Page 5 of If We Were Young

Reunion

“Repeat after me. ‘He will be bald and fat’.”

I groaned and placed my head against the cool bathroom mirror. The burst of chilled freshness on my hot skin slowed the thump inside my ribcage until my heart fluttered a faint stuttered echo.

I’d been like this for days, ever since I’d agreed to go.

And to go… I’m talking about that thing… the reunion… A meeting at the gates of hell.

Re-uni-on; such a stupid word.

“Say it,” Angela shouted through the wall of the hotel bathroom. To be fair to her, the determination she’d put into making sure I couldn’t back out had been impressive; twenty-four-hour monitoring, an emergency first class flight from Scotland, and all toilet breaks chaperoned. She’d taken on a stealth security detail; not letting me out of her sight, apart from now. I’d locked that bathroom door as quick as humanly possible. In fact, I think it bordered on meta-human super-speed.

She rapped on the wood again. “I can’t believe we are still doing this, eighteen years later. I’m worried about your personal growth here, Ronnie. You’re a grown woman, a successful businesswoman; you shouldn’t be barricading yourself into a bathroom of a budget hotel. It smacks of desperation.”

Her pep talk seeped into my logical thinking. The woman was never wrong. I was a grown woman—sort of. I was a successful woman too—so long as you discounted the growing debts and the month to month worry about whether I could pay my staff.

I turned to reach for the latch of the bathroom door and then remembered that everyone would look at me. Me, the widow. Poor Ronnie, did you hear her husband died in a snowdrift?

Then I remembered him. It was the worst bit. It’s the deep and desperate secret of my soul.

Looking in the mirror, my breath misting against the glass, I gagged. “I can’t,” I finally said, sure that I wouldn’t be sick.

“Are you dry heaving there?” Like she even needed to ask.

“Mm.” I lowered my head down. Let’s all praise the Lord for the pristine shine of a chain hotel toilet.

“Your gag reflex is pathetic, Ron. How do you even run a successful business? Don’t you spend half your time hiding in the toilets with your head down the bowl?”

I gagged again. Answer enough in anyone’s opinion.

“I’m not like this at work.” I straightened back up and wiped my hand along my forehead, leaving a snail trail of sweat on my wrist. “I wouldn’t even be like this if you’d just let this go. I don’t see why I had to come.”

“Because it’s the reunion, and we made a solemn promise to ourselves when we met that we would be one another’s wing woman until the day we died. That’s what best friends do. And frankly you’ve sucked at that promise. Badly. Like if you weren’t almost a sister to me, I would have dropped your arse long ago.”

She’s right, I have sucked. I was a one-winged wing woman.

“Mm. Thanks.” I took in the sight of myself in the reflection and poked at the bags under my eyes. They were getting worse. I couldn’t even focus on the crow’s feet etched from the corners of my eyes. Finding those had been a trauma. One day, I glanced in the rear-view mirror of the car and they’d just been staring back at me like I’d walked into a cobweb and it had scarred my skin.

“Just say it, Ronnie.” Ange pulled my attention back to our circling conversation. “And then come out of the bloody bathroom so I can do something with your face.”

“What’s wrong with my face?”

“Nothing. It just needs a dash of colour that’s all.”

“I’m not coming out if you plan to treat me like an overgrown Barbie. I thought we stopped doing that years ago?”

“We only stopped because you’ve been going through a dreary ‘earth mother’ stage since Paul… well, you know. Died.”

My chest sagged. I stood and unlocked the door. She watched me, her expression deeply critical.

“Everyone is going to stare at me, Ange.”

My red-lipped—harlot-red, according to my mother—friend scrunched her brows. “Ronnie, it won’t be that bad. Do you know how many people from our year are divorced by now—”

“But I’m not divorced, am I?” I could feel the wild-eyed, frayed around the edges look I’d perfected whenever conversation went this way, seeping onto my face.

“No, you aren’t. You had a perfectly legitimate reason for your boring-as-fuck marriage to come to an end.” Ange peered over my shoulder and pouted into the glass wall of the bathroom.