The Cool Kids

I missed my ten year high school reunion this past fall. It was held a few weeks before Thanksgiving in New Jersey, so the odds of me getting there and still being at my sister's dining room table to watch my toddler nephew get my 88-year-old aunt to put a paper plate on her head were pretty slim.

I missed out on finding out what happened to everyone.

I grew up in a pretty small town, so the basic details are often easy to come by. Someone's mom is bound to run into my mom and know what two thirds of the kids from my class are up to now. But all that tells me is who works in a bank and who got married and has four kids. Those are just mundane details.

What is really eating at me is, have the cool kids changed at all?

I was never one of the cool kids. I always have been and always will be a geek. I studied in homeroom. I ate lunch in the band room. I was in the drama club. I hung out with the kind of kids who would cut a pep rally to finish up a biology lab.

In middle school, I envied the cool kids. I even liked New Kids on the Block in an effort to fit in with the cool kids( Donnie Whalberg, sigh). I did everything I could to be one of them.

In high school, I figured out that the cool kids weren't anything special. I didn't want to be one of them. Their parties seemed stupid and, in their constant quest to not be like me, they acted like idiots. I actually sat in tenth grade English and listened to two of them (kids I had been in the top groups with all through elementary school) spend 45 minutes discussing whether or not London was a country and, once they exstablished it was a city, whether or not it was in Paris.

I couldn't force myself to act that dumb if I'd tried.

So, what are these kids up to now? Do they all have normal jobs? Do they regret being so cruel in middle school and acting so dumb in high school? Will they encourage their children to act like them?