Over Andover Again (2021)
I graduated high school from Alex Horvat’s backyard. As backyards go, it was quite something, a broad and sprawling space looking out onto the woods behind the house. A particularly rainy Seattle rainy season had done a number on the grassy patch in the back and my new heels squelched and stuck as I walked. The sun was shining bright above, and his mom had spent the night before blowing up massive gold balloons that spelled our names, tethered to little silver weights from Party City that skipped across the stone as the wind picked up. By lunch they spelled ALIENAX. By dinner they were shoved into the back of my dad’s Volkswagen Jetta, barreling down I-5.
I was not supposed to graduate high school from Alex Horvat’s backyard. I was supposed to graduate on a beautiful Massachusetts spring day, wearing a white dress and walking down a lush, green, non-squelchy lawn with my friends and my enemies and that kid from my Freshman history class who always forgot my name. Instead, I was in Alex Horvat’s backyard, watching a video of our class president on a laptop, my friends and enemies and acquaintances scattered across 44 states and 50 countries, according to the admissions material I had memorized as an incoming freshman.
It had been three months since we were sent back from school, three months into a spring break that would extend for the rest of our lives. I had left my dorm room with a small suitcase, hugging my house counselor goodbye, and forgetting my favorite green Belle and Sebastian t-shirt crumpled under my bed. Within two weeks, the official verdict was announced: the class of 2020 would not be returning to graduate. The rest of the term, as well as graduation, would be conducted remotely. My books, clothes, memories were left in that dorm room, collecting dust, as I remained in isolation across the country, unable to rescue them. We had heard some news about moving crews packing up rooms, shoving things in boxes and shipping them to us. We received tens of emails reminding us to update the school with our current address, so the things wouldn’t get lost in the mail. After the third email I stopped reading them- letting them pile up in the school inbox I had checked religiously for four years.
The week before graduation a package arrived, containing my diploma, a collection of stickers, and a blue t-shirt that read HOME, our school’s crest replacing the O. For a school whose name was practically synonymous with pomp and circumstance, this was not their finest work. I couldn’t help but think that if I had known all those years that my high school experience would have ended with an ugly t-shirt and some blue confetti, I may have partied more. For the first time in my life, Alex Horvat seemed a bit like a prophet. We ended up in the same backyard, after all. At least he had had fun getting there.
It’s safe to say that when I pictured my high school graduation, Alex usually didn’t factor into the fantasy. Sure, I knew he would have been there, but I thought that graduation would be like the rest of our high school experience: spent separately, with little to no acknowledgment that come Thanksgiving his dad would be brandishing a slice of cheese in my face, declaring, “You have to try this. It is like crack cocaine.”
(I don’t think Alex’s dad has ever tried crack cocaine, but the way he talks about it, you’d think every drug addict in America should just run to Eataly for their next fix.)
After lunch, our parents herded us into the living room for a surprise. Alex sat to my left, fiddling with the packaging of the two cigars his parents had bought for the occasion, his mom batting his fingers away from the stack of cocktail napkins on the table. His mom handed me a pristinely wrapped stack of gifts- a series of travel guides for the areas near St Andrews, where I’d be heading in the fall. They were nice books, filled with hikes and shopping tips and glossaries of Scottish slang, all of which would probably have been quite helpful if once I arrived in Scotland I had ever left my dorm room (I didn’t) and stayed for longer than nine weeks (I didn’t).
After presents we went outside. Alex trimmed the cigars, lighting the first and puffing on it to get it started. His cheeks puffed out like a chipmunk; his eyes crossed slightly as he concentrated on the cherry. He handed it to me, and the end was wet from his mouth. I accepted it anyway, blowing plumes of smoke and pointedly ignoring my mother, who hovered over my shoulder, laughing nervously, and saying things like “wow honey, you must really like that thing. Isn’t that enough? Doesn’t that make you feel nauseous?” It didn’t.
There’s this great picture of my dad from the day he graduated from Andover, leaning down as his best friend’s grandma reaches up to light his cigar, his friend laughing in the background. He’s wearing khakis and a blazer, and all the girls are in white dresses. As a child I would flip through his photo albums, tracing my fingers across the raised lettering on the covers of his yearbooks. I have trouble looking at those pictures now, feeling only grief for what I thought my life would be.
As I sat there in Alex Horvat’s backyard, some of the tobacco leaves getting between my teeth, it was as though I could taste that same taste in the mouths of everyone I had ever known, as we all lost each other, scattered across 45 different states and 50 different countries. Our moment had passed. We had moved past each other, our lives rotting in dorm rooms, waiting to be packed away by strangers and delivered to their new homes. I couldn’t help but feel as though I had been left behind, crumpled under a couch or hidden away in a dresser drawer, the worst parts of me being shoved into boxes and loaded onto UPS trucks.
In July, sixteen boxes were delivered to my door, my Belle and Sebastian t-shirt nowhere to be found.