High School Time Machine

by Lupe Fernandez – Class of 1980

I attended a high school reunion in August. It’s been thirty-one years since I graduated from Sunset High. Stepping into the Crow Canyon Country Club in San Ramon, I felt transported through time. In an instant, the goofy kid became the responsible, pillar of the community adult, the flighty social butterfly became a stern mother of three, and the student voted mostly like to succeed is dead.

My idea of fun at a reunion was asking questions such as

“Did you like high school?”

“Did you have to fend off unwanted advances from boys?”

“Can you tell me about that traumatic experience of being taunted?”

Other alumni were drinking, talking and dancing.

I thought about the teenage life I didn’t live. I thought of a different story. What if I had an affair with a teacher and fell in love? What if I married a high school sweet-heart and she got pregnant with somebody’s baby? What if I asked the popular girl out for a date and she said yes? What if I tried to burn down the gym and never got caught? What if I adopted the slacker life style and fought with my parents about college? What if I became a literary sensation and couldn’t handle the fame? What if I had gone drinking on overnight school trip and committed a crime?

What if I saved the school from some horrible disaster of my own making? What if I joined a cult? (Joining a cult was a big fear in my teen days.)

All these possibilies. Lives unlived. I was a well-behaved, bored, shy, sarcastic kid whose regrets have regrets.

In those days, Warsaw Pact Forces occupied Eastern Europe, ready to jump off into Germany. Iran held American Embassy personnel hostage. A disease emerged – today known as AIDS - with causation unknown, treatment non-existent and death guaranteed.

What if World War III broke out and my school survived? What if someone I knew was a hostage at the American Embassy and I hated my fellow Iranian students? What if I caught the mysterious disease and developed immunity?

I’m grateful to have avoided those scenarios.

I can’t go back in time and revise my past. Writing stories that take place in high school, during those uncertain years of out-of-fashion smells, ill-fitting conversations and awkward clothes, allow me a small measure of instant replay to satisfy romantic wishes or fashion an exciting life.

I’ll never know why that one girl dumped me after a week of going steady, so I’ll have to make something up and live with it.

What if…