In my nightmares about high school, I’m in an empty corridor around the corner from my locker, a space unmonitored by the teachers in the bordering science or business departments and just above the head of the principal in her office one floor below.
I don’t remember being particularly scared of that bit of real estate back in the mid-90s – and it holds for me none of the lingering humiliation of gym class or the girls’ locker room – but it makes a certain sense that all my heart-pounding bad dreams about the last four years of my secondary education involve a place where all the adults were so close, and yet none would ever hear me if I was in real trouble.
If through the alchemy of class, good looks and early awareness of human hierarchies (and how to advance in them), you were popular in high school, then maybe you never wake up, sweaty, in the middle of the night, after nightmares like mine. Or maybe you do – maybe high school was a living nightmare for everyone, even if you were a cute cheerleader or captain of the football team – but I sort of doubt it.
Who you go to high school with is always an accident of geography (unless you went to private school) – a matter of a border drawn this way or that, of where your parents chose or could afford to live, a hundred decisions by hundreds or thousands of adults that resulted in you sharing a socio-educational experience with a bunch of other teenagers with whom you might have nothing else in common but geographical proximity.
So you sort yourselves, or have yourselves sorted, into jocks and brainiacs, drama geeks and band nerds, future farmers and potheads, the smart kids and the ones that will never amount to anything, and then you navigate the politics of trying to make and trying to keep friends as everyone, including you, is rapidly changing.
For the vast majority of people, high school was a horror show of hormones and humiliation, a four-year endurance test of daily slights and regular physical imperilment interspersed with some, occasionally grudgingly offered, traditional education.
The limited upward social mobility – once the popular clique was established, there was virtually no way to break into its ranks – and imminent threat of downward social mobility meant that everyone in the vast middle was constantly jockeying to maintain their limited social capital, often at the expense of others.
Unpopularity was deemed both more contagious than the common cold and a fate to avoid at all costs – even if it meant cutting off and even publicly mocking the girl who’d been your best friend since the fifth grade.
High school movies attest to the ritualized indignities all but a lucky few are expected to suffer, from She’s All That to Mean Girls to 10 Things I Hate About You to Can’t Hardly Wait to Heathers. Even Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion – while celebrating the close, lifelong friendship of the titular characters – serves as a reminder of the degradations the unpopular students are expected to endure for the entertainment of the elite.
The question, then, is why anyone would attend a high school reunion if they weren’t popular? And yet, we do. Or I did, anyway. This year marked my 20th high school reunion, and older, heavier, unmarried and childless, I giddily drove three hours north of New York City just to see what would happen.
In all fairness, I attended my 10th reunion as well, a somewhat hastily organized affair just before Christmas to which I was invited by a woman who I last remember stopping by my locker our senior year and threatening to beat me up because, as editor of our yearbook, I altered the text under her senior class photo.
In 2005, I spent ages picking the perfect outfit to give the impression of a successful urban singleton who wasn’t trying too hard to impress anyone, and drove to a bar named Clinton’s Ditch with my hands almost shaking.
When I arrived, the organizer hugged me. I didn’t know what to do with that, so I got a couple of drinks as the room filled up, and then had to explain to a classmate that, yes, although I did not at 17, I did drink alcohol at 28. Even a decade after high school, my goody-two-shoes reputation endured.
In the 10 years since, though, almost everyone has a Facebook profile, so another reunion was bound to be anticlimactic for everyone: with three clicks you can see who is married and who is single; whose page is still filled with pictures of them at parties, glasses in hand (me) and whose is awash in first-day-of-school pictures and wedding-day flashbacks (almost everyone else’s).; where people have traveled, if anywhere, and who still lives near the village in which we grew up.
The questions that we all had 10 years ago – What are you doing now? Where are you living? Are you married? – were answered within moments of RSVPing on Facebook this summer and snooping around on people’s profiles. The only unknown was how we’d all interact with one another.
Still, though I didn’t obsess over my outfit this time, my hands shook a little as I drew an eyeliner across my top lid: there was something a little too throwback about having my dad drive me to a party with some of the people who’d once made fun of my “dirty blonde, not real blonde” hair, or called attention to my bras in the girls’ locker room, or whose money I’d taken, eyes cast down, when I worked retail at the mall selling clothes I couldn’t afford to buy even with an employee discount.
No matter how happy I am with my life as it is – and I am – it’s easy enough to look in the mirror and know exactly what the meanest of the mean girls would say about me, and it’s hard not to snap back to being the teenager who desperately cared.
But among the many great things about being an adult – which includes never being forced to attend high school again – is the ability to legally ameliorate social anxiety with a liberal application of alcohol. And so, upon arriving at my high school reunion, I followed the crowd to the bar, turning over one of my two drink tickets for a steadying-but-mediocre glass of wine, and opted to work out my best cocktail party skills.
I cheek-kissed, I inquired about people’s kids, I listened to stories about how one high school friend fell in love with her husband and another wax on about the best bike trails in central New Jersey. I ate some truly terrible chicken massala – at least, I think that’s what it was – and took in the local band.
Only two guys (who still live in town) stared at me when I said hello like I’d broken the cardinal high school rule of trying to talk to someone above my station and, slightly drunk, I laughed in their faces. After three hours it was clear that not only did I not really care about some long-ago established social hierarchy ... but neither did almost anyone else, except for two of the people who, in adulthood, found themselves near the bottom of it.
There weren’t any grand reveals at my high school reunion: no one flew back in via helicopter or pretended to have invented Post-It notes only to be unmasked as frauds. It was just a bunch of teachers, a couple of lawyers, some stay-at home moms, one commercial airline pilot, an affordable housing developer, a massage therapist, an acupuncturist, a newspaper editor and a bunch of other people in a terribly hot room with mediocre wine, catching up on the years since the accident of geography that threw us together loosened its grip and cast us out into the larger world. It was even kind of fun – and probably will be so again, in another 10 years.
