When my freshman high school yearbook came out it featured four of what the school deemed to be the top students of the year. I frowned at the fact that I was not one of the exalted four-pack, and I bitterly cut my own face out of a photo and pasted it over one of the quartet on the cover. “Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about.” I nodded smugly. I was satisfied with my in-your-face fix.

Not thinking much of it, I carried my yearbook to school the next day to pass around for signatures. Little did I suspect the manner and degree of reception my mid-Pleistocene Photoshop gag would garner. I traded yearbooks with a brother and just like that it was gone. My effen yearbook was effen gone. Gone with a whooosh in a vortex of dust.

It pinballed its way across campus, trading hands as students screamed and howled with laughter at my mug plastered next to the homecoming queen. I was the man! Forget the homecoming king, where is that guy who put his own face on the yearbook? What’s his name? Where’s the book? I wanna see the book…the book…the booooooook!”

The yearbook as it appears today makes a simple statement, though it hardly fools anyone, what with the B&W photo cut out and plastered to a color photo.

It’s good to be king, even if only for a day in high school in Chandler, Arizona. It was a prank. No harm, no foul. Right in, right out, nobody got hurt. I didn’t get any chicks out of the effort, so how had it really even served me? I mean, it’s not like it fooled anyone. Well, maybe just those few with feeble cognitive prowess.