Mr. Weede, I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life. I’ve been in rehab three times. I let my parents down. I let my friends down. I let my ex-wife down, and a couple other women who made the not-great decision to get involved with me. I’m not a good father and have not always been as reliable about paying child support as I should have been.
But I ate that sandwich in twenty-two minutes! The whole friggin’ thing. That’s gotta be worth something. I swear if you don’t believe me just go to Big Sal’s in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
My picture’s right there on the wall.
Your former student,
Greg F.
* * *
Dear Hall of Fame Selection Committee:
My beloved father, Walter Finley, graduated from Green Meadow High School in 1952. He attended Drew University and worked for many years as a CPA specializing in tax preparation for individuals and small businesses. He had an office on Center Street, right next to the bakery that has since become a Starbucks.
My father was also an author of some renown, publishing six novels under the pen name of W. K. Finn. His books are all out of print today, but they were well-received at the time of their publication, and one of them, Blue Meadow Fugue （1973, Dark Horse Press）， is widely considered to be a masterpiece. Professor Marcus Dowling of Fanning College called it “a late modernist gem from a writer who deserves a wider audience.” The poet Grant Pasko praised Blue Meadow Fugue as “a tour-de-force of interiority… [a] painstaking and eerily beautiful reconstruction of the inner life of a twelve-year-old boy… [and] a vivid portrait of suburban America in the aftermath of a cataclysmic war.” The critic Marcia Franck recently included Blue Meadow Fugue in her listicle, “20 Forgotten Novels Worth a Second Look.”
I have included a copy of Blue Meadow Fugue, along with a SASE, for your perusal. I would appreciate it very much if you could return the book when you’re done reading it. I have only eight copies left, and each one of them is precious to me. He was a true artist and a genuinely kind person and the best dad a little girl could have wished for. He died in 2015 after a long struggle with Parkinson’s. I hope you will honor his memory as I do.
Sincerely,
Phyllis Finley Wenderoth
- 11 - Nate Cleary
We divided the most promising candidates among ourselves for further research. One of the names I got was Kelly Harbaugh, class of 2016, who’d dropped out of college and become a successful ASMR artist under the name of WhisperFriend47. That was how I happened to be watching a video called You Look Soooo Pretty Tonight while eating my Grape-Nuts on a Tuesday morning.
It was a simple concept, one girl pretending to do another girl’s makeup, going through the whole routine, all the different brushes and pencils and creams, and offering a lot of compliments along the way.
“I wish I had your natural beauty,” Kelly whispered. “You make it look so effortless.”
All you could see were Kelly’s face, her neck, and the top of her shoulders. Sometimes she held up her hands so you could see her perfectly manicured, sky-blue fingernails. She kept tapping those nails against hard surfaces—the makeup cases and bottles, the top of her desk, the screen of her laptop—and when she did this, she whispered the words TapTapTap really fast （I guess some people get off on that）。 Mostly, though, she just focused on the makeup.
“I’m going to start with a hydrating primer,” she said, holding up a neon-green tube. “This is the Flower Girl Coconut Water Exhilarator. TapTapTap. It’s what I always use when I want a fresh and shimmery look. I think you’ll like it. TapTapTap.”
Objectively speaking, the video was boring as shit, but I couldn’t take my eyes off it. Kelly’s lips were amazing—plump and pink and glossy—and she licked them a lot. If my father hadn’t interrupted, I might have watched the whole thing in one sitting.
“Morning, champ.” He patted me on the shoulder as he passed.
I shut the laptop and sat up straight. I’d been leaning pretty close to the screen.
“Morning.”
“Little early for porn,” he said.
“It’s not porn,” I told him, though I could feel myself blushing. “It’s the Hall of Fame.”
Lily Chu
There’s a shelf in the back of the library that has all the GMHS yearbooks going back to 1949, the first year the school existed. The original yearbook was called The Memory Bank, and they kept that name until 1962, when for some reason it got changed to Reflections, the lame title we still use today.
During my free period, I opened the Reflections from 1969 and scanned the rows of senior portraits. I thought I’d find a bunch of Woodstock hippies, but the teenagers of Green Meadow didn’t seem to know what year it was. The boys were mostly clean-cut in jackets and ties; a lot of the girls had hairdos that flipped up at the shoulders and collared dresses that buttoned at the neck. They were a very formal, very white crowd, only twenty or so Black students in the entire graduating class. It’s still pretty white around here, but a little less so. Maybe forty Black people now, at least that many Asians, and a handful of Latinx people as well. Also, we get to submit our own photos, so our yearbooks feel a lot more colorful and visually diverse. And we all smile, which was totally not the case fifty years ago. They were pretty serious back then.
James Haggerty didn’t look like a soldier. He was just a skinny kid with a bad complexion and an oversized Adam’s apple. He seemed a little worried, almost like he knew something bad was coming. Beneath his photo, he’d listed a few special memories: Camping with Ziggy and Slim. Junior Prom with Ellen. Summer weekends at Seaside. White Castle Emergency! More gravy, ma. Farewell, Green Meadow.
I took out my phone and snapped a picture of his senior portrait, in case anyone on the Committee wanted to know what he looked like. For some reason, I kept staring at it throughout the day, the way you poke at a sore tooth with your tongue, even though you know it’s going to hurt.
Nate Cleary
So the weird thing is, I actually knew Kelly Harbaugh. She was my counselor at summer camp back when I was in middle school, which was kind of a rough period in my life.
You wouldn’t know it from looking at me now, but I used to be really short. Other kids （and a few asshole adults） used to call me Tiny Man and Little Natey, which for some reason didn’t bother me for most of my childhood. It helped that I was really good at soccer, and always had a lot of friends.
I didn’t get self-conscious about my size until sixth grade. Kids I’d known my whole life were suddenly sprouting up, leaving me in the dust. Bigger, less-talented players were pushing me around on the soccer field, using their weight to bump me off the ball. I didn’t even bother to jump for headers anymore.
So I was pretty anxious when I got to the sleepaway camp that Green Meadow Youth Soccer sponsored every summer. I was twelve years old and I felt like everyone was staring at me, whispering about my bony rib cage and tiny hairless dick, and I guess Kelly noticed my discomfort, and took me under her wing.
I had really delicate features back then, and she used to tell me how good-looking I was. You’re gonna be such a heartthrob, Nate. I wish you were my age so you could be my boyfriend. She touched me all the time, running her fingers through my hair, rubbing sunscreen onto my face and shoulders, letting me sit on her lap. We messed around a lot in the pool, swimming through each other’s legs, seeing who could hold their breath underwater for longer. If there were chicken fights, we would always partner up. I would climb onto her shoulders, and she would wrap her hands around my ankles, and we would take on any challengers. And the whole time, my feet were brushing against her boobs, which were a little too big for her bikini top—it was blue with white stars, I remember that very clearly—and it made me excited in a way that she couldn’t help but notice, because my crotch was pressed right up against the back of her neck.