(no subject)
Last night, I went to the most awkward dinner ever.
I spent some of the afternoon with old friend W, who I wrote about here. We go way back to before freshman year of high school, and when we were young, we had that sort of intense friendship that you can only have with someone you see all the time. We used to have notebooks we would pass back and forth (using intermediaries, borrowed locker combinations, and even occasional face-to-face contact) and we’d write long notes back and forth about boys and friends and Spanish class. We spent high school wrapped up in each other; proms and driver’s ed and gym and fan fic and volunteering together, and all being besties in a super-close group of friends who adored each other.
Not too long after we graduated high school, I started dating a mutual friend’s brother’s friend, a man four years my senior. I don’t want to get into the details of that, but- he’s the only person in the world about whom I have nothing good to say.
In part because of this man’s machinations, I ended up having a falling out with one of the girls from my high school clique. It was awful; she’d invited me to hang out with several friends of hers, and while I was in my car, I found a list she and at least two other people in our social circle had made of reasons why I was awful. I freaked out and shut down that night, all while hanging out with those three people plus another friend of theirs. To this day, I can't write about that moment without getting twitchy.
Breaking up with that friend was probably much more painful than any romantic relationship I’ve ever had. W was a casualty of that friendship break up, and we didn’t speak for years in the meantime.
In the past five years or so, we’ve reconnected. It was awkward at first, but it’s important to have the people in your life who remember you when you were young.
Going back to freshman year of college, W set me up with a buddy of hers, a guy she’d known since the second grade... V, my current whatever friend.
The three of us getting dinner might be weird enough, except it goes even further, because V is also the first boy W ever slept with.
Which is sort of awkward since I’m the first girl W ever slept with.
A fact not lost one W, though V knows nothing I think.
Last night, when V texted me and mentioned he was at a store that happened to be one neighborhood over from W’s place, I mentioned that I was a few miles away, and what a marvelous coincidence, and did he want to get dinner? Oh yeah, and I’m inviting W, who’s on vacation at work and happened to mention on facebook that he was one of the people she wanted to make plans with this week.
I didn’t realize, though, that when they said they should hang out at some vague indefinite point in the future, that the last time they saw each other, they had terrible drunk sex in the backseat of a car. He realized he’d made a terrible mistake because he was seeing someone special, and how could he sleep with someone else?
Two months later, he got engaged.
***
Dinner was not nearly as awkward as it should’ve been.
V and I were texting ahead of time.
She doesn’t know.
This is so sitcommy. Should I set up a dinner with my boss the next room over?
Just keep your hands off me.
We sat there and discussed high school reunions and our old classmates, and who was married, and who was divorced, and who had kids and who never left their parents’ house.
Eventually, we were joined by W’s friend Q, the birthday girl from this story, and, as a funny coincidence, a person who is in my life because W tried to set the two of us up once. We didn’t click romantically, but we go out line dancing all the time.
In fact, the day I reconnected with V, I was supposed to be line dancing with Q, but she was freaked out because of this pushy dude and cancelled on me.
We talked about nothing, but the company was great. Revisiting the past was fun; I heard names I haven't heard in years. We discussed lies we'd tell at our high school reunion, if any of us actually attend. And we discussed our lives now, a bit, but mostly we reveled in the past.
And I got a little bit drunk.
Q left and we switched locations, going from a lovely pub with delicious food we never ate over to a greasy sports bar, where we ate deep fried food and I guzzled water and held hands with V under the table.