Kapiolani Community College
Diamond Journal 2004

Sixty Three Perfect Squares
Cheryl Sakai Snap.

With a gentle touch and a firm hand, I pressed the button on my beautiful silver Olympus camera. Snap. Once the picture was taken, the lens retreated back into the camera and a steady internal clicking sound told me that the film was rewinding and that I had taken twenty-four more pictures of my friends. For weeks I had irritated them with the snap of my camera, always lurking on the side ready for the next great shot. My mission was concise: I needed to have an amazing senior page for my high school yearbook.

I knew what types of pictures I wanted; they had to be clear, vivid, colorful, and illustrate the personality of the person. I was diligent about bringing my Olympus Stylus Epic to the weekend parties, after school skate sessions and lunch hour; my camera was always the only one present. Week after week, Costco was bombarded with my rolls of film, which were to be carefully developed and distributed for pick up in the “S” section.

By November, I had proudly accumulated sixteen red and white Costco folders of pictures. Conscious of the approaching due date, I made a call to my Uncle Matt. Uncle Matt owns HonBlue, a top local printing company that manufactures Midweek coupons to Pizza Hut boxes and especially my father’s blue prints from his architect company. I asked for a family favor.

“ I want to see if you can make my senior page for me.”

A few nights later, I sat at his dinning room table and explained my layout sketch to him. On an eight and a half by eleven inch computer paper, I had carefully drawn perfect squares. They covered the paper like an all white chessboard. A picture was to be digitally inserted into each little square. As Uncle Matt thumbed through my 336 pictures he laughed at every one.

“ There are a lot of tongues in these pictures,” he said. I nodded proudly with a grin on my face,

“ Yup, I guess so,” I responded.

The next step was to pick and choose the most comical and hilarious pictures and crop them. I lay a taped piece of tracing paper over the pictures and meticulously drew squares onto the paper leaving an overlay which would indicate to the technician where to digitally cut my pictures. Once scanned, I mapped out where each shot would go; I was very particular because I was confident each one had a rightful place on the grid. A final copy went into HonBlue, and a week later, Uncle Matt dropped off a professional cardstock copy of what would be my senior page in the 2003 Kalani High School yearbook. Along with my final copy was a post-it from the technician who had made it; it read, “There are a lot of tongues in these pictures, I counted eleven.”

On November 21, 2002 I handed in my folder to the yearbook committee and awaited the end of the year. In the following six months so much would happened but I had “broken up” with my Olympus; after such extensive use I needed a break before I snapped. Two weeks before the senior’s last day the yearbooks arrived. Excited murmurs and the flipping of pages sounded throughout the campus. I went straight for the last section which contained the senior pages. I found my page among my friends’. It was an eight and a half by eleven inch paper divided into sixty three perfect black and white three by three centimeter squares. Looking up at me were twenty nine of my beloved friends, countless smiles and eleven tongues.

I received so many compliments from students, teachers, and people from other high schools, and though they were much appreciated, I was constantly asked the same questions, “Why are you hardly in any of the shots?” or “Why didn’t you put your name on it?” My answer was always fervent, “Because I wanted it to be different, not just a bunch of cut up pictures glued to a paper. I wanted the focus not to be on me, but on me and my friends.” People didn’t really grasp why I had paid $120 for a senior page when it wasn’t recognizable as mine, but it made perfect sense to me, and I soon realized that even then I didn’t understand the full meaning of these pictures.

Recently, I had my graduation party at Hanaki restaurant. I was surprised with a thirty four by forty inch laminated blow up of my page. It was in full color, and each once tiny square was now almost four and a half inches. My eyes watered at the sight. It made quite a conversation piece in the restaurant. My elderly relatives gasped at the wildness of my friends; I laughed because those were the ones I considered to be the non-explicit pictures.

Carefully I brought it home without bumping any of the corners, and once in my room, I really took the time to examine it. Willis was doing the shaka. Marisa was licking Chad’s nipple ring. Soliven was bent over eating a candy bar out of his own lap. Craig was as handsome as ever. Taryn and Hayly had whipped cream all over their lips. Matt was sucking on a seven inch banana. I had seen these pictures countless times but everything seemed different. Since November of 2002 so much has changed. I was seventeen in the pictures, a year younger than I am now. Kris was not present and neither was Anthony L. or Anthony P.; they are now extremely close to me. But more than that, ten of my girlfriends have recently left for college, four guys did the same. I am no longer close with Justin who used to be my best friend; he will leave for Portland State University in two weeks. Taryn’s dad passed away. And in April, Kaniela, my “baby” died suddenly and tragically right after his eighteenth birthday. My page began my senior year and ended it. Each of the sixty three pictures is a reminder of a moment that I can never relive again. It is a statement of who I am. Even its organization symbolizes my orderly personality. My senior page captures a great time in my life when we all felt young, wild and free. It was before the graduations, before the good-byes and before the deaths. It still brings me to tears when I see it.