Melany started taking meds in ninth grade to help her focus. It worked with boys, with the AP curriculum, not so much. She went to the prom with Tony who proposed to her in his tux. She ended their engagement tearfully in college when she met somebody else. Several somebodies actually, plus a year of girl time with her freshman roommate. She got an apartment share after college seeking the “Friends” vibe, met someone and got married but it didn’t survive her cheating ways. Old habits. She and her husband vowed to stay friends forever, although no one ever does.
Tony wasn’t particularly tearful over the break-up. He’d been cheating on Melany since prom night, twice with her freshman roommate. He happened to be on a date when Melandy called to end things. Tony claims he started smoking weed at thirteen and has puffed daily ever since. Sufficient anecdotal supports evidence the first claim and very little disputes the latter. His life is a hazy Dorian Grey time warp. Still lives in his mother’s basement, listens to the same music, wears the same clothes. Even has his prom tux which he never returned to Mr. Hays’ Tux Me Up Rentals.
A smalltown tuxedo rental shop sounds like a guaranteed way to go broke. You have a prom once a year and, in a good year, a couple of weddings. But Mr. Hayes rocked it and that shop gave him everything: money, respect, even a secret affair with Tony’s mom that everyone knew about but pretended they didn’t. Then his sons wanted in it. They convinced the old man to underwrite their video rental empire. Mr. H. lost it all, even Tony’s mom. He did walk away with tons of video tapes, DVDs and enough microwave popcorn to last a lifetime.
Tony’s mom is over eighty and doesn’t plan on dying anytime soon. What would be the fun in that? she says. Who’d you complain to then? I dunno, Tony’s mom, but you’d probably find someone. She plays mahjong, at the library and the senior center. She hates mahjong but sometimes you need something to hate. She used to hate the parties Tony had in the basement while she was out with Mr. Hayes but that stopped after whatever happened to that girl happened to her. No one comes around anymore now, except some of the guys when they’re in town.
Some of the guys drop by Tony’s when they’re visiting family because on every trip home there’s a moment when you just hate being back. These days millennial pouches outnumber dadbods to the same proportion that orthopedic walking shoes outnumber DCs and Vans so ditching the family for the annual Turkey Bowl or three-on-three b-ball is unlikely. However, if you don’t mind grappling with Tony’s life-like phallic-themed bong you can revisit a time before mortgages and crabgrass and checking out assisted living facilities for your parents and reminisce about parties, except the one nobody mentions, and raze Tony about Anita.
Anita was two grades behind us and super brainy. AP everything: calc, physics, Latin. Devon teases her, saying that even the Church dropped Latin. Anita had a long crush on Tony that almost everyone in the school knew about. Everyone but Tony. Anita’s grades tanked for a while one year, but she rebounded and got her Ivy League PhD. The guidance counselors and teachers touted the benefits of proper medication, but we knew that wasn’t it. These days she runs the library for a buck over minimum wage plus whatever she pockets helping lazy high school seniors rewrite term papers.
Devon was it-girl hot back then; a perennial all-county wrestler, good grades, scholarship to Wake Forrest. He had a great pick-up line: he’d take off his shirt. He took Anita to the prom after promising her brother, Oxymoron Fred, there’d be no sex. A couple of freshman-year failed drug tests got him kicked out of school. Barely goes anywhere now, except the library for lamer-than-the-original Sam and Diane flirtation with Anita. “You’re a PhD and you file Kerouac, Jan before Kerouac, Jack?” he taunts. “Lady’s first,” she says without looking up. It’s as close as they’ll ever get to fucking.
Oxymoron Fred’s brief life was not without etymologically robust nicknaming. His teammates called him Ox in honor of his impressive athletic prowess. We changed that to Oxymoron Fred because he was academically smart (1600 SATs) but elsewhere naïve, including, but not limited to, occasionally totaling his car to sustain injuries severe enough to be given Oxycodone, the resulting addiction to which was precipitated by post-surgical prescriptions which predictably turned out to be little more than a free trial. Sometimes we called him Oxycodone Fred during that period but decided to stop after the accident that killed him and not-black Troy.
Maybe there’s comfort in knowing that Not-black Troy believed in God. Fervently. And liked to spread his word. Annoyingly. Even if, painfully, his God was Old Testament God, the wrathful, angry Karen God who showed Adam the apple and said, “OMG, this is so good. Eat not of it.” Maybe he was trying to save Owen’s and Fred’s souls that night. And maybe he did. Of course, maybe Fred wouldn’t have driven into that tree if nbT was spreading the word of God 2.0, the one with Berkenstock sandals who selectively cured, although never eliminated, leprosy, blindness and wine shortages.
The news kept reporting that Owen’s friends feared also losing him from the accident but that was bogus because after he brought those pills to that party at Tony’s mother’s house Owen didn’t have any friends and no one liked him. People bought from Owen out of desperation, when their regular dealer, usually Si, was away, like you might use a mall dentist for emergency root canal on a Sunday. Fred was a customer, maybe, not nbT and they weren’t friends. And it’s total bs how people let themselves believe that helping people with survivor guilt is Owen’s new high.
Pipa arrived in fifth or sixth grade, shy, poor and socially invisible. By junior year she’d managed to shed her accent, was co-captaining the soccer team with Diane, Diane St. Claire and was Psilocybin-Si, mushroom queen. Since the aggregated pharmacological contents of student lockers dwarfed the drug closet at Seattle Grace, Si saw natural psychedelics as a niche market. With terms like “micro-dosing” and with nostalgic images of hippie users in their heads, even parents thought shrooms were safe. Except, quantify “micro” and try playing DII soccer while flashbacking. After losing her scholarship Si came home and started providing not-so-naturals.
It was probably Charlie and his nerdy little friends who started calling Diane “Diane, Diane St. Claire.” Charlie had a huge crush on Diane and why not? So did everyone else. She was pretty, friendly, smart and U of Tampa scholarship good at soccer. She stayed in Florida for a graduate fellowship and seemed destined to become “Dr. Diane, Diane St. Claire.” Then suddenly her career GPS seemed to lose connectivity. Rumor had it she’d left grad school and was tending bar in Jackson Hole, then waitressing in Kennebunkport. Whatever she’s gone looking for should have turned up by now.
Charlie was the most normal of all his nerdy little friends. Yes, he worked in IT like them, but he seemed capable of grander things than resetting user passwords after holiday weekends. He was a support desk director when he decided to hit the career pause button to focus on his artistic endeavors, the pursuit of which apparently derived from an art therapy workshop suggested by his traditional therapist after two decades of therapy without meaningful progress. The creative workshops and the art supplies were expensive, and his art wasn’t particularly coveted, so Charlie went back to delivering Penny’s Pizza.
Penny’s provides thin crusted pizza with a purist’s menu of acceptable toppings: peperoni, sausage or both. It’s not fancy but it is delish. You get a good slice quickly and, thanks to voluntary compliance with the Pizza Principal which pegs the slice price to NYC transit rates, it’s reasonably affordable. It’s where your parents order from after the long Good Friday service or for impromptu festivities when more than one child comes home for the weekend. It’s where Tony’s mother ordered from whenever Tony’s friends were over, including that party, and it’s where Jeffrey came for lunch every other Friday.
You could be simultaneously quirky and popular if you were good at something socially important. Thanks to the perfectionist in Jeffrey, that was basketball. Freshman year he couldn’t shoot, next year he couldn’t miss and suddenly nobody cared that he counted the lockers between classrooms. Unfortunately, that year he was diagnosed with OCD. It wasn’t surprising to us; in kindergarten he won best handwasher and shoe lacer. But his devastated parents insisted on starting medication. He stopped worrying if both socks were the same height. Within a year his shooting average plummeted and short Larry was starting ahead of Jeffrey.
We used to joke that short Larry was always overreaching, oh wait he’s not quite reaching. Maybe he brought it on himself by always overcompensating, trying to come in first at everything. We called it Napoleon Dynamite Syndrome because, in a significant overassessment of his class standing he campaigned for most popular student. Along with football and basketball he was perpetually trying to validate his manliness, including probably instigating the events at that party at Tony’s mother’s house. He later hooked up with Cynthia Wheeler at “Last Night,” the traditional end-of-summer seniors-only party and then boasted about it to everyone.
Cynthia delivered in the spring semester at a hospital near her college. With her mother’s help she graduated on time, not with honors or anything but still, impressive single-momming. Larry hasn’t seen the baby, doesn’t know the sex. He brags incorrectly about winning the parenthood race. But hey, if it’s any consolation, Larry, you did win first deadbeat-dad. The group chat tea is that Cindy’s been mostly happy but recently the wee one started asking to meet Daddy-o who, they’ve been given to believe is Big Dave, the tall, handsome guy who won Most Popular in Momma’s high school yearbook.
You can’t blame Cindy. If you asked who most girls want contributing half their baby’s chromos Big Dave would still be most popular. He was handsome, smart, and athletic. Things came easily to him. In his mind, too easily, as if everything he’d achieved was a mistake and one day he’d find out that his whole life really belonged to someone else, someone like Charles Garrigan. Dave’s therapist suggested he practice constructing virtual accomplishment quilts in his mind, with each panel representing some kind of personal success. But Dave, for all he’s achieved, just couldn’t think of anything quilt worthy.
We all felt the opposite about Charles. Nobody wanted his DNA and we were amazed that he amounted to anything. He’d somehow gone from conning his way out of detention to highly-sought-after defense attorney representing worse versions of his younger self. Steady work, if your cojones were Brunswick bowling balls and you had no conscious about who you defended, which was true of Charlie until a certain client reminded him of Mr. Phillips, a young teacher known to frequent Tony’s parties. In retrospect, Mr. Phillips’ presence at those parties didn’t feel right and Charlie started questioning his choice of clients.
Mr. Phillips was less a teacher than kind of a cool older cousin who kept a lookout for the parents while you sampled adult drinks at family gatherings. This was BC MeToo so the adults didn’t notice but it did seem odd that a teacher was hanging with us in Tony’s mother’s basement. Especially her teacher. When you’re young you don’t always notice things but when you have kids you suddenly wonder whether anyone was paying attention. Maybe someone was because suddenly there were a string of loser substitutes arriving on random Mondays while poor old Mr. P was unperson-ed.
The string of loser substitutes arriving on random Mondays weren’t even out of work teachers, they were losers out of work at other things; print-media editors who hadn’t predicted the web, journalists with AOL accounts and myspace pages, marketing copyeditors with red pens, pencil-holstered hipsters dragging themselves through the freshman halls at dawn looking for stale teachers-lounge coffee terrified of slipping down another career rung, swallowed whole into the career abyss of Home Depot, Home Depot that shining anchor to the mall in Rockland. But for now, they were with us and Mr. Johannson introduced them on their random Mondays.
We sometimes wondered what kind of child dreamed of becoming a principal but then, at some point, we realized that nobody wanted to do whatever their job is. There’s like six things kids want to be: soccer player, astronaut, teacher, fireman, doctor, influencer. And half of those are just shortcuts to becoming an influencer. The rest of us settle, becoming things like farmers; state senators; tax accountants; baseball players and principals. Mr. Johannson was different; as a child he dreamed about becoming a principal, which is what made his ineptitude so tragic. But also, as Lydia pointed out, so comic.
A paralyzingly shy child, Lydia’s doctors encouraged her parents to incrementally increase her exposure to anxiety-inducing environments to help build confidence. Soon enough the child who was nervous coloring found herself hyperventilating at swimming lessons, trembling at ballet classes and panicking at tennis instruction as she realized life was little more than an unending stream of crippling social interactions. She found an outlet in writing, specifically facetiously composed letters from real people, including one from Mr. Johannson apologizing for his administrative faults as our principal. We all knew these were fake, except apparently Megan, who was just trying to help.
Megan was always just trying to help. We called her a pathological meddler, Mother Theresa with a jinx. It’s not that she wasn’t well intentioned. She just naively thought good would win out for her in her goody two, goody two, goody goody two shoes. Quite predictably, things always went south for someone and when she shared Lydia’s blog with the Board and select parents we all expected there to be fallout. And there was. Except it ended up a different teacher, and all we could was grin and bear it and write it on a pound note, pound note.
Amazingly, we said sarcastically, the Board and select parents recognized that Lydia’s blog was little more than sophomoric attempts at humor. They didn’t believe that the cafeteria team used leftover Biology class specimens in the chili or that the shop teachers were supplementing their income by offering detention-student staffed repairs. They were surprisingly only modestly concerned about Mr. Phillips showing up at the parties at Tony’s mother’s house amid the corresponding drug use but curiously they did want to hear a little more Ms. Larson, the algebra and trig teacher, and her continuing propensity to practice multiplication outside the classroom.
Ms. Larson didn’t just teach math; she made it seem relevant and interesting even if you were not a budding Archimedes. But that’s not what got the attention of the Board and select parents. They focused on entries alluding to connections between the early spring delivery of several wee Larsonettes and members of the Summer Paint Team. They knew that the rest of the stories were fake so it’s anybody’s guess why the Ms. Larson multiplication table warranted detailed scrutiny. Unfortunately, these days Ms. Larson, now Dr. Larson, heads up the math department in a different district now. Thanks, Megan.
The first thing to know about the Summer Paint Team is that they were losers. The school described it as a great opportunity to make a little money and get practical on-the-job experience. We called it janitorial reserve training and custodial boot camp. No one wanted jobs, least of all jobs painting classrooms. The Summer Paint Team were the saddest kind of losers; losers who didn’t know they were losers. The idea that Dr. Larson, nee Ms. Larson, was going to make whole numbers with those guys was ludicrous. Except for Tyler. Tyler was totally greater than or equal to.
Tyler Taylor was a dumb name and, to be honest, Tyler Taylor wasn’t joining Mensa anytime soon, but he was a hottie, if you didn’t mind the smell of dirt. The summer painting gig was a no-brainer for him. He’d work with friends and put some money into his budding lawn business. The rest of us were barely cutting our own lawns, let alone other peoples’ but that was Tyler. Currently he owns a nursery, runs a successful landscaping company, and lives in a big house with Stephanie and their three kids. Of course, regrettably he still smells like dirt.
Stephanie and Tyler barely even spoke in high school. Her control freak parents, mainly her dad, forbade her from staying out late and going to parties. She made up for lost time at college though, parties, weed, boys, even a rumor of a junior year pregnancy, which explains why she senior-yeared locally. She was home one day when Tyler was doing some landscaping for her parents. He looked familiar, more importantly, he looked like the kind of boy her father would dislike. But, Pops was shrewd; he enjoyed doing the gardening and only hired Tylere after Franklyn started coming around.
Everybody’s goal was to not live anyplace near home after graduation. NYC was a cool; Boston or Philly were acceptable if you went to school there. Anywhere but here. Franklyn went to business school in Chicago so, because of the frigid winters, he was allowed to come home but only for a year. Or two. But he’s still here, playing catch regularly with X-man. We get it; he was an all-county centerfielder twice; the baseball team went to three state championships, winning twice. This is where he had the best years of life; it’s where he’ll probably have the worst.
Baldwin, we didn’t get the name either, although it did come in handy later, was Franklyn’s best friend on the team and off. He was the smallest guy on the team, possibly the toughest too. He took Nicole to the prom, all 5’ 11” of her. In his late twenties, he had an announcement for Nicole and Franklyn. He had decided to initiate hormone therapy to transition. It was all kind of new to us then and we made some stupid comments and gave him that horrible nickname but for the most part, people were happy for him. Her. Baldwin.
We weren’t sure how to react to Baldwin’s news but we didn’t want to seem unsupportive, so we focused on gossiping about Nicole. They had dated for ten years, we’d say. How could she not know? Or did she know? We did hear she was blindsided but then they confused us by staying close. They even went to Kyle’s wedding together, which was suddenly the one event we all wanted to attend. Later, we’d find out just how lost Nicole felt. And confused. How love didn’t die because of a sex change and how being happy for Baldwin didn’t help.
It was kind of amazing that Kyle’s wedding took place without incident. Kyle had always had a thing for Nicole, but he and Baldwin were both jocks, and he was therefore technically forbidden from pursuing Nicole, even if he disliked Baldwin. He watched them date throughout high school and saw them on school breaks when were we all home together. His therapist encouraged him to move on, to explore dating sites. It didn’t take too long before he started dating Kayla. They quickly moved to being exclusive and he proposed to her just as Nicole suddenly became single and available.
Kayla hadn’t met many of Kyle’s friends prior to the wedding. She sensed some weird vibes at the reception but blamed them on the recency of Baldwin’s announcement. She couldn’t help but feel compassion for Nicole and she was touched to see Kyle giving the poor thing some extra comfort. She felt a little differently a few weeks later when Nicole was still indulging in so much attention. That’s when she remembered overhearing someone named Claire saying something in the women’s room at the reception about everyone wondering if Nicole and Kyle would ever get the chance to get together.
Claire was just planting seeds when she accidentally on purpose let Kayla overhear her restroom comments. At the time it seemed like Claire had a good thing going with Michael and she never seemed to want for male companionship but sometimes a girl needs to plan for rainy days even when the sun’s out. She wasn’t the only one who used old classmates as a kind of practice squad that she could turn to in a pinch but as time’s gone by there’s been a slow attrition of eligible guys since one by one they’ve all married-up over the years.
Michael was five years or six younger than Claire, a little too close in age for her to qualify as a cougar but good enough for bragging rights amongst the girls. She didn’t mention how they met so the assumption was obviously Tinder. They seemed compatible, danced a lot, got caught necking once or twice but the word was they didn’t stay together too long after the wedding. We’re a tough group and the kid probably felt like he was watching a scared-straight video. Although, that didn’t stop him from asking about Amber. To be fair, though, everyone loves Amber.
We all assumed that we’d each end up doing well. After all, we had been told since t-ball that we were winners. But Amber did well quickly. She’s a veterinarian with a thriving practice, mostly small animals; cats, dogs, birds but occasionally a house call for a llama, the only one in the county. She’s married happily, she says, and finds motherhood fulfilling, she says. Work is rewarding, she says. But at her Thursday night therapy sessions she sounds like someone with a case of burnout, wondering, what’s the point of saving Timothy the Turtle when the oceans are dying?
Timothy is an Eastern Box turtle who has lived most of his twenty-plus years in a 30-gallon fish tank. He doesn’t care about existential threats to the oceans like chemical pollutants and plastic straws. He’s seen his owner, Jordan, with a straw up his nose and he’s usually fine by the next day. Timothy was a Confirmation gift. Jordan chose the same name for each of them to honor St. Timothy, patron saint gastrointestinal ailments because young Jordan suffered from chronic stomach aches. Two years later Jordan felt cheated after his younger brother received a new bike for his Confirmation.
Patick Timothy O’Hara was the kind of kid you’d expect to have a turtle, maybe a stamp collection too. He was mainly memorable for being forgettable. And moody. His best friend Dave nicknamed him The Pendulum. Pharmaceuticals provided little stability, so his behavioral therapist suggested putting twenty nickels in each front pocket. For every bad thought, he moves a one from the right pocket to the left; does the opposite for good thoughts. The goal is to fill the right pocket. Patrick says that either way if he falls overboard, he’d better start swimming, or he’ll sink like a stone.
Dave and Patrick were friends even before Patrick and Timothy. They met in middle school and chummed their way through high school and college. Patrick had his moods; Dave had everything but. Or so it seemed. Somewhat paranoid, he couldn’t hear about a disease without gradually displaying symptoms. In retrospect, becoming a doctor was a terrible idea. He wasn’t always like that; not before Paulie brought them to that party at Tony’s house. He died of colorectal cancer in his thirties. “I told you I was sick,” he said. Even when he was dying, he thought he had something else.
Paulie was a straddler, a chameleon. He could fit in with multiple groups. He played soccer so he meshed with sports guys, he was a decent student so he got along with the brainiacs and he was a moderate user so he didn’t make the druggies paranoid. He could just show up and everyone assumed he came with some other group. He had a permanent free pass. It did always hurt that no one, Claire in particular, ever noticed his absence. He used to say he didn’t have a Claire in the world because she never noticed. But Jenn did.
Jenn had a way of noticing things; lots of things, odd things, like who favored punch-buggies (women) compared to Mini Coopers (guys and couples) or how many people used the drive-thru but ate in the parking lot (more than half at McDonalds, zilch at Starbucks.) She took a job in retail planning after graduation and got promoted just as the chain began downsizing, surprising only because she more than anyone, certainly more than Michaela, should have seen that trend coming. Suddenly Jenn had two kids and the normal loan trifecta, college/car/house, while the corporate ladder she was climbing was disintegrating.
Michaela never plans anything. Every day is like a snow day, a gift, an ellipsis between important things that could probably have waited anyway. The universe typically thanks her for her faith and looks out for her, sometimes in small ways, like catching designer footwear on closeout, sometimes in big ways, like falling into a pre-IPO dream job. But the years of her therapist telling her to plan, to have a strategy, have started to inspire fits of worry and lately she’s been reevaluating a lifetime of haphazard decisions good and bad, starting with attending the prom with Male Stacey.
Going to the prom with Machaela wasn’t a decision that Male Stacey ever spent a lot of time questioning, nor was sleeping her that night. It was the highlight of his tender years and taught him an important life lesson that served reasonably him well: always ask. He applied this strategy widely, to dating, getting himself raises, requesting discounts. The problem was he was still asking for dates after fifteen years of marriage. Never very discriminating, he was an equal opportunity adulterer who rarely let an opportunity pass, once even somewhat incestuously asking out Female Stacy at the ten-year reunion.
The two Stacey’s weren’t really brother and sister, we just treated them like they were because they looked alike and had the same name. One big difference was pot because Female Stacey was a stoner. We sometimes called her Ibid because if you asked where to find her it was usually the same place: behind the tennis courts. Pot was probably her most important relationship through her twenties when she suddenly discovered yoga and decided to have an unhealthy relationship with something healthy. Two things healthy, if we count Max, who was the first to notice her vastly improved flexibility.
Max went from second place behind weed to second place behind yoga but, as a healthy living advocate he viewed it as Female Stacey taking a step in the right direction, by which he meant becoming more like him. Max was our dietary pioneer, in second grade when half the class was glutton free, he was already pescatarian. He’s proudly played the trendy diet field over the years, from vegan to paleo. He only cheated once, buying a cupcake from Ashely at a bake sale for cancer research. Lately he’s tried singing to his microbiome to improve his gut health.
Ashley doesn’t cook much anymore, which is a shame because along with making delicious treats she was always happy to volunteer with event planning. Well, maybe not happy, because over the years she realized that most of her efforts went unnoticed. She recently left therapist, who, it dawned on her one day never thanked her for the apple cakes, Mandelbrot cookies and hamantaschen she made for him around the holidays, was essentially repeating exactly what Cassandra had said for years: if you surround yourself with people who don’t appreciate your value, soon you won’t either. Cassandra’s advice came for free.
Over the years, Cassandra offered lots of us free advice. Although it was usually wise counsel, we rarely followed it, which was too bad because when you spoke to her you knew that she really understood your problem. There was just always an adjacency about her, like she knew us but wasn’t quite one of us and the lunchroom and our later lives were her own version of Gombe Stream Park where she kept hoping to see us using the human behavior tools we studied in sociology, only to be crushed by our persistent failure and our allegiance to Noah.
When you reach a certain age, you look back at your life in blocks of time. Noah recognized those blocks while they were happening: this kindergarten, where we color and play, this is middle school where we learn, this is high school where make dumb decisions. He was the left-shoulder devil counterpart of Cassandra’s right-shoulder good angel, recommending risky behaviors like going to parties, like that last one at Tony’s mother’s house where the thing that happened happened to her. It’s those memories, good and bad, we value now that we’ve reached adulthood, where we die a little every day.
Looking back, we should have been more supportive of her than we were. It wasn’t her fault that what happened happened or later that Mr. Phillips got unwas-ed or the school cancelled our remaining field trips. We never bullied her or talked about her behind her back. We were much crueler. We ignored her. We walked by her locker in the hallway, sat next to her in assembly, saw her in library but barely ever spoke to her and, other than Melany, we sat quietly as she walked across the stage at graduation, collected her diploma and walked off stage.
–T. Francis Curran
Stories