I was chatting with an old friend on the phone a few years ago and I asked if she was planning to go to our high school reunion. She was going to be out of town anyway the date it was being held but she followed her answer up with, “Besides, Hill, high school was a horrible experience for me. You probably don’t understand this because you were really popular but high school was total hell for me. I never want to see those people again.”

I wasn’t really sure what to say to this. I think any world where I was “really popular” in high school has a different color sky than the one I am currently in but this friend and I weren’t as close back in high school as we are as adults so I didn’t protest. I figured I just probably missed something back in high school and missed what a terrible time she was having.

Then it is a few weeks later and I am on the phone with another high school friend. This second friend and I were very close in high school and she has been one of my very best friends to this day. We were laughing about some ridiculous story of our old high school antics and I said wistfully, “High school was so much fun.”

“High school was horrible!” my friend replied. “I had no friends, everyone was always picking on me, I never got to do anything fun, it was hell.” Again, I didn’t try to fight this but when I said that I enjoyed most of high school, she gave me the “Well, that is because you were popular” line.

OK, time out. Through no stretch of the imagination was I popular in high school. I don’t particularly remember being unpopular but I certainly wasn’t prom queen or anything. I knew a lot of people from a bunch of random different groups and cliques but I am not sure that knowing a large quantity of dorky, nerdy, less popular people translates into you yourself being popular.

I also liked high school which is apparently akin to saying to like beating your spouse. Sure, there were annoying moments in high school but, by and large, the majority of my memories from those years were good.

I was willing to give the first friend the benefit of the doubt that she was enduring unseen horrors backstage that I was oblivious to because we weren’t that close in high school but hearing the second friend say this blew my mind. We hung out very frequently in high school. If I was “popular” then doesn’t that mean she was too? We had the same friends, we did the same stuff. If I was having an enjoyable time in high school and she was there for many of those good times, why does she view it as this horrible trial and I view it fondly?

It comes down to perspective, I suppose. Maybe it’s my personality, but I tend to look at the glass half-full. I look back and high school and the good memories stand out more than the bad so I give high school a smiley sticker. My friends obviously look back and see more bad than good and give it a frown-y face sticker. I understand this, though it is strange to me that we all experienced the exact same thing and took something totally different away from it.

But what really confuses me is the part where both of them have rewritten history to where I was somehow popular. I understand them coloring their own fictions to match their memories but why did they rewrite my history too? For them both, unprompted, to feed me the same line was too weird, especially since they aren’t friends with each other.

The only answer I can come up with is that they’ve concluded that since I enjoyed high school, I must have been popular. But, man, would I like to know what I look like through their eyes.

I really didn’t know how to take this. Should I take it as a compliment that I came off as somehow much more popular than either of them? Should I be embarrassed that times I consider good times my friends considered hell on earth?

I don’t know the answer to this but, by golly, I am going to eventually work it into one hell of a story when i figure out how.