THE GUESTS ARE ARRIVING when I finally pull up to the reunion. The sidewalk in front of the Millard Fillmore is packed with people in cocktail dresses and dinner jackets, exchanging handshakes and hugging old friends while they walk in. Even the outside of the hotel looks somehow done up for the occasion, the crumbling Victorian facade strangely romantic under the streetlights in the night.
I’m annoyingly late. When I got to the electronics store, despite my having called ahead and confirmed they had the adapter I needed, the clerk informed me he couldn’t find it. After fifteen minutes of furious online searching, I found one other store in the area with the adapter and had to coerce them to stay open while I crossed the city. I got here frantic and half an hour past when I’d planned. Nevertheless, it was nice not having to depend on Ubers or my parents during my adapter odyssey.
Slipping past the guests, I find my way quickly to the staff room we’ve been using to store decorations. I shut the door and pray no one comes in while I change out of my sweaty cardigan and jeans amid the cleaning supplies and extra candles. Just when I’ve zipped up my dress, the door swings open and Ethan enters.
“Finally,” he says. “Took you long enough. You have the adapter?”
He’s reading on his phone and hasn’t looked up. My gaze catches on his reunion formalwear, the light gray dress shirt he’s wearing cuffed halfway up his forearms, with fitted black pants and a thin black tie. I can’t help admiring him, even while I know I need my concentration in other places. Though I don’t condone him changing his wardrobe in freshman year because of me, I can’t dispute the results. “Of course,” I say. “You? Everything set up for—”
He preempts me. “Of course. And I just got word from Adam’s assistant that the vendors have been paid—” He puts his phone away and glances up, and I see the very moment he loses focus. “You look nice.” It’s a simple statement, in stark contrast with the volumes his expression speaks.
I straighten my dress, running my hands over the form-fitting black fabric. “Finally,” I say pointedly, “you noticed.”
“There’s no finally about it.” He pulls me in for a kiss, and I’m just sinking into his lips when the door flies open again.
“And you tried to tell me you weren’t a couple,” Clint says from the doorway, smiling like he’s caught us up to no good.
“We’re not getting married, are we?” I reply dryly from Ethan’s arms.
Clint eyes us. “Remains to be seen,” he grumbles. “Someone out there wants to talk to you.”
“Much appreciated, Clint,” Ethan says, his voice conveying exactly how much he appreciated the interruption. Clint closes the door, and Ethan faces me. He looks down at his hands on my waist, reluctance to leave this room written on his features. “Well.”
“We’ll pick this up later,” I promise him. “Right where we left off.”
He grins, and we walk into the hotel ballroom.
I’m struck for a moment, seeing the reunion in full swing. The room is packed and noisy with the clinking of glasses, the laughter of friends, and the chatter of guests wearing the name tags I printed. The lights strung from the ceiling cast an elegant glow on the cocktail tables decorated with small flower arrangements and the centerpieces Dylan and I made, each incorporating photos from this class’s yearbook. Dylan helped me copy and cut up the pages she found in the yearbook room closet.
The crowd spills from the center of the room onto the dance floor, where there’s no DJ booth set up, and to the hors d’oeuvres station of crab cakes, ceviche cones, and chicken skewers in neat rows on trays. On the far wall is the backdrop I constructed using ten-year-old issues of the Chronicle, or rather, The Paw Print, as it was titled then. It’s not the photo booth Ethan wanted. It’s better. Even Ethan admitted as much. I watch guests walk up, inspecting the headlines and taking photos in front of the newsprint wall, and feel a swell of pride in my chest.
Ethan and I did this. First while feuding, then while everything else. When we got the reunion planning project, I couldn’t have been less interested or more eager for the event to be over. Standing in the Millard Fillmore ballroom now, I want the night to be perfect.
Williams emerges from the crowd. Her suit is ivory and immaculate as ever. Yet improbably, she’s wearing a pair of the cheap CELEBRATE glasses I ordered for people to ornament their photos with.
“Job well done, both of you,” she says. Her eyes drop to Ethan’s hand resting on the small of my back. She raises a superior eyebrow.
“I’m sorry,” I say with light incredulity. “Did you just compliment us?”
Our principal’s expression is unmoved. “Don’t push it.” She nods in our direction with clear insinuation. “I see you’ve found a way to get along at least.”
“Sometimes,” Ethan replies. I hear the smirk in his voice. It’s a tone I’m well accustomed to.
Williams frowns deeply. “I may have preferred the fighting.” She walks off, picking up a drink from one of the servers.
Glancing into the crowd, I spot Hector. He’s freshly shaven, which is new. His blazer noticeably exceeds his narrow shoulders, and I wonder if it’s borrowed. He looks excited and nervous, walking into the room like a seventh-grader would into a school dance. I watch him put down his drink and head for a guy in an expensive-looking suit.
Ethan follows my eyeline when I nudge him. “Ah, the long-awaited AJ reunion,” Ethan says while Hector taps his friend on the shoulder.
The guy in the suit faces him, and in a flash I recognize Adam Elliot. It’s the face I found on LinkedIn and his company’s website. I remember the name on the profile—Adam Joseph Elliot. Adam, mid-conversation with the woman next to him, looks surprised and wary until he recognizes Hector, and his expression softens. Immediately, they hug. I can’t hear what they’re saying, but I see Adam smile and ask Hector something, nodding when Hector replies.
“Huh,” Ethan says, watching the scene play out. “Maybe Adam doesn’t suck so much.”
He heads in the direction of the hors d’oeuvres, presumably hungry. It’s half past seven, and neither of us has eaten. Nevertheless, I don’t follow. I can’t. Rooted in place, I can’t take my eyes off AJ—Adam—and Hector.
While they’re plainly happy to have found each other, there’s a stiffness to them, the out-of-practice asynchrony of playing old parts. They don’t have the ready rapport Dylan and I do, but the eagerness in their eyes says they want to.
It makes me sad. They’ve undeniably diverged in the years since high school. Their relationship died out, and yet here they are, getting along. Which means maybe they could’ve stayed friends if they’d wanted, if they’d worked to maintain the friendship. What I should consider just a happy reunion for them instead feels like a decade lost. It winds a knot into my chest. Wanting to find Ethan, I pull my gaze from the pair.
The shrill of a familiar electrical screech interrupts me. When I look in the direction of the sound, I find Jamie walking onto the small stage Ethan rushed to rig in the corner of the room. She catches my eye and sends me a huge smile, which I return. In her room hours ago, my explanation of our music predicament had hardly left my lips when she said she and her friends would play the reunion. At stops on my adapter odyssey, I approved her setlist suggestions over text, mentally retracting every time I complained about or was annoyed by her band.
Ted walks up to the front of the stage. Placing his hands on the mic, he addresses the crowd. “Hello, Fairview alumni. We’re the Stragglers,” he shouts before Mara counts them off into their first song. It’s a Fall Out Boy song I vaguely recognize.
The alumni around me, though, chant the intro lyrics immediately, jumping onto the dance floor. Instead of conversation and cocktails, the Millard Fillmore suddenly echoes with the energy of a house show for a student band. The reaction makes sense—Jamie’s about the alums’ age and would’ve listened to the same hits in high school.
When the song ends, Jamie, on one side of the stage, starts picking the opening notes of the next on her guitar. It’s Green Day’s “Good Riddance.” The song is slower, and couples pair up, swaying on the dance floor.
I turn and find Ethan behind me, his hand outstretched. “Dance with me,” he says.
Smiling, I take his hand and step close to him. In the middle of the dance floor, the music sweeps over us, lyrics of turning points and unpredictable rightness. The lighting is soft, and my cheek fits perfectly against Ethan’s shoulder, his head lowered so our mouths are close.
With alums ten years older surrounding us and a song about change and remembrance playing, something comes over me. I feel like we’ve stolen into the future. I’m twenty-seven, home for my own reunion. Ethan and I broke up, went to Harvard, and—what? Maybe we found each other again, or maybe we didn’t. Maybe our rivalry and romance faded, and it was for the best. Or maybe it wasn’t. We’re in a venue not far from where we grew up, on a night like this one, celebrating a decade since we graduated from high school. If we even dance together. It might feel half familiar, like Hector and AJ’s reunion, heavy with the weight of everything we wish we hadn’t given up.
Worry works into me. I don’t want to forget how this feels. High school was meaningful for me. I’ve built toward a future I know will come without knowing what it looks like quite yet, only to realize I’ve fallen hard for a few of the bricks I used. I don’t want to leave these pieces of my present behind, turning my back while they gather dust and eventually crumble into it.
Especially the one in my arms right now. Holding Ethan closer, I make a decision and voice it without giving myself room for doubt. “Let’s not break up,” I say.
Playful light enters his eyes. “Ever?”
“Before college,” I clarify. “We’ll see about ever.” I’ll do whatever he needs to help him make his own choices in college. We’ll try everything we can before breaking up.
His smile softens. “I hope you’re willing to have a long-distance relationship.”
I withdraw a little, studying his expression, waiting for some joke about the long distance from his Harvard GPA to mine. “What?” I ask when none comes.
“I’ve decided to take a gap year before Harvard,” he says, “To find out what I want to do there.” His voice is gentle, his expression honest.
Searching his eyes, I see what I hoped I would. He wants this for himself. It’s his own decision, and it’s real. I’m proud of him for it. “I could do long distance,” I say, pausing for a moment and slipping into a different future. One where I’m picking him up from the airport while he visits me in my freshman year. He’s working for the San Mateo Daily Journal, or interning for Adam Elliot’s company, or volunteering for a homeless outreach charity. He comes to my graduation, and I return to Harvard a year later for his.
I’m smiling as I put my head on his shoulder, and it feels like turning a page. It’s odd to me now, how I’d considered every paragraph of high school only prologue while I wrote chapter upon chapter of newspaper productions and driving lessons, fights and fantasies and food poisoning. Under the lights, I feel grateful for the exhilaration of an unfinished story and the necessity of every page before this one.