You guys want to hear something scary?
Last week I got an email about a high school reunion. I’m not being coy about the number, but saying it out loud though has the feeling of a curse to it. Like if I accidentally say it three times I’ll summon a colonoscopy appointment or a celebrity death. Know t’s a number big enough that they don’t usually make quirky reunion-based romantic comedies about it. I had a teense blue screen moment when I got the email and then remembered that, no matter how old I am, the entire living (!!) cast of “90210” will always be older. So. Resignation. Acceptance. Did you know that the actor that played Emily Valentine (the best character) is 54 now and she looks fantastic? Enlightenment.
I’ve never been to a high school reunion. There are some meaningful reasons for that–the iceberg tip of which I’ll let the professionals address. More (selfishly and personally) to the point, the people I’d want to see at a high school reunion are rarely the ones that would come. Which probably includes me, at this point, but I’m pretty findable, my life and thoughts are knowable (I present, as evidence, this not-even-robot-produced content). If we meet in the wild, odds are I’ll give you a hug if we were in chamber choir together, even if I always thought it was a little fasc-hy that you were a Young Republican (I still think it’s weird) and you assumed that I would only wear those shoes if I were a depressed lesbian (you were at least half-right). The people that I miss are the long gones and faraways. They don’t want to come the reunions. They’re not looking for hugs from the old days, on or off campus. They’re not looking to be found at all. And who could blame them?
Also, my high school friend group extended pretty broadly across other years. People a class or two older than me. People a class or two younger than me. My school was small (my graduating class, I think, was less than 50). Social groups emerged somewhat independently of grade, based on more important things like extracurricular activities, favorite cigarette brand, ability to defy dress code without officially violating the rule, did you agree that jam bands were of the devil, and, if so, where did you fall on the Seattle v. Shoegaze line. Not necessarily in that order. But even an umbrella reunion, encompassing a whole era, held off campus, independent of official alumni networks and fundraising apparatus would probably not bring the people together I want together. Too far. Too expensive. Too weird. Too much. I’m not even sure the people I most want to see are the people they are anymore. I don’t even know if I am. It’s maybe easier to bear the cognitive dissonance from the distance of Google searches and social media.
High school wasn’t perfect for me, though I am well aware that I talk about it a lot. Mostly in lieu of talking about college which was _________(ellipsis, obscene hand gesture, stack of mixtapes, ????). There was a narrative concision to high school, especially one so small, so at-once homogenous and eccentric, so rulesbound, yet unsupervised as mine. It was a spare trilogy, a tidy three seasons of television with a satisfying, if not entirely uplifting conclusion. There is a reason people write boarding school stories, even people that have never been to one. There is a reason why they make compelling settings whether you’re reading about Holden Caulfield or Harry Potter. It’s easier to concentrate on how characters and how they change when the setting behind them stays immutable or nearly so. The collision of the rigid and traditional and elite with the sloppy impulsive invention of youth. Great framing device. Fantastic setting as character. Doesn’t always feel so great in real life. Doesn’t always look so picturesque when look back on it with a critical eye.
Sometimes though, you do have a good memory. Here’s one. Halloween Senior Year. Somehow everyone ended up at my house, and by everyone I mean a clutch of day students, most lived in my neighborhood, almost all of us had been in school together since elementary school at the same public schools. Most of us were on the high school newspaper masthead. We were those kind of nerds. We decided to prank our favorite English teacher, and faculty advisor to the newspaper, who also, conveniently, lived in the neighborhood. We bought toilet paper and eggs. We loaded up, the six or seven or us, in a rattling, oversized early-days SUV driven by the friend most likely to get a ticket for passing on a one lane street in a residential neighborhood. I remember we listened to Pearl Jam in the car (the Seattle contingent won that night) and when we arrived at our English Teacher’s house, we found ourselves too fond to do any real damage. We neatly lined up three rolls of toilet paper on her top step, just under the roof of her porch, and placed an egg vertically, as if in a China egg cup, in the cardboard tube at the center. Then we drove away, home. I don’t remember where my mother was or my sister were that night (I was probably supposed to be at my Dad’s). But we sat in my living room after, eating Reese’s cups and smoking cigarettes and listening to a couple of boys try to play Dinosaur Jr songs as sing-alongs until we ran up against one curfew or another. There was nothing special about this night. Or even about our English Teacher’s reaction the next day (“I had an amusing anonymous delivery last night”). But sometimes the best moments are the simplest ones. No fanfare. No drama. Just a bunch of dumb, bored teenagers who were secretly all too polite, too anxious, too worried about not getting into college to do anything truly risky.
I thought about that night when I got the reunion email. I know roughly where most of us have ended up, even if I can’t account for all of us, even if I haven’t spoken to at least half of those people in more than two decades. Power of the internet. Benefit of gossipy parents in small cities. I have no idea if any of them think about that night, remember it as fondly as I do, as some perfect momentary snapshot of a time and place. Most of those people might not remember it at all. And that’s okay. We don’t all operate in the same version of the past, even if it’s a shared one. None of us are obliged to participate in someone else’s memories, whether or not we happened to live through them.
Cue flashback. Cue “Freak Scene.” Cue oh my god that was so long ago.
Feel free to opt out.
I won’t be at the reunion, but it’s not because I don’t remember the good parts.
Tiny Commotions 