I’m gonna start off by saying this is a very-fucked-up story to tell about my high school friends because one day I want them to be my real friends again. It’s not that I violated them or that they felt disdain for me (that I know of).

It’s more that life took its own route and tonight was our 25th-year reunion and I still have no idea if they worry the way I do.

About waking up pissing wrong instead of right. Or right instead of left.

About to-do lists.

About my next boss being white or a woman or both.

About how much longer I have with my mother.

About whether or not I shot through that last rubber.

I worry about mortal weight because if my brain feels too light for too long, it’s like I’m cheating life, giving it room to uppercut me under the belt.

When I get started worrying about real things, I need distractions, like the story of Wynn and June and the girl they shared.

They say appreciate your body now when you’re young because when you get old, you’ll see those were the best bodies you really ever had.

When we wore chunky Filas and our girlfriends’ ponytails stayed slicked back, waves were the point of entry. Even if you ain’t have game, or pretty almond eyes, a round head and seasick waves could help your first approach not be a dub.

I was not hollering because I didn’t have Carolina Blue contacts or Jordan VIs or enough Murray’s pomade to really kill ‘em with Botox luscious waves. I used an S-Curl gel, a hot shower, a stocking cap, soft bristle brush followed by hard bristle followed by soft.

I still couldn’t bag no Tamara, the Haitian-Italian baddie all my friends kept drooling over. She had her pick, too, but was all about straight As and varsity tennis (along with the skirt riding just under her butt). Wynn had been crushing on Tamara since about 5th grade and his 4-wheel drive Landcruiser, Nike Air Max, and North Face confidence assured him bagging Tamara for life if he so chose.

June was in the Beemer, earned from his dad’s First Black Hedge Fund bread. I noticed when Tamara came out to see Wynn, June would screech that Beemer around the corner, peeling off little bits of attention with each exit. June invited us out to his country home after prom and our dates, who looked like backup dancers from an Ashanti set, dropped jaws and looked at us and June way different. Wynn was Brooklyn Caribbean rich, mom worked at the bank, pops ran an auto body shop. Four-floor, two-family in East Flatbush that they owned.

The first on the block with a Motorola, 2-way pager who wasn’t selling work or boosting Polo denims.

But June was on a totally separate plane, private jets to the Bahamas for spring break, country homes plural. I was lucky enough to go to Jamaica some summers, but also had to choose between that and SAT prep once high school came.

And their bodies. Wynn was a lean wrestler and track athlete, so he had arms and abs and his neck looked like one big muscle extension of his bicep. A chest accessory.

June was a hooper who wore size 14s. He made varsity as a sophomore and we ran out the gym screaming when he first dunked after AAU summer league. They almost had to call the police when he yammed in a game. His girls were there and looked dead set on fighting out their claim to him. He had 6-foot-3-inches in height and sometimes faked being a man well enough he could get us in clubs by lying that he was on the Knicks. Since I was neither tall enough nor cut enough, I rode passenger with Wynn or June and picked up the scraps and overflow. Girls who wanted a shot at them might join the wait list and give me a spin in the meantime.

Senior summer jumped off and we knew where we’d all go to college so parties were priority billing. Ronald and Wynn had the hookup to the Carib boat cruises and we’d swing through the Bronx or Queens in the Landcruiser, pending pick-up of whichever sweeties were down to sweat and grind to the diwali riddim and sharp rum. One night, Wynn scooped me from Canarsie with a scowl. He wouldn’t pick up his head and was listing off the night’s stops like a pilot giving an itinerary.

“You good, bro?” I asked.

“Nah, man. Tell you the truth, I’m not fucking good, yo. Tell me why a nigga go to pick up these new tires at the shop to see a very familiar Beemer on Flatbush near St. Marks,” he said.

“June live right over there. You know he put in work at that musty ass pool hall.”

“Right. So, I figure lemme stop by the light and honk the shit out the horn and fuck with this nigga. I start honking. Mad loud, mind you.”

“He pop out on some crazy shit?” I laughed.

June did not laugh.

He crinkled his face up til it was just nostrils and lashes.

“Not even. But I could see bro’s big ass head and hat turning to look me like, this caking-ass nigga looking dead at me, bro, not saying a fucking word. Just turning and looking back through the windshield, turning again. I’m like, why is this nigga being funny style?” he explained.

I started feeling the pit of my stomach and my toes getting numb like when my anxiety turns into a swarm of fear wasps.

“Then I see Tamara come out the same fucking bodega he’s waiting at. She goes to hug up on this nigga but he mad hesitant, looking back at me in the truck. She pops fly and they bickering before he leans down and whispers something. This trick wanna look back at me in the car now.”

“Tamara, nigga??”

“Yup, Tamara who I took to prom. Who call my mother every Sunday. Who be chilling with me and my brother at the shop.”

Now, I knew June had other girls. One of his other girls was my other girl, in fact. These things happened — overlaps, war stories, pass-arounds.

But she had achieved special status with him.

He was calling her wifey because he thought they might do the high-school-to-the-pros fairytale wedding. Tamara had violated and he saw this confirmed in the side view mirror where heartbreaks were closer than they appeared. One August afternoon in front of the bodega. T in the Baby Phat jeans, silky hair down her back, and Wynn breathing the same air at the same pace like they had done this before. Like many befores.

“Charge it to the game, yo. I don’t even know what to tell you. That nigga rich as fuck. He probably hollered cuz he was bored.”

“And that’s supposed to make me feel better. Man, fuck that tall-ass lil nigga. Bro on me like that? He got everything, yo! I’m bout to find one of his bougie curly-hair girls and pipe her.”

He already was. Because that’s how high school goes when you’re in your best body. Your body is a conduit for insecurities, spilling out in acne pustules or wayward tongues pulled to other bodies. I can’t say who was more beautiful at the time, Wynn or June or me. But I can say we all wanted our beauty retold to us, verified and salivated over. We chased our own body ideals through the rating systems we had for girls. Pretty bodies with weird faces were nines but not dimes. Weird bodies with the young, cute faces were solid sevens or, best, eight and a half.

Lips. Hair. Legs. Shoulders. Designer cashmere, Gucci leather, silken suede and crushed velour contouring our bodies into bright blue sex.

As we first entered the marketplace of sexual desire, we paid the steep admission fee of childhood. We stumbled into magazine spreads — Maxim, Smooth, Men’s Health — where the best guidance was to shrink, rip, and chisel ours down to nihilistic sizes and mock anyone who couldn’t zero out. We weighed in before wrestling matches and basketball games, sliding the tab way over for anyone who came in bloated and slapping open hands at the remaining fat that teen hormones hadn’t yet devoured.

I blasted myself in the mirror, pinching the stretchiest, softest parts of my mold, and ignoring all the undeniable manly muscles pushing their way to the front.

This is my view of Euphoria, a show meant to reduce us to our teenage essence, where no one exists if they’re fat, dark, or sad. I have an unhealthy view of my body. I do not need this American writer-director reinforcing my internal critique. That might not be the point of his show, but isn’t it?

American stories can be reductive in their happy-ending-or-bust framework. Levinson at least writes into the cracks of this conceit. The popular kids in high school often walk into premade yearbook tragedies. Dreams can be stunting and early praise misleading. To distract from his A-list leads’ megastardom (Zendaya, Jacob Elordi, Sydney Sweeney), the writer shapes a tragedy around small-scale fame and the narcissism of youth. Rue can get away with so much because her promise, her face, and her snark grant her special privilege that will soon run dry. Nate scams his preppy bro friends because those men are obviously attracted to him. Cassie can dumb out as the shallow blonde because, well, look at Sweeney’s career.

Where Euphoria falls apart is in the excessive gore, where the main damage to its characters happens only to their bodies. Nate has his little toe amputated by vicious mobsters and, in the melee, Cassie catches a knuckle sandwich to the nose. In the campiest moment of the season, one that I’m not sure should’ve so easily played for a laugh, Sweeney cries “I’m bleeding!” as if to remind the audience we need a new reference for her mug as bruised. Rue, too, vomits, bleeds, and expels fluid in each episode. This body horror is Levinson’s only way to complicate or challenge his characters but, in life, much simpler pains visit us.

A romantic rejection. An interview flop. The deaths of parents, friends, and lovers all haunt us into the plain conclusion that living is hard. Life pauses for no one and spares no innocents in its wake.

I learned a lot about my friends and classmates after 25 years and also very little. Having kids makes them happy. Work isn’t as rewarding as we once thought. The measure of a man isn’t his wealth, but his character. Our teachers could’ve told us some version of these truths and we would’ve thought ourselves beyond disappointment, maybe immune.

They were right. They fell because they loved. They cried because they expected. They failed because they wished. They were also kind enough not to detail their failures or to force us to live in ours.

While it may not be Euphoria’s job to summarize how quickly these powers vanish, I demand better of prestigious art. What can’t be captured in 35mm reveals of perfect curves is the disdain of aging that we celebrate. The hate we feel about scars. I contend that scars are where you feel love and tenderness. They’re where you understand yourself because they don’t peel away smooth. They linger. They spell out regret.

My high school reunion has fucked me up for weeks now. But it’s not because anyone’s doing bad or that I am not where I want to be. Although, I’m sure both those things are true. My high school reunion is fucking me up because we’re at the exact point where we can see our teenage selves as imperfect and still love them with our broken hearts and weary eyes.

I will take that over scripted, injected, blushed cheeks any day.