Photo via Flickr user Glenn Harper
Every year you go home for Thanksgiving, and every year you take the same cringe-inducing trip down memory lane. Here's your childhood bedroom where you used to masturbate and squirrel away weed. There's the bottom of the hill where you rear-ended that car when you were cruising around at 2 AM and afterward had to endure a whole weekend of lectures from your dad and soul-crushing silence from your mom. There's the guitar that was your combination Christmas and birthday present one year, another abandoned hobby that's now just a piece of furniture. And over there, on the same tattered couch the dog (RIP) tried to eat one time, are your parents, in whose mouths "How are things going with you?" is the beginning of a serious argument.
No wonder you want to peace the fuck out of all that and head to the local bar the night before Thanksgiving—even if that local bar is the same overlit Applebee's where you vomited into the aisle when you were eight. But then you realize everyone you went to high school with has had the same idea. All of a sudden the ghosts of your shitty teenaged hometown life are manifesting themselves before you like a drunken version of A Christmas Carol, only no one learns any lessons at the end. Here they are:
The Bro Who Wants to Brag
He was marked, you figured, for the sort of life that peaks in high school. That's how it's supposed to work, right? The good-looking, self-assured jocks get crowned at prom then denouement into being soft-around-the-middle car salesmen or janitors, while the ugly ducklings turn into Bill Gateses. But no, this guy has to buck the teen-movie script and go on coasting through life like a sports car hitting nothing but green lights. In college he'd monologue about his frat brothers, the tens he was banging, the rapper-endorsed booze he slammed. Now it's the same song but he's into his Apple Watch, marathon training, diets that force your body into ketosis, a job that vaguely involves meeting "clients" on the "coast." After all these years he's still 90 percent white teeth and shiny skin. He shows you his Apple Watch, his blood-pressure apps, a photo of a beach where the water is so clear it's practically invisible. He breaks his flow to put his hand on your shoulder like a camp counselor and asks how you are doing. Fuck him.
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The Girl Who Used to Hook Up with Your Brother
First she looks at you with a twinge of fear in her eyes, and you realize that's because she's probably remembering the time you caught her sneaking out of his basement room in post-coital shame. Then she puts her best ha ha we're all adults here smile and launches into a conversation about school and degrees and work before getting up the nerve to ask, extremely casually, if your "siblings" are home for Thanksgiving too.
The Happy Burnout
You only knew him because you went to a few sloppy, the-cops-are-definitely-gonna-get-called parties at his house, where his parents never seemed to be. But here he is with a full bowl's worth of life updates: Have you heard about his mixtape? Here, take one, they're usually $5 but he'll just give that one to you; it's called CannaBEST Vol. IV and he's working on Vol. V right now. Then there's his parole officer, who is on "some bullshit," which is why he can't drive right now. Long story. Then there's his dog, his vaporizer, and his girlfriend, photos of which he shows to you (in that order) on his phone. Then there's his phone, which he says he got hooked up for, like, $100 because he "knows a guy." Do you want his guy's number? You sure? The guy also deals in car stereos, certain high-end breeds of lizards—hell yeah, lizards, you ever been to the deep web? His guy's, like, the king of that shit.
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The Girl Who Pretends to Have Forgotten Everyone
There are a lot of ways to deal with the slings and arrows of high school, and one of the simplest is to just act like those years of your life never happened. Move to New York, get a drastic haircut, start going by your middle name, and don't friend anyone on Facebook aside from your fellow aspiring whatevers. She's clearly gone for this strategy in a big way—you can tell by her hair—and when you sidle up to her, three drinks in, to acknowledge that you know each other, she stares through you like you just asked for spare change.
The Former Party Girl Who Now Has Her Shit Together and Is Making You Feel Bad About Your Choices
It takes you a long time to place this woman, partly because by now you've had a solid number of Applebee's Fireball Whiskey Lemonades™ and partly because she talks like a human Facebook status. In the course of two minutes you hear about her stationery store, her daughter's first steps, her other daughter's admission into a gifted preschool, her church, her husband, her general sense of being #blessed. Then her name clicks into place—this is that girl? The one who snuck vodka in class, crushed and railed pills in the bathroom, and showed up for the first day of senior year with a neck brace from a 99 Bananas-related pool accident? It has to be her, yet here she is telling you about her dog, which has three legs and was rescued from a situation so abusive she is tearing up just describing it. Would you like to volunteer at the soup kitchen with her tomorrow morning? She's stopping by after her run but before putting the turkey in the oven. You need another drink, maybe hold the lemonade this time.
The Former Christian Youth Grouper Who Wants You to Know He Doesn't Believe in God Anymore
He firstly wants to apologize for inviting you to come "jam" with Pastor Jay. He is so so embarrassed by that, and also embarrassed he used to burn you dc Talk CDs, and just generally mortified about the way he "witnessed" all over the school. He knew that people were laughing at him and his lunchtime crew of like-minded Christians. They were right to laugh! he tells you. All that Jesus stuff was bullshit! He spills his drink a little and stumbles into a barstool, which he apologizes to and then sits down on. He wants to tell you he dropped all that stuff as soon as he dug into the freshmen intro to Western civ reading list. Do you know about Nietzsche? Christopher Hitchens? Richard Dawkins? Here he tries to say something about the evolution of the eyeball, how he used to think that such a complex adaptation needed to have been designed by God, but now, fuck evolution is just so complex man—he starts making extremely intricate but unclear hand gestures, and spills his drink again—it can, like, create one part for one thing and then that part does this completely different thing, and all of a sudden the fish is glowing in the dark. You know? You do not.
Photo via Flickr user Kelly Teague
The Woman You Worked at Arby's with Six Summers Ago
You thought of her as old back then but that was just because she talked about her kid a lot and had these really blotchy veins on her arms that you tried to stop yourself from staring at. But at the bar she looks, what, 37? Younger? Was she still in her 20s when she told you no one was allowed to smoke by the dumpsters but it was fine as long as Ron didn't catch you? Anyway, judging by the intensity with which she's slugging back vodka and diets and the way she's staring at the local news on mute, she's not here for any kind of impromptu reunion.
The People Who Got Hot
Teenagerdom doesn't suit everyone. Sometimes it's like you get handed a bunch of body parts at random and are expected to build yourself into a person with them: Here's hands that are too big, legs that are too skinny, and a pair of hands that won't do anything you want them to. Have fun out there in the big world! A lot of kids hit puberty and go, "OK I'm going to wallflower myself in the back of rooms and never open my mouth in front of an adult," and who can blame them? It's hard to figure out who you are, let alone how to dress that person correctly and how to stand around for more than 30 seconds without freaking out over the idea that everyone is watching you and judging. A lot of these teens end up taking a mulligan on these years, more or less, and go someplace away from their individual childhood traumas where they can sort themselves out.
Now here they are at the bar, the slouchy extras of your youth replaced by hip, clever people with interests and opinions on bands and lives that you gotta admit sound a little more interesting than your own, which lately has been, OK, a little bit crisis-heavy, with the car problems and the breakup and the thing where you wake up and check your phone to make sure you didn't send any ill-advised texts last night. And it might be the Fireball Whiskey Lemonades™ talking, but when is your prime gonna hit? When is it going to be your turn to be gorgeous and successful and a microbiologist or whatever Emma is, instead of thinking about asking your parents for help with the rent again, which is gonna lead to one of those conversations with your dad where he pauses for the shortest fraction of a second before sighing out an "OK" in that precise way that makes you just want to scream and scream and scream?
The Guy Who Sells Weed
Thank God.
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