The other newscaster, Shauna, gave me a wave and a slightly puzzled tilt of the head as she buzzed around the small studio, handing out photocopies of the morning’s announcements to the producers, to Ian (slouched behind the news desk, a combo of James Dean and a pile of dirty laundry) and the camera operator. She wore the high-school equivalent of a business suit, her black blazer with shoulder pads of a size somewhere between a football player and David Byrne’s Stop Making Sense suit. Shauna and I were in the same calculus, English, and French classes and she had always been cordial if not coolly competitive. She had the third-highest grade point average in our graduating class of three hundred and twenty-four. I was number nineteen, one of only two boys in the top twenty, which told you all you needed to know about my male classmates.

Shauna asked, not unkindly, why I was there. I told her I had an announcement about a new club.

She said “Okay” about ten times while scribbling on her announcements sheet, and said (to herself, I assumed), “I can talk about it between the student council and powderpuff football sign-up.” Then, to me: “Got it, Art.”

“Oh. Thanks, but, well, because it’s a new club and as the founder and president I think I need to make the announcement myself, and, um, Mr. Tobin said that I could do it.”

Shauna smiled but her eyes moistened, as though on the verge of you-can’t-do-this-to-me tears. Before I could say sorry, she said, “We have five minutes to air, do you know what you’re going to say and how you’re going to say it, and when it might be best suited for airing?”

I shrugged, offered something mostly committal. She shoved me into the adjacent secondary studio, an isolation chamber encased in thick windows so no one could hear me scream.

The announcements began when they were supposed to. They were piped through a small box of a speaker perched above the door of my studio. Ian and Shauna sounded trapped in a tin can, but I was the one sardined in here with barely enough room for me (standing, no chair), a tripod, and a bored underclassman lurking behind a camera.