James Tait is a senior at Irvington High School. He’s taking five AP classes because all his friends are doing the same, but none of his friends know he’s failing all of them.
He has a test in his first period, but he hasn’t studied. Instead, he guesses random answers and picks his nose in the back of the classroom. He even tries to cheat off the smartest person in the class, but in the process of leaning over to see her answers, James falls out of his chair, hitting his head on the floor.
James is angry. He leaves first period with a throbbing headache and heads to his second period. His teacher announces a double in-class essay. Incensed by the already torturous events of the day, James erupts in an outburst of anger, screaming and yelling and throwing chairs around the room. His teacher panickedly exclaims that it was just an April Fool’s joke. Hearing this, James stands frozen, and immensely embarrassed. He zones out for the rest of class.
In advisory, James thinks it will all start going better. But then, two staff writers from the school newspaper come to his classroom to pass out the paper. James is all-too-familiar with the “Void,” which is the Voice’s annual satire issue. He flips through it, amused by the articles. Then, he flips to the entertainment section. There’s an article titled “James is Awful.” He starts reading it. It describes every embarrassing mistake or slip up he had made earlier that day. He isn’t sure whether to start sobbing or fuming with anger.
James chases the newspaper people out the door of his classroom and cusses them out. “Why? Why me? I’m James Tait! How do you know this? Why would you do this?”
One of them is more timid. “I don’t know who wrote that,” she says. The other one smirks. “You signed away the rights,” he says. Then he pulls out a folded-up sheet of paper from his shirt pocket. “Look at this. Tell me what it says.”
James unfolds the crisply-creased paper and mumbled through the text. “I, James Tait, hereby sign away my name, likeness, and all of my life events to be reproduced at will and with artistic liberty by the Irvington Voice.” A whole lot of other legalese follows it, followed by his signature.
“When did I sign this?” James asks.
“You visited our website,” says the Voice staff writer. “You agreed to our Terms and Conditions. Pretty exciting, isn’t it?”
James splutters, trying to come up with an answer for his pathetic situation. “So they know everything? Your readers know everything?”
The (still unnamed) journalist unfolded one of the many copies of the newspaper he was holding and pointed to a paragraph. James read it out loud:
“James has many secrets. He plans on reporting to the Voice and the @ihsco25decisions account that he’s going to Carnegie Mellon University, but he’s actually going to attend San Francisco Bay University since he couldn’t get in anywhere else. He tells everyone he has a girlfriend who goes to another school, but he’s afraid of what will happen when he shows up to prom without the puzz (prom huzz). He told his family that he got a job at Tpumps, but he actually just uses that time after school to cry all alone in an alleyway.”
James starts bawling. “How do you know all of this?” he asked. “And why is it all true?” He throws the newspaper in the journalist’s face and runs away.
For the rest of the day, no one sees or hears from James. His teachers are, for the most part, undisturbed. His friends wonder what’s wrong, but don’t really miss his absence. He only appears at the end of the day, in room 84, where the Voice usually meets for class.
“Who wrote that article?” he screams, swinging around a large ax. “Who wrote ‘James is Awful?’”
The classroom falls silent, except for the one journalist from before who showed James the contract. He is typing away at his keyboard, writing this very article in real time.
James walks over and raises the ax.
