Page 70 of The Reunion

I … really don’t know if I can go back to that party. If I can face it all again.

I am exhausted.

Exhaustion is an old, familiar friend, after night feeds and the girls kicking me awake as they crawl into bed after a nightmare or just run rampant around the park while I try to keep up on a Saturday afternoon. But this isn’t just weary, bog-standard, need-a-good-night’s-sleep tired. This is heavy enough to make me want to slide to the floor, sink down through it, close my eyes and not open them until the world has moved on around me, because I cannot even contemplate returning to it.

What it is, I think, is not really being fed up, so much as anxiety. The old, familiar kind that had a hold on me when I was a teenager and creeps back in occasionally now. It tells me they’re right, I’m wrong, everybody else knows something I do not and there is nothing I can do about that no matter how hard I try. They have it all figured out; I am the imposter, the fraud, and they all know it.

I suppose there is a chance that it’s true – they’re right; I’m wrong. I gave it all up and I shouldn’t have, and they can all see that, and I’m the fool for burying my head in the sand.

Are they right?

Why do I care so badly if they are? These people I haven’t even thought about for years, whose names I’ve mostly forgotten, faces I don’t recall … Why do I suddenly value their opinions so highly, now?

I groan, the noise muffled against my palms, and wish I never came along tonight. It was a mistake.

Yes. That was the real mistake. Coming to the reunion, thinking it would be anything like fun or remotely a good idea. That was a fool’s errand.

The rest of my life – and God, I felt so angry about the rest of my life until that fire alarm went off and we had to spring into action. Some of that rumbles through my body now, but it doesn’t have the same ferocity as before, and when I concentrate on it, I just feel pissed off at everybody who gave me those sad, sorry looks instead of that blazing, harrowing fury at the entirety of my life in the last ten years.

I am still angry. A bit at myself, yes, and mostly at them, and maybe that isn’t very fair, either. But the one thing I’m certain of is that this anger isn’t truly mine in the way I worried it would be. It’s – a symptom. A side effect of the peer pressure and nostalgia. That will disappear with time, can be treated by distance, surely?

I wish I never came out tonight.

I wish they never instilled this doubt in me; I was happier living in ignorance.

School was draining enough when I had to be here. Why did I think it would be any different now? I owe these people nothing, and certainly no more of my emotional reserves or my time. I’m tired. I’m zapped. I want to sink into my hotel bed and treat this all like a bad dream, so I can leave it behind tomorrow and not take it with me.

Whatever everybody else thinks – whatever I started to think, earlier – I made the choices I made because they were what I wanted. Not just because they were best for the girls or for Lucy or even financially. I can regret not doing more for myself, but I can also contentedly stand by the choices I made in the last ten years. Those don’t need to be mutually exclusive terms like everyone tonight seems so convinced they should be.

With the lights back on, I hear Bryony’s playlist kick back on in the school hall, blaring through the speakers exactly where it left of, the final strains of the ‘Macarena’ bleeding into ‘Stacey’s Mom’, and I wince. With the power back up, she’ll surely corral everybody back into the hall to finish the party; even if some people make a move, I bet most will stick around to salvage their night out.

I, however, won’t be one of them. I can slip away with the other people who decide they’ve had enough, disappear quietly, maybe message Bryony a thanks for organising or something after I’m gone, which is only polite under the circumstances.

But I’m done.

This reunion has taken enough from me already; I don’t want to see what additional damage it can inflict in another hour or two. It’s time to go home.

I clean my glasses on my shirt, scrub a hand through my hair and feel it sticking up on end, too unruly to bother tidying up now, and make my way back outside. I can hear shouting – no, cheering, and the volume of it only increases as I step through the entrance and some old classmates notice me.

The whoop! that cuts through the night is piercing, voracious enough to practically bowl me over. Someone – Shaun – lifts his fingers to his mouth to give a shrill whistle and the rugby lads start up a chant of my name, slicing it into two defined syllables in low bass notes.

‘Hay-den! Hay-den! HAY-DEN!’

Other people join in the chant. People are applauding.

I’m the hero of the night, the party saviour, which is rich when RJ once accused me of being a party-pooper and tried to disinvite me from prom before Ashleigh verbally cut his legs out from under him.

Bryony turns to me, her whole body sagging in relief and a smile lighting up her face. It’s much simpler than her usual practised, swaggering grin, and makes her look years younger. She mouths, ‘Thank you,’ to me. She might say it out loud, but I can’t hear over the cacophony as everybody celebrates me.

So much for a quick getaway …

I don’t know what to do with all the attention so for a couple of seconds I just stare blankly, trying to wrap my head around it.

When I was fourteen, I had a recurring nightmare that I forgot my PE kit and had to go to class dressed in my boxers and one of those vests my mum made me wear when I was little and it was cold out, and everybody would be picking teams for whatever sport my dream decided we were playing that lesson, and they’d start playing. And I’d realise, it was all of them against me. They’d all point and laugh and jeer and shout and inevitably, a ball of some description would come hurtling towards me and then I’d wake up, gasping and sweating.

So the baying crowd before me isn’t … unfamiliar, exactly, but it still takes my brain a few seconds to catch up and make sense of it, and for the spike in my adrenaline to fade away.

I don’t know what they want from me, so decide to treat it as if this was a game with Margot and Skye, and give them all my very best curtsey then a regal wave, calling, ‘Thank you, thank you, so kind of you, thank you …’

---