I’m not ashamed of sounding harsh, nor am I going to pretend that the traumas of adolescence don’t find expression in my psyche, even 20 years later. (One of my most fearsome antagonists, a freckle-faced brunette from the aforementioned gated community, makes an appearance in my dreams once or twice a year.) At the very least, my high school angst provides me with some interesting stories, such as the time the cute musician I’d been crushing on and obsessing over for months accepted my invitation to the prom only to abandon me at the event and run into the arms of a really nice, beautiful blonde I’ll call Kristi. (My date ended up marrying her just a few years later, further cementing my suspicion that in high school, as in life, the nice, beautiful blondes usually win.)
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Anna Holmes
Anna Holmes is a contributing columnist for the Style section. She is the founder of Jezebel.com.
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Here’s the fantasy of what my 20th reunion will be like: Dozens and dozens of the most privileged, popular kids — the ones for whom high school was an apogee, not a nadir — milling about and enjoying beers as they subtly brag about their six-figure incomes, their ranch houses, their new luxury automobiles. (I can get enough of that in any Upper East Side hair salon, thank you very much.) Here’s the probable reality: A few hundred of my contemporaries, all grown up and genuinely eager to see one another and make new — and old — friends.
Even so, my unease about the whole thing means that I’m choosing to spend this Sunday in my adopted home town on the East Coast, where, along with millions of other New Yorkers and Washingtonians, I’ll mourn a more poignant and painful anniversary. This, I decided recently, will prove to be more communal and life-affirming than any microbrew-soaked assemblage in my little bubble of a California town. But I’m willing to concede that I may be wrong, and that maybe my dismissal of the event is less about the devil I think I know than the devil I don’t. (Pardon the aphorism, but our school mascot was a Blue Devil.)
On Wednesday, another Facebook message appeared in my e-mail inbox, this one from a high school buddy I’ll call Theo, an exuberant, intelligent and sensitive soul with whom I’d been extremely close and had traveled with to the Soviet Union on an exchange trip. I hadn’t spoken to, or heard from, him, in almost a decade. It turned out he’d gotten his PhD and was working as a poli sci professor at an Ivy League university. “Anna Holmes!” it began. “Are you going to the reunion this weekend? Or would you rather eat stones?”
I laughed. And I’m pretty sure he already knew the answer.
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