Chapter 1
Choosing the local Applebee’s to host our 10-year reunion is turning out to be the wreck I knew it would be. There’s just something about decade-old pride and rivalry that really shines in the light of ‘Dollar Margarita’ night. At least Georgia was prudent enough to reserve a party room for us. Though it’s not exactly on par with the reunion we were originally supposed to have a year ago.
Last year would have been exactly ten years after our graduation. Georgia, the self-delegated organizer, had everything set up picture perfect. The theme was prom night, which she had recreated in the old high school gym using photos from our class’s actual prom. She somehow got hold of the original decorations that had been buried in a storage closet. Our old teachers were going to be there as mock chaperones. She even had a photo booth set up where we would have competed to see who could best recreate our high school prom photos.
Everyone who saw the decorations said the whole set-up was amazing. Not that I was exactly thrilled with living that night over again. A nightmarish prom turned into my first sexual experience. Which wound up with me pregnant at eighteen.
But that was years ago, and I’m no longer the same quiet girl who hadn’t figured out this whole puberty thing yet. I’ve since stopped trying to tame my natural curls and have just gone with them. A recent love for yoga has slimmed up my mommy body in all the right places. At almost thirty years, I look better than I ever did in high school. My complexion is clear, my teeth are free of braces, and a job that places me in front of the camera has seen my confidence grow steadily over the past few years.
The high school reunion was going to be my chance to outshine the girls who excluded me from every other event when we were kids. With the help of my daughter Lizzie, I even dug my prom dress out of the back of my childhood closet with the hope that I would be the only one able to fit into her dress from a decade before. All of my dreams for that night were certainly petty, but I felt I deserved them.
The fire thought otherwise.
Georgia attests to this day that the flames started in one of the adjacent classrooms, but the firefighters who finally extinguished the gym after four hours claim the cause was more than likely a set up on one of the many tables. She’d tried to go for a test run the night before the actual event and ended up burning half the school down. With Georgia’s plans up in smoke, we all decided to postpone for one year, thinking this would give Georgia enough time to plan something equally dazzling. But with the gym, her hopes for the perfect night must have also burned to ashes, because here we were, one year later, drunkenly sloshing margaritas at the local Applebee’s.
I briefly considered wearing my prom dress but dropped the idea when I imagined how it might backfire. Still, I wasn’t going to let this opportunity pass, so I opted for my favorite pair of jeans. I paid far too much for them at a department store, but my god do they make me look better than I feel even on my best days. Sticking with the casual but sexy look, I wear a black blouse with a low neckline that will draw plenty of lusty stares from the men.
Lizzie gave me a snaggletoothed smile and two thumbs up when I left her in the care of her babysitter. She’s the only person I care about in my life now, so why do I feel the need for validation from a herd of mouth-breathers who only ever paid attention to me back in school when I was blocking the way to their locker?
It all comes down to what my mom told me when I came home from school the night of the original prom. Not one boy had asked to dance with me. A teacher even dragged a reluctant Luke—the skinniest kid in the whole class, who was known for sitting in the back row, one hand down his pants, the other digging in his nose—over to where I was trying to hide in a corner. That was when I took off outside, where the light drizzle managed to soak me through by the time my only friend in the world found me.
Cory was an outcast like me, and his late arrival at the prom at least meant he was there to comfort me when everything went south. Instead of heading inside the gym when my mom arrived, he opted to go home with me as moral support.
In the car on the way home, I told him and my mom that I hated every single one of the people at my school. That I wanted to take revenge on them somehow. That’s when my mom told me what has become the mantra of my life: The best revenge is a life well lived.
So that’s what I intended to throw in everyone’s faces tonight. And it would have worked except for one small detail I hadn’t accounted for. A question I’m asked again and again at our 11-year reunion whenever one of my old classmates looks me over with scrunched-up eyebrows and a tipsy sip of their salt-rimmed margarita.
“Sorry, what’s your name?”
No one even remembers me. Not a single one. Even when I point out my picture in a yearbook Georgia has helpfully plopped on the table closest to the entrance of our party room, all I get in response are puzzled looks. It’s as though I’ve been completely wiped from the collective memory. And with no past to compare with my present, my transformation is simply nonexistent. Just like I felt all those years ago.
It’s not like I don’t get plenty of eyes crawling up my legs and chest, even from Matt, but he doesn’t remember all the times Tina, his perfect girlfriend at the time, mocked me. And he was always too happy to join along in their laughter at Aggie.
It’s even what the teachers called me.
Aggie.
If anyone ever went through the trouble of learning that it was short for Augusta, my great grandmother’s name, they kept that secret close to their shriveled hearts. Instead, I was labeled Awful Aggie, Raggedy Aggie, and worse, Saggy Aggie. I had books slapped out of my hands in the hallway, used pads slid up under my bathroom stall when I was eating lunch by myself, and even one time had my bra straps cut by Tina while she was sitting behind me in Chemistry.
There’s only one person I would have liked to see at this reunion, but he won’t show. I can’t even say for certain whether he’s alive or not. He disappeared the day after prom. Gone without a note or a word. It’s been the defining tragedy of my life. A blow to my self-esteem even worse than all the slurs hurled at me between classes. Despite how he disappeared, I can’t help but remember the day
s we had together. As fellow outcasts, we found solace in our mutual misery.
An uproarious roar of laughter erupts from the opposite end of tables, drawing my attention away from stewing thoughts. Red faces and green Heineken bottles create an almost Christmas feel to the celebration. I tune my ears to catch what has the table to my left in such hysterics.
“That girl, what was her name?” Tina is saying. Time has been cruel to Tina. Her perfect skin is puffed out in unnatural bulges, telling a story of addiction with Botox and fillers. She still dresses like she’s a cheerleader, but her body has bloated. She’s not fat, but neither is she thin enough for the black dress failing to contain her hips and chest. “Anyone remember that girl’s name?”
Shaking heads are the only response she gets.
“Anyway, whoever this stupid girl was, she always sat in front of me. Always so focused. One day her bra straps were poking out. Normally I’d help a fellow lady out, but this girl just got to me, you know? Like she acted all higher than me. I don’t know how to explain it, but just know that she was a little sassy ass. Anyway….”
Me.
Tina’s talking about me. About what was arguably the worst day of my high school life, overshadowed only slightly by prom night.
“Remember how she ran to the principal’s office while holding both her boobs!” That’s one of Tina’s sycophants, Sara. Whereas Tina has gone up a size or two, Sara has ballooned out. How people recognized her and not me is a mystery.
Tina snaps her fingers and shakes her head. “What was that slut’s name again?”
The old me would have let them go on like this. I would have stayed out of it because sticking my head in would have only meant having it cut off. But we’re not in high school anymore. And Tina’s no longer untouchable.
Telling myself that I can’t expect Lizzie to stand up for herself at school if I can’t do the same for myself, I stand up so suddenly that my chair falls back, clattering on the floor. In the past, Tina would have turned this around on me, pointing and getting her little groupies behind her in ridiculing me. But I’m ready to flay them and leave them hanging in the light of all their crimes—past and present. In my mind’s eye, I can already see myself walking out after absolutely laying into them.
But I don’t manage to get a single word out.
Someone else beats me to it.
“Once a bitch, always a bitch,” says a guy who’s just arrived. Actually, he probably walked in the door while Tina was talking about me but I didn’t notice. Somehow he’s heard everything I have. “Nice to see some things haven’t changed.” He looks her up and down. “Wish I could say the same about other things.”
Tina’s eyes are absolutely bulging, and when she finally remembers to breathe, she asks the same question currently on my mind: “And who the hell are you?”
And here I find that I’ve fallen into the same self-absorbed miasma as the rest of my old classmates. How could I have possibly forgotten someone who I must have spent years passing in the halls? I hate to admit it, but no matter how I look at this newcomer, the bells inside my brain are silent and still.
Unlike the other guys around me, he’s not wearing jeans or cargo shorts or a rumpled polo. He’s dressed in a gray suit that fits his form perfectly. His perfect form. He looks he’s walked straight out of a cologne advertisement. I only wish I was closer so I could see if he smells the part too. The angles in his face are all clean, though a light stubble covers his cheeks, chin, and jawbones. But it’s a uniform stubble that doesn’t conjure up the word scraggly.
Sexy is more the describer I’d go for.
From the width of his shoulders to the confident way he holds himself, I can only imagine that he was on one of the sports teams back in school. Baseball, maybe? Or football? But I remember all the jocks, and he’s not anywhere in my memory’s line-up. My only other guess is that he’s someone like me. An ugly duckling who only came into their own after graduation. Here for the same purpose: to show off how he’s thrived as a sort of schadenfreude revenge. Only he hasn’t hung about in the shadows waiting for his chance to strike. He began swinging the moment he stepped in the room.
“Don’t recognize me?” he asks in a smooth baritone that’s almost familiar.
His identity hangs about in a corner of my brain, but I’m having a hard time coaxing it into the light. It’s like seeing the face of a famous childhood actor all grown up, and not quite remembering the name attached to their aged face. He reminds me of someone….
And then I know. It’s someone I see on a daily basis in Lizzie. He has the same nose as my daughter when she looked up at me the day she was born, the two of us alone save for my parents in the hospital. When I bandage her scrapes and wipe tears from her cheeks, I see him in her.