Nobody Remembers Signing It — But Every Name in That Yearbook Is Real

My mother found the box when she was cleaning out the crawl space last March. Old report cards, a cassette tape with no label, and my yearbook from Dunmore Regional High, class of 2003. She left everything on my old bed like a small museum of a person I barely recognized anymore.

Photo: Dunmore Regional High, via media.tegna-media.com

I flipped through the yearbook mostly out of habit, the way you do — scanning faces, reading the loopy inscriptions people wrote in blue ink that had faded to the color of old denim. Stay cool. Don't ever change. HAGS. The usual archaeology of adolescence.

Then something fell out from between the back cover and the endpaper. A photograph. Glossy, the kind that comes in a paper sleeve from a school portrait package. It showed a senior class group shot — maybe forty students arranged on gymnasium bleachers, the kind of photo that gets framed and hung in a hallway somewhere and eventually nobody looks at it anymore.

I didn't recognize the gym. That was the first thing.

Ours had a scoreboard on the east wall, a big blue hawk painted at center court. The gym in the photo had neither. The bleachers were older, wooden. The lighting was different — flatter, almost institutional. But the students in the photo were wearing Dunmore colors, red and gray, and a few of them I recognized immediately. Tyler Marsh, second row from the top. Kezia Odum beside him. A girl I was pretty sure was Dana Pellegrino, though her hair was shorter than I remembered.

Photo: Kezia Odum, via indopop.id

Photo: Tyler Marsh, via assets1.cbsnewsstatic.com

And the photo was covered in signatures. Not in the yearbook itself — on the photograph. Written directly on the glossy surface in a silver paint pen, looping around the borders, cramped into the margins. Thirty, maybe forty names. Some I recognized. Some I didn't.

I texted Tyler that same night. Sent him a picture of the photo. His response came back in about four minutes: where did you get this? I never signed that.

I called Kezia. She said the same thing. She remembered the gym photo being taken — or she thought she did — but she had no memory of signing anything like it, and she didn't recognize the gym either. That's not our gym, she said. Our gym had the hawk.

I started working through the names I could read. Fourteen people, I reached. Fourteen people who confirmed their handwriting, or something close to it, and denied signing the photo. A few of them got quiet in a way I didn't push. One of them, a guy named Marcus Fell who I barely knew in school, asked me not to contact him again. Just that. No explanation.

The student in the center of the front row was the part I kept coming back to.

He was smiling the way people smile in photos when they've been told to smile — a little held, a little performed. Brown hair, plain features, a Dunmore hoodie. Nothing remarkable. And yet every single person I showed the photo to said some version of the same thing: I kind of remember him. Not I know him. Not that's so-and-so. Just that vague, greasy sense of familiarity, the kind that doesn't attach to anything specific when you reach for it.

He wasn't in my yearbook. I checked every page. He wasn't in the class roster, the club photos, the candid shots. I called the school's main office and asked if they kept archives of old class photos. The woman who answered was helpful, genuinely so, and she called me back two days later to say that the gym in my photograph didn't match any configuration of Dunmore Regional's facilities going back to 1978, when the current building was constructed.

She paused before she said the next part. There was an older building, she told me. Before the current one. It burned in 1971. We don't have records from that period. Most of what survived was administrative.

I thanked her and sat with that for a while.

The photo is sitting on my desk right now. I've looked at it probably two hundred times in the past few weeks, and every time I look at the boy in the center I feel that same pull of almost-recognition, like a word on the tip of my tongue. The signatures crowd the edges. Some of the names I still haven't been able to match to anyone.

What I keep coming back to — the thing I almost didn't write down because writing it makes it more real — is the silver pen inscription in the bottom right corner, underneath all the other signatures. It's different from the rest. Neater. It reads, in handwriting that doesn't match anyone else's:

Good luck in whatever comes next.

No name. No year.

I've shown it to everyone who signed the photo and none of them wrote it. I don't know who did. I don't know how the photo ended up in my yearbook, or why it was hidden the way it was, or what gym those bleachers belong to.

But I do know that the boy in the center is still smiling. And I know that every time I look at him, I feel certain — absolutely certain — that I went to school with him.

I just can't remember a single thing about him.

And I'm starting to think that might be the point.