The day I graduated from high school I whiled away the tediously long ceremony at the county fairgrounds by ripping out the hem of my dress, a psychedelic blue and orange vintage thing with enormous pointy collars.
My mother had shortened it to match the white robe, but I had a foot of swirling color showing by the time I marched on stage, condoms pinned to my cap in protest against the school anti-sex-ed policy, to firmly shake the hand of a superintendent who knew me as the girl who would be happy to tangle the district in multiple lawsuits if not allowed to graduate on time.
Oh, and also because I had both failed my senior year and secured five merit scholarships. While graduating on time, with enough credits to have walked out a year earlier. What a conundrum.
After the ceremony I paused for a series of photographs with people I would mostly never see again, announced to assembled family members that I was not available for a celebratory dinner, grabbed the hand of my loathed boyfriend’s confused best friend, and scrambled away through the parking lot.
Dashing between dusty cars with a kid I didn’t care one bit about I saw David, who had been a good friend through numerous adolescent horrors, adventures, and schemes. David was a hilarious and clever boy who generously adopted one of my guinea pigs when I had to move out of the family house for awhile. I stopped only long enough to flash the favored hand gesture of the metal kids before jumping in my car and racing away.
Since then I’ve heard not one word from David, nor even any gossip about him, except the information that he moved out of the country. As a general rule those of us who banded together for safety at age thirteen severed our ties with each other, and our hometown, as soon as we were old enough to leave. It was well over a decade before a few people made tentative contact; the handful of friends who are back in my life have reinvented themselves almost beyond recognition.
If anyone had asked me in 1989 I would have predicted that most of us would die, or at the very least remain trapped by the poverty and despair of our gorgeous communal landscape. Very few people I knew back then have moved more than a hundred miles from home.
I find it quite odd that I live in England, let alone all of the other strange facts about my grownup life. I sincerely value the friends who made similar fairy-tale escapes, but for the most part I have to fly somewhere to visit them.
Imagine my surprise then to learn that David actually lives in London and, from all accounts, is a fabulous adult version of the boy I once knew.
Of course I’m not interested in reviewing the past, except for literary purposes, so the catch-up emails and texts have been quite minimal in terms of information; I can in fact cover sixteen years of lapsed friendship with a cryptic half-sentence.
But it is extremely nice to know that there is another exile from home nearby.