Frankenstein's Girlfriend

8: The Yearbook

Blank pages. No “Have a great summer;” no “Trig was hard;” not even a “Die, bitch!” The first few pages of Dana’s senior yearbook were a barren wasteland, like the arid, life-choked deserts miles away from her bedroom window. Perhaps skipping school altogether during her final week was a mistake, since that’s when the seniors all traded yearbooks for signing. But duty called – specifically, it called her cell phone, saying the freezer was busted and all the fruit needed to be sliced immediately or they were gonna lose a month’s worth of peaches.

Surely someone would’ve wanted to sign her yearbook, Dana assured herself. She took a regional 1st place trophy at the BSOA competition (Business Sharks of America) with a marketing presentation for a faux burger chain called Burger Burglar. “Go Directly To Flavor Jail” was her award-winning slogan. However, the school didn’t have the money to send Dana and her teammates to nationals, as the extracurricular budget was spent revamping the locker room, getting the football team deluxe padded cushions for the benches. They do not run cheap. Dana attempted a solo bikini car wash to raise money for the trip, though her timing––Parent Teacher Conference Day––was not great.

She saw herself many times as she flipped through her yearbook. Most favorably in the back row of the Debate Team photo. Dana was a researcher, because she refused to argue pro on raising the debt ceiling for “religious reasons.” She was also pictured in the back row of the School Paper photo. Dana was successful at selling ad space, though the editor had to undo the damage she’d done by selling a local car dealership the paper’s naming rights. Dana believed Sammy Hoglund’s Used Car and Mini-Bus Mega Emporium’s Yearbook: A Buchanan High Production would’ve had a nice ring to it. It occurred to Dana, while flipping through the pages of her yearbook on her military cot – which she preferred to a so-called “real bed,” as it provided her crazy dreams some much needed discipline – that no matter how much she tried to help people, she kept getting pushed to the back row.

Thankfully, she thought to herself, they don’t make yearbooks for summers. Dana hated summer. There was always so much excitement for it among her fellow students. They’d go on long vacations, relax by the pool, hang out at the mall, but Dana’s family didn’t have money for vacations, she was too antsy for “chillaxing,” and what’s the point of going to a mall if you’re not going to purchase anything? To frustrate the shop owners who’ve invested hard-earned treasure into their businesses? Sure, stores like Klutzman’s Kooky Gifts and Teen4Eva Fashionz weren’t nearly as dynamic as her Juiceroo, but they deserved more respect than a mere window browsing.

Her worst summer ever was at age 10, when Mark and Shannon shipped her off to sleepaway camp. On the first day, her smiling, dreadlocked counselor Marly warned all the kids about “the wolves in the woods,” so they shouldn’t go out there at night without supervision. Sure enough, when Dana tried to sleep, she could hear howling and the shadow of fierce creatures stalking through the trees. She spent every night shivering, never sleeping.

One night she decided, enough. Clad in unicorn pajamas and equipped with a wooden hairbrush, Dana snuck out of her bunk and crept towards the trees. When she got close, a creature snapped its head around and ran towards her! Dana stood her ground and jabbed her hairbrush into the creature. A very human moan escaped from this “creature,” and the mascot head came off the wolf costume to reveal Marly, wincing in pain. Apparently the counselors were enjoying spiked bug juice and a very pleasurable variation on tug-of-war every night in the woods, and wanted to ensure no campers wandered in on them. The busted counselors sneered at Dana the next day when her parents came to pick her up early, and she vowed never to return to camp again––a vow she kept.

Dana knew her life would be full of work. Why goof off every summer, and pretend you’ll be a kid forever? Why not use the summer to get a head start on life? Or, as she saw it, jab a wooden hairbrush into life’s tender scrotum.