By Elissa Caterfino Mandel

My ambivalence grows. The woman who’s in charge of my 40th high school reunion has been using a special page on Facebook to list the names of the people planning to attend. Now she’s up to the F’s, and it’s fair to say that none of the people on the list were my friends. One woman is a medium, and I think she’s coming mostly because she has a book to sell. She’s someone I’d like to speak with, if only to use the three hours of the event to commune with my late husband. But really with the exception of my friend Barbara, who was a G, there is no one I’m dying to see.

Confession: I even used to be afraid of some of the boys on the list when they ended up in my gym class. They’re men now — at least I assume they are — and I expect they won’t throw volleyballs at me when they see me. Let’s hope.

In a move that is destined to jeopardize whatever social clout I never had, I am dragging my second husband with me to my reunion. Bad move, I know. The reality is I want there to be someone in that room, other than Barbara, who recognizes that I am not the social clod I was in high school.

Hal can talk to anyone and probably will. Undoubtedly, he’ll come home with the names of three or four people he’d like to have dinner with. And because most of the people coming live within 30 miles of my high school, including me, we’ll probably do it.

I have been analyzing why I am so desperate to go. Maybe it’s because I want to say a permanent adios to my high school persona. She got me where I wanted to go but also made sure I didn’t have a lot of fun while I was doing it. I never had a drink in high school. I was lucky to squeak out a last-minute invitation to the prom from a boy I could speak to about Macbeth but had no desire to kiss.

Back then I was not at the peak of my powers interpersonally. I was so desperate to be at the top of my class that I couldn’t imagine that anyone who wasn’t in that decile with me was worth knowing. Defense mechanism, anyone?

I remember wanting to have a conversation with the boy I had a perennial crush on — surprise: he’s not coming to the reunion — about how a large bus could physically manage to make a turn around a sharp corner. Face it. Nobody in high school wants to discuss things like that. Very few people in my adult life want to do it either, except maybe my niece who’s a physics major at Yale.

It has been almost 40 years since graduation, and I remember very little about that day. But something recently made the rounds on Facebook as a fond “remember when”. One of my classmates, hoping to inject some mirth into a somber ceremony, had apparently released mice into the auditorium during graduation. Yes, it was the boneheaded move of an 18-year-old jerk. So why did it bother me now that at the time I didn’t even know about it? Or even worse, that if I had known, I probably would have disapproved.

The thing is, I want to prove to the people who do show up that I’m different. No, that’s not it. I want to prove it to myself. For years I have been telling a good friend who I exercise with to take pity on me when we run together. After all, I was the high school newspaper editor, not a cheerleader. But the dirty secret is I wanted to be a cheerleader, too. A non-cartwheel doing one, but still.

Five years after graduation, I was riding the bus to the city to get to my first job. I ended up sitting with one of the “popular girls,” and I discovered she had a lot to say. She even invited me to a Rod Stewart concert with her and her brothers and I went.

And in the end that’s why I’m anxious to go to the reunion: to meet the cheerleader I probably didn’t know who wanted to be the high school newspaper editor I was. I bet we have a fantastic conversation.