His voice echoed through the ballroom as he called me a woman of a “certain vintage,” reducing my painful divorce to a cheap punchline for our entire graduating class.
The humiliation was a physical thing, a hot wave that washed over me in my carefully chosen jumpsuit. This wasn’t a bad joke; it was punishment for ignoring the pathetic messages he’d been sliding into my DMs for weeks.
He thought he had the stage, the microphone, and all the power.
Little did he know, I was a user experience designer with a folder full of his own desperate messages, and I was about to give this entire ballroom a masterclass in public humiliation using their own shoddy AV equipment.
The Ghost in the Jumbotron
The email landed in my inbox with the subject line: “You’re Old! (And Invited!).” Classic reunion committee humor. I let it sit there for a full day, a digital landmine I wasn’t ready to step on. Twenty years. It sounded like a prison sentence. In some ways, it had been.
I was finally breathing again after a two-year divorce that felt like a decade. My ex, Mark, hadn’t been a monster, just a slow-acting poison of indifference. Our split was less a dramatic explosion and more of a quiet, protracted sinking. Now, my world was small, but it was mine. A two-bedroom apartment that smelled of fresh paint and coffee, a thriving career as a UX designer, and a teenage daughter, Lily, who was thankfully more me than him. We were good. We were stable.
The reunion felt like inviting chaos to dinner. I clicked open the Evite. The header was a pixelated photo of our graduating class, a sea of shiny, clueless faces. I scrolled down past the details about the open bar and the “throwback” DJ. And then I saw it. “Your Master of Ceremonies for the evening… the one, the only, Chase ‘The Ace’ Donovan!”
My stomach did a little flip-flop, the bad kind. Chase Donovan. He wasn’t a bully in the traditional, shoving-nerds-into-lockers sense. He was worse. He was a social surgeon, dissecting people with a smarmy grin and a well-placed “joke” that left them bleeding out in a puddle of polite laughter. His currency was wit, but it was always traded at someone else’s expense. Especially girls. He’d had a particular talent for commenting on our bodies, our grades, our boyfriends, all under the guise of being the class clown. He was the looming issue, the one giant, hair-gelled reason to click ‘No.’
The Text Chain Inquisition
My phone buzzed with a screenshot of the invitation. It was from Maya, my high school lifeline and one of the few people who’d survived the twenty-year cull.
Maya: So? Are we doing this? Ready to see who got fat and who got rich?
Me: Did you see who the emcee is?
A string of vomit emojis appeared.
Maya: Ugh. Chase. I thought he moved to Florida to sell sketchy time-shares.
Me: Apparently not. He’s back to relive his glory days on a rented microphone.
Another friend from our old group, Sarah, chimed in. Sarah had married her high school sweetheart, had three kids, and lived in the same zip code we grew up in. Her world hadn’t expanded so much as it had deepened.
Sarah: Oh, Chase is harmless. He’s just… Chase. It might be fun! We should get a table.
Harmless. The word hung in the air of the group chat. Harmless was a luxury men like Chase were always afforded. I thought about the time he’d loudly asked if my training bra was “in training for a marathon.” I was fifteen. The boys around him had howled. I had wanted to disappear. Harmless to whom?
I looked around my quiet living room. On the wall was a framed design award I’d won last year. On the fridge was a goofy picture of Lily and me at the beach, both of us laughing so hard she was snorting. My life wasn’t perfect, but it was a fortress of peace I had built brick by painful brick. Letting Chase Donovan inside, even for one night, felt like a betrayal of that peace.
Me: I don’t know. I think my dog has to get his teeth cleaned that night.
Maya: You don’t have a dog, Viv.
Me: I’m thinking of getting one. And he’ll have terrible teeth.
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