Carrie smiled at me with white teeth and indifferent eyes. It was the smile of someone who had met a lot of people but couldn’t remember most of them. A socialite’s smile.

She hadn’t figured out who I was yet. But she would. After all, I was the guy who had taken her virginity. Plus, it was our college reunion, so I was wearing a name tag.

I tilted my head slightly and raised my eyebrows, letting her know that this was more than just a friendly but meaningless exchange of glances between two fellow graduates of the Ellison College Class of ’88. 

A series of emotions played out very quickly on her face. Recognition, dread, resignation and finally excitement, or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof.

“Oh my God! Aaron! You look so different!”

She was right.

Twenty-five years had gone by since we last saw each other. My curly hair was now thinning and gelled straight, my gangly frame meatier. My wispy adolescent attempt at a mustache was now a full beard just starting to turn gray, my dark brown eyes residing behind glasses framed with black plastic.

But Carrie was unmistakably Carrie. Time had aged her, but not transformed her. The sharpness of her cheek bones were softened by the looseness of her skin and added weight, and offset by the fine wrinkles around her eyes. Her hair remained chestnut brown, or was perhaps dyed that way. I couldn’t tell. The billowing of her clothing left the state of her body a mystery, but having given birth to two children, it was safe to assume that the flatness of her stomach was a distant memory. 

She wasn’t beautiful. But then again, she never was.

Honestly, I can’t remember what had initially attracted my seventeen year-old self to eighteen year-old Carrie. She did have extremely large breasts, supported, I would later learn, by very expensive bras. She had been somewhat traumatized as a child by seeing a corpulent middle-aged aunt in the pool house shower, lifting each pendulous and exhausted udder to wash away the chlorine, and had vowed that she would never allow that to happen to her. 

Carrie’s real estate magnate father, who frequently went jogging with his daughter when she was still living at home, was willing to invest thirty-five dollars a bra — and this was in mid-1980’s dollars — but requested that, at those prices, she remove the bra herself before letting any guy fondle her.

By late adolescence I had been fully conditioned by Playboy Magazine, and her slutty cousin Penthouse, to include D-cups, at a minimum, whenever I mentally assembled an image of a sexy woman.

But while that was certainly part of it, there had to have been more to the story, because I thought Carrie was a knock-out and she most assuredly — as friends and photographs would confirm — was not.

We first met at a party in this exact same room in Brooks Dorm. That I was meeting anybody at a party was in itself a minor miracle. It was the first week of our Freshman year and there was a general feeling of openness, optimism and excitement. In high school, I was socially awkward, but here in college, I was still socially awkward, yet somehow already made friends. And not only with my roommate, but with at least half a dozen Freshman women down the hall. There was this profoundly naive sense that these newly minted friendships would last forever. Which, now that I think about it, some of them did.

Carrie and I went up to my room and, to the disappointment of everybody who assumed we were getting it on, merely talked for a very long time. 

Beneath my posters of flashy Italian sports cars and a nuclear explosion (with the hilariously ironic caption “Oops!” at the bottom) we laid out the contours of our lives. She had hit the adoption lottery, brought as an infant into a mansion in the Pacific Palisades, where they had servants, but thought of them as family. She had been a high achiever in school, the impending inheritance of a multi-million dollar trust fund doing nothing to dull the cold steel edges of her work ethic. Student council, the debate team, planning committees too numerous to name. She traveled the world, hung out with other rich kids, went to cool clubs and parties and concerts. She had been in therapy for the past five years.

For me, it was growing up upper-middle class in a woodsy Pennsylvania suburb. I considered myself a writer and everyone agreed that I was destined for success, although I had written almost nothing that hadn’t been assigned as homework. I had a small group of socially inept friends. We reveled in our apathy and played Dungeons & Dragons. In winter, I vacationed with my family at a resort in the Poconos and spent nine summers in a row at a sleep-away camp. 

Simultaneously unworldly and jaded, I had an unearned cynicism that manifested itself in endless repetitions of the sentence: “Life sucks and then you die.” I can see now how annoying that must have been.

As it turned out, my dream of becoming a successful writer had come true, albeit in a technical, Devil-finds-a-loophole sense. I had accepted my father’s offer to take over his small advertising business and made a decent if unspectacular living writing copy. It was all business-to-business stuff that appeared in trade publications and, once the World Wide Web was invented, online as well. I was good at what I did, my prose punchy and clever. I made reading about waste disposal supplies fun.

Now, Carrie hurried towards me across the tile floor, the clicking of her boot heels faintly audible over Prince’s “When Doves Cry.” She gave me a big and not entirely insincere hug, her breasts pressing against my chest.

“So what have you been up to?” I asked when our embrace ended.

Brightly, she rattled off her curriculum vitae: Columbia Law School grad, a nationally-respected civil rights attorney, professor at Johns Hopkins and — most important, of course — adoring wife and loving mother of two unbelievably smart and talented children.

“Is that it?” I deadpanned.

She was unable to stop herself from adding, “I also set up a non-profit to help kids with autism.” I blinked a couple of times as she wiggled her fingers cheerfully at another classmate, giving him the same smile she had just given me. “So how are you?” she asked. I detected, or maybe imagined, a hint of a challenge in her tone.

“Great,” I said, which was true, or not, depending on whether I was looking at my life in the warm light of objectivity, or the cool shadow of unmet expectations. “I just found a quarter in the parking lot. So...” I was trying to be funny, but the joke fell absolutely flat.

A strained silence followed.

“Well,” Carrie finally said, her attention drawn to another alumnus — I couldn’t remember her name, but I was pretty sure I had cheated off of her on a Physio-Psychology exam — who was waving at her, “I’m so happy we ran into each other.”

“Yeah,” I agreed prosaically.

She hesitated, perhaps thinking that I wanted to say something else. Which made me wonder if perhaps she wanted me to say something else. Which made me say something else.

“Hey, you want to get together later?” I said and instantly felt I had made a mistake. “Dinner?" 

“Um. Sure,” she replied. “You can meet my husband.”

“Super.”