The Reunion Bet She Lost

The invitation arrived in September, letter-size card stock with raised navy lettering, the kind of stationery that announced a person rather than an event. Ten years since we left Calder Ridge Prep. Cocktails at the Harborline Club, cocktails and nostalgia and the particular cruelty of adults pretending they had never been cruel. I almost threw it away. Not because I feared the people. Because I had spent five years teaching myself that they were weather, not climate. Blair Carlisle was weather. She blew through rooms and left damage and moved on. I had stopped keeping count of the damage somewhere around my junior year, when I finally understood that her cruelty had never been about me. It was about her needing an audience. But the invitation sat on my kitchen counter for three days, and on the third day I picked it up and traced my name. Elena Reyes. They had spelled it right for once. I called my sister. "You're actually considering it," Maria said. She was chopping onions; I could hear the knife against the board, steady and unbothered. "Elena, that woman made your life hell for four years." "She made my life interesting for four years," I said. "There's a difference." "There isn't." I laughed, because she was right and because laughing was easier than the alternative. "I looked her up. She's a partner at some boutique firm in the city. She's on the board of the prep school now. She's exactly where she was always going to be." "And you're a project lead at a company that builds clean water systems for rural counties. You qualify for triathlon nationals next spring. You weigh about forty pounds less than you did at graduation." Maria's knife paused. "You don't need this." "No," I said. "I don't." But I went anyway. That was the thing about me that Blair had never understood: I didn't go to prove anything to her. I went because I wanted to see the ocean, and because the Harborline Club had been a wall to me once, a place where other people's parents ate dinner, and I wanted to walk through the front door on my own invitation. The night of the reunion was cool and clear. I parked three blocks from the club and walked, because walking helped me think. I had chosen a black dress I bought for a work gala in the spring, nothing flashy, but it fit me the way things fit when you've stopped hiding. My hair was longer than it had been in high school. My shoulders were wider. I looked like a person who had worked for something. Blair saw me before I saw her. That was how it had always been. I was halfway across the room before I registered the sound of her laugh, that bright sharp laugh that had once made my stomach drop, and there she was, blonde and tall and dressed in white, holding court near the bar. She looked me up and down. I watched her do it, watched her eyes move from my face to my dress to my shoes, and I watched them come back up. "Elena," she said. "Wow." "Blair." "You look... different." She said it the way you'd say a house had been repainted. As though the change were cosmetic and possibly ill-advised. "Is that a size six?" "Eight," I said. "But thank you for asking." Her smile didn't move, but something behind it did. I had spent my whole adolescence learning to read that small shift, and I recognized it now: calculation. She was measuring me against the version of me she'd kept in her head, and the two figures didn't match. She turned back to her circle, which included two women I remembered and one I didn't, and I heard her say, in a voice pitched just loud enough to carry, "She was always creative with numbers." I got a drink. I found the quietest corner of the room and the one person I actually wanted to see, a woman named Priya who had sat next to me in AP Chemistry and who now ran a small bakery two towns over. We talked about her kids and my projects and the strange luck of ending up fine. For an hour, the reunion was just a reunion. And then someone said my name. I turned, and Blair was standing at the center of the room with a glass raised, and there was a small stack of bills on the bar behind her. "Since Elena's here," she said, "and we're all feeling nostalgic, I thought we'd bring back one of our traditions." She smiled at the room. "A little betting pool. Settle an old question." Priya's hand closed around my wrist. "The question being," Blair said, "how many pounds do you think she's lost? Ten? Twenty?" A pause, and the laugh again, lighter now, sweeter. "I'll put a hundred on fifteen. Who's in?" The room made a sound. Some of it was laughter. Some of it was the particular silence of people who want to laugh and don't want to be seen doing it. I stood there with my drink in my hand and felt, for one second, sixteen again, in a hallway, with the whole class watching. Then I looked at the money on the bar, and I looked at Blair, and I did the math I was good at. Eleven people in this room had already put money down. "This is a real pool," I said. "Cash on the bar." "Of course," Blair said. "We're adults now." "Then let me make it interesting." I set my glass down. "You want to bet on my body. Fine. But if I'm the subject, I should get to set the terms." The room went still in a different way. Blair's smile flickered, and I saw her make the decision to enjoy it, because backing down in front of an audience was not something she knew how to do. "Terms," she said. "Go ahead." "I'll match the pool," I said. "Every dollar on that bar, doubled, from me. But we don't bet on pounds. We bet on something you can actually verify." I took my phone out and set it on the bar beside the bills. "You and I have a race. Three miles, the Harborline loop, a week from Sunday. Anyone here who wants to bet on you, want to bet on me, they can. Winner takes the whole pot." Someone in the back said, "Oh, she's serious." Blair laughed, and this time it was real, bright and sharp and delighted. "You're on," she said. "But you know I ran cross-country, right?" "I know," I said. "I looked it up." That, more than anything else I had said, made her hesitate. One second, no more. Then she was Blair again, and she was picking up her phone and saying, "Everyone, put your money where your mouth is. I'll set up a group." I walked out of the Harborline Club an hour later with Priya beside me and the cold ocean air on my face. My heart was going the way it went at mile five, steady and loud, and I was not afraid. I had been afraid of Blair Carlisle for four years. I had spent the next ten making that fear obsolete. "It's a week," Priya said. "Are you trained for three miles?" "I'm trained for thirty," I said. "Three is a warm-up." She stopped on the sidewalk and looked at me. "You knew she'd do that." "I hoped," I said. "But I didn't plan it. I planned the rest." What I did not tell her, standing there under the streetlight, was what else I had set in motion three months earlier, when the first rumor reached me through a friend on the prep school's alumni council. Blair had found something. She had a document. And she had been showing it to people, the way she had once shown around my old diary, and telling them that the woman who now sat on the county water board had bought her seat. The race was a week away. I had a document too.