The second-to-last week of school, Meyer handed out a worksheet to everyone with just one sentence at the top: “If you could rename the school’s football team, what would it be?” Luke and Will turned their desks toward each other and I stared at the paper by myself for a few minutes, trying to figure out what deep, hidden meaning Meyer thought this meaningless busywork assignment had. Was this a reference to some book no one had heard of? I wondered about what kind of intellectual nonsense he’d want us to write, but nothing came to me.

I got up and dragged my desk over to Luke and Will, and when I sat down, I saw a detailed, grotesque drawing of a man teabagging a cast-iron grill Will had drawn on the paper under the heading “The Sizzling Scrotums.” It was the sort of image that makes you wonder what other people think of your group of friends. How did he draw it so quickly? Was that image stored in his muscle memory? Was that what Will did all day at school?

I laughed at it.

“You’re into this name?” Luke said.

“Definitely,” I said. “I mean, if there’s one unquestionable, slam-dunk name that would unite the student body and get approved by the school board without making anyone uncomfortable, it’s the Sizzling Scrotums.”

The paper asked for an explanation of the suggestion. “Oh, and here, for the explanation part, say . . .” And I took Will’s pen and wrote without thinking, just making dumb stuff up to entertain myself like I had done back when I first started writing: “At the stroke of midnight, an army of students surrounds the football field under spotlights and punishing rain, clutching George Foremans at their crotches. Orange extension cords run up the stadium steps like jungle vines and the grills hiss, a chorus of a million snakes. Angry and determined, we chant: We are no longer bristling, dwindling, middling, sickening. We are thickening, stiffening, and it’s greatness you are witnessing, for our scrotums now and forever shall be sizzling.”

It felt like doing a prank call with them like we used to. It was the only time I’d enjoyed writing in months. I was sure Meyer would immediately send us to the principal’s office. Whatever. It was fun.

“Did you learn that stuff in that writing class thing you took with Alex?” Luke said.

Oh, shit. “No, uh . . . not exactly.” I needed to explain that that whole thing had been a lie. But there never seemed like a good opportunity at school. “I was just kind of making fun of the weird poetry crap Meyer likes.”

Luke laughed. “Oh, yeah. It’s like rap, but worse in every way.”

Will took the paper up to turn in and I cringed, turning my head away from Meyer but glancing out of the corner of my eye to watch him read it. He leaned back. He laughed a few times. Huh.

He came over to our group and said, “Assonance. Words that resemble each other because of their vowel sounds. You wrote this, Kevin?”

I tilted my head up at him. “I, uh, well, I mean it was, like, a group — ”

“It’s disgusting,” he said. “But it’s good to see you’re finding practical ways to apply my lessons.”

“Oh. Uh, thanks.”

Huh. He wasn’t as clueless as I’d thought. He had some level of self-awareness about his own weirdness. Why had I let myself get so annoyed with him? Why had I judged him for volunteering at film festivals and literary magazines? He went out of his way to help people be creative. So what if he worshipped artistic eras he’d never actually known? I spent most of the year fantasizing about girls I barely knew. So what if he loved jazz and nonsense poetry? I loved slasher movies and prank calls about searing my penis on a grill. Everyone’s interests are equally ridiculous, just like he’d told us at the beginning of the year with that pie chart.

Right then I knew what I wanted to do for Meyer’s final project. Plus, it would be the right time to come clean to the guys and apologize for being an asshole all year.

“Hey, you guys wanna come over Saturday night?” I asked as we stood up at the end of class.

They looked surprised, but neither hesitated. Luke said, “All right.”

Will said, “Yeah.”

“Cool,” I said.

“Cool,” Luke said.

“Cool,” Will said.

It felt good to be back.

At the end of the day, we got our yearbooks and I saw the picture of myself with the digitally altered skin Mom paid for. They’d sanded the bumps off my forehead, erased blackheads from my nose, and blended my skin from its red-purple shiny swirl into flat beige. This hollow, lifeless-looking guy who never existed and never would, a shared hallucination between me, Mom, whoever at the picture place retouched it, and everyone else who ever thought it was a good idea for high-schoolers to have professionally Photoshopped yearbook pictures. A collective fantasy of the ideal teenager based on daydreams and movies, not reality: It was like looking at the Doritos Dude.