20 Years Later

It's reunion season for the Class of '05

I don’t use Facebook anymore, but the other day I got an email that I had been added to a group, so out of curiosity I opened the site to check it out. It turns out I was added to a Class of '05 group by a former classmate, and at first I was confused; surely we made one of these before? And even if we hadn’t, why now? Then it hit me: It's 2025. The time has come for our 20-year high school reunion.

After the shock of this wore off, I reached out to the only person I still speak to regularly from my high school years and asked if this meant we were getting old. She laughed and asked if this was something we were going to; she was leaning toward 'no' but would go if I wanted to. And I won't lie, for a brief moment, I considered it. I envisioned a moment like in Yellowjackets season two where the ladies strutted into their reunion like the badasses they are, all eyes on them. But the truth is, that isn't how it would go for me.

I went to my five-year reunion, because it was just after college, and we were all new adults, and we wanted to see where everyone landed. But the truth is, 23-year-olds are barely grown, and I felt like I had changed more than most of the people there; it felt a little like I had accidentally stumbled into one of the high school parties I wasn't invited to and I was reminded why I didn't keep in touch with most of the people there. I remember I even tried to bond with a girl who I had seen on Facebook had also come out since graduation and she just...was not interested in talking to me. So I don't even know if we had a 10- or 15-year reunion, but I wouldn't have attended if we did. (And come to think of it, 15 years would have been 2020 so I doubt one happened even if it had been planned.)

But 20 years is interesting. High school truly feels like it happened to a different person. I can transport myself back there if I want to, to the itchy uniform sweaters and the too-small lockers and the comfort of the auditorium and the smell of the art room. I remember lunch periods spent finishing homework assignments and after-school hours spent in our favorite teachers' classrooms. I remember walks to Treadwell's for ice cream and drawing with car markers in the parking lot. I remember passing notes and gathering around a computer in the lab to watch Homestar Runner videos. I remember the teachers that made my life hell and the ones who looked out for me. I remember the friends that made me cry and the ones that held me after. But when I think of the girl those things happened to, I almost don't recognize her. She almost feels like someone separate from me. She was scared and starving and so fucking sad, confused and lonely and in near-constant pain. But she was stronger than she knew, and smarter than anyone gave her credit for, because she wasn't always good at studying or deadlines, and not necessarily in the ways adults meant when they shook their heads as they handed back a test marked with a B and said "I know you're smarter than this, if you just applied yourself." They didn't know how hard she was applying herself to staying alive and being a friend and learning skills that would prove much more important than random facts about biology. And she didn't know that that was okay. That spending the night talking a friend off the ledge was more important than her calculus homework. That while she was at school until 10pm for drama rehearsal, she was learning dedication and interpersonal skills that no social studies class could teach her.

But also, she was good at hiding all of that. She was good at smiling and laughing and she tried to be kind and helpful, and unless she was in a safe space with her friends, she was quiet. Despite never feeling smart enough, she did do well in her classes by most other people's standards, so she was perceived as smart by her peers. She attended so many extracurriculars that happened to be religiously coded since it was a Catholic school (Liturgical Choir, Campus Ministry's Outreach Program, etc) that she was awarded "Most Spiritual" for senior superlatives. (And was runner up for Nicest, but the person who won did deserve it more.) All this to say, most of her peers didn't know her, not really. Which wasn't their fault. They knew the persona she was projecting to the world, and also how could they know her when she didn't really know herself?

All this to say, I have a better grasp on who I am now, but I have no idea the kinds of people my classmates grew up to be. I stopped using Facebook years ago, the only window I had into many of their lives, and even before that, it had already started to be a Boomer's medium. We had moved on to other platforms and didn't follow each other there; we were new people, we had new friends and new lives. We grew apart, even the people we genuinely loved, because the foundation of a lot of our friendships were built on proximity, and without that foundation, they were gently but surely returned to the sea. There are still a lot of people I knew in high school that I think of fondly and genuinely hope they are doing so well; including people who weren't in my specific grade, since I made most of my friends in aforementioned extracurriculars and those weren't year-specific. There are some that I think I would have kept in touch with if social media was then what it is now, but it was just harder to keep in touch in the early 2000s. But the truth is, we don't know each other anymore. And while I'd like to think we would, we have no idea if our adult selves would get along like our teen selves did.

What's funny is, when I first tried to imagine what it would be like to go to this reunion, my teenage self did try to claw her way back from the abyss, shouting things like, "All they'll see is how you're fatter, you have no partner or kids, you’re still renting an apartment, and they won’t think writing is a real job. You'll always be the loser drama freak scholarship kid to them!!" But present-day me just patted her on the head and told her to go back to sleep, because those aren't standards I hold myself to anymore. Maybe they're benchmarks of success for some people, maybe even some of my former classmates, but not for me. What adult me is actually concerned about is that I'm extremely queer, and unable (and unwilling) to keep my mouth shut if someone says something racist/sexist/fascist/homophobic/transphobic/generally idiotic. And I just can't be sure that this reunion would be a safe space for me. In fact, it seems statistically unlikely that it would be. It's in Massachusetts, sure, but it's a reunion of a Catholic private school that was made up of mostly wealthy white kids from the wealthy white suburbs of the North Shore. I was one of my only peers who had to get a job at 14 for spending money and whose car was a hand-me-down from a relative and not brand new. I have to believe that the people I kept closest growing up are the good people I perceived them to be; even though I didn't come out until after college, I was a huge LGBT+ "ally" in high school and didn't back down from calling my religion teachers out on their hypocrisy of "love one another...unless they're gay/another religion/etc" and I don't remember having to fight with my friends about that fact. There was a rumor going around at one point that I was a lesbian and dating my friend (we weren't dating but gosh did they accidentally clock me there) and it didn't seem to phase the people closest to me; surely I would have had some friend group friction if there were true homophobes among us. But of the people in my friend group who were in my grade, it was only a small portion of our class. I knew the names and faces of everyone in our graduating class, because there were only a little over 200 of us, but I didn't KNOW all of them. And I would argue that after twenty years, those of us who didn't keep in touch don’t know each other anymore at all.

I'll admit, the nosy nelly in me is morbidly curious about who married who, what jobs people ended up with, if anyone else has come out since the five-year reunion, what people remember about our time together. Did the popular girl who was misunderstood and underestimated end up becoming a CEO, or did she fall prey to the low expectations of her and join an MLM? Did the douchebag from AP calc become a politician, or did he look inward and grow as a person and start a non-profit? Who moved away and who stayed put, who are still just as inseparable as they were in high school, whose kids go there...oh god, some of them could have kids at our high school! As curious as I am, however, I don't think it's worth the risk of potentially getting hate-crimed or micro-aggressed by someone who has been brainwashed by the dictator-in-chief. Which is sad, in some ways, but also a bit of a relief. I think my teenage self would be pleased to know that we no longer feel like we need to prove ourselves to these people in particular.

My answer might have been different if we were having a reunion of the cast of Anything Goes or Crazy for You across all grades, or of people who used to linger in room 214 or 312 after school, or those of us who went on Summer Service trips every year. And I definitely would have attended a reunion of the people who used to sleep over my one friend's house and jump in the pool with our clothes on, watch one scary movie then either Monty Python and the Holy Grail or Shrek (sometimes in Spanish for something new!), and eat the icing-filled donuts her parents would get us for breakfast. But I will sadly have to RSVP no to the general reunion for my entire grade.

I do wish the Class of '05 all the best. We went through a lot together, especially considering 9/11 happened our second week of Freshman year. By senior year we really didn’t have any hard-line cliques, just different groups of friends who moved in different circles. I hope the reunion is fun for them, and they get everything they want from it. I hope old connections are rekindled or new ones are formed. I hope they are proud to tell people what they've been doing for the past 20 years. And I hope I'm wrong; I hope it would have been a safe space for me. Who knows, maybe I'll catch them at the next one in 2035.