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.
One Month Later
I WIN VALEDICTORIAN.
Seated on the stage, I look out onto the football field, at my classmates sitting in sections of red and white, and past them, the friends and family gathered in the stands. Sweat dampens my forehead in the June sun. I reach up, adjusting my cap while Principal Williams speaks. I wondered if it would feel anticlimactic, like every other afternoon. It doesn’t. It feels like the end of high school.
As valedictorian, I have the honor of graduating first. Ethan, seated next to me, is second. He’s salutatorian, a fact of which I’ve never missed an opportunity to remind him. Including in my valedictory graduation speech. Where I referenced speaking instead of him. It earned me actual laughter from our classmates, which was good, given the serious subject matter of the rest of my speech. I said I wasn’t sorry I only went to one party, never skipped class, and knew a sizable portion of the audience had never met me. I only hoped they’d done high school their way.
Williams calls my name, and I walk to the podium, receive my diploma, and shake her hand.
“Congratulations, Alison,” she says. “I look forward to having a much freer calendar next year without you to contend with.”
I grin, remembering months full of meetings, rigorous email chains, Chronicle interviews, and ASG initiatives. “I’ll miss you too, Principal Williams,” I reply, and Williams’s features flicker the closest to a smile I’ve ever seen them.
I walk across the stage, flipping my tassel to the other side of my cap to the enthusiastic cheering of my parents and Jamie, who’s wearing her new Fairview staff shirt. Returning to my seat onstage, I wait while Ethan walks up and receives his diploma.
For the next half hour, we hold hands, watching the rest of our class graduate. I stand and whoop when Dylan walks on stage. We went to Berkeley together a couple weeks ago, and any heartache she had over Olivia seemed erased by the cute people on whom she kept commenting. She’s even been texting one girl she met in the art department. Texting might in fact be too insignificant a term for the constant conversation they’ve kept up, punctuated by Dylan’s smiles or laughter every time she looks down to read her phone. I can’t help smiling whenever I notice, either. I’m excited to help Dylan move in before I fly out to Boston.
When Isabel crosses the stage, Ethan whispers in my ear, “What are the odds she follows through on her class president responsibility to plan our reunion in ten years?”
“She’d better,” I reply immediately. “I’m not planning another one of those.”
“Certainly not with your co-vice president,” Ethan says.
I picture planning our own reunion with him a decade from now. Poetry might require choosing the Millard Fillmore for our venue. Ethan would want a fancy hotel, and I’d fight for nostalgia. While we cooperate well now, I can’t imagine the process without a little contention. “Certainly not,” I say, smiling.