The Playboy and the Country Girl
Found an old yearbook entry that describes me and Hannah from senior year, and it’s disorienting to see yourself rendered in that particular voice—earnest and cataloging, mixing affection with mockery the way teenage chroniclers do. They’ve captured the essentials. I was the guy with the Mac obsession, the iPod permanently attached, constantly disappearing into Japanese media and somehow managing to turn some of that into actual video work on our school trip. The apples thing is real—I apparently just carried them around and distributed them like some kind of edible hype man. The charm they mention about being popular with girls, that was happening, though I was aware of it happening, which probably means I was less charming than I thought. The distraction in class was real too. There was this guy next to me who made it impossible to focus, and I’d given up fighting it.
Then there’s Hannah’s entry, and they’re really going for the full treatment. Country girl from Stotten in her Elvis car, the one with the underpowered engine she could never quite control, always driving out to the countryside to rescue Angelika from the middle of nowhere. She’s loud about everything, doesn’t apologize for it, Black Eyed Peas blasting while she avoids your calls because her schedule’s packed with actual living. The yearbook gets playful when they describe her social life—the men she danced with, the hotel rooms in Prague, the casual cruelty of calling girls names and then battling them. It’s trying to capture something wild and uncontained, and they’re doing it by listing infractions and adventures like evidence at trial.
What actually lands, reading this now, is how specific the observations are. The apples. The videos. Hannah’s laughter cracking open social studies class. The Elvis car. Angelika always needing a ride. These are details that felt enormous and now feel like proof that we existed. The yearbook was doing the only thing yearbooks can do—preserving the texture of specific people at a specific moment, even if they got the tone slightly wrong.
There’s something unsettling about being read so literally. They’ve made me and Hannah into characters, types—the tech guy, the party girl—and there’s enough truth in it that it stings a little. I was all of those things. But reading it now, I feel like I’m looking at someone else, someone I used to wear like a suit. The Mac obsession has faded. The Japanese media thing is still there but quieter now. The charm has either developed into something else or evaporated entirely, I’m not sure which.
Hannah probably hasn’t changed as much. Or maybe she has and I just remember the version of her that lived loud, that didn’t calculate, that showed up in her weird car and picked up Angelika and called women names and danced like she owned the room. The yearbook tried to make it charming and ridiculous, which was fair. It was both.