So, yesterday I logged on to Facebook, minding my own business, when I came across a post from a Toni, a woman that went to high school with me. She's on the planning committee for our 20-year reunion. She did a post to let us know that the Target closest to our old high school sells the high school's merchandise, and we would also be able to purchase high school merch (t-shirts, hoodies, etc.), at the reunion! Yay!
I stared at this post blankly for like five minutes. It astounds me how different other people's high school experience was from mine. When I think of high school, I think of bullying and being immensely unhappy. I think of how this high school was one of the last ones in Georgia to take down the Confederate Flag from the flapping proudly in its lawn...I think. Well, I assume it's down now. Back in the 99s and 2000s when I was there, the parents had voted to keep it. Can you imagine being 15 and Black trying to explain to a 55-year-old White teacher why the Confederate Flag is problematic?! There are no memories from this place that make me want to put on a tank top with the high school's mascot plastered on it, believe me.
Oddly enough, Toni had reached out to me a few weeks earlier via Facebook message, asking me directly if I was coming to the reunion. She and the committee were trying to figure out how much food to get and what venue to book. Toni was always cool with me. We were in remedial math together. But my instinct to reading that message, which was very sweet by the way, was to tell her to kiss my ass! I wanted to ask her why she was so eager to celebrate this nightmare? Could my poor Black experience had been that much different than her middle class Asian one? I guess so. If it had not been, she would have known to not even waste her time reaching out to me at all.
Merch. Incredible!
Oh, and I didn't tell you the best part: Bradley Barker is on the committee too! This for me is truly unbelievable. Bradley was then what he is now: a fat, Anime-loving, horribly dressed weirdo. This boy was made fun of so badly for being himself that I used to wonder if the student body was in cahoots to make him lose his mind! He was socially rejected and lost every SGA office race you could possibly run for! I should know, I was his campaign manager for his race for Regional President of a club we were in together. I guess 20 years has erased these memories for him, because he is now posting on social media posting about reunion ticket sales. What?! The boy had been so hurt about losing the Regional President race that he literally cried in my lap!
I can't wait until the reunion goes down so that the publicizing for it will end and I can stop being traumatized whenever I go online. I try to pretend like high school didn't happen, and I'm eager to do that for the next 20 years.
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