It's yearbook day - time to celebrate the school, recognize the community, and take home a pleasant painted little picture of it all - cropped and pasted together into smiles and bright colors. Smell the beautiful, crisp new pages and all the cute pictures of a caring suburban community. Laugh at the kids who aren't smiling in their pictures - why wouldn't they want to smile? Just look at all the clubs, the stretched faces and curved hands, and the sports teams, ranks assembled in regalia and standing at attention. Anyone could join one of them! And everybody must have fun raising money for selfless causes, with only the consolation of fraternizing as reward. A small boon, to be sure, for any good teenager. The community here does so much and contributes in mountains, as we are so quickly and often reminded. We take home so many honorable awards, highlighting the legions of our wonderful contributors, and frame them and hang them on the wall, far away from the recycling and the paper with the police blotter. We take home the yearbooks, with their shiny pages and painted faces, a gilded picture book of blissful ignorance and youthful joy. We forget the stuffy and bustling hallways, murmuring with rumours of vice and viciousness, the ostracization and greed, and the kids in the back of the bus talking about cell phones and getting high.

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