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FORTY-NINE

“Before we go in, I have a confession to make,” I said to Alex, after we pulled into the parking lot at McCormick’s.

He came around to my side of the car and put his hands together in mock prayer. “Please don’t tell me you’re thinking about running for Congress,” he said. “Anything else I can handle.”

“You know Duff Logan, don’t you?”

“Sure. Funny guy. What about him?”

“When I was in high school, I thought he’d make the perfect boyfriend.”

He laughed. “You were right. And he did. But for Warren, not for you. Why are you telling me this now?”

“Because we are going to be spending the next few days with eighty-seven people I went to high school with, most of whom you’ve never met, and I wanted to let you in on the only secret I’ve ever kept from you so that you are not tempted to ask them any questions about my questionable past. Got it?”

“Damn,” he said. “I guess now I’ll have to scrap the intro I worked on. Hi, my name is Alex. Just how big a slut was my wife in high school anyway?”

I put my arms around him. “I can’t believe I’m dragging you through an entire weekend of this memory-lane mania,” I said. “Thank you.”

He pulled me close and kissed me.

“Hey—I have an idea,” I said, trying to sound like it had just popped in my head and not something I had decided six hours ago. “We haven’t had any alone time together in ages. Let’s go away next weekend. Just the two of us.”

“Fantastic,” he said. “I put the boat in the water at the end of April, and we’ve only taken her out twice. Why don’t we sail to Block Island for the?—”

“Alex, that’s a father-son weekend. As much as I love cramming my body into a bunk bed, squatting on a tiny toilet, and waking up at four in the morning because that’s when the fish are biting, I’m talking about you and me going somewhere with a few more amenities—like a shower.”

I grew up within spitting distance of the Hudson River, but for me, boats are confining. Alex, who was raised in the Great Plains of Kansas, swears he never feels freer than when he’s cutting through the water with the wind in his sails.

“Why do we bother owning a sailboat if we’re not going to use it?” he said.

“That’s a good argument for selling the boat, not for getting me to be trapped on it for forty-eight hours. Why don’t you and Kevin make a plan to spend some time smelling like real men on the high seas, and I’ll think of something more romantic for the two of us this weekend.”

“No problem,” he said. “Have your people call my people with the details.”

I didn’t bother telling him that my people had already made a reservation at the Mohonk Mountain House, a hundred-and-fifty-year-old Victorian castle resort in the Hudson Valley. There’s never a right time to tell the love of your life that you’re dying, but this felt like the right place.

One more kiss, and we walked around to the front of the building, where someone wearing the Heartstone High School hawk mascot costume high-fived us and escorted us through the front door of the restaurant.

Duff Logan and his husband, Warren Tremaine, own a successful party-planning business, and I knew they’d give us a lot more than our meager budget could afford.

They did not disappoint. Somehow they’d managed to transform an Irish pub into an all-American high school gymnasium, circa 1998. The ceiling was festooned with lights, balloons, and miles and miles of crepe paper. The walls were covered with group pictures from our past—blowups taken right out of our yearbook. And the sound of Elton John singing “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?” filled the air.

Duff, hovering near the entrance, spotted me, hurried over, leaned in for a double cheek kiss, and shook Alex’s hand. “So,” he said, his arm sweeping across the space, “what do you guys think?”

“It’s fantastic,” I said. “It’s like our senior prom on steroids.”

“More like our senior prom on Metamucil,” he said, “but I’ll take the win.”

“Maggie!” The shout came from across the room.

I looked up. “Brenda!” I yelled back.

“And so it begins,” Alex said. “I’ll get you a drink.”

He headed toward the bar, and I braced myself as I watched Brenda and two other women come scurrying toward me. For better or for worse I was about to go back to high school.

I don’t enter into any situation blindly, so I prepped for this weekend by scouring the web for blogs and posts about the ins, outs, ups, and downs of reunions. The war stories ranged from mortifying tales of embarrassment to sordid confessions about hooking up with old lovers, to pithy tweets that said, “Waste of time. These people were boring then, and they’re even more boring now.”

Alex brought me a glass of wine, and I worked the room, while he opted to sit at a table with the other good sports who never even heard of Heartstone High until they married one of its graduates.

I spent the next hour reliving old memories, sharing family photos, smiling for selfies, reconnecting, reuniting, and secretly searching for the Cinderella who could effortlessly fit into the glass slipper I’d be dropping when my biological clock struck midnight.

A high school reunion may be the single most judgmental place on earth, and I couldn’t help but fall prey to the temptation. I made mental notes of who got fat, who was losing his hair, who was drinking too much, and who looked desperate to impress the people they couldn’t impress twenty-five years ago.

I knew they’d be judging me too. Bring it on, I thought. I look damn good, I’d walked through the door with my dreamy, successful hunk of a husband, and I was mayor of Heartstone. As long as I didn’t tell anyone I wouldn’t be around for my twenty-sixth reunion, I was pretty sure I’d take first prize in the “Wish I Was Her” bake-off.

On a scale of one to ten, I quickly gave the party an eight, but as the evening wore on, I dropped it to a five. There was a reason I hadn’t stayed in touch with most of these people. And the two I cared about the most—Johnny and Misty—weren’t there.

When I asked Johnny if he was going to the reunion, he gave me a flat-out “no way.” Except that he’d said it in three words to make sure I knew he was serious.

“Maggie, I hardly ever showed up in high school back when I was supposed to,” he said. “Why should I show up now?”

“Because look how far you’ve come. You could be the biggest success story of the night.”

“It doesn’t matter. It still won’t stop some asshole from introducing me to his old lady as the school drug dealer. I can’t erase my past, but I don’t have to go back and have people rub my face in it.”

Misty, on the other hand, had promised me she’d be there. “Fashionably late,” she said. “And with Carl on my arm.”

Carl was Black, thirty-six years old, and six feet tall, with a smooth dome, neatly trimmed stubble, and a physique to be reckoned with. Together they made a stunning couple. What people never knew was that they weren’t a couple. Carl was Misty’s personal trainer, and from time to time she’d invite him to a party as her plus-one. This was one of those times.

“I kind of had the reputation in high school as being a bit of a slut,” she said to me when we had lunch a few weeks before the reunion.

“ Kind of ?” I said. “The editors of our yearbook wanted to vote you ‘Most Likely to Succeed in the Adult Film Industry,’ but the faculty adviser nixed it.”

“Whatever,” she said. “All I know is that if I show up at that party alone, I’ll be fighting off cockeyed Casanovas all night. But walk into a room with Carl, and men keep their distance.”

She was right. The two of them arrived just as dinner started. Heads turned. They always do when Misty enters a room. But with a guy who looks like an action-movie hero at her side, there was no mad dash of men offering to get her a drink.

I waved at Misty, and she and Carl joined Alex and me on the buffet line. Then the four of us found a booth and had a nice relaxing dinner without any pressure to dredge up stories of the good old days.

At seven thirty Duff took center stage. He waited for the crowd to settle down, and then he said, “Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the Class of 1998.”

I stood up, and much to my surprise, the room filled with the ruffles and flourishes of drums and bugles, and the United States Marine Band played “Hail to the Chief.” Duff Logan thought of everything.

I walked to the front, and he handed me the mic. I stood there and stared at the crowd. I cocked my head from side to side and slowly scanned my classmates. The room grew silent as they waited, and it was a good fifteen seconds before I finally spoke.

“Jesus, you fuckers got old.”

It brought the house down, just as Lizzie had promised me it would when she came up with the bit that morning. I flashed her a thumbs-up, and she waved at me from the bar.

I quickly thanked everyone for coming, and half a minute later I turned the show back over to Duff, returned to my seat, took Alex’s hand, and sat back to watch the culmination of a crazy idea I’d had twenty-five years earlier.