While sipping a fish bowl-sized glass of Cab Sav and scouring the Internet for free porn (is there any other kind?) I suddenly received an email notification–

the subject of which, Can you believe we graduated high school ten years ago?!

“Oh, God damn,” I said aloud, because one, it had been ten years since I’d sashayed across that stadium stage to collect my diploma dressed in a graduation gown of shimmering polyester teal, a textile choice that radiated an unfortunate suspicion our gowns had come from the same spool of fabric used to spin the sheets gracing the brass bed of a moderately-priced call girl; and two, because I’d lost my place on MILFHunters.com.

THE FACE OF ADOLESCENT RAGE.

But, curiosity being stronger than fermented grapes and amateur sex acts, I read through the email. It seemed that a few former classmates had started a Facebook page noting the anniversary of our aforementioned graduation, and we were encouraged to offer various suggestions for shifting our weight inelegantly in front of other members of our graduating class while pretending to show concern for significant details of their lives other than the fact they had a stain from what looked like baked beans on their shirt; or, its formal name, “a reunion.”

Take the survey for our reunion this August! the Facebook page urged me. It will only take 2-3 minutes!

Thinking, oh, what the hell – Crystal the Cougar will still be on the prowl when I get back to surfing the web – I started to fill out the survey:

How will you be traveling to the reunion?

Chemically altered and listening to “The Very Best of Supertramp” (This is, of course, in jest. I will probably be listening to Rush.)

Will you be bringing your spouse/significant other/guest?

No, keeping myself open to bed old English teacher (I hope they know I’m talking about the hot, 29-years-old-at-the-time one who loved William Blake and not the retirement-age woman who always had a run in her left stocking and smelled vaguely of male cat urine.)

Will you be bringing any children to the event?

N/A, all aborted

Will you be needing a hotel during the weekend?

Only if said English teacher is available (I am again kidding, of course. I would never shell out $90 for a room when it would only take 25 minutes in the back of my Sentra.)

Would you prefer a beach day/picnic? Check one:

At that point I just had to click out of the survey and drink my wine in a slow, seething exhaustion. Picnic? Picnic my two-sizes-larger-than-it-was-in-high-school-ass. Standing around a park in the dead of August sucking down a vat of fly-swarmed potato salad doesn’t sound like something I’d do with people I actually wanted to keep the company of, let alone people who had been witness to my years of staggering breast development, which, to be fair, was also why I didn’t attend family reunions. If there’s one thing I hate it’s when people ruin my potato-salad eating experience because I can see them mentally calculating the growth rate of the ol’ titties.

A haughty refusal to complete the survey didn’t stop me from looking through the rest of the Facebook page, however.

ad.

Recently reminded of our “senior song”! someone had posted, and underneath was a YouTube video of Eve 6’s “Here’s to the Night.” I was shocked. We had a senior song? AND IT WAS BY EVE 6?! Oh, fuck you all with spoons. I know for a fact that I, nor my classmates, voted on that musical aneurism. More than likely it was picked by the members of student council, the same people who participated in ill-conceived spirit days (“DRESS UP LIKE YOUR FAVORITE FARM ANIMAL SO WE CAN BEAT GREAT BRIDGE HIGH!!!”); who slung their arms around the gym teacher whom they affectionately called “Coach”; and who delegated the fifty clams we all shelled out for prom toward a purple cardboard castle backdrop and a drunken middle-aged DJ for the most magical evening the Virginia Beach Sheridan had ever seen, and will ever see again (and if the nightlong No Doubt dance hits didn’t seal that deal, the convenient purse-sized sewing kits we received as prom favors absolutely did). Oh, student council. Maybe you power-mad assholes were hereing to the nights you felt alive, but here’s to the nights I did my German homework then tried to catch when the new Ginuwine song was coming on the radio so I could record it on my cassette player and practice making out with my pillow it. Glory fucking days, man.

Lord, what am I doing, I wonder, taking another sip of wine. I’m getting angry at an alumni Facebook page. I was 27. It was just a reunion. It was supposed to be fun. And I didn’t even have to go! It’s not like if I declined the invite my chemistry teacher was going to bang on my apartment door and let me know she was retroactively revoking the B- I had struggled to obtain during her lesson in moles. I was 27. It didn’t matter anymore.

So why was I still angry? Was I still carrying out some adolescent baggage that I had repressed after years of collegiate research papers and post-collegiate Yuenglings? High school hadn’t exactly been a miserable time in my life: no one ever really teased me (well, to my face; perhaps a terrible nickname was circulating behind my back like ‘Doesn’t Excel at Algebra II Girl’ or ‘Pretty Uncoordinated at Volleyball Watkins’), I had plenty of friends, and kept busy with extracurriculars. An honor roll student who got along with her parents, I was a rather unsuperlative portrait of teenage angst.

So why did I want to slam down my nearly empty bottle of Cab Sav (that sort of behavior was reserved for monsters who drank Pinot) and tell the student council, who were just trying to organize a reunion, they were all flaming cunts and to just leave me the hell out of their tyrannical Internet grasp?

Only the Cab Sav can save us.

And then I realized why I was becoming so unhinged, and it wasn’t just because I was drunk and my porn viewing had been interrupted. It’s because I was 27. I’d walked off that graduation stage and I’d been shown the world – not the whole of it, mind you, but enough of the world to realize that the classmates who ran the social infrastructure of our forced adolescent assemblage didn’t actually run anything at all. They had suddenly and entirely by accident won a genetic lottery of sorts, flourishing because they were the best-looking of a sampling of teenagers from a geographic area. We had to socialize not because we had similar interests or philosophies we wanted to share, but because our parents had bought real estate near each other.

And here they were, trying to cash in yet again, telling me and the rest of us who had kept our heads low for four years that we were going to meet in a park in the dead of fucking summer and eat coleslaw and chat nice about who was pregnant while we all politely avoided the subject of Ben Foley’s criminal charges.

Not anymore, assholes! There’s a world beyond our high school, and I’ve discovered it, and you can’t pull me back into your shitstorm of public school socialization now! It’s too late! I’ve had five apartments, a car wreck, a boyfriend who was a clinical sociopath so I couldn’t change my address on anything official or he’d find it, and one time someone threatened to beat me up and my gay friend in a bar so I punched him and then threw my beer on his face! I shook the hand of Edward Albee! I got drunk and lost on the Metro and ended up being taken home by a Naval officer who showed me the Secretary of Defense’s office door in the tour of the Pentagon the next day after brunch! A construction worker masturbated to me at 11 in the morning and I had to press criminal charges! I dated a coke dealer! I have fucking lived, people! You have nothing for me, nothing to offer! I will see you all when my life suddenly becomes so meaningless that I feel the best thing for it will be to ask to see pictures of the glob you shit out of your uterus that for some reason you all named Madison! I will see you all when am mentally incapacitated enough to feign excitement that you’ve been promoted to assistant financial analyst at your father’s insurance company! I will see you all when spending the day comparing sun dresses we got on sale at Dillards becomes more appealing than a Doctor Who marathon! I WILL SEE YOU ALL IN HELL.

Unless that English teacher is coming, in which case, I will see you all in August.

more from Laura:

The Search for Hampton Roads’ Most Dateable People: The AltDately Challenge

Steve Inskeep Thinks I’m a Slut: The Inner Turmoil of a Secret NPR Hater

Survival of the Spinster: When Your Ex Gets Hitched