Getting Over Jack Wagner by Elise Juska Page B

no act of fate, but through the very goal-oriented, time-consuming scouring of the previous year’s yearbook, looking for Z’s face. My methods sound a little pathetic, I know, but in situations like these you need to capitalize on your strengths. Behind-the-scenes is where I work best—not on the stage, on the phone, on the kickball field. I prefer to be tucked behind televisions, laptops, magazines. If my search was pathetic, at least it was privately pathetic, unlike the wan, fearful girls draped in XXL Mötley Crüe sweatshirts who looked as if they’d been spooked by their own shadows.
    Locating Z in the yearbook wasn’t as simple as I thought. As it turns out, Quadders don’t go out for too many extracurriculars, and the pretalent-show Z kept a low profile. No wonder I’d barely noticed him since kickball games at Glendale Elementary. He appeared only twice in the two hundred and fifty pages of the York Yodel: once among the generic rows of the freshman class (still scowling) and once in the staff shot of the literary magazine, slumped low in a desk chair, looking intensely thoughtful, the white nub of a cigarette pinched between forefinger and thumb.
    My mission: to track down the first Transformations staff meeting. In what turned out to be a brilliant move on my part, I asked my English teacher, Ms. Horn. “I certainly ought to know when it is,” she beamed. “I’m only the faculty adviser!” Then she went on to tell me how glad she was that I was “finally embracing my potential as a writer” (this based on one bullshit-filled bluebook on Ethan Frome).
    The following Monday, after school, I prepared myself for the meeting. In the bathroom, I applied black mascara and eye-liner. That morning, I’d picked out my favorite new tie-dye and a pair of jeans I’d managed to bust up a little—some stray white threads at the cuff, a hole at the knee—but not too much, preserving the illusion that the damage had happened organically. In the mirror, I arranged an expression on my face that I thought was dreamy, thoughtful, deeply preoccupied, and held it tight, barely breathing, as I headed for Room 117.
    It was your basic gray-green classroom. It also happened to double as a chem lab, which explained the periodic table hanging incongruously among the scattering of tortured artists. Ms. Horn beamed at me as I entered. I couldn’t beam back, for fear of wrecking the expression on my face, so I flicked her a low wave. There were about ten kids sitting in chairs: a clump of giggling, fluorescent-clad upperclass girls, a few pale, skinny, bespectacled boys (layout, I guessed), and one morose chubby girl with a pierced nose. Then I spotted Z. He was sitting alone in the back of the room, legs sprawled under the desk, dressed all in black and wearing a half-lidded squint I would later realize was probably boredom or rudeness or marijuana—but I took then to be, you know, deep.
    I chose a desk two seats from Z’s: not so far that we couldn’t talk if we wanted to, not so close that I was being obvious. I felt a touch of pride about the fact that none of the other Z-lovers had had the same idea I did. The pack of upperclass girls was oblivious to anyone but each other, the glasses guys were talking Dungeons and Dragons, and the morose chubby girl had her head bent over a book (she was probably the only one of the lot who actually wanted to read and write, not just accumulate activities for college applications or score a date with a rock star).
    As I was inwardly congratulating myself on my ingenuity, four kids—two girls, two guys—floated through the door and sat in a row on the long table at the front of the room. They carried themselves with such ease that I knew immediately they were seniors. All of them were dressed vaguely, genderlessly alike, in loose, flowing pants or willowy skirts, wide-sleeve shirts, long hair and sandals, and