I've been staring at my senior year photo for a while now. The way I would stare in a mirror while screaming Bloody Mary.
Who is that? And more importantly, whose pearls are those?
A twist of fate and a scheduling conflict will take me back to Miami next week, coinciding with my high school reunion. So, in an effort to mentally prepare for the terrible community play rendition of Hot Tub Time Machine that I'm about to headline, I rummaged through a box of mementos, read cringe-worthy letters and found this, my senior year portrait.
At first glance, I was reminded that while I was taking this picture, my boyfriend was sitting in the waiting room with the promise of reaching third base on the ride home. He was adorable, gentlemanly and sweet, but terribly flat chested and had a penis, which eventually caused our demise.
When I looked closer though, the me from 1996 had a prophetic message embedded in my eyebrows - one that only took twenty years of hindsight to actually see it. Unlike what I thought about myself at the time, I was pretty damn un-hideous. I would even go as far to say that I was pretty cute. Yes it's a cliché, teens and their self-esteem issues. But I'd truly look in the mirror and see an out-of-place monster. How terribly sad.
On the bright side, if I had that face today it would be riddled with HPV, so I guess it worked out.
The other non-hideous things about seventeen were the rest of the know-nothings that I befriended. The valedictorian. The nice guy. The Goody Two-Shoes. The bad ass. The comedian. The rebel. The weirdo. The rich girl. The super rich girl. (I went to private school.) The artist. The Goth. The drama queen. My secret girlfriend. They were glorious. Each one. Raging with hormones, broken out with acne and hiding torn hymens from Jesus. Together we made up a super diverse version of The Breakfast Club that could have been made for Telemundo after dark.
But that was then. Next week we will be reunited for an episode of Oprah's Where Are They Now, where the impulse to undo our high school stereotypes will most likely lead to boring each other with talk of investment banking, bibs and breakfast nooks. But as much as my body recoils with the thought of being trapped in a boring conversation, my FOMO is too powerful not to be there. And I'm willing to bet that in the midst of polite conversation, I'll see a glimmer of the shitheads we once were. And I'm also willing to put money on having to hold someone's hair back at the end of the night.
It was Catholic school for Christ's sake.