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.
An Unwanted Slide
A few days later, a notification popped up on my phone, separate from the text chain. A direct message on Instagram. The profile picture was a selfie taken from a low angle, showcasing more nostril than personality. It was Chase. My thumb hovered over the delete button, but a morbid curiosity, the kind that makes you slow down for a car crash, made me open it.
ChaseTheAce: Vivian Mills! Blast from the past. Saw you’re on the ‘maybe’ list for the reunion. Don’t be a maybe.
I closed the app without responding. An hour later, another one.
ChaseTheAce: Seriously, you look amazing. Better than in high school, and that’s saying something. Heard you’re back on the market. Mark was an idiot to let you go.
A hot spike of annoyance shot through me. The casual way he invoked my ex-husband’s name, the smarmy assumption that my new single status was a public bulletin for his benefit. I took a screenshot, a habit I’d developed during my divorce proceedings. Document everything. I sent it to Maya without comment. Her reply was instantaneous: a single, perfect GIF of a dumpster on fire.
The messages kept coming over the next week. Each one a little more desperate, a little more clueless.
ChaseTheAce: You always were the one that got away. Shoulda asked you to prom instead of Tiffany.
ChaseTheAce: Let’s meet up before the reunion… get a head start before anyone else does. My treat.
ChaseTheAce: C’mon Viv, don’t leave a guy hanging. Still got that killer smile?
Each message was a small act of vandalism on my carefully constructed peace. He wasn’t seeing me, Vivian, the 38-year-old single mom and successful designer. He saw a name on a list from twenty years ago, a box to be checked. A girl he thought he could finally get. The rage was a low hum, a background noise I tried to ignore. I never replied. I just kept taking screenshots.
The Armor
It was Lily who made the decision for me. I was sitting at the kitchen counter, scrolling through the reunion’s Facebook group, a digital zoo of awkward updates and heavily filtered photos. Lily came in and poured a bowl of cereal for her dinner, as is the teenage way.
“What’s that?” she asked, nodding at my laptop.
“My high school reunion is coming up.”
“Are you going?” She crunched loudly.
“I don’t think so. It just seems… stressful. A lot of people I haven’t seen in forever.” I left out the part about the emcee who was currently trying to slide into my DMs like a greased-up weasel.
Lily stopped crunching. She looked at me with that unnervingly perceptive gaze she’d developed. “Mom, you’ve spent the last two years getting your life back. You don’t hide from Dad’s passive-aggressive emails. You don’t hide from demanding clients. Why would you hide from a bunch of old people in a bad hotel ballroom?”
Damn her for being right. Hiding was what I used to do. I’d hidden in a loveless marriage. I’d hidden my ambitions so they wouldn’t inconvenience anyone. I was done hiding.
“You’re right,” I said, a smile finally breaking through. “Okay. I’m going.”
“Good. Now wear something that makes them all feel bad about their lives.”
That Saturday, I went shopping. Not for them, but for me. I bypassed the sensible, age-appropriate dresses. I ignored the flowing, forgiving fabrics. I found it on a mannequin in the back of a boutique I normally wouldn’t dare enter. A tailored jumpsuit in a deep emerald green. It was sharp and structured, with a clean, modern silhouette. It wasn’t flashy. It was powerful. When I tried it on, I saw the woman Lily saw. A woman who didn’t hide.
As I paid, I made one last decision. I opened Instagram, went to my message requests, and took one final, perfect screenshot of Chase’s last plea from that morning, complete with the timestamp and his blue-check-verified name. I saved it to a folder on my phone I labeled, simply, ‘Receipts.’ Just in case.
The Time Capsule’s Hiss
The ballroom at the Marriott was a symphony of beige and bad decisions. The air was thick with the smell of steam-table chicken, cheap perfume, and simmering regret. A playlist of 90s one-hit wonders thumped from oversized speakers, a relentless soundtrack to our collective aging. It felt less like a party and more like a high school science experiment to see how nostalgia curdles under fluorescent lighting.
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