Class Clown
By DANIELLE JACULEWICZ
Illustrator WILL HARDISON
The older I get, the more I find myself thinking about the material remnants I will someday leave behind. There won’t be a building of which I’m credited as the architect, or a bronze statue of my head sitting behind bulletproof glass in a museum. But I am certain there will be small pieces of my history for future humanoids to discover. I’ve known this since high school, and at 18 made sure my unimportant existence would have the proper manual documentation I believed I deserved.
I was recently listening to Amy Poehler’s podcast Good Hang, where she interviewed Jennifer Lawrence. One of her rapid-fire questions for the A-list actor was: “Which superlative did you win in middle school?” To which Lawrence laughingly answered without much thought, “Most talkative.” No one at her Louisville, Kentucky school knew that she would go on to become an Oscar winner and cultural touchstone, but they knew she was important. At least that’s how I viewed school superlatives when I was 18.
Noteworthy people—students who had crawled their way into their school’s collective psyche—are remembered. It doesn’t matter if they’re “Most likely to be famous” or something as simple as “Best laugh,” earning a superlative is the great divide between the interesting and the boring, the significant and the forgotten. During my senior year of high school, I was utterly determined to be remembered.
As the polls for senior superlatives were being sent to the senior class, I had my eyes set on two of the categories: Best Dressed and Class Clown. Look, I know I was nowhere close to a Miuccia Prada or a Joan Rivers—and I honestly wince at a good portion of what I wore and said in high school—but I truly believed I could make a campaign for myself. Though as the votes rolled in, I was proven wrong. I was voted runner-up in both categories.
No one has ever been remembered, honored, revered, or memorialized for being second place. There was even a psychological study conducted in 1995 that found that Olympic silver medalists were less happy than those who won bronze. When you can almost taste gold but can’t quite reach it, nothing hurts more. My mom was her high school’s student body president and homecoming queen for God's sake, and I couldn’t even make the glossy pages.
Despite my disappointment, I knew I needed to think tactfully if I wanted to salvage my deteriorating reputation. As one of the four members of the yearbook class, I studied the votes for each category and found a flaw in the system. The student who had won Class Clown had recently left the school, and to my knowledge, was not graduating with us. So, in full Tracy Flick fashion, I broke the news to my yearbook teacher and made it clear that even if they were voted to, the real winner couldn’t make the book.
To this day, I have never told anyone about what I did. I never told a soul that I logged into the yearbook system and put my name and photo under the title of Class Clown. I never told anyone, even as my friends laughed and patted my back for the win. I didn’t even turn around as I left the double doors to my high school, clutching the book. In my mind, I had made it.
I look back on this period of my life, before the whole world opened up to me, and I laugh. Nothing I could have done or said in my four years at Bishop Blanchet High School could have been as funny as the self-importance I had to grant myself the title. I worshipped at the altar of my own ego, the future I could create, and the traces of success I would leave behind. It all felt so serious.
Since then, I would say I have mellowed out. Not to end on a sermon, but I now try to turn my lens outward, rather than stare into my own mirror. Mine is one of billions of stories unfolding every day, and as much as I would love a physical record of my own small impact, I know it's not a vital sign of a life well lived. But hey, you’re reading my name in this magazine, so maybe some things never change.
This story was first published in Issue 03: The Signature Issue in Spring 2026.