by Harlan Coben Oct 2, 2010
An hour before, I was home, worried. After all these years, I still wanted to impress. I still cared what these people thought of me. I still wanted to be liked. I changed shirts twice and then decided my dressy loafers were trying too hard, so I went with something more casual. I debated calling an old friend—anyone, really—so I wouldn’t have to walk into that beige hotel conference room alone.
As I step through the portal, the transformation occurs. The stale air is gone, replaced with the smell of crisp leaves and used textbooks and that chemical-weapon disinfectant found solely in high school corridors. I can hear the echo from slammed lockers, the sounds of Steely Dan on a transistor radio, the grudging grunt of the school clock as it nears 3 p.m. I see that vice principal in the woodchip-brown polyester suit, those Big Hairs with the strawberry Lip Smacker, that pretty girl in the monogrammed sweater who sits in the front row and always whines that she’s going to fail the test, then finishes in record time and spends the rest of the class putting reinforcements in her notebook.Â
Yep, as many students were preparing to head back to school, here I was going waaay baaaack—t hree decades back—to my 30th high school reunion. Thirtieth. Big number, right? Long time. Things change, don’t they?
No, they don’t.
I’m 48 years old, not a kid anymore by any definition, but here is a universal truth that every adult at some point will realize:
We are all always 17 years old, waiting for our lives to begin.
I hear stories of triumph and tragedy. None of our lives has gone according to plan. No life ever does. That’s a good thing. There is an old expression that the young people cannot understand yet but that we, Livingston High School’s Class of 1980, are living: Man plans, God laughs.
I look around the room. Some of us are heavier, some of us have more lines on our faces, some of us have even—gasp!—lost hair. The jocks are still there. The pretty girls. The nerds. But something odd is going on. The head cheerleader is chatting up the pocket-protecting geek. The big jock is sharing a joke with the Glam Rock dude. The cliques are gone now, smoothed away like stone pounded by years of heavy rain. Everyone talks to everyone, and we realize what a waste it was not to have conversed like this when we had the chance.
So as I talk with my old classmates, as I see them laugh and share and listen, I am deeply moved. The time machine may still be there, but the war is over. Make no mistake, adolescence is a war. No one gets out unscathed. But here we are, former rivals, former clique members, former insecure high school kids who thought we had to get the better of one another to get ahead.
I look at their graying locks, their weathered faces, their smiles, and one thought knocks me down like a surprise wave at the beach: I wish them all nothing but the best. I hope they’ve all found happiness or at least contentment, and I’m surprised and overjoyed to discover how many have indeed reached a good place. I sense something akin to love for them, and I have a strange hunch that my classmates are feeling the exact same things.
I wish we had felt that way in high school.
I don’t mean this to sound so Pollyanna. Competition is a part of life. But I wish that we hadn’t wasted so much time and energy worrying and belittling and keeping score. It has taken us 30 years to learn so simple a lesson: No one has to fail so that I can succeed. In fact, maybe it is just the opposite. Maybe we are all on the same boat, and maybe we rise and sink as one.
