The light streaming into the wide hallway gave a subtle sheen to the linoleum floor, as if we walked along a softly glowing carpet. We emerged from the [[library|The Library]], fingertips sore from hurriedly typing in final drafts of stories and shedding bits of plastic lino tape that had stuck to us during the layout. The afternoon sun smiled on us through the plate-glass windows and we were jubilant: the final issue was out.
What started as a single sheet of student tidbits had blossomed into an eight-page publication, complete with a proper banner ("The Horizon"), and a range of articles that included news, [[feature stories|In the Summertime]], and [[sports|Sports by Adam]]. Once a month, we gathered briefly to brainstorm and distribute story ideas. Dispersing with assignments in hand, we would reconvene three weeks later to construct the beast. We would edit, lay out and laugh our butts off in a [[chaotic evening|Layout Night]] heavily fueled by equal parts cheap pizza, some [[insanely caffeinated soda|Jolt]] I had recently discovered called Jolt, and early teen hormones. Not until I was an adult did I realize why kids being dropped off at my house for Layout Night were never accompanied to the door by their parents.
You couldn't enter the library without passing through the security gateway, and the gateway was positioned smack under the narrow, watchful nose of The Librarian. She was angular, and reminded me of characters drawn in 8-bit: a rectangular head, arms that seemed to attach to her shoulders at right angles, half-rim brick-shaped reading glasses perched on the slender plane that formed the bridge of her nose. She was the old-fashioned sort of librarian that favored buttoned-up white blouses under cream-colored cardigans, and could tell you what book you were looking for even if the only thing you remembered about it was "it had this red-haired kid and a dragon."
Sports was a bit of a puzzler for us. Journalism attracted the kind of kids who gravitate towards an after-school club that, by virtue of being entirely dependent upon paper and computers, is necessarily located both under a roof and indoors. The co-editor played soccer, but she was an anomaly. The rest of the staff was more like me: [[drawn towards books|The Library]] and harboring a deep-seated dislike of gnats. I realized early on that, being both slight of stature and near of sight, I was doomed to permanent membership in the Probably Picked Last club. Not the type often seen near a chalk-marked field.
Fortunately, the black hole created by the need for a sports page quickly sucked in an enterprising young man named Adam. Although he had originally signed on to write [[news stories|All The News That's Fit To Print]], he saw our need and stepped into the breach. The opportunity to join the Boys Club of Sports Writers was too much to resist.
"It's the last issue for us, ever. We should do something fun."
"Like what?"
"Well, my sister says the high school paper does a special section for the end of year. We could do something like that."
*pause*
"Oh wait. I have an idea."
And so started the quest for the story, Where Do All The Teachers Go Over The Summer, Anyway? It occurred to us that, since we were about to part ways with this institution forever (at least on a legal basis), this might be a good time to Get Away With Stuff.
Our feature article interviewed one of our science teachers ("Where do you go all summer, Mr C?" "Well, many people don't know this but we don't actually leave. The reason they built these enormous closets in back of the lab is because we put ourselves into hibernation until August, at which point we thaw out from a cryogenically induced freeze and start printing worksheets") and our english teacher ("Mrs R, what do teachers do at the end of the school year during the week after all the students leave?" "We lay out the ScanTron sheets and play mini-golf in the hallways").
True story.
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"All The Sugar And Twice The Caffeine"
<img src="http://seester.com/twine/img/JoltSoda.jpg" height="500" alt="Jolt Soda">
With a tagline like that, what kid could resist it? One who lacked the sense to realize that, at thirteen years of age with the metabolism of an ant, the thing lacking in my life was NOT extra caffeine.
Instead, I became a devotee of Jolt, particularly around the evenings when we had to [[put the paper together.|Layout Night]]I even took the precaution of stashing one in the top of my locker ("Emergency Rations") in the case that I or some unfortunate friend found themselves desperately in need of the kind of pick-me-up you could legally administer to someone not yet finished with puberty.
What I actually needed was someone to whack me over the head and clarify the immediate benefits of organizing my life around something as simple as a checklist. Instead, it wasn't until college that I poached that particular philosophy off my friend whose father made him attend a four-day seminar on Getting Organized over winter break.