This story was co-published with Slate Magazine.
Back before the internet made it possible—and popular—for people to document their lives in real time, teenagers found themselves preserved between the pages of their high school yearbooks—forever young. Enshrining cliques and clubs, acne and braces, these artifacts capture students as they are, in the present.
Yet many yearbooks also make predictions about the future. There’s a tradition of bestowing “superlatives” to members of the senior class who stand out as the “class clown,” “biggest flirt” and “most athletic.” Most of these awards reflect largely innocuous teenage concerns, but one superlative in
