The afternoon passed slowly as I listened to endless entreaties for money from professors, successful alumnae, the school president. My parents had worked their asses off to pay for my college tuition, yet there was the clear implication that this was by no means enough, that I still owed Ellison — that I would always owe Ellison — for the education my parents had already paid for.

We were in the chapel, an impressive Norman-revival structure of granite and sandstone, illuminated in the daytime by sunlight filtered through Tiffany stained glass. This was where I had heard, on separate occasions, Jesse Jackson speak about racial injustice and Lee Iacocca bash the Japanese. In both cases, I sat next to my friend Lexi, a sophisticated and athletic blond, an international relations major, who liked to steal the marshmallows from my Lucky Charms, which I ate at practically every meal. I would make snarky comments under my breath and she would laugh.

Lexi and I had stayed in touch, and she had insisted for months that she would be coming, that she couldn’t wait to relive old times, but as reunion got closer, she started talking vaguely about work commitments that complicated her plans, which she said she would try to figure out, but ultimately concluded with a defeated sigh that she simply couldn’t. She may have been lying. It was always hard to tell with Lexi. 

So it was just me, muttering my snarky comments to nobody in particular, receiving dirty looks and increasingly aggravated requests to “Shhhh!” and, later, “Shut the fuck up!” 

I was sitting towards the back, off to the side, something I started doing in high school to avoid being called on by my teachers when I hadn’t done my homework, which was almost always. This continued through college, where I was both too lazy to do my reading and too clever to get caught. As a result, I got decent grades without learning much of anything.

Towards the front, dead center, was the back of Carrie’s head — leaning forward, listening attentively — and next to it was another head, this one with a bald spot surrounded by a swirl of black hair that I presumed belonged to her husband, whose name I would eventually learn was Daniel.

I felt a surprising surge of hostility towards the back of Daniel’s head, an inexplicable, visceral desire to fight a man I had never met for a woman I had last seen half my life ago, and had long considered insane. But as I focused the heat of my gaze on his skull, I couldn’t help thinking that I had gotten there first.

Sort of.