In high school the closest friend I had was this guy named Mark Reed, who sat at the same lunch table with me, mostly because we weren’t wanted anywhere else. He had thick glasses that made his eyes look bigger than they were and orange freckles across his cheeks. Sometimes we’d do our chem homework together, and I’d share my pretzels with him.
He asked me out once. We’d been letting our legs touch under the table at lunch for, like, two weeks, when he finally asked me to go to the movies with him. But my mom was on a bad streak. I worried that if she found out I had a date, she’d go ballistic and call me a slut, like she did when some guy from the swim team prank called our house, pretending to be my boyfriend, during freshman year. Or she’d get manic and want to micromanage every single thing about the situation. Either way, I worried Mark would somehow end up getting hurt, and I liked him too much to let that happen.
I told Mark that I only liked him as a friend. “I just don’t like you that way,” I said. It was probably true. I didn’t have any burning desire to kiss Mark or be his girlfriend, but I was sad to pass up the chance to secure him as my friend. To lock it down.
He moved his knee away from mine. “Oh,” he said softly, blinking. “I’m sorry.” His glasses magnified the red creeping into his eyes. “To put you on the spot like that.”
“No,” I said. “It was nice of you.”
Even his freckles looked sad.
We still did our chem homework at lunch together for all of sophomore year, but he kept his legs directly in front of his chair, and if my knee happened to knock into his knee, he moved his leg away immediately. Junior year, we had different lunch periods and drifted apart. I ate alone in the library, hiding my baggie of pretzels in my lap and popping one in my mouth when the librarian wasn’t looking. Instead of real friends, I had Jane Austen and Willa Cather. I read my way through at least a third of the alphabet by the time I graduated. I took notes on the characters as I read, and at night, after I finished my homework, I painted them. My bedroom walls were covered with watercolors of Antonia, Emma, Anne with an e, Jo March, Jane Eyre, Scout, and Pip, the way other girls taped up torn pages from magazines and made photo collages of their friends.
Still, I thought, the one person it would be nice to see, the one reason for going to my high school reunion, was Mark Reed. He was always nice to me. He was probably doing interesting things now.
Plus my braces were long gone, my hair wasn’t as frizzy, and my skin had cleared up. I bought myself a new dress, and I felt like it would be nice to go and feel all grown-up. To feel like I’d moved on from all the bad stuff. To feel different. But when I got there, on a big board in the lobby with photos of people who weren’t able to attend, there was a picture of Mark Reed. Filled out and acne-free, wearing a tuxedo, walking on the beach at sunset with his beautiful bride.
It wasn’t like I’d hoped Mark and I would somehow fall madly in love or anything, but the fact that he had moved on and grown up so much that he didn’t even feel the need to go to the reunion so everyone could see how different and handsome and successful he was made me feel lonely and left behind.
Carla Carrigan talked to me for twenty minutes about her home-based cosmetic-sales business, until she realized that I wasn’t the girl who sat behind her in senior year social studies. “Oh no. Wait, that was Jenny Mulligan,” she said, smiling at me like I was some kind of freak who wasn’t worthy of hearing her new lip-gloss sales pitch. “Oh, you know, I think that’s Julia and . . .” She didn’t even finish her sentence. She just walked away.
I stared at people I’d barely known reuniting with people they’d actually cared about. I stood around listening to Ace of Base, drinking ginger ale, and eating cheap cheese on stale crackers, until the pathetic reality of my high school existence made me so overwhelmingly sad, so overtly aware of what I had missed, what was normal, what my mother never let me have, that I couldn’t stand it anymore. I worried I might scream or burst into flames or, worse, start crying. So I left. I decided there was no point in standing around waiting for someone to recognize me. No one knew who I was. No one cared.
On my way out, I ran into the Four Amigos. There were still four of them without me, because Rachel, Sheila, and Rachel K. adopted Jodie Moorehouse when she moved to our district from California, and they were all dying to learn how she got her hair so sun streaked and straight. Plus I think they realized that if they were friends with Jodie, when all the boys watched her, they would also be looking in the general direction of Sheila and the Rachels. Even when my mom was on a good streak, I had never brought that much attention to the table.
Jodie held her camera gingerly in her perfectly manicured hands, trying to get the other three to pose for a picture.
“Jenny Shaw?” Sheila said, as I walked past them.
“Hi, Sheila.”
“Jenny. You look fantastic. I almost didn’t recognize you.”
“Thanks,” I said, because I had never learned the right way to address a backhanded compliment.
“Come on, girls,” Jodie said. “Do the thing.”
Sheila and the Rachels put their arms around each other and kicked their legs up like they were Rockettes.
“Oh, wait,” Sheila said. “Jenny . . .”
And for a split second I thought maybe they wanted me in the picture with them. The original Four Amigos. Maybe that summer we all spent together actually meant something to them too.
“Jodie,” Sheila said, “Jenny can take the picture. Get in here!”
“Do you mind, Jenny?” Jodie asked. It was one of those questions that wasn’t really a question. “We haven’t all been together like this in, what? Six months? It’s crazy!”
So I took the picture. I didn’t even do anything snotty like cut Rachel K. out of it or wait until Sheila was doing that funky “the flash is coming any second” kind of blink. I took a nice picture of them. It’s not like their friendship was there to hurt me. It’s not like I’d earned a place in their picture. I hadn’t been there to get ready for prom together. I hadn’t helped them nurse breakups with ice cream. I wasn’t a part of their group, and I’m not even sure if I wanted to be. I didn’t think they were the people I would choose as friends now, if I could, but feeling excluded made my throat tighten and my eyes water, even though maybe I was supposed to be too mature for those kinds of feelings.
“Great! Let’s get one more!” Regular Rachel said. “How about one where we’re all Charlie’s Angels?” She clasped her hands together with her index fingers out like she was holding a gun.
“That’s cheesy,” Rachel K. said.
“Oh,” Sheila said, “let’s just get a nice normal picture.”
Then Jodie said something, but I don’t know what, because I’d rested her camera on the table behind me and walked away before any of them noticed.
When the conference was done for the day, I went back to my room to relax. I showered in the big bathtub-shower combo. Before I got in, I opened the doors to the balcony and slid the Japanese screen to the bathtub open. The cool, fresh air and the hot water was the perfect combo. I filled the room with steam.
After my shower, I made a pot of coffee and drank two cups while sitting out on the balcony in my big fluffy white hotel robe, taking in the view, trying my hardest to just be. But then I realized I should probably change my spa stay to just one person. There were appointments booked, and I didn’t want to get billed for Deagan’s massages and mud baths. I paced around my hotel room while I waited for someone to pick up the phone.
“Hi,” I said, “I have reservations booked for next week, with my boyfriend, but now it looks like I’ll be coming alone. Under Jenny Shaw.”
“Hmm,” the woman on the other end of the phone said. “I don’t see anything here.”
“Maybe it’s under Deagan Holmes?”
“Okay . . . ,” she s
aid, and I could hear her typing. “It looks like that reservation was canceled.”
“Canceled?”
“Yes, there’s a note here in the system that the reservation was canceled last month.”
“Last month?” My heart pounded. So not only had Deagan dumped me to “explore” Faye, but he’d planned on doing it for at least a month.
We’d been a couple in that month. Things had been pretty normal. We went to dinner. We watched movies on the couch. We had sex. And that whole time he was already planning to break up with me. He was pretending like everything was fine, and he already had one foot out the door.
I hung up the phone and sat on the floor. The cool, fresh air was starting to get too cool, but I couldn’t bring myself to go shut the door, so I just sat there, crying and shivering like a pathetic mess.
There was a knock at the door, so I picked myself up off the floor and wiped my face on the sleeve of my robe.
“It’s Myra,” I heard her yell, before I even got to the door.
“You’re not ready yet,” she said, when I let her in. “What’s going on?”
“I just . . . ,” I said, and then I broke down again.
“Oh, honey,” Myra said, and handed me a pack of tissues from her purse.
“A whole month,” I said. “He was planning to dump me for a whole month! He canceled the spa reservations a month ago!”
“Oh no!” Myra said, wrapping her arms around me. “I’m so sorry, J.”
“How could he? How could he pretend that everything was normal while he was planning to break up with me the whole time? He’s such a liar.” Of course, as soon as I said it, I realized what a big fat double standard it was to call Deagan a liar, and that made me cry harder.
“I think you dodged a bullet,” Myra said. “He showed you who he really is, and, thankfully, he did that before you got married or bought a house or had a kid.”
“He didn’t even want any of those things with me.”
“Which just goes to show you how stupid he is,” Myra said. “So you dodged a bullet.” She sat down on the bed.
I crashed on the floor again, wrapping my robe around myself tightly and hugging my legs to my chest. “I guess I’m just finding it hard to feel lucky,” I said.
“Well, of course. When someone shows you their true colors like that, you still get to be sad that they aren’t who you wanted them to be. You miss who you thought they were, even if who they really are completely sucks.”
She looked at me. It was a hard, heavy look, and it made me wonder if this wisdom she was sharing with me was something she’d learned the hard way when her best friend disappeared right after high school. If it was, I guessed Myra was way too polite to ever say so.
I felt guilty in the strangest way, as if I’d been the one to hurt her all those years ago. Of course, I was pretty much feeling all-round awful, so it was hard to separate misplaced Jessie guilt from just plain misery.
“Hey, you’re still coming to the reunion, right?”
I sighed and shook my head. I knew I shouldn’t go. I knew I needed to end the charade. When I thought my life was simple, it was a big mess. Now that it was actually a mess, how would I fare?
“Come on,” Myra said. “I won’t take no for an answer.”
“No,” I said, smiling weakly.
“See, I’m not going to accept that,” she said, grabbing my hands and pulling me up off the floor. “Do you want me to wait while you get ready?”
“No,” I said, wiping my eyes. “I’m sure you have stuff to take care of, Madam Better President Than I Ever Was.”
“I can come back, and we can walk down together.”
“I’m a big girl,” I said. “I can manage. I’ll meet you down there.”
Myra left. I stood in the bathroom, drying my hair with the fat round brush I’d bought from the hairdresser. I thought about bailing. Myra would probably be busy with all the people and the last-minute details. Maybe she’d forget about me. I had an excuse. I got dumped. I got worse than dumped. I was cheated on and canceled on and lied to and humiliated.
I couldn’t stop picturing Deagan and Faye lying in bed together, talking about how he was going to dump me. Did they have discussions about how stupidly oblivious I was? Other people had to know. Had I missed the pitying looks when I’d gone to the Old Toad for beers with the volleyball team after a game? Was everyone talking about clueless, ridiculous me behind my back? I thought about it while I put my makeup on, while I found my shoes and shimmied into my red dress and grabbed the name tag I’d swiped the night before. I thought about it when I left my room and took the elevator downstairs. What I didn’t think about was what I was about to do, and then I was at the door to the reunion, with all the streamers and glitter and a DJ playing Depeche Mode, and I just stood there, like a deer caught in the disco-ball lights.
Then I had a horrible, horrible thought: What if Jessie Morgan did show up?
I scanned the room in a panic, looking for someone who looked like me. But I couldn’t see faces in the dim light. She could be lurking and I wouldn’t even know it. I couldn’t even check to see if she’d picked up her name tag, because I had it.
I decided I needed to just go back to my room, wash my face and go to bed, catch an early flight home in the morning, and pretend none of this ever happened.
“Well, you sure clean up nice, Jessie,” some guy said, as I walked past him on my way back to the elevator. His name tag read “Marshall Hetfield.” In the high school picture next to his name, he was a younger, smiling guy with slightly more hair. He wore a letter jacket and held a football up by his ear like he was about to make a pass. The high school version of Marshall Hetfield was the kind of guy who never had acne or got picked last in gym, who was prom king and dated the head cheerleader.
Adult Marshall was still attractive, but he wasn’t what he had been.
He put his hand on my shoulder, like he was holding me in place.
“Hi, Marshall,” I said, smiling. There was something thrilling about getting away with being Jessie, and it snapped me out of my panic.
“You heading in?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Sure.” The adrenaline kicked in. It was good to feel something other than hurt.
“I’m just running out for a smoke, but it’s really good to see you.” He slipped his hand around my waist and kissed my cheek. I could practically taste his cologne. “What do you say, when I get back we head over to the high school and meet up under the bleachers like old times?” he whispered into my ear.
“I’m good for now,” I said, smiling enough to seem at least a little bit flirty. “But thanks.” While I was in bed by ten on Friday nights in high school, wondering what it felt like to be actually, honest-to-goodness kissed, Jessie Morgan was hooking up with guys in dark corners.
From across the room, by the door, Fish was watching us, glaring. He looked away when he caught me watching him back.
“Find me if you change your mind,” Marshall said, his face still very close to mine. His breath was hot. “I dream about you.” I saw a flash of gold on his finger. When he walked away, I could still smell his cologne and the whiskey on his breath, like it had soaked into my hair and my dress.
“Hey,” Myra said, running across the lobby to me. “I have a surprise for you.”
“Uh-oh,” I said.
“Don’t kill me.” She held her hands over her face and peered at me between her fingers.
“Are you giving me a reason to?” I looked for Fish, but he had disappeared into the darkened reception room.
“Okay, so yesterday,” she said, grabbing my hand and leading me across the room, “Robbie and I talked the DJ into bringing his karaoke machine.”
“I don’t like where this is going.”
I had never sung kar
aoke in my life. Not even when Luanne dragged me out to some dive bar on the west side because she had an urge to belt out “I Will Survive” to a room full of strangers after a bad breakup. I hid in the bathroom until it was over. Luanne was too drunk to notice I wasn’t singing backup.
“Come on, Jess!” Myra said. “It’ll make Robbie’s day.”
“What song?” I asked, cringing. Not that any answer would be a good one.
“Do you even have to ask?” She pushed me up the stairs to the stage.
Robbie was already standing there with a mic in his hand.
“Hey, guys,” he said to the crowd. “Do you remember Jessie Morgan?” The guys in the class yelled and whooped and hollered. I think a couple of the girls may have booed. My heart was pounding so hard—I felt like the whole room lurched with every beat.
What was the song? What if I didn’t know the song? And even if I did, I’d never sung alone in public before. I was in chamber choir in high school, so I had an excuse to stay late after school. I loved adding my voice to the Fauré Requiem or old English madrigals. I liked feeling a part of something, pretending the people in choir were my friends. But it was one thing to be a tiny little voice in the alto section. There was safety in that. It is another thing entirely to be up on stage singing karaoke in front of a class full of strangers. There were at least three hundred people in the room.
Everyone stared at the well-lit stage. I made note of the exit signs, but they seemed so far away. If I didn’t go through with it, I’d have to push though a sea of people to escape. There wasn’t a good way out.
Part of me wanted to do it, to know if I could. Everybody has rock-star dreams sometimes. Everyone wants an excuse to let go. I had mine in front me. All I had to do was take it.
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