The Reunion

    Out of my graduating class of 325, about 120 responded that they intended to come, which I felt was a high number, maybe too high. Regardless, it would be a disappointing reunion. Technology had eliminated the high school reunion tropes of the past: the former geek who shows up in a sports car with a perfect ten, the jock who desperately clings to any semblance of past glory and who ultimately embarrasses himself in the process. There would be no surprises here. I already knew that Chris Tonnesen made partner at a firm in San Francisco that allowed him to spend most of his time fishing in Northern California. I knew that Brian Paulson built an empire out of pizza delivery franchises. Both truths would have been surprises if I hadn’t already seen the gradual upward falls of guys who were, when I knew them, dumb fucks. 

    And I, to them, would not be a surprise. They have likely seen that I am divorced. They might know I’m a sales manager for Midwest Materials, but likely don’t know what my company does. They know I have no children, though they probably don’t know that I have only recently regretted it. I guess they probably don’t know that I was left with nearly nothing in the divorce, not because Chelsea took it, but because years of living beyond our means left little for us to split.

    The reunion was held at Rockford Country Club, which Chelsea and I had once joined, despite being unable to afford it. It would be a suitable venue with great food, but I knew that their beer selection wouldn’t be great because men of affluence hardly drink it. When we had been members, I seldom ordered it out of fear of being judged. Those types generally drink whiskey or gin or the classic cocktails; the truly wealthy men drink wine. When I pulled into the lot, there was a far less intimidating selection of cars than you’d normally see, and I thought that maybe I could drink beer after all. 

    An unfamiliar balding man in an ill-fitting suit stood at the main entrance, sucking down a cigarette. “This fuckin’ guy!” Mark Dowell said, and though I hadn’t recognized his face, his voice unmistakable. We used to smoke cigarettes in the donut shop before school on Fridays back when you could still do that. 

    “Mark Dowell. How the hell are you?” I asked. I wasn’t especially interested in the answer, but years in sales had instilled in me the importance of mirroring. The ensuing small talk was painless enough. He’d also gone through a messy divorce and thought better about asking about the family. 

    “So how is it in there?” I asked.

    “Same old shit. Everybody’s grayer and fatter. Except Jen Paulson. Damn.”

    “Oh yeah?”

    “Yeah. Man, did she age well. I’d go chat her up if I was you.”

    “Why don’t you?”

    “Nah, I was a lot lower on the high school food chain than you. Shit still matters, believe it or not.” I thanked him for the tip and entered.

    The party was divided into three rooms: a ballroom where a DJ played hits from our teen years, a dining area with an impressive spread, and the bar, which is where most of the men gathered. None of them were drinking wine, which made me feel like a bit less of a failure. 

I spotted my social circle at the far end of the bar, unapologetically drinking beers. When I joined them, they gave me the typical greeting, still, after all these years calling me by my last name. We all did in those days, a phenomenon which I can only assume came out of fear of intimacy. Somehow, Brad got to be Brad. 

    “Hey, we missed you,” Brad said, “You know, you don’t have to avoid us now that… you know.”

    “I know,” I said. “It’s just still a little weird hanging out with couples.”

    “This doesn’t mean you’re gonna bail on the Guns and Roses show, I hope.”

    “And eat three hundred dollars? Fuck that, I’ll be there.”

    “Good. I’m pumped. Can you believe we’re finally seeing them?”

    “No. You think Axl can still hit the notes?”

    “Probably not, but who cares? It’s Guns and fucking Roses. Oh, and Kate’s brother is out, so if you know of somebody who wants in, let me know. Hell, maybe you can pick yourself up a date tonight. You seen Jen?”

    “No, but I’ve heard.”

    “Man, we really fucked that one up, huh? Hell, maybe you can take a trip down memory lane with Laura.”

    “Wait, what?” For some reason, I hadn’t considered that Laura might be at the reunion. We’d started dating our junior year, then stayed together though college until I broke up with her the summer after she graduated, a year earlier than me. We initially broke up on relatively good terms, leaving open the possibility of reuniting after our lives leveled out a bit, but then I fucked Christine Kellog after a party. Christine had been friends with Laura, though theirs was a surface relationship that Laura had exaggerated after learning the news. When Laura called that day, I’d taken the call to give my side of the story, but she only wanted to chide me. I let her unload until I couldn’t take the beating, and I hung up on her. That was the last time we spoke.

    It had not been my intention for that conversation, 21 years ago, to be our last, though maybe it was for her. But as my life moved forward, there no longer seemed reason to look back.

    Sitting at the bar with an eye trained on the entrance, I gave myself the advantage of seeing her first. She arrived with the Rosanskis and the Clarks, promptly excusing herself to the restroom. Unlike most in attendance, I hadn’t seen Laura at all on social media, not even in the Suggested Friends section of Facebook. Admittedly, I’d wondered if she aged well. For whatever reason, she was one of those people whom I simply could not imagine getting fat. Then again, I couldn’t have predicted what my own body had become. It was easier for me to imagine her with gray hair or pronounced wrinkles. What I really couldn’t be sure of was whether I would be attracted to her. With Laura, I first learned the fleeting nature of physical attraction.

    I spotted her at coat check, and when I saw her, I could only see that she had gained neither excessive weight nor gray hair. She wore a form fitting red skirt with a gray sweater, an ensemble sneaky in its ability to draw the eye, and her hair was much shorter than it had been, though not aggressively short. I found myself thinking that she looked sharp and classy and smart, but I felt none of the sexual attraction I’d once felt, and in recognizing this void, I tried to feel what it was that had once driven me crazy, a fruitless endeavor.

I turned back to my friends, who were sharing the tired old stories of near-arrests and near-pregnancies and near-death. The stories did nothing for me, but I played along. I couldn’t help but be annoyed by the revisionist history in all of it; we were never as dangerous as we liked to believe in our reminiscing, and our good fortune in escaping any life-altering consequences was due largely to the safety net of privilege we never wanted to acknowledge. It wasn’t that the stories had never been fun, it was just that for them, their adult success and happiness retroactively raised the stakes, rendering the stories more thrilling, and the security they now had in their lives allowed them to fetishize adolescent risks. I had no such payoff in my current reality of a solitary life in a shitty apartment and a job that, while relatively lucrative, did little to help me climb out of the mountain of debt that Chelsea and I had accumulated.

Tim Tuite had gotten caught doing ecstasy at the Winter Formal. The general sentiment at the time was that he was fucked. And in the short term, he was. He struggled to assimilate into the public school setting, and he opted to drop out and began working as a dishwasher at Paragon, then worked his way up to line cook. He moved to Chicago and continued to work as a cook, then chef, and opened a couple of his own restaurants, gaining the kind of success that fascinates people. He was somebody, and unsurprisingly, turned down the invitation to the reunion. 

Of course, there were the cautionary tales that never found redemption. Derek Crider was doing an 8 year sentence for selling cocaine within 500 feet of a school, and rumor had it that while Nell Sanders had successfully kicked her heroin habit some time ago, she’d contracted HIV from one of the needles she’d shared while in the throes of addiction. And somewhere between the success stories and the tragic downfall of my classmates, there was me.

The wives soon approached the bar, goading my friends to the dancefloor, which I took as my cue to step outside. On the patio overlooking the river were a cast of former smokers, most of which had converted to vaping. I’d quit in college but had recently taken to smoking cigarettes again as an act of rebellion, though I didn’t quite know against whom or what I was rebelling. I found a table on the far end of the patio and lit a cigarette. It was the first time of the night that I could feel the warmth of nostalgia that had evaded me. Luke and I used to sit for hours in the park behind his parent’s house and smoke, swearing that we would never actually become addicted like the idiot goth kids at the mall who allowed Hot Topic to curate their music collection while they railed against conformity.

I finished the cigarette and reached for another when a voice interrupted me. “Could I bum one of those?” she said. I looked up. It was Laura.

“Jesus,” I said, “you scared me.”

“A ghost from your past?”

“Something like that. Here.” I handed her a cigarette. She sat down in the chair across from me and I studied her face to prepare for the nature of our encounter. She took a drag and titled her head to blow it into the sky.

“So, Paul, how’s life?”

“Not much to tell really.”

“That bad?”

“Maybe.”

“Married? Kids?”

“Was, and no. What about you?”

“Two kids, Grayson and Adelyn. Their father passed away a couple of years ago.”

“Jesus. I’m sorry.”

“Thanks.”

“So how did he…”

“Cancer. Pancreas.”

“Fuck.”

“Yeah.”

“How long ago?”

“Four years next June.”

“Wow. That’s just awful.”

“Well, yeah. But enough about that.”

“You said you were married. Can I ask what happened?”

“Divorce.”

“Was it you or her?”

“Her. Out of the blue, really. It’s not like things were great, but one day she just came home and said she wanted a divorce.”

“You didn’t see it coming at all?”

“Not exactly. Things weren’t too bad. Maybe it was because we chose not to have kids.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like, my friends with kids? They’re too busy to question whether they’re happy.”

“That seems a bit reductive.”

“Maybe, but I think there’s some truth to it. Chelsea and I? We only ever had each other. And we had time. If we weren’t connecting, it wasn’t because we didn’t have the time. I don’t know, I guess kids give you away to outsource your marital troubles.”

“Interesting.” The way she said it reminded me of why things never worked out. She always had this patronizing way of subtly telling you she thought you were an idiot. I suddenly remembered when, as a high school student, I’d told her I wanted to consider film school. She hadn’t laughed off the idea or even openly criticized it. She said what she was supposed to say as a supportive girlfriend, but there was always an element of judgment beneath it all. She was right, of course, but still.

“Anyway,” I said, “I could be way off. I guess you just try to find reason in all of it and land on what makes you feel better.”

“To avoid doing the hard work?”

“Maybe.”

She began to laugh. “You know what’s funny about this?” She motioned to the club, where our aged classmates drank and danced, “We’re all pretending to have it figured out, but we’re as clueless as ever.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Well for one, I went to the bathroom, and it was homecoming all over again, all the shit talking, the primping. I kid you not, Brenda Wilcox was in there telling anybody who would listen that she was gonna go home with Ryan.”

“Ryan Brown?”

“Yup.”

“Oh god.”

“Right? I should have known this is what it would be.”

“So why did you come?” 

“I don’t know. I guess I wanted something familiar. Maybe just a little reminder of who I used to be.” I couldn’t tell whether she was looking for that familiarity in me or something else. The truth was, a bit of the long-lost chemistry between us seemed to emerge, and I realized that this was the first time I had enjoyed anybody’s company all night. She took a drink and looked into the glass doors at our former classmates. “Wanna go in?”

“Together? That’ll stir up some of that good old-fashioned high school gossip, won’t it?”

“Oh my god, that’s perfect!”

“Perfect?”

“Yes. Let’s pretend that we’re a thing.”

“You’re serious.”

“Yes! Come on. It will be hilarious.” She stood and beckoned for me to join. We walked side by side, and I put my arm around her waist, which may or may not have been the way I had all those years ago. She leaned her head on my shoulder, which very much was how she once had, even if in jest. 

When we walked back into the club, nobody paid much attention. As far as half of them knew, we never broke up. It wasn’t until we ventured into the ballroom that anybody seemed to think twice about it. Our friends nudged each other as Laura led me to the dancefloor, where only a few other couples were dancing to late nineties pop. Though I would grow to resent what I would eventually see as domineering and bossy, I suddenly recalled how I’d once fallen in love with the way she would pull me out of my shell. And just like before, I still struggled to find the confidence and coordination to be a suitable dance partner, but she made it so that I had to do very little, spinning and circling around me as I stood like a statue. 

Our friends and their spouses joined on the dancefloor, and for a moment, it was 1997 all over again. When the DJ played Jewel’s “You Were Meant for Me,” I paused and waited for a cue from Laura like a teenager fearful of the implications of a slow dance. She tilted her head down and looked up at me, sarcastically playing the role of the girl waiting for an invitation. She collapsed into me, putting her head on my shoulder in a manner that felt more like exhaustion than desire. We circled the floor among friends who didn’t exactly hide their excitement for what they believed was a new development. Charlie gave an approving nod that felt more like the reaction one would get after finally swearing off booze. It was all a charade, but it still felt nice. Even the song, which I’d hated all those years ago, felt good, so much so that I allowed myself to ignore the banality of the lyrics and pretend to find meaning in them.

When the song ended, our friends retreated to the bar. “Time for another drink?” I asked Laura.

“Yeah,” she said, “but maybe somewhere else?”

We unceremoniously retreated to my car without any goodbyes. I looked back to see if anybody was watching, but nobody was. I didn’t know where we were going, but it felt good to get away. I started the car and glanced over at Laura. I watched her as she looked out the window and couldn’t be sure what she was thinking. Whatever it was possessed a depth that shamed me, as I my mind could only process the logistics of an ill-informed fuck.

“Show me the town,” she said playfully, and I rifled through the rolodex of references we’d shared twenty years ago without finding the source of her comment.

“Ok,” I said, and I drove. Admittedly, I considered driving into a hotel parking lot and waiting for her to tell me it was a bad idea, but I knew she wanted something else. I drove to Cumberland Street, where her childhood home was. 

“Oh God,” she said, looking at the house where we’d spent countless hours cuddling on a couch in the basement, watching DVDs, “They cut down the trees.” I didn’t tell her that I thought it was an improvement, and I drove on. “I’m hungry,” she said, “Is Burgerhaus still open?”

Burger house had been a common hangout back then, our own version of The Max or Peach Pit. I wondered if, without the influence of teen television shows, we would have chosen it as our homebase on Friday nights. Yet still, a new generation of kids sat at the tables, who, like us back then—and maybe like us now—had nothing better to do. We ordered a couple of burgers and found a booth where we waited for our number to be called. A boy and girl sat in the booth opposite ours. They sat on the same side of the booth, with no space between them.

“What do you think,” I said to Laura, motioning to the kids, “first date?”

“Are you serious? They’re obviously a couple. Look at her, the way she’s leaning into him, that melancholy look on her face.”

“I was focused more on him. He seems more interested in his fries than her.”

“Probably because they’re sleeping together.”

“How would you even know that?”

“Isn’t it obvious? He’s totally her first. The sad thing is that right now, she wholeheartedly believes he’ll be her last. She’s probably got their whole life planned out, while he’s just trying to figure out if she’s going to finish her fries.”

“To be fair, the metabolism of teenage boys is insane.”

“Oh, I remember. I used to be so grotesquely fascinated by what you guys could eat without gaining a pound. So unfair.”

“If it makes you feel better, I can’t get away with that anymore, as you’ve probably noticed.”

“Stop. You look good for your age.”

Our number was called, and I brought our tray of food back to the table. We made quick work of our burgers, but admitted they weren’t as good as we remembered.

With our tray empty, we returned our attention to the teenagers, who had now resorted to flipping through their phones. Reflexively, we did that thing where the older generation harshly judges the younger, insisting that we were somehow better at being such an objectively stupid age. When we tired of watching the kids at the table, we returned our attention to each other, finally catching up on the twenty years of life that existed between then and now. She pulled out her phone to show pictures of her kids, completely ignoring our previous lamentations of how people choose technology over conversation. I let her rifle through photo after photo, one, because of how alive she became when talking about her children, and two, because I had no such pictures to share. Back in college, she used to talk about our future together, kids and all. I’d never told her back then that I didn’t want kids mostly because it was easier to play along. I never saw it as disingenuous; I figured that I would eventually come around, but I never came around to any of it. It was unfair to her, I knew, but I had never meant for it to happen. 

When she had shown all the pictures she wanted to show, Laura peppered me with questions about my life and career, feigning excitement about what had been an unremarkable adult life. The only thing I had on her was the little bit of travel Chelsea and I had done.

“You know,” she said, “I will never ever regret having children. They’re the best thing that has ever happened to me, but I really wish we had traveled more before we had them.” She twirled a fry around a glob of ketchup, contemplating the weight of her words. 

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“No, it’s fine. You just get these little reminders sometimes. It’s gotten better with time, but then the fear is that one day, you won’t get them at all.”

“Yeah. I think Chelsea was like that. The idea of my death was so unbearable that she divorced me so she could avoid it altogether.” 

Laura chuckled and tapped my leg with her foot. “I forgot that about you.”

“What?”

“You’re funny.” She drank the last of her Diet Coke and said, “How about a change of scenery?”

I didn’t ask what she had in mind, though I had a few ideas and wasn’t sure what I thought about any of them. I emptied our tray and got in the car. I considered putting on some of our old songs but thought better of it. “Where to?” I asked.

“Let’s go to Sacred Heart.”

“Really?”

“Would you believe me if I told you I haven’t been there since a year or two after we graduated?”

We pulled into the dark parking lot. The school was only slightly illuminated by the streetlights, but we could see that little had changed outside of a new athletic center named after the owner of a local car dealership. We reminisced about the logjam at the single exit at the end of each school day, how we rolled our windows down and turned up our stereos and how the we smokers would all light up cigarettes the moment they finally turned the corner and how stoners sometimes ducked below their steering wheels to puff on a one-hitter while still in line. Off to the left, the football field conjured a different kind of memory. We’d never been especially invested in the team outside of playoffs or rivalry games, but the Friday night games were where we would meet, and were often the first moment we would see each other in the clothes we’d so carefully chosen to impress each other, all the more meaningful after a week in uniforms. 

“Remember that one night after the mixer?” she asked.

“I do. We were right around this spot, albeit in a much shittier car,” I said.

“I used to think about that a lot.”

“Yeah?”

“Can I ask you a weird question?”

“Ok.”

“If Mr. Corden hadn’t almost caught us, what do you think would have happened?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you think we would have fucked?”

“What?”

“Like, if there was nothing to stop us, would we have stopped ourselves?”

“I think so.”

“You do? Why?”

“Because we hadn’t done it yet. Wasn’t really the right time and place for that, you know?”

“I used to think that.”

“What do you mean?”

“I just remember that night, like after the fact, I was so grateful we didn’t do it, because I totally would have. And I used to think, wow, how horrible would that have been to lose it in a car, like it was this trashy thing to do. Because back then, the first time was such a big deal and I wanted it to mean something and everything. And so we do the most laughably cliche thing ever and do it after prom as if it was this big meaningful thing.”

“You don’t think it was meaningful?”

“In the grand scheme of things? No. Maybe if we had gotten married and had never slept with other people, but that’s not the way it worked out.”

“Oh, I see.”

“No, no, no. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying this to settle a score or anything. It’s just the truth.”

“Fair, but I don’t know if I’d say it wasn’t meaningful. We loved each other, right?”

“Did we though? And I swear I’m not being petty here, but seriously. How could any of that have been love? We were pretending. We were kids who wanted to believe we had all these big adult feelings, but we didn’t know shit. We certainly didn’t know what love was.”

She wasn’t wrong, and I struggled to find a counter. There had been times when I thought about Laura, those transitional periods between relationships when I entertained the idea of looking her up. Most of the time, I’d settled on the reality that we were never right for each other, but that we’d met at a time when it was easy to fall for each other. But then there were other times where I’d wondered if our problem was the opposite, that if we’d met at time where our values were better aligned, we could have been happy together. Perhaps the former had just been a defense mechanism. 

“You’re right. But I have to admit it’s been nice to relive some of it, isn’t it?” I said.

“Of course it is. I’m sorry, I don’t know why I brought any of that up. I didn’t come with you to rehash ancient history.”

“No?”

She’d taken the lead for much of the night, but now, she turned away from me and looked out the window, waiting for something. I extended my fingers to her jaw and gently turned her face to mine. We leaned into each other and kissed softly. We’d broken character, of course, failing to recall the hormone-driven urgency that had once propelled our lips. But then a different kind of urgency emerged. With every touch, every kiss, I couldn’t be sure if it was how I’d done it back then. Our years together had given me a road map to her pleasure, but the lines left by lovers that followed had left me uncertain of the path, and I was desperate to find it. And as her hand ran up my neck or across my belly, I couldn’t be sure that she wasn’t taking stock of new hairs and layers of fat that had not existed. All those years ago, a hand creeping up a shirt or fingers unlatching a belt buckle had been questions, and there never existed a possibility that the answers might disappoint. Determined to reclaim the past, I slid my hand underneath her sweater and onto her belly, but just as my fingers recognized the battle scars of motherhood, she pushed my hand down between her legs with an assertiveness that could only have been acquired in the years after me.

I slid my hand under her panties and was struck by how smooth she was; my fingers could not detect a hint of pubic hair. The thought occurred that this had been her intention all along, but then, she hadn’t known I would be there and had simply opened herself to the possibility of anybody. Too much time had passed for me to remember how she liked to be touched, so I could only hope that she liked what Chelsea liked. And it was a very real hope, even if I didn’t know whether I was trying to show her what I used to be or what I had learned in the years since. She grasped my penis with a confidence I’d never known, a confidence that, from anybody else, would have turned me on. But with her, there was a jarring strangeness to the way that she so efficiently freed my erection from my pants. I tried to ignore it, focusing on pleasing her, wondering if I was doing it right. I opened my eyes for a clue and saw her face, illuminated.

“Oh shit,” she said, pulling away, sitting perfectly upright with her eyes closed tightly. I turned and saw headlights coming from around the rear of the school, heading right toward us. But as it approached, it did not slow and drove past us. For the first time since we left the reunion, that ever-elusive feeling of youth had returned, but instead of picking up where we left off, we laughed, she with her panties askew and me with my penis liberated but already starting to soften. All those years ago, the shame wouldn’t have registered, and all those years ago, there would be nothing funny about our exposed genitals, especially since mine wouldn’t have so quickly softened. But now, all we could do was laugh.

“I guess that’s our cue,” she said.

“Yeah.”

I put the car into drive and exited the lot. We didn’t say anything on the drive back to the country club. I have no way of knowing what she was thinking, but as I drove, I replayed the brief encounter in my head, unable to connect it to our past, no matter how hard I tried. It felt more like the beginnings of a random one-night stand than the affirmation of a rekindled love. But of course it did. We were strangers, and that truth would only become magnified if the reunion were consummated. 

I won’t pretend I didn’t want it. Even after the recognition that there would be no reclamation of our past, I still wanted her in the most primal way. But I could tell that for her, it was over. And that had been such a fundamental difference between us, my ability to summon my libido independent of emotion, something that, in our time together as kids, I thought was mutual. 

But now, I couldn’t act on my urges with the luxury of ignorance. Her desire for a careless fuck had waned, and my only way back existed in an outside chance that somewhere within her was the hope of rekindled romance.  But I wasn’t going to be the one to decide. I waited.

Finally, she spoke. “So, do we go back in?”

We got out of the car, no longer interested in playing our roles. Before we got to the door, she tugged at my arm and stopped me. “Maybe I should go in first. You know, to avoid the gossip and all.”

“Right,” I said.

She started walking in, but stopped and turned back. “What do you think would have happened if we didn’t get interrupted?” se asked.

“I think we wouldn’t have found what we were looking for.” She smiled knowingly, then turned and walked back in.

I stayed a moment longer and lit a cigarette. When I brought it to my lips I could smell her on my fingers. The musk itself did nothing to trigger memories of us, but for a moment, it unlocked the boyish excitement that comes with the newfound knowledge of a woman’s secret. 

The music emanated from outside. The DJ had abandoned 90’s schlock in favor of Rod Stewart’s “Ooh La La.” I could hear the crowd on the dance floor singing along with the chorus: I wish that I knew what I knew now, when I was younger. I guess Rod had a point, but as I puffed down the final bit of my cigarette with my fingers still under my nose, all I could think was how much I missed not knowing anything at all.