He wore a name badge like the rest of us. Easton University, Class of 1995. The same blue border, the same insignia that always looked to me like the Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz crashing through a crusader’s shield. Like everyone else, his name was printed in bold 16-point font. ELMAR W GRAY. He would probably spend much of the next four days insisting it was not a typo, that his name was spelled with an -ar, not an -er, much like he might have done while a student at Easton.
I don’t recall any of my Easton buddies, who had agreed that this was the year we’d attend Reunion, inviting Elmar to hang out with us. At the Day 1 welcome reception, he was just there, smiling and hugging us and asking how long it had been, the afternoon sun streaming across his tanned forehead. I remembered him, or a slimmer, full-head-of-haired version of him, from our first year, one of the poker nomads who wandered Laney Hall after 11:00 p.m. in search of free pizza and a card game. My former roommate Dan, who spent more time that year playing poker than attending class or studying, always welcomed them, no matter how late, and they would go at it until someone got tired of losing and called it a night. (Fortunately, I had the inside bedroom and trained myself to sleep through these sessions.) My only other recollection of Elmar was that he was in my American Social History class in sophomore year, only because he once asked me for my lecture notes.
He and Dan were from the same hometown, more or less. Dan had grown up in San Mateo, a somewhat affluent suburb of San Francisco. Elmar was raised in the city’s Excelsior district, a blue-collar haven with more pick-up trucks per capita than any other part of San Francisco. They hadn’t known each other before Easton, and though Dan seemed happy to see him, I didn’t get the impression from Elmar’s basic questions (any kids?) that they had kept in touch much. Jalen and Ross, my other two buddies, nodded, smiled, and pretended to remember him.
“Yeah, Ross,” Elmar said. “You were in my history class.”
“Oh, yeah, I remember, yeah,” Ross said, before I could say anything. Ross never took any course that didn’t have the word Science in it.
“You come to the last reunion?” Elmar asked, to no one in particular.
The three of us looked at each other. Before we made plans to attend this reunion, we had all joked over e-mail about what shitty alumni we were. None of us had attended any of the previous four reunions, and none of us had given a dime to Easton since graduation except maybe Jalen, who thought he might have donated fifty dollars last year.
“We all decided to wait until the twenty-fifth,” I said. “We figured we’d better do it before we start — you know …”
Nothing killed a conversation among men in their late forties like a hint of death.
“I’ve been to everyone,” Elmar said, holding up his badge like it had a gold attendance star on it. “Five, ten, fifteen, twenty.”
“He must have been a math major,” I whispered to Jalen.
He elbowed me in the ribs. “Behave,” he said.
When we were students at Easton, Jalen was always telling me to behave. One night during our junior year, we were at a party drinking too much, and Jalen decided it was the perfect time to tell me what was wrong with me. “You find fault with everything and everybody,” he said.
“You mean like how you’re finding fault with me right now?”
“Here you are at one of the most prestigious universities in the world,” Jaen said, “and you sabotage it for yourself.”
“Sabotage? How so?”
“Instead of enjoying it,” he said, “you make yourself act like the campus dick.”
I’d never considered my biting criticisms of students and professors as bad, just honest. I was a blue-collar local kid who had probably been let into Easton because they had fallen short on public school admits that year. So I never took Easton too seriously. Jalen, on the other hand, was the son of the dean of the medical school at another East Coast university and the first Black female state supreme court justice. With that kind of pedigree, he had nothing to prove to anyone. I always told him so.
“Right, except when I do,” he said. “I’m always proving myself.”
“My point exactly. They’re all assholes for treating you that way.”
“Behave,” he said.
Dan’s wife, Sarah, and Jalen’s wife, Chris, had returned to the hotel to rest. Ross and Amy had recently divorced, so Ross was solo for the weekend like me. I had decided to leave my partner Bill home and spare him the indignities of being a Reunion spouse. He hated that sort of thing.
Elmar asked me if I had any children.
“No. You?”
“Three daughters,” he said. “All three are nurses.”
“Is your wife with you?” I said. Not that I cared. I was trying to be polite for a change.
“She’s been ill,” Elmar said. “She’s staying with my oldest.” Then he looked behind me, and his eyes lit up. Sterling Hard, our class treasurer, had arrived.
“Hardee!” Elmar yelled and walked away, his arms extended, smiling.
“I guess he’s done with me,” I told Dan.
Dan put his arm around me and pulled me into his warm shoulder. “He’ll be back,” he said. “He always comes back.”
***
That evening, I arrived at dinner before the others and scouted out an empty table. Ross joined me a few minutes later with an oversized vodka tonic in his fist. I noticed his left pinky was missing.
“What the fuck happened?”
“Had a little run-in with a pickaxe on a glacier climb,” he said. “Years ago.”
“How come I never heard about it?”
“If you’d sliced off one of your fingers, would you want to talk about it?”
He had a point. I tilted the backs of four chairs against the edge of the table to save seats for Dan and Jalen when I saw Elmar walking over.
“Christ,” I said. “We have company.”
“Don’t be rude,” Ross said. “He’s harmless.”
Elmar lowered one of the chairs and sat next to me. “I wanted to show you something,” he said, taking a folded paper from his back pocket. “It’s a poem I wrote.”
I looked at the neatly printed words on the page.
Bright Easton years of old.
They’re worth their weight in gold.
I bit my lip.
“I write one every year for Reunion,” he said. “I talked to Sterling about publishing them in the reunion program, but it’s too late.”
I read on:
Remembering life’s lessons we all learned
As the torches of knowledge brightly burned.
Remembering the secrets to success
As we pursued our dreams of happiness.
I smiled and handed the paper back to Elmar.
“What did you say you did for a living?” I said.
(Elbow. Behave.)
“Retired Air Force General. But I always dreamed of becoming a writer.”
Dan and Sarah arrived, both wearing black. “Jalen and Chris will be late,” Dan said, looking at the three remaining chairs.
“Amy had a pair of earrings like Sarah’s,” Ross told me. I hadn’t noticed Sarah’s mosaic-patterned butterfly earrings, pink and blue, buried beneath her full platinum hair. For a moment, I thought I was staring into a museum.
“I got them for her for her birthday,” Ross added. Then suddenly, his face twisted, and he started to cry.
“Ross, Jesus … what’s wrong?” I touched his left shoulder as he wiped his eyes with his right sleeve.
“I just wish Amy were here,” he said. “She loves – I mean, used to love – this kind of thing. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” Suddenly, I wished Bill were here.
“I get allergies, too,” Elmar said to Ross. Then he stood up. “Hey, there’s Sterling’s wife, Amelia.”
I leaned forward and tilted the chair onto the table, hoping Jalen and Chris would arrive before Elmar returned.
“You don’t like him, do you?” Dan said.
“Like him?” I said. “I don’t know him.”
“You know his story, right?”
“He comes with a story? What a shocker,” I said.
“He left school after sophomore year,” Dan explained. “He never came back.”
“You mean he didn’t graduate?”
“Not from Easton. Maybe from somewhere else, but not Easton.”
Sarah leaned into the conversation. “So what is he doing here?”
Dan shrugged. “He says he comes to every reunion.”
I looked down at my nametag. DAVID R LO BIANCO. Easton University, Class of 1995. The same blue border, the same Cowardly Lion as Elmar’s.
Only I had earned mine. I had put in my four years, tough as it was, and graduated. I had always felt out of place, despite my friends, the working class kid who’d managed to slip in the back door, waiting for the prep school students with their 1600 SAT scores and shiny AP credits to out gun me in class. But I had seen it through.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “How does he get to attend reunions if he —” I lowered my voice. “If he never graduated?”
“You think it’s that hard?” Dan said.
“Well, for starters, don’t you have to be invited?”
Dan laughed. “You remember that pic I posted on Facebook two years ago? The one of Sarah and me at the 75th-anniversary celebration of RCA Records in New York?”
“Sure.” I didn’t, really.
“Mother fucker of a party. A real celebrity bash. Even Hall and Oates were invited.” Dan paused. “But we weren’t.” He nearly giggled.
“That was different,” Sarah said, her face twitching slightly.
“No, it wasn’t,” Dan said.
“So how did you get in?” Ross asked. His eyes were red, but at least he had stopped crying.
“Long story short, we just acted like we were invited. Looked the part, dressed the part, practiced saying, ‘There must be some mistake.’ It’s not hard.”
“Maybe he gives a lot of money to Easton,” Ross said. “I mean, technically, he was in our class. So he’s probably on some alumni donor list.”
“Still, I think we should report him,” Sarah said. “Isn’t there some alumni official we could speak with?”
Just then, Jalen arrived — sans Chris. “She’s not feeling well,” he said. “It might have been the flight.” Jalen sat next to Sarah and pulled the empty chair upright.
“For Chrissake, get rid of that chair!” I said. Everyone was looking at me but not saying anything. They must have thought I had some beef with Elmar. I decided to let the moment pass.
“I still think we should call someone,” Sarah said, breaking the silence.
It was the last time Elmar was mentioned that night. I knew there would be more tomorrow.
***
The next morning, the four of us met at the gym early. Dan was dressed in black again, this time in a snug DriFit shirt and shorts. Ross had on a blue sweatshirt and gray sweatpants. Jalen wore a yellow tank top and white capris. I recycled the white t-shirt I had worn to bed and my camo beachcombers. We didn’t match, but then again, we never really had. That was why we’d stayed friends for so long.
Jalen and I headed for the bench press.
“Chris feeling better?”
“A little,” Jalen said. “She didn’t really want to come to the reunion.”
“I guess it’s hard if it’s not your reunion. Everyone is a stranger.”
“It’s not that,” Jalen said. “She doesn’t like Easton. Or I should say, what Easton stands for.”
“Which is?”
“Privilege, exclusion, entitlement.”
“Some people feel that way.”
Jalen finished his set and sat up. “Well, she feels particularly strong about it in my case.”
“Why? You worked harder than any of us. You had the straight A’s to show for it.”
“But I only got in because my mom went here.”
“So? Haven’t legacy applications always gotten a second read?”
Jalen’s face became tense. “It’s more than that. I had a train wreck of a senior year in high school. I barely graduated, yet somehow I was able to get into Easton University.”
“You never told me that,” I said.
“I never told anyone that. Even my parents and I never talk about it.”
“Are you two going to hog that bench all morning?” Dan said, flexing his biceps. Then he noticed the forlorn expression on Jalen’s face. “What did you say to him?” he asked me.
“Nothing, I swear.”
“Oh, fuck it,” Jalen said. “I just confessed to Davey that the only reason I’m here at our twenty-fifth reunion is because my mother cut a big check to Easton.”
“You left out that part,’ I said.
“So the fuck what?” Dan said. “You guys remember that story the Easton Daily leaked about fifty students in our freshman class being admitted because of a clerical error?”
“Sure,” I said. I didn’t, really.
“Right,” said Ross. “And the admissions director decided to let them attend because they were afraid of the bad press.”
“So?”
Dan raised his hand. “I was one of them.”
I laughed.
“Don’t act so smart, local quota boy,” Dan said, pointing his finger at my chest. He had nice arms, tanned and veiny.
“Hey, I never hid that fact,” I said.
“That’s amazing, though,” Ross said. “You were one of the Undeserving Fifty.”
“You know what?” Dan said, adding two twenty-five-pound plates to the barbell. “By senior year, about twenty of us knew about each other. We had a little secret society.”
“You’re lying,” I said. Dan could always pull off a joke with a straight face.
“I am not,” Dan said.
“But how did you all know?” Jalen said.
“We just knew. I remember everyone was dumbfounded when that story came out. You’d see some guy at the library with three books open, shaking his head and looking like he was about to cry. And you’d think, I wonder if he’s one of them. Then someone would tell a friend about how their roommate got into Easton with a B average and 950 SATs, and they’d tell someone else, and so on. So yeah, we never officially knew. But we knew.”
“Anyone else we know?” I asked. I was secretly hoping he would say Elmar.
Dan smiled. “Does the name Sterling Hard ring any bells?”
I wasn’t convinced Dan was serious.
“I wonder what happened to the other thirty,” I said.
“They probably flunked out,” Dan answered. Then he turned to Ross. “Okay, pal. We’ve now established we have a card-carrying member of the Undeserving Fifty, a donation-bribing legacy charity case, and a local-boy-makes-good admit with a cool-sounding Italian American surname. What’s your story?”
Ross stared at us. “Uh . . . Bronx Science valedictorian and National Merit Scholarship finalist?”
Dan scratched his chin like he was considering the veracity of his answer. Jalen and I looked at each other and simultaneously raised our eyebrows.
“Wait,” Jalen said. “I thought you went to Stuyvesant?”
“No, Amy did,” I whispered.
And Ross started to cry again.
***
That afternoon, I waited in the lobby waiting to walk over to the art gallery tour with Ross. I would have preferred to enjoy a cool and sunny June afternoon, but Ross was into doing Reunion stuff. He’d already done the nature hike and visited the new campus bookstore, neither of which had interested me. I guessed it was his way of taking his mind off Amy.
The elevator door opened, and five Reunion attendees walked out. The last one was Elmar. I lowered my head and pretended not to see him.
“Hey, good news,” he said. He had his stack of poems in his hand.
I didn’t need to ask him what.
“Sterling wants his friend Adam to look at my poems,” he said. “Set them to music. Not for this time, but maybe for our thirtieth.”
The thought of having Elmar’s attempts at verse being performed made me decide I wasn’t going to the next reunion.
“That’s wonderful, Elmar.” My insincerity suddenly caught up with me. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Dan told me you never finished at Easton. So why does this place mean so much to you?”
Immediately I felt like an asshole and wished Jalen had been here to punch my arm before I’d opened my mouth. I expected Elmar to act insulted or angry, but he grinned at me instead.
“You ever go on a long trip, like a two-week vacation?”
“Sure,” I said.
“As many sights as you’ve seen, as many nice dinners you’ve eaten, as much money as you’ve spent, you’re still a visitor. And the best part of the vacation is when you come home and get to sleep in your own bed.”
I knew exactly what Elmar meant. Every summer, Bill dragged me to the latest hot tourist destination, and I counted the days until we flew home.
“That’s what Easton always was to me,” Elmar said. “As many places as I’ve lived, it’s the one place in my life where I felt I belonged.”
Adam should set those words to music.
“So why did you leave?” I had to ask.
Elmar looked down at his poems. “Long story,” he said, a story he apparently had no plans to share with me.
“But doesn’t it feel … weird?”
Elmar smiled. “Weird? No. How can it feel weird to sleep in your own bed?”
***
That evening, the six of us had way too much wine with dinner. Once Jalen told her he had owned up to being an impostor, Chris changed her attitude about the reunion and was all smiles. It probably helped that she and Jalen had awesome hotel sex before dinner. (They didn’t have to tell me that. I knew Jalen’s just-got-laid look all too well from freshman year.) She asked me why Bill didn’t come, and I promised to bring him next time. Ross cried just once, not from the mention of Amy, but after he dropped a forkful of spiced apple tart on the only dress shirt he packed for the weekend. And Dan kept trying to figure out who he needed to speak to about ordering more wine and wondering what the hell happened to his wife.
Then Sarah appeared as coffee was served. “You’ll never guess who I met in the ladies’ room.”
“You’re right. We’ll never guess,” Dan said, trying to smile.
“Nora Williams. Assistant Director of Alumni Relations. And she was very interested in hearing about a certain person who didn’t graduate with the Class of 1995 attending reunions.”
Dan’s attempted smile vanished. “You didn’t.”
“I did,” she said. “She couldn’t find an Elmer Anybody on the list but said she would look into it.”
Dan’s attempted smile vanished. “But why?” he said. “Why would you do that?”
“Because he never graduated,” Sarah said. “He doesn’t deserve to be here.”
Dan stood up and tossed his napkin into his half-filled water glass. “I’m going to find the goddam wine,” he said.
“Dan, wait —“Sarah got up and followed him through the maze of tables. The rest of us sat there, silent.
“Speaking of Elmer Anybody,” I said. “Where is our little friend tonight?”
“I passed him when I went to take a piss,” Ross said. “He was out on the dance floor with Sterling’s wife.”
I leaned toward Ross and Jalen. “You think he really was a general in the Army?”
Jalen laughed. “You think all three of his daughters are nurses?”
Ross looked at both of us. “You think he has any daughters?” He laughed for the first time since the start of the Reunion.
Then Jalen looked serious. “Listen, should we warn him about what Sarah said? I mean, I’d hate to see him thrown out. Embarrassed like that in front of all these people.”
I looked toward the dance floor and saw Elmar with Alecia Hard and a gray-haired gentleman I recognized as Alston Brooks, the most famous English major in Easton’s history, Pulitzer-winning author of ten New York Times bestsellers. And Elmar had a fistful of poems in his right hand.
“Nah, don’t spoil his reunion,” I said. “He’s one of us.”
*****
Don J. Rath holds an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte. A recently retired finance executive, he lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and writes short fiction and creative nonfiction, focusing on themes of identity, race, family, and LGBTQ+ experience. His work has been published in Musepaper, Hypnopomp, Scribes*MICRO*Fiction, Blood and Bourbon, Twelve Winters Journal, Barren Magazine, and Fiery Scribe Review. He is also a frequent contributor to the Southern Review of Books. His writing has been supported by the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference (2023) and the Juniper Summer Writing Institute at UMass Amherst.
