The Yearbook Read Online Free PDF Page A

my mind off it … him.
    No one had proofread the yearbook the night before, but Mr. Brophy had told Mr. DeWaart it could be done early this morning. I didn’t know what time Someday My Prints Will Come was open, but I’d find out.
    And I would take the overland route to get there, as far from the Ramble as I could go.
    “Aaagh! Someone hold me up! I’m seeing things!” Mr. Brophy said, clutching his heart and staggering backward on the print shop’s front steps. His gray, shoulder-length, aging-hippie hair fell across his pasty face.
    He was joking, I assumed. But on this particular day, that particular kind of joke made me nervous. I smiled to humor him.
    “It’s … it’s a high school senior awake before noon on a Saturday!” he gasped.
    “Hey, some of us have to work hard,” I managed.
    Mr. Brophy put his key in the front door. “Yeah, to make up for the other slobs, huh? Come on in. I have the mechanicals laid out for you. The photos aren’t pasted down yet, but you’ve got them marked on the back, right?”
    “Right.”
    “Matching pictures to names is something I can do pretty well,” he said. “It’s the names themselves that get me. My eyes cross after six letters.”
    I followed him in, feeling queasy, thinking about what lay in the river a few hundred yards away. I vowed not to say a thing about it. If Gumby was a dream, I’d forget it eventually. If he was real, somebody would discover him. There would be an explanation, and I’d be able to forget the whole thing.
    I went through the motions of proofreading. I vaguely remember correcting a few last names and skimming over some quotes, poems, and captions. But my concentration was shot. The letters on each page seemed to swarm like ants. Under the circumstances, I did the best I could do.
    On my way out, I saw Mr. Brophy racing around the shop. Employees were straggling in, and machines were whirring. “Thursday okay?” he shouted.
    “ This Thursday?” I asked. “To print them and bind them?”
    “What do you think I run here? A bunch of Benedictine monks with quills? I do everything in-house — and you guys ain’t the only school I’m doing. I’m like an accountant at tax time. I need to get you out of the way for the crunch, that’s all.”
    “Thursday would be great,” I said.
    He rummaged around a pile of papers and pulled out an envelope small enough to hold a yearbook photo. “This is the weird shot. You want one copy for each absentee, right?”
    “Yep,” I said.
    Mr. Brophy gave me a sly half-grin and shook his head. “You guys are sick, man. Worse than we were at your age.”
    “They had photographs back then?”
    “Out!” Mr. Brophy picked up an X-Acto knife and held it like a dagger. “Out, brazen child!”
    I ran from the shop, surprised I had any sense of humor left.
    Over the weekend, no one said a thing about a body. I listened to the local news each evening and kept my ears open in town.
    On Monday morning, as I approached Wetherby High, I noticed three police cars parked in front.
    Inside the lobby, students were gathered near the office doors of our principal, Mr. Dutton. I could see Ariana, Smut, and a friend of theirs named Monique Flores.
    Monique is blond, wispy, smart, and very emotional. (When she found out she was class salutatorian, she burst into tears of disappointment.) Ariana and Smut were on either side of her, arm in arm, as if they had to support her.
    “What happened?” I asked them.
    “Rick Arnold’s … missing ,” Monique said gravely, between sniffles. “The police are talking to Mr. Dutton about it.”
    “His parents are in there,” Ariana added. “They’re hysterical.”
    “Wow,” I replied. “When did they notice he was missing?”
    “They’ve been looking since the weekend,” Smut said. “But they didn’t want to make a big deal about it. You know Rick. They figured he hitched down to Vanderbilt to camp out at his brother’s college dorm. He does that