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realized those guys only really pick on the after- school crowd. So I decided my smartest move was to just wait them out. That meant I needed to find something to kill time once school ended. There are a whole bunch of clubs for students, but I've never really been that interested until now. Today I stayed after school to see if there was something that would be a good fit. The Board Game Club sounded like it might be pretty fun, but it's run by Mr. Nern, and I've already spent

enough time with him for one school year. There's a Pillow-Fighting Club, too, but one look inside the room where they meet told me it wasn't really my thing. There are some clubs that are REALLY on the fringe, like the Free Hugs Club that just started up this spring.

It was too hard to decide what to do, so I left it up to the Magic 8 Ball. I walked up to each door where the different clubs meet and gave the 8 Ball a shake to see which one I should join. I got a lot of "No's" and a few "Ask Again Later's," but I finally got a "Yes, Definitely" when I was in front of the Yearbook Club door. I walked inside, and the staff looked like it was in the middle of a meeting.

I waited in the back until the meeting broke up, then walked up to the editor in chief, Betsy Buckles, and asked if I could join. She said the yearbook was almost finished, but they needed a few more photos for the "Candids" page. Then she said the school would pay five bucks for every photo that ended up in the yearbook, and I was sold. If I can avoid the Mingo kids AND get paid, that's a win-win. Thursday Today was my first day as the yearbook photographer, and it wasn't as easy as I thought it would be. I wanted to get good pictures, but to be honest, kids at my school don't really do anything that INTERESTING.

I was trying to do my job taking pictures while ALSO being a full-time student, and that didn't make things any easier. I was hoping somebody would do something really dumb and I'd get a great picture of it. But for some reason people were on their best behavior today. One shot I was DYING to get was Jamar Law with his head stuck in a chair. There was a picture of him doing that in the LAST yearbook, and if he did it again I wanted to be ready for it. I know a photographer isn't supposed to

influence his subjects, but I tried to at LEAST nudge Jamar in the right direction. Whenever I see a picture in a yearbook or a magazine, there's always a little caption underneath. So when I turned in my photos at the end of the day, I wrote little blurbs so Betsy would know what she was looking at.