Above Us Only Sky

I graduated in 2002 from a big high school in a  little town located in the Hudson Valley.

That June, the Near Earth Asteroid 2002 MN missed our planet by 75,000 miles — about one third the distance to the moon. While Dubya got a colonoscopy, Dick Cheney served as acting President of the United States of America for two and a half hours. A train disaster in Tanzania killed 281 people in the worse rail accident in African history.

No one graduating in my class in 2002 remembers any of that. No, we remember sateen dresses and bobby pins, standing awkwardly in a backyard as our parents took photos of the kids that secretly pawed each other at the movie theater on the weekends. We remember inhaling sticky-licked joints in over-crowded trucks with the windows up, suffocating on the smoke and sexual tension; the thrill of hands and the hot longing of legs.

We lined up, two by two, ready for our jet black stretch ark, our families still snapping pictures in the heat. It was the dying days of the disposal camera, just before the onslaught of digital’s pose-stop-look-erase-pose mantra. We grinned and scurried off into the limo, some of us holding hands, some of us swatting hands away.

I believe there were 12 of us (I was supposed to be with Kevin, who I had recently dumped because I couldn’t stand his sarcastic bullshit, and was instead with Frank. So Kevin ended up with tall, angry Ashley. Steve was dating Chrissy. Jessica was dating Graham. The other Steve had brought a slut, we all knew it was true, from the junior class. Lauren and Liz both brought older boys from different schools.), but I can’t be sure. If you count correctly and leave off the older boys and the younger girl, it averages out to 12.

That night we would split into clusters, the girls gently lying their heads on the shoulder of the tuxedo, each pair making small concentric circles to an anachronistic Imagine. We would end up drinking all of the wine in Graham’s basement and vomiting in the cul-de-sac. We would end up kissing Danny or Pete or both that night, we can’t remember.

So now what? What has become of the prefornicating prom limo?

We have lives. We are in love, in big cities, small towns, important jobs, time-consuming degrees. Most of us still talk. Except Kevin. Kevin is married and living in Texas or California, I can’t remember which. None of us were invited to the wedding. None of us have heard from Kevin in years.

Frank knows this, I tell him: I am so happy I dumped Kevin.