Later Bloom

Chapter One

Aubrey pockets her phone on her way up the steps to her old high school. She halts, for a second, at the bulky wooden doors that mark the entrance. It’s hard to rush past this sight without a linger, like when someone pulls out an album of your baby pictures.

She pointedly ignores the text that came in a minute earlier. She’ll make her choice later—for now, all she can muster is the strength to walk into this room of people she chose to assume she’d never see again.

She hates that she came, that she wouldn’t allow herself to miss this.

She inhales again. Boisterous cries erupt from the parking lot behind her as women slam their car doors and greet each other excitedly.

Aubrey’s phone buzzes again in the depth of her coat.

Another paragraph, probably, with arguments increasingly hard to refute.

She turns to grab the door’s intricate cast iron handle and heaves it with a grunt. When she was a teenager, it always sat open except in the harsher days of winter. Then she’d go in through another entrance, the one in the back through the yard.

The world shifts and transforms in Redfern’s entrance hall.

The air is dry and heavy with the scent of cedar, the light warm and very still, as if time moves a little slower in its glow.

The hall is smaller than Aubrey remembers, but most things are, at the height of grown-up eyes.

It might be the sea of people flooding the space, too, clutching champagne flutes they take dry little sips out of, resting delicate hands on each other’s arms in polite greeting.

“So the rain’s got worse, then,” someone says to Aubrey’s left, and when she turns the scarce air settles. The familiar smile that managed to convince her to leave the house greets her now—deep burgundy lipstick framing perfect, blinding white teeth.

Aubrey says, “I can’t see what you mean.” Her hair sticks to her temples.

“As promised.” Maggie, ever so sweet and drawn to whichever drink is closest, holds out a much too full glass of fizzy bubbles and hardly waits for Aubrey to take it before she points to an open classroom to their left. “Leave your coat in there, then join the rest of us, yeah?”

“Yeah,” Aubrey echoes. She knows it isn’t very convincing. But the rest of us is like biting into a lemon. Her smile lingers for a moment, though with an air of irony now, the kind that would make her mother tut in quiet complaint.

Maggie, incapable of standing still, vanishes in the hubbub of the crowd.

She’s so very pretty, as always. At the last second, Aubrey recognizes the swoop of her best friend’s old prom dress.

It’s a deep shade of red now, the colour a little dull from cheap dye, and the hemline has been altered to be shorter and less formal.

Still, it bears an air of memory. Aubrey could never have worn hers, even though she’d promised her mother she’d repurpose it after prom.

She shudders now at the thought of dragging the poofy, deep magenta gown out of her closet.

Three figures emerge behind Aubrey then, squealing as they shake off extra water from their umbrellas. Aubrey steps over to the improvised cloakroom. She used to eat lunch on her own here when everywhere else felt too crowded. How little things have changed.

The awful sets of combination desk and chair, which Aubrey had managed until now to wipe from her memory, are now piled high with rain jackets and dripping umbrellas.

Her trench joins the mix. Then she gulps down half of her drink and stuffs her phone in the bag hanging low off her shoulder.

When the screen lights up for a second, she pretends not to see the two unread messages begging for her attention.

“Oh, my god,” a high-pitched woman calls from behind her. Aubrey’s just turning on her heels when she hears, “Rose?”

Three pairs of wide doe eyes stare at her, quickly shifting to disappointment when they realize she is not, in fact, Rose.

“Afraid not,” Aubrey offers, hesitant between apologetic and pitifully sarcastic.

“Oh. Hey,” the woman on the left says tentatively. “Aubrey, yeah?”

“That’ll be it.” Her smile is so stiff she wonders if it’s permanently altering the configuration of her features.

She raises her glass in their direction as a sort of salute and says, “See you out there, ladies,” slipping past them with the polite nod she knows must be customary when encountering acquaintances for the first time in a decade.

It sounds so oddly formal. As if they hadn’t gone through the atrocities of puberty together, shared adjacent bathroom stalls through their first periods and heartbreaks and pretended not to hear any of it, between classes they remember nothing of anymore.

Chatter drowns Aubrey’s senses when she re-emerges in the hall.

A makeshift bar lines the left wall, behind which a visibly sweaty bartender drowns in blue raffle tickets.

On the opposite end of the hall, a sign invites guests to take pictures and share them on social media with the tag #RedfernHighReunion.

“Sorry, ’scuse me,” Aubrey weaves her way through dark blazers and tightly tailored dresses. The voices in her ears ring familiar, changed a little by the years but not enough.

She’s hesitant to study the faces around her.

Part of her itches to recognize them; the other hopes they all turn out to be strangers, invited by Maggie to fill the room and guarantee the night’s success.

It’s the sort of thing Maggie would do. She once invited her much younger sister’s friend group to her birthday party so it seemed like a bigger hit in photos.

Maggie was turning twenty-two. Her sister was sixteen.

“Aubrey!” Maggie chirps from a short distance ahead, her long, fire-truck red nails waving high over her head. Aubrey softens. Maybe she does know how to smile after all.

“Quite a turnout,” she offers, raising her flute in the air in congratulations.

“Well, you saw the event page! More people should be on the way still.”

“Good, yeah.” The fewer people there are, the better Aubrey fares. She doesn’t feel like reminding Maggie. “Great job with everything.”

Maggie leans in and says flatly, “It’s been a nightmare.”

Aubrey laughs against the edge of her glass. “You tried to gather two hundred people who haven’t seen each other in ten years in one place at the same time. I’d have been shocked if it did go well.”

“Mm. That’s not the worst of it.”

“Oh, isn’t it?”

Maggie takes a dramatic pause, breath held in and chin rising just a hair as she prepares for a very grave revelation. Then she says, slowly for impact, “Victor’s here.”

Usually, Aubrey would say, at his own high school reunion, really? but tonight it’s the wrong tone. Maggie is practically vibrating with nerves, and the glass she was previously drinking from has been empty so long it’s gone dry. So Aubrey offers, “Well that’s rancid.”

“Mm. No fuss about it, really. It’s been years. It’s just, well, I thought maybe he wouldn’t show up. Since I put the whole thing together and all.”

“Right. Maybe he thinks enough time’s passed by now. I mean, it’s been a while.”

On the walls around them, stately portraits of past principals and vice-principals watch on with a judging eye. Aubrey ignores them pointedly. To Maggie, she offers, “Who’s told you he’s here? Maybe you won’t even run into him.”

“Oh, I already have. He obviously looks incredible. Like he hasn’t had a carb in years.”

“Why are you surprised? Weren’t you checking his feed the past few years? Mags.” Aubrey tuts. “It’s like I don’t know you anymore.”

Maggie winces. “Ah, no, remember one of my exes made me block him everywhere? And then I figured it was one of those healthy habits I might as well keep up with. Like a gym membership, sticking with white wine.” She waves about her empty glass. “Do you need a refill at all?”

“I’ll come with.”

There’s no way Aubrey is leaving Maggie’s side.

The risk of standing there on her own and meeting the inquisitive eye of people who weren’t too interested in talking to her ten years earlier makes her sweat in places she didn’t dare slather on deodorant.

The dark silk of her dress sticks to her where it’s meant to hang loose.

Her hair is up in a bun that she tried too hard to make look effortless.

Crowds get her much too flustered for her hair to even graze the nape of her neck.

She makes herself small in Maggie’s shadow, trailing along with her eyes on the floor.

Though she insists, quietly to herself, that she doesn’t care, she clings on with curiosity to the bits of conversations that reach her ears—talk of new jobs, heinous bosses, how nice it is to get out of the house, isn’t it, away from the kids for a bit, and how much are you charging for your babysitter, by the way?

Someone is showing off a new ring, followed by gasps and congratulations, questions about the lucky fiancé, how it’s too bad he couldn’t make it tonight.

Maggie rolls her eyes at Aubrey. “Everyone’s been on my case for not allowing plus ones,” she says, an explanation to a question Aubrey didn’t even think to ask.

She clicks her tongue in disapproval. “Ignore them. No one else bothered putting this thing together in the first place.”

“Right.”

They stop at the bar and Maggie sets her empty glass on the counter with a commanding jut of her chin.

Bubbles fizzle and sparkle a nearly amber shade in the dim light.

The truth is, Aubrey is glad they weren’t allowed a plus one.

She much prefers it to the thought of standing by herself in a sea of tired new parents and fiancés and couples with hands on each other’s lower backs, asking her how come she didn’t bring anyone, and how things have been, and isn’t it so funny how this is a little like prom after all?