Tracy Flick Can't Win (Tracy Flick #2) (22)

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.

Nate, she would say in this fake-shocked voice. What’s going on up there?

Nothing, I would say, not very convincingly, which always made her laugh, and the motion of her shoulders just made everything worse.

No worries, she would tell me. It’s all good.

It was just a one-week camp. She hugged me on the last day, pressed her lips against my ear, and whispered, You’re my favorite, and I told her she was mine too, and that was it, the end of our summer fling.





Lily Chu


Clem and I liked to FaceTime late at night, after I was done with my homework. I had to whisper so I wouldn’t wake my parents, but Clem was okay with that. They said it was hot when I whispered.

“Hey, Clem.”

“Hey, Lils.”

There was a little hump of silence, a shy moment when I didn’t know what to say. It happened every time we talked, right at the beginning. It was like we’d never even met before, let alone had sex or said, I love you, or cried together for hours on the last day of Code Camp. All that seemed like a distant dream, a story I’d read over the summer and only vaguely remembered. But then it passed, the way it always did.