The Name Tag at Our Class Reunion

The name tags were laid out on a folding table just inside the gym doors, alphabetical, in neat rows on a blue plastic tablecloth. Somebody had written each one by hand in black marker, in careful block letters.

Mine was near the end of the H row. TAMMY HELLER, it said. And under my name, in the same careful letters, it said DID NOT GRADUATE.

Every other tag on that table said CLASS OF ’96 under the name. I checked. I stood there with my purse on my shoulder and my receipt in my hand, and I read every single one from Abbott to Zimmer.

There were forty people in line behind me. I could hear the DJ testing his speakers inside, a thump and a squeal and then Bon Jovi, too loud, then turned down.

“Did you find yours, hon?” the woman at the table asked. It was Lori Bauer, who sat behind me in typing class. She had gone gray in a pretty way, and she was smiling at me like she meant it.

“I found it,” I said.

She looked down at what I was holding, and her smile went somewhere else. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, Tammy. Heather did those. I didn’t know she did that.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “It’s true.”

That was the thing. It was true. I did not graduate from Pruett High School with the class of 1996. I left in the spring of my junior year, seventeen years old and five months along, and I never walked back through those doors as a student again.

The girl who left

I want to tell this plainly, because I have spent thirty years learning to tell it plainly.

I was a good student. Not the best, but good. I liked English and I liked typing and I liked the way Mrs. Moss read poems out loud like she was telling you a secret. I had a boyfriend named Mike Heller who was two years older and already working at his uncle’s garage on Route 6.

In February of 1995 I found out I was pregnant. In March, when I started to show, the vice principal called my mother in and suggested it might be “easier for everyone” if I finished the year at home. That was how they did it then, in a town like ours. Nobody said you had to leave. They just made it clear you weren’t wanted.

My mother cried in the car. My father didn’t speak to me for two weeks. Then one night he came out to the back porch where I was sitting and said, “Well. That baby’s going to need a crib,” and he went out to the shed and started building one.

Mike asked my father for permission to marry me before he asked me. My father said yes, and then said, “You’ll finish school, though,” and Mike said, “Yes sir, she will.” I married him in June at St. Paul’s Lutheran with my dress let out at the waist.

Brooke was born that September. Seven pounds even, with a full head of dark hair and a voice that could strip paint.

I meant to go back. Everybody means to go back. But there was a baby, and a little rented house on Spring Street, and Mike working sixty hours a week, and the fall turned into winter and the winter turned into another year.