Page 1 of People Like Us

Prologue

I’d rather douse myself in communion wine and crawl inside my oven than go to my high school reunion. But I have always been very good at doing things I don’t want to.

“Are you going?” Emily’s voice came through the receiver of the phone positioned carefully between my chin and shoulder. She still lived in North Carolina, though further from our hometown now, but we still talked on the phone weekly, the same way we had when we were teenagers.

I pressed the bottle of cooking sherry to my lips, letting the bitter liquid, warm from the constant humidity of Louisiana that trapped itself in my cabinets, sit on my tongue for a moment before swallowing. It spun in my stomach as if it were already searching the confined space for an exit.

I didn’t own wine glasses. I had a set of champagne flutes from my wedding, though they were sitting under a layer of dust in the back of the china cabinet in the dining room, which didn’t seem worth the trouble of having to wash. So I pulled a coffee mug from the drying rack instead and felt mildly satiated by the sound of the bottle glugging away as I emptied it into the ceramic.

I’d never been much of a drinker–hence the lack of proper glassware and the kind of alcohol people were actually supposed to consume directly—as being inebriated always made me talk too much. But the e-vite opened on my laptop perched on the counter made me suddenly crave the taste of first Sunday communion.

“Lola?” Emily echoed as I rummaged through the pantry for crackers.

“I’m thinking,” I said, lightly.

My son was on the living room floor making noises as he rammed one plastic car into another. Crash. Vroom. Crash again. No hesitation or guilt for the havoc he was wreaking.

Had I taught him that?

“Lindsey will hunt you down if you don’t go.” Emily offered, as if this trumped everything else—our loyalty to a friend we’d made when we were freshman.

“I know.” I sigh.

The invitation had come via social media. Lindsey always gave soft invitations to hard expectations. High school reunion: Woodland High Class of 2015. A neat little calendar marker to remind me of every carefully curated choice I had made to achieve the life I was leading. I could feel each of them, tangling together, doing their best to create a web thick enough to block out the images of everything that had happened ten years ago.

“Okay,” Emily said, dragging the word out. “So you are going. That’s what I’m hearing.”

“I didn’t say that.” I took another sip of sherry and immediately regretted it. My throat tightened, like my body remembered something my mind had not agreed to retrieve.

“You didn’t say no,” she chided.

I leaned my hip against the counter and watched my son try to force a toy truck into a space in the storage case where it didn’t belong. He frowned at it, patient in a way I never was.

“I haven’t decided,” I said. That was another lie.

Emily exhaled sharply through her nose, the sound cracking through the phone. “Are you going to bring your husband?”

“Yes,” I said. “He’s very interested to see where I grew up. All five miles of it.” It came out dry enough to pass as humor. Which was something I’d gotten good at: making things sound like jokes so nobody looked too closely at what was underneath.

“I don’t want to go,” I said, more honestly than I meant to. “I haven’t seen her since…” I stopped.

Since everything with the wedding, I almost said. Emily didn’t push. That was worse somehow. My best friend only got quiet when she knew where the edge of something was.

“Are you going to be okay seeing everyone?” she asked.

“Yes,” I replied too fast. Like I’d been waiting for the question so I could deliver the answer without feeling it.

“It’s not like anyone still cares about the stupid shit we did in high school, Lola. It’ll be fine.” The words should have been comforting. They weren’t.

“It’s not that simple,” I said.

Emily didn’t like that. I could hear it in the silence that followed. “Do you still care about the shit Andy did?” she asked finally.

“No,” I said easily. That one, at least, was true.

Emily made a sound that could have been agreement or dismissal. “Okay then,” she said as if that proved her point.

I looked down at the mug in my hand. The sherry had gone warm in a different way now—like it was settling into me instead of passing through.