Then there was graduation, which was anticlimactic in the way of any ceremony. My family stayed at the Raymond TraveLodge, the same place my parents had stayed in the fall of my junior year, and the first thing they told me when we met in the school parking lot on Saturday night before walking over to Mr. Byden’s house for dinner was that right after they’d checked in, Tim had taken such a huge shit that he’d clogged the toilet and they’d had to switch rooms because it was overflowing. “He’s six!” Joseph was shouting. “How can a six-year-old take a dump that size?” Tim, meanwhile, was blushing and smiling as if he had accomplished something great that modesty prevented him from acknowledging directly. At first, my father ignored me, but everything was so hectic that ignoring me was impractical; he downgraded his anger to talking to me curtly. On Sunday, at the graduation itself, Mr. Byden shook my hand in an entirely neutral way (Joseph told me our father had threatened to confront Mr. Byden and somehow I’d known he wouldn’t). My parents and brothers sat with Martha’s parents and brother at the ceremony-at last, my mother’s wish to meet Mr. and Mrs. Porter was realized-and my family left that afternoon, the trunk of the car weighted down with all the possessions I’d accumulated in the last four years.

For graduation, Tim gave me a pair of socks with watermelons on them (“He chose them himself,” my mother whispered), Joseph gave me a mix tape, and my parents gave me a hundred dollars in cash, which I spent helping buy gas for the people from whom I got rides during senior week-Dede a few times, and Norie Cleehan and Martha’s boyfriend Colby. The last party was in Keene, New Hampshire, and Colby drove down from Burlington to get us and then kept driving south to drop me off at Logan Airport before they returned together to Vermont. Hugging them both-I had never hugged Colby, and I never saw him again after that-and pulling the suitcases from the trunk and checking that I hadn’t left my plane ticket wedged in the back seat, I felt desperate for them to leave and for it all to be done with; I just wanted to be alone. And then they drove away, and I was. I was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, and both the airport terminal and then the airplane itself were frigidly air-conditioned. Flying to South Bend, I was freezing, and exhausted from drinking a lot and sleeping not that much over the course of the last week, from saying good-bye to so many people, from the friendliness-in the end, only a few classmates had been conspicuously unfriendly to me that week. After the plane landed and I walked through the terminal and collected my luggage and went out to the curb, where my mother and Tim were waiting, the air was a hot thick blast, and Ault was absolutely behind me. I had no reason to ever go back, no real reason-from now on, it was all optional.

Of course, I did go back, for both my fifth and tenth reunions. Do you want to know how everyone turned out? They turned out like this: Dede is a lawyer in New York, and I get the idea, though she’s grown more modest with age, that she’s very successful. The summer after we were sophomores in college, I received a card in the mail with a Scarsdale return address. On the front of the card was a picture of Dede in an over-the-top college coed outfit-a pleated skirt, an argyle sweater-vest over a button-down shirt, wire-framed glasses, and a stack of books in her arms-and under the picture, it said, The problem with a Know It All… and inside, when you opened the card, it said… is that she thinks she Nose everything. Below that, it said, Yes, I have finally done it! My nose job was completed at 4:37 p.m. on June 19. Fewer pounds, fewer ounces. The most welcome arrival of my life! After that, I always liked Dede, I liked her unequivocally, as I never had at Ault. I see her now when I go to New York, we have dinner and talk about men. She makes me laugh, and I don’t know if it’s that she’s funnier or if I just wasn’t willing to see, at Ault, how funny she was.

Like Dede, Aspeth Montgomery lives in New York, and she owns an interior design boutique, which always disappoints me a little to think about-it just seems so insignificant. I was right about Darden (he’s also a lawyer), who became an Ault trustee at the age of twenty-eight. Sin-Jun, of course, lives with her girlfriend in Seattle and is a neurobiologist. Amy Dennaker, whom I never lived with after freshman year in Broussard’s, is a conservative pundit; I don’t usually watch those Sunday morning political shows, but sometimes when I do, if I’m in a hotel, I see her arguing in a business suit, and she always seems to be enjoying herself. I heard that Ms. Prosek and her cute husband got divorced a few years after I graduated. I hope that it was she who left him, or at least that it was mutual; basically, I just don’t want him to have left her. She no longer teaches at Ault, and I’m not sure where she’s gone. Meanwhile, Rufina Sanchez and Nick Chafee are married; they married two years after she graduated from Dartmouth and he graduated from Duke. In equal measures, this sounds suffocating to me-high school sweethearts and all that-and I envy it; I think it must be nice to end up with someone who knows what you were like when you were a teenager.

I haven’t seen Cross since we graduated because during our fifth reunion, he was living in Hong Kong, working for an American brokerage firm, and then he was planning to come to our tenth reunion-he lives in Boston now-but his wife went into labor the night before. Recently, Martha and her husband, who also live in Boston, met Cross and his wife for dinner, and Martha called me afterward and left a message saying, “He keeps golf clubs in his trunk. I’m not sure why I’m telling you this, but it seems like the kind of thing you’d appreciate.” I know what Cross looks like now, because there was a picture from his wedding in The Ault Quarterly. He’s balding, and he has a handsome face, but it’s handsome in a different way. Because I knew it was him in the photo, I could discern his earlier features, but if we’d passed on the street, I’m not certain I’d have recognized him. His wife’s name is Elizabeth Fairfield-Sugarman.

Martha is an assistant professor of classics, tenure-track. I was the maid of honor in her wedding, but the truth is that we talk about twice a year and see each other less than that.

And as for me: Cross had been wrong, and I didn’t particularly like college, at least for the first few years-it seemed so vast and watered-down. But then as a junior I ended up getting an apartment with another girl and two guys, though I knew only the girl ahead of time and knew her only a little. One of the guys wasn’t around much, but the other one-Mark, who was a senior-and the girl, Karen, and I made dinner together most nights, and watched television afterward. Upon moving in with them, I thought at first that they were both kind of LMC, but somewhere along the way, I forgot that I thought this. I learned to cook from Mark, and that summer, a few weeks before he moved out, he and I became involved; he ended up being the second person I ever kissed, the second person I had sex with. (Once, I had imagined that the first boy you were involved with was your initiation, that after him the switch had been flicked and you dated continuously, but, at least in my own case, I had been wrong.) After the first time Mark and I kissed, I was talking to Karen about it-I didn’t know for sure if I liked Mark-and I brought up Cross. I was planning to say he was someone I had been certain about, but before I could, Karen said, “Wait a second. The guy you dated in high school was named Cross Sugarman?” She began to laugh. “What kind of person is named Cross Sugarman?”

I actually didn’t-I don’t-particularly like talking about Ault. I don’t even really like reading the quarterly, though I always at least page through it. But if I give it real attention, my mood plummets; I remember my life there, all the people and the way I felt. In college, or after, in the course of ordinary conversation, someone might say, “Oh, you went to boarding school?” and I’d feel my heart thickening with the need to explain what the person did not truly care about. By my sophomore year at Michigan, if the subject arose, I would make only the most superficial remarks. It was okay. It was hard. I was lucky to go. These conversations were a lake I was riding across, and as long as we didn’t dwell on the subject, or as long as I didn’t think the person would understand anyway, even if I tried to explain, I could remain on the surface. But sometimes, if I talked for too long, I’d be yanked beneath, into cold and weedy water. Down there, I could not see or breathe; I was dragged backward, and it wasn’t even the submersion that was the worst part, it was that I had to come up again. My present world was always, in its mildness, a little disappointing. I’ve never since Ault been in a place where everyone wants the same things; minus a universal currency, it’s not always clear to me what I myself want. And anyway, no one’s watching to see whether or not you get what you’re after-if at Ault I’d felt mostly unnoticed, I’d also, at certain moments, felt scrutinized. After Ault, I was unaccounted for.