged Polly to say I’d be home late and, with mozzarella hanging from our mouths, and a feverish air of scared anticipation, I rewrote the yearbook.
I added things to the Do You Remember? pages to add balance. I wrote a foreword and an afterword. Elijah fed me pizza, whispered words of encouragement, kissed my shoulder, and told me how proud he was. I leaned over and kissed him.
“What was that for?”
“For everything.”
“I’ve not done anything, Paige. You’ve done it all. You.”
It was almost eleven by the time I came to the Most Likely to…page. Polly had rung twice to remind me it was a school night, giving me a warm feeling of being cared about and worried over. Elijah’s mum pointedly told us she was going to bed and suggested, firmly, we do the same.
“Almost done, sorry. One final philosophy question,” he said. “We’ll be quiet.”
Tired and nervous, I clicked onto the most important page. “Final page,” I said, taking his hand. “Are you ready?”
“Are you?”
“No, but yes.”
“Crystal clear you are, Paige.”
I laughed but my tummy felt tight.
I zoomed in on the Most Likely to…page. There it was, in all its awful, bullying glory. Elijah, seeing it in person for the first time, let out a low whistle.
“God, it’s real,” he said. “I can’t believe anyone thought this was funny.”
As I scanned it afresh, the anger reignited, pulsing through me, reassuring me this action was worth the consequences. I took screen grabs to keep as evidence, before I checked the tracked changes, to remind myself of who actually won what, and typed it all back in carefully. Making it how it was before. Erasing the pain, erasing the humiliation. Saving the scars before they left their mark.
Then, when it was restored, I stared at the screen for a while. I clicked on the return button and added three more lines. Right at the top, so it was the first thing anyone would read on the page.
I read it back.
It wasn’t a lie.
I didn’t think even they could say this was a lie.
We proofread it one final time, so exhausted our eyelids kept twitching. I then hit download and waited for Elijah’s computer to save it.
“I still can’t believe I’m doing this,” I said, my hand hovering over the laptop and an email to the printer.
“I can.”
“I could still back out. I don’t have to send this version over.”
“You don’t.”
The Most Likely to… page was still up on his screen, feeding my anger.
“But I want to…”
Elijah smiled and took my hand. “I know you do.”
As the download bar slugged along, I tried to imagine how the story of this would go next. I was not naive about the consequences. We would send it off and the printer would have no time to check it. I would email Ms Gordon to say there’d been no further typos. The yearbooks wouldn’t arrive back until the day of the Leavers’ Assembly. The Awfuls would offer to open the boxes and hand them out, so that Ms Gordon didn’t catch onto their changes. Maybe the girls would have time to check them, and find out what I’d done, before the Leavers’ Assembly. Maybe they wouldn’t get a chance. Either way, it was going to be drama. But at least Lily Welsh wouldn’t open the book and see herself winning that category. Instead she’d scan the pages and see her bullies held to account for the first time in five years. Some students would cheer at what I’d done, others would think I was pathetic. Many would have no idea of the humiliation I’d saved them from, and I never wanted them to know. I didn’t need to be important in that way. And the popular gang would explode, of course. They’d be apoplectic with rage and deny any of it was true. Because everyone thinks they’re the good guys in the story of their own lives, no matter how much they’re the bad guys in other people’s stories.
Me?
What would happen to me?
As my finger hovered over the mouse, I made peace with the fact I could very well be expelled. Though they might take my “family circumstances” into account. I’d be suspended at the very least. Would they even let me take my exams? I was leaving for college anyway but still… Would my classmates get to see this yearbook before the teachers stopped it? Or would it get out? Become legend?
From that point on, I wouldn’t be able to control the story. I’d started writing one, but it was up to other people to help write the ending. All I’d done was throw a final plot twist into the tiny nothingness of my tiny year group’s narrative, in our tiny school, in our tiny town. But I’d left a mark. I’d made an impact. I’d told a story. My story. My version of the truth. As true as I knew it.
Elijah’s computer dinged. My yearbook was downloaded. I attached it to my email, my heart going mental. Elijah took my hand once more and squeezed it. And I knew the legacy of Elijah loving me would last throughout my life. When it came to the story of us, we were only at the start, with no idea how it would end. Maybe we’d last as long as our padlocks, weathering multiple storms on the banks of the Thames. I could only hope. But I knew his love had changed me. Every person on this earth deserves to have someone love them for precisely who they are. In fact, if more people felt loved for who they are, maybe they wouldn’t feel so desperate to feel important at the expense of others.
“Are you ready?” Elijah asked. The boy who gave me a red pen, arming me to argue against the story of my own life.
I nodded, and hit send.
Look, as I said, you didn’t need to read this to be reminded what secondary school was like.
You were with me the whole way. You lived these pages with me. You have your memories now. That’s all those years are now. A memory. After all of that.
I don’t know if any of you will get to read this but, if you do, you may not agree with what I’ve done. You may not remember things happening the way I do. You may think my truth isn’t the truth – it may certainly not be your truth. Or maybe it is, but accepting that hurts too much because it means you have to accept some truths about what you did, and what that means about who you are.
Just because I told this story doesn’t mean you have to agree with it. In fact, I encourage you not to. I urge you to pick up a red pen and make this yearbook your own. Make your life your own. Make your story your own.
Pick up the pen. And tell the truth.
A school enquiry has been launched after the Year Eleven yearbook revealed details of systemic bullying by popular students.
A pupil on the yearbook committee discovered the Most Likely to…page had been rewritten with new categories and new winners to shame vulnerable members of the school community. Rather than alerting the teachers, the student decided to significantly rewrite the yearbook and expose the truth about the long-term bullying before it went to press.
The rewritten yearbooks were distributed at the Leavers’ Assembly and “all hell broke loose” as students started reading them. Eyewitnesses said the school hall became pandemonium, with teachers struggling to contain the uproar. The three students who’d initially changed the Most Likely to…pages were escorted to the head teacher’s office and suspended immediately. The student responsible for the significant rewrite was spared suspension, but is leaving the school at the end of term.
An anti-bullying review has been announced in light of the yearbook’s revelations, however copies of the book are banned. Students were asked to return them immediately, but some are said to still be in circulation. The identities of the pupils shamed in the Most Likely to…pages have been kept secret, although the whistle-blower did send PDFs of the incriminating pages to the school as evidence of the scandal.
Head teacher Mr Steele said: “Nothing like this has ever happened in our school before and we take bullying extremely seriously. However, it appears some individuals have slipped under the net. We are reviewing our anti-bullying procedures to see what we can learn so this never happens again.
“However, I do urge any students harbouring these contraband yearbooks to hand them in immediately and allow the school to handle any in-school bullying professionally, rather than giving credence to this unacceptable act of vigilante justice.”
The yearbook editor, who cannot be identified due to school rules, spoke to the paper only briefly to say this: “All I did was tell the truth. I highly recommend everyone does the same.”
If you have been affected by the issues raised in this book, the following organizations can help:
Samaritans are available round the clock, every single day of the year. You can talk to them any time you like, and in your own way, about whatever’s getting to you. Call, free, any time, on 116 123
Or email jo@samaritans.org
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