Page 26 of The Reunion

I nod, remembering her reaction to the spiked punch earlier, and that fits more with the Steph I know.

And with the coffee story, the floodgates open. I have a craving to know everything, to build on the idea of Steph as I remember her against who she is now, to tell her the most inane stories of my life from the last ten years.

She’s looking at me like she wants to tell me everything, and my heart thuds hard and fierce inside my chest.

Steph’s free hand reaches across to settle on my arm and I realise how close to her my feet have carried me without even realising it.

‘Tell me all about you,’ she says. ‘What’ve you been up to for the last ten years? Tell me everything.’

I know I should be thinking about the party and all the friends we left in the hall, and that I should be making my way back to Aisha in case her new friends split off and she’s at a loose end, but … whatever I want to tell myself, I know, deep down, that this is exactly the way I saw this conversation going, and that this is the only place I can imagine myself being right now.

So I lean back against the bookcase opposite hers and spill every mundane detail of my life that I can think of, pausing when I know she’ll laugh or adding in more information when I know she’s about to ask a question, and it’s like nothing else exists.

It’s like I’m eighteen, and everything is exactly the way it should be.

Chapter Fourteen

Hayden

‘Most Likely to Succeed’

The party seems to have turned into one giant echo chamber telling me how underwhelming my life has become, and by the twelve-hundredth time I hear that sentiment, I realise that – it’s starting to ring true.

This is not some doom-scrolling that I can dip out of and immediately forget when faced with a distraction in the form of Skye spilling a cup of squash or Margot demanding to watch Encanto for the billionth time, and getting the words wrong no matter how patiently I try to teach her the correct Spanish. This is not out of sight, out of mind.

And how can it be, I wonder, when this is my entire life? It’s never out of sight, nor out of mind – yet, somehow, I’ve been absolutely blind and ignorant to it for the last ten years.

I used to want things. I used to aspire to be more, to do something, to build things.

It’s not exactly news to me that that attitude is all in the past, or that I’ve become a different person to the one I was supposed to be. None of my old classmates are alone in thinking that this, the stay-at-home dad with a part-time job he does remotely from the desk in the corner of the living room while keeping an eye on the girls, doesn’t match up to the quiet, studious kid they pictured as the next Steve Jobs one day. I agree with them.

But I thought I was okay with that. I thought this life was one I’ve not just made my peace with and come to accept, but one that I actively liked having.

Somewhere between Noodles Greg smacking my shoulder and saying, ‘Sucks, man,’ and Thea’s sympathetic smile as she told me there’s still time to make it all happen, I think I started to question it, too.

The presentation is still on the projector up on the stage, circulating through the old yearbook and the new additions of ‘where are they now’ photos. I catch a glimpse of my own teenage face up on the screen, and …

I see it, too.

I think, Sorry, kid. I’m sorry it didn’t work out like we wanted it to and I messed it all up.

Life had seemed … simple, then. Another equation to be balanced and solved; a problem to analyse based on previous, similar case studies and accounting for the variables of my own interests and personality. I applied for engineering degrees at top universities, had a spreadsheet balancing up the cost of halls to figure out if it would be more cost-effective to stay catered or not, applied for part-time jobs before I even officially moved to campus. I figured out which modules I wanted to take over the entire four years. I knew which graduate-scheme programmes would be top of my list to apply for. What the trajectory of my career path would look like from that first role where I’d be little more than a trainee, to the ultimate dream job where I would have freedom and authority to create and design, being challenged while experiencing the absolute exhilaration of sinking my teeth into something I loved.

It had all looked … so clear. Precise and straightforward and – inevitable.

I can pinpoint the exact moment it changed. I haven’t thought about it much for a while, but remembering the way Lucy came to my room, ashen and tearful and too scared to go buy a pregnancy test by herself … God, the memory hits me with such vivid clarity it’s like I’m there – fidgeting with the doorknob and watching the seconds tick down on my phone’s timer, so sure that one night which we both ultimately agreed was probably a mistake and we were better off as friends anyway … That couldn’t be it. This sort of thing didn’t just happen like that, not to people like us.

Except it did, and all I could think was that we should make a spreadsheet to weigh up our options. The world shifted beneath my feet, but Lucy had been so close to crumbling and so I did what I do best. Lists, and logic. I was the anchor, if only because I didn’t know how to get swept away.

I never gave myself a chance to mourn what I lost, or panic about how quickly everything was changing. I just made new plans. Had something else to study for and read up on.

Was it a mistake, to not have let myself feel bad about everything I was giving up? Would I be somewhere different now, if I had?

Maybe it’s the effect of the echo chamber everybody has created tonight, a whirlpool made up of empty pity and thoughtless sympathies that sucks me round and under and over, scrambles my brain and leaves me struggling in the centre of it all. Maybe it’s just being back here at school, and a bitter twist on the nostalgia.

Or maybe … It’s simply that it’s true, and I haven’t let myself see it for a while.

Whatever conversation I’m currently part of (which is a generous term for ‘standing by and pretending to listen while doing the bare minimum to actively participate’) moves on, and I take the opportunity to slip quietly away, making some excuse about getting another drink. I’ve lost Ashleigh; she disappeared into the crowd not long after we did our routine to Taylor Swift’s ‘Shake It Off’ (which Margot helped coordinate a couple of years ago, and is just silly enough that it borders on entertaining rather than straight-up embarrassing when performed in public like this). I can’t even see Shaun anywhere, which means that I’m left alone, sinking further into my thought spiral.

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