NOW
To: “Ambrosia Wellington” a.wellington@wesleyan.edu
From: “Wesleyan Alumni Committee” reunion.classof2007@gmail.com
Subject: Class of 2007 Reunion
Dear Ambrosia Wellington,
Your ten-year reunion is less than a month away! There’s probably somebody you’ve been meaning to connect with—now is the perfect time to reach out. If you haven’t joined our Class of 2007 Facebook group, we encourage you to hop online and log in. You might be surprised by who you find.
Sincerely,
Your Alumni Committee
I don’t tell anybody about the reunion. Not my mom when she calls to ask if Adrian and I are coming up for Pennington Day, or Toni when she texts me photos of Layla, my two-year-old niece. Not even Billie, whom I message about everything—Billie, who knows more about me than anyone else in my life. She would encourage me to go. But she doesn’t understand. Her past hasn’t yielded casualties.
Hadley and Heather, the only girls from Wesleyan I keep in touch with, ask me in our group chat if I’m going, and I tell them I have something else planned for that weekend. Boo, Hadley says. Justin will be sad without Adrian to talk to. I check the mail in our building every day to snatch any potential notes before Adrian has a chance to see them. Adrian doesn’t ask many questions, but when he gets curious, his need for answers rivals that of a six-year-old. Why. Why. Why. It’s not even the insistence that I hate most. It’s his simplicity, the very quality that I was once drawn to. His belief that there’s a solution to every problem.
No more notes arrive, and I honestly think I got away with it. Then the past finds me in the last place I expect it. At the Skylark, where Adrian occasionally meets me after I’m done with work, making his rare pilgrimage away from the soft shell of Astoria and its craft beer. The Skylark is my favorite Midtown bar, my own glittering nest on top of New York. We’re sipping our drinks—a martini for me, just one, Adrian likes to say, just in case—when Tara Rollins appears at our table. Tara from Wesleyan, who was assistant editor for the Argus and now works in book publishing.
“Ambrosia!” she squeals. I haven’t seen her since Heather’s bachelorette party—a boozy weekend on the beach in Sag Harbor where Tara tearfully admitted to cheating on her husband with a fellow editor—but here she is, and already, Adrian is standing up and pumping her hand with embarrassing vigor.
“Look at you. You look great! Please tell me you’re going. It wouldn’t be the same without you.” As if we were ever anything beyond party acquaintances.
“Going where?” Adrian says.
Tara laughs. “The reunion, of course. You’re coming too, aren’t you? My husband wouldn’t miss it.”
I gulp my drink, smile intact as vodka burns my throat. Your husband misses a lot.
“Reunion?” Adrian makes the word an open wound. I stare at his tanned forearms, the brush of dark hair creeping up to the sleeves of his plaid shirt. “I didn’t know—”
“I just haven’t had a chance to talk to you yet,” I say, sparing him the humiliation. “It doesn’t matter anyway. I don’t actually want to go.”
Tara knows why but plays dumb. “Of course you want to go. Everyone will be there.”
“It’s our anniversary weekend,” I explain. “We’ll be doing something special to celebrate. Three years.” Now is one of those times I wish I had a bigger ring to flash.
“No way,” Adrian says. “We can’t miss your reunion. We can do our anniversary anytime. It’s just pizza on the patio anyway.” He smiles up at Tara, all little-boy charm, as if she’s going to be impressed with our low-key date night.
“Exactly,” Tara says. They start talking like I’m not even there. It takes less than a minute for Adrian to mention his novel and less than two for Tara to mention Butterfield C. Anger surges through me. I want to protect Adrian, not just from the truth but from Tara’s inevitable judgment of him, of us.
“I got pretty wild back then,” she says with a laugh. My eyes search the room for a waiter who can bring me a second martini. “But of course, not as wild as Amb.”
“You must have the wrong girl,” he says, reaching for my wrist. “This one kept her head down and studied.”
I can’t look at Tara because I know what I’ll see there. She kept her head down, all right. She’s a time bomb, and I need to get rid of her before she detonates.
“Fine,” I say, fingers closing so tightly around my glass that I picture it shattering. “We’ll go.”
It’s only once I say those words out loud that the truth hits me.
I do need to go. Not for Tara, not for anyone else, but for her. Because maybe she knows something that will absolve us. I keep picturing her wherever she is, taking the time to write such careful calligraphy—so unlike her; she was always in a rush. But she summoned me for a reason, and I need to know what it is.
I said We’ll go, but I didn’t mean we. I rack my brain, scour the Internet for reasons to leave Adrian behind. Maybe this will help our marriage. I can face the past, shed my dead skin, and come back with some of the gratitude I used to feel for my husband instead.
I find a weekend writing workshop offered at NYU, excitedly presenting it to him as a great opportunity to take his craft seriously. “Consider it my anniversary gift. Just imagine how much writing you’ll get done,” I gush. He’s almost ready to enroll when he notices the date.
“Not this time,” he says. “There’ll be another one. Hey, should I get a suit for your reunion?”
A message comes in from Hadley. Are you guys signing up to stay in the dorms?
I imagine it. Adrian beside me, holding hands on Foss Hill. Maybe it wouldn’t be that bad. We see Hadley and Heather and their husbands every couple months for dinner and drinks, and the boys retreat so deep into their conversations about sports and action movies that they forget we’re even there. Hadley and Heather know that I haven’t told Adrian about Dorm Doom—at my engagement party, I said I didn’t want to taint what Adrian and I had with all those awful rumors, and they gave me sympathetic hugs and promises of It’s not our business, we’d never say anything. I could get through a weekend at Wesleyan. We could.
I let the idea marinate, cautiously. Adrian brings it up again when we’re out for dinner with Billie and her husband, Ryan, in Brooklyn. We’ve been making that hour-long commute from Astoria with decreasing frequency, and they never come to us because of the kids. He grabs my hand when we sit down, a small gesture that makes us a team, the way married people are supposed to be.
“Amb’s reunion is going to be sweet,” he says through a mouthful of steak after our main courses arrive. “Ten years. Makes me wish I had graduated.”
“Reunion?” Billie says. I take a swig of wine, the second glass Adrian didn’t want me to order. I can feel her eyes on me, the hurt there that I didn’t tell her myself. “Wait. For Wesleyan? And you’re going?”
“Yes,” I say quickly. “I thought I told you about it.”
“You didn’t,” Billie says. “You must have forgotten.”
She knows I didn’t forget. I picture the blue glow of Billie’s face at the Hamilton Manor when we were drunk at Central’s senior prom, her cold hand wiping tears from my cheeks. Matt’s here. With her. Don’t look. Fuck them, it will always be us.
I grapple for something else to talk about. “Your last post was so cute. The girls are starting to look so much like you.”
Her pinched expression relaxes, but I’m not off the hook. She’ll message me later tonight, wanting me to spill, like I’m a drink teetering on the edge. “Oh, yeah. I had to bribe Sawyer with cookie dough to get her to sit still. I’m mother of the year, didn’t you know?”
Billie hasn’t technically worked since Ryan got promoted to some kind of private banking job in the Financial District and she had Beckett. But she calls herself an “influencer.” Her online persona—a blog called GurlMom that turned into an Instagram account with a following of nearly thirty thousand—is nothing like her real self. She’s a paragon of the #2under2 contingent, moms who wear their babies like clingy purses over skintight yoga pants. They worship Billie and the state of blush-pink staged flawlessness she embodies.
I don’t have Instagram for that reason. Because I don’t want to cultivate a #nofilter life, a pastiche of fake smiles. I learned at Wesleyan that people don’t envy the girls who are the smartest and prettiest. They envy the ones who are smart and pretty without trying. Unlike Billie’s, my attempt at effortlessness played out live. There was no delete button, no way to undo.
“I remember my five-year reunion,” says Ryan. I hate him for bringing the conversation back around. “We stayed in the dorms and got shitfaced. I was planning to hook up with this girl I used to be obsessed with, except I barely recognized her under the bad plastic surgery.”
“My dorm room was awesome,” Adrian says. “It used to feel like a palace to me.”
The palace of pussy and weed. Adrian fully copped to being a slut in college. He even told me his wake-up call was when chlamydia sent him running to the campus nurse, fearful his dick would fall off from overuse. It’s one of his many anecdotes, which never failed to entertain me when we were dating, even when I suspected some weren’t entirely true. Adrian is a bartender. He’s used to listening to other people’s stories. It’s only natural that he tries to pass some of them off as his own.
“The dorms were full when I called,” I say. “I already booked us a hotel.” Not one of the ones recommended in the email, but one farther away from the school, outside of Middletown, a more expensive Uber ride.
“Bummer,” Adrian says at the same time Billie says, defensively, “Can you blame her for not wanting to stay there?”
“What do you mean?” Adrian asks after a silence that lasts too long.
“Amb’s roommate—” Billie starts.
I cut her off. “My old roommates are going, too. Hadley and Heather. It’ll be great. Is anyone getting dessert?”
Billie purses her lips. She is very aware that I haven’t told Adrian about my other roommate, so I don’t know where she’s trying to take the conversation. Her forehead would be furrowed if it weren’t for her recent Botox injections.
I’m afraid of what Billie will bring up next, but then her cell phone chirps and her attention is diverted. “Fuck. It’s my mom. She says Beckett’s refusing to sleep.” She drains the last of her wine. “I guess that’s our cue to leave.” Ryan waves the waiter over, scribbling in the air with his index finger and thumb pressed together.
The waiter is mercifully fast. Billie’s on the phone with Beckett, telling her, “Mommy and Daddy will be home soon, go to bed for Nana, sweetie.” I chug the rest of my drink, and that’s when I see her. It’s not actually her, though. It never is. Deep down, I know this, and yet I keep seeing her, in different places.
In a summer dress with tights, a slick of lipstick when she wants to feel fancy. She watches me on my commute to work, fish-belly-white hands pressed against smudged train windows, getting off with me at Bryant Park. She’s holding an iced coffee in the lobby of my office building, watching me take the elevator to the twenty-fourth floor, where the hive of Brighton Dame buzzes, where I complete my transformation to basic PR bitch. Her glare, the moment our eyes meet, splits my skull. The question she wants to ask. Why?
The therapist my parents made me see the summer after freshman year told me something I never forgot. “You went through a trauma,” she said, a string of words she was paid generously to dole out. “You wish there was more you could have done. But maybe you’re scared to let things go because you aren’t sure what to hold on to otherwise.”
Secretly I was impressed that she had dug all that insight out of my silences and nods. The truth wasn’t that I held on to things. It was that I clutched them in a death grip.
I wish I had done a lot more, I told her. It was what she expected to hear. The reality is that I wish I had done so much less.
“Amb,” Billie says, smoothing the lace skirt puckering around her thighs. “Call me later. We should talk.”
When we hug goodbye, the girl is coming out of the ladies’ room, still staring at me, silently judgmental. She hates my lipstick. She doesn’t think red is my color. And she’s right. It’s forever hers.