Darlene Hamilton was gaunt and pale, with dark circles under her watery eyes, at our twenty-year high-school reunion in 2003. She had all her hair, or I would have wondered if she was in fact battling cancer. We never chatted about her health. After a moment's catching up with me, she leaned forward and said solemnly:

"You were so sweet, I feel so bad for what we put you through in school."

I was pulled a few ways by that unexpected remark. On the one hand, I was still taking in Darlene's sickly appearance. I had to check the urge to set down my drink, put an arm around her shoulders, and walk her to the nearest chair. On the other hand, I was digesting what she'd said.

Andy Warhol ingeniously declared that everyone is famous for fifteen minutes. He was referring to a democratic and impersonal culture of acclaim, in the pop milieu. Darlene, at my reunion, was recalling a socially very rough patch for me, in grades six through eight, when I'd been "unpopular," when I'd been ritually despised by peers. I'd had no friends or supporters at all. To this day, I can recall being in sixth grade on a typical day and sitting on a school bus, and a big boy I faintly knew rapping on the window to get my attention. When I looked, his grimy middle finger was in my face. The mean boy wasn't an aberration, this kind of horror lurked everywhere for me. I can recall the seventh grade when Gwen, a new girl, asked me with real concern in her voice, "Why does everyone hate you so much?" after witnessing a spitting incident in the hall. I wasn't sure of the origins of the peer sentiment, but as fame perpetuates itself, so did the hostile climate I found myself in. My notoriety during those years was a personal mirror image of Warhol's "fifteen minutes."

My high school experience, which would constitute Darlene's most recent memory of me, was really pretty bland by comparison. Few people went out of their way to give me a hard time by then. I still ate lunch alone a good bit, but at least I enjoyed social anonymity; by then, others were much lower in our peers' esteem than I was. It seemed my "fifteen minutes," which had dragged on a full three years, were finally up.

If she'd looked hale, I suppose I would have experienced Darlene's apology as a dig--nothing more than her collusion with the old bully dynamic, lording my "difference" over me. Because she looked so wan, I thought Darlene's acknowledgement to me might in fact have had have filled a personal need for reckoning. I imbued her remark with a kind of solemnity, but I set it aside.

In all the evening of my reunion banquet, in all the socializing I did, Darlene was the only one to raise the matter of my pariah status in grades six through eight. I believe Darlene was the only one, besides me, who thought about it. Others might have observed my early experiences, but kept them in mind only neutrally, as they would remember about where it was I'd lived in high school, or what my hair had looked like back then--short or long? In their eyes, there was no lasting stigma in anything I'd undergone. In my own mind, a cloud still hung.

I had attended the reunion to reconnect with people I had not seen in decades. I expected the occasion to be light and sociable, with darker undercurrents. I had old hurts not yet completely healed. I still remembered the way I'd been treated, and it still felt significant. Not only could I not yet laugh about peer abuse in my early teens, I had the vague sense there was more to work out. Without yet knowing how to bring about completion or closure, or whom else my efforts were to involve, I wanted to use the reunion to "stare down the past."

The day after the banquet was a beach picnic, organized by my old classmate Deb Henry, her husband and children in tow.

Bubbly and organized, quick to hug, Deb had certainly had problems of her own in high school. She and I had been friends a while, but she assured other people by the end of ninth grade that she found me "boring." I was clearly nobody she wanted to be seen with.

In our senior year, it had been Deb's misfortune to offend Sheila Perleone, the yearbook editor. I'm not certain how she accomplished this. But Sheila included a personal, and most unflattering, edit of Deb's senior quote, from a Carole King lyric, in our class's senior yearbook. I have that yearbook on my shelf to this day. I have the adulterated Carole King verse. Nobody has seen or heard from Sheila Perleone in years, and I think it's because she was mortified at the durable reminder of her juvenile pettiness.

"Was Sheila Perleone able to make it?" I mischievously asked Deb at the beach gathering, feigning off-handedness. "Did you talk to her at all?"

Deb's face darkened ever so slightly.

"I tried to reach Sheila at the latest phone number we have for her," she said, "It was disconnected."

Maybe she was telling the truth. My mischievousness evaporated into an unexpected rush of sympathy; I secretly hoped Deb had been able to bring herself to make the contact.

It was then I saw a youngster of about ten running around in the sand, wearing a football jersey lettered with a name I had not seen in years: 'TARNES.' I froze.

Dave Tarnes was here. Now he had a kid. Dave Tarnes had ruined my eighth grade.

Tarnes and I had ignored each other as late as high school. In junior high, Tarnes had been a popular boy where I was a despised girl. In spring of 1979, precisely as I was becoming less awkward and making more friends, Tarnes subjected me to peer abuse at about its most malicious and predatory, apparently, because he could. There would be no official consequences for what he did.

During this term I caught word of an "eighth-grade ditch day." I thought this might be something the school administrators had planned for the kids, when in fact it was a caper the kids had planned to flout authorities. I naively asked the vice principal about "ditch day" in the lunchroom. Unfortunately, I asked the question in Tarnes' earshot. Over the next day or two, Tarnes launched an energetic smear campaign, in which I was cast as a "narc," or "tattle-tale."

What was really devastating--the harm I've actually spent part of my adult life undoing--was humiliation over ignominy attached to my name during those years, through no fault of my character, and through nothing substantive I'd done.

"Children who experience harshness and abuse at home, with the sense they can't escape it, often find themselves scapegoated in other settings," said a kindly therapist I saw in my twenties.

My own early social cluelessness--not knowing it wasn't a good idea to approach a school official indiscreetly about other kids' behavior--had come from a deep sense of helplessness. Because of my experience at home, I'd believed unshakably that I was going to be in trouble--no matter what I did. I hadn't known how to protect myself.

None of it was not your fault, any more than some dread disease would have been.

I made my way slowly up the sand-dune towards Dave Tarnes' silhouette. I heard his booming exchange of greetings with old classmates. I saw his glad-handing and high-fiving. I stood there, watching him from feet away, I don't know how long.

I wish I could say I approached him then. I'd have struck up a conversation, to have laid matters between us to rest. After initial pleasantries, it would have gone like this:

"Dave, do you remember our eighth-grade year?"

"I remember Mrs. Haines for social studies--all year. You were there, too."

"What else do you remember--what do you remember about me that year, Dave?"

"Uh, well. You weren't too happy. You didn't have a lot of friends, as I recall."

"What else do you remember about me, Dave? What do you remember about the dynamic between the two of us?"

"Is this a game of twenty questions?"

"I'll help you. My strongest memory of you is what happened after the eighth-grade ditch-day plan was floated among the kids. You maliciously told everyone I had warned the vice principal about it. That rumor you started did some serious damage to me. Do you recall?"

"Oh, shit. That? You remembered that after all this time?"

"Evidently, you did too. The weeks and months after you spread that rumor were really hard on me, and the whole thing caused lasting fallout in my life."

"Well, uh. I was an asshole in those days. I was pretty immature, is all I can say."

"What are you trying to tell me, Dave?"

"Uh, I..."

"What's there to say? What's the right thing to say to me?"

"I am really sorry for the pain I caused you."

"Thank you, Dave, that's what I was hoping to hear."

In the imaginary encounter, I approached Tarnes, rather than the other way around, because his broach of the topic would have felt to me like pity. You pity a victim; you acknowledge a comrade.

I never did get the chance to shake Tarnes down for an apology. But as I was making my way towards him, a number of former classmates approached me and exchanged pleasantries. I was even taken by surprise, caught from behind and from both sides in a "sandwich hug," by Ed Davis and Tim Belden. Before I recognized Tim, he had kissed my cheek. I turned, and we greeted each other.

Tim had been one of Dave Tarnes' inner circle, back in the day. I remembered him as one of my tormentors, but now his hair was graying and he had wrinkles around his eyes.
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