By Jenny Tran
They’re everywhere. You can’t avoid them. Every classroom, every library, even every coffee shop — the same horrors bombard your eyeballs.
Stickers. Like a virus, they rapidly multiply, infecting laptop cases throughout the world. And Fountain Valley High School is by no means immune; students everywhere boast various bits of these adhesive pictures on their Chromebooks and MacBooks and PCs.
Yet … no one who is infected seems too interested in curing themselves. Like, at all.
Case One: senior Hayden Nguyen. He has a particular strain called “weeb,” where stickers from popular anime series — Haikyuu and My Hero Academia alike — have swarmed his laptop. A fact he’s proud of.
“[Kyoya]’s from one of my favorite animes Ouran High School Host Club,” Nguyen said, referencing the sticker on the top left corner. “He embodies what I feel every single time I wake up.”
Moving on, here’s one that’s just a hopeless cause. I honestly don’t even know what to say.
“[My friend and I] went to Stater Bros, like, every week during junior year and basically got two Icebreakers per week for a full semester,” senior Jordan Phi said. “And I realized I had too many Icebreakers, so I just filled my Chromebook with them.”
Thankfully, there are some instances that aren’t as severe. Example: junior Reggie Dao, whose stickers are small and sparse. Among them include Trader Joe’s, Gravity Falls and other things she frequently enjoys.
“I have a Fastback Mt. Sac sticker because I do cross-country with my friends,” Dao said. “And I have two Brandy Melville stickers because that’s, like, the only store I shop at.”
Similarly, senior Haley Vu has collected her several stickers over a long time from different kinds of events she’s been to.
“I really like the one with the guitar that says ‘Little Sister’,” Tran said. “I do not play the guitar, but I like the way the sticker looks.”
Some people, sadly, aren’t as fortunate. Senior Trinity Bui, who has been struck with a grave condition of “bunny-pox” is far from gone in terms of sanity levels. To the point where she has become one and the same with her bunny-infested laptop.
“My stickers are derpy and kind of cute … just like me,” Bui said.
Junior Josiah Ibanez is one of the rare victims who doesn’t actively encourage their symptoms.
“My mom works at the company that the stickers are about,” Ibanez said. “And she just gave them to me for free.”
Possibly the scariest lesson we can learn from this is how no two laptops are the same. And it seems the stickers develop according to who the person is, from their habits (like weekly Stater Bros visits) to their interests (Ouran High School Host Club) to their favorite self-insert creatures (bunnies).
Maybe that’s why there hasn’t been a substantial cure yet. The different personalities of people manifest into what appears on their laptops; the combinations tangibly portray their unique stories and perspectives.
That just means the sticker virus, or whatever it is, isn’t coming to stop any time soon. But, hey, you know they say. If you can’t beat ‘em, might as well join ‘em.
