When Shannon first saw an ad for the reunion episode, a week ago, her interest was fleeting. She enlarged the photo to scrutinize the actors’ faces. So much plastic surgery. She kept scrolling. A day later she watched the trailer, not crying but registering the moments, music swollen, when a younger version of herself would have cried. Now, alone and dehydrated in a motel room in southeastern California, she watches the whole thing. She might puke. The episode opens with one of the cast members, the most popular of the three men, wandering Warner Bros. Studios, Burbank. “Wow,” he says, shaking his head, his smile bashful and trained. “I’m nervous! But excited too. Where’s everyone else?”
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It’s possible Shannon has heatstroke. Last night, the seven of them climbed two thousand feet from the valley to the ridge, recreating their first night of college, when the second-years abandoned them near the northernmost peak with nothing but a can of beef chili and a box of Cheerios. They never called it college back then. They referred to the program or the valley. And back then, they never drank; the program had been dry since its founding. But Louise, now a famous television writer, brought a flask of tequila—“ranch water,” she called it, with a mischievousness that no longer matched her age—and they passed it around, toasting the novelty of booze in the valley.
Only half of their cohort had shown up to the centennial, the mass reunion to mark the program’s hundredth year. If she could have swapped Louise for Buck, who hadn’t come, these would be the six of her peers whom Shannon had loved best fifteen years ago. Because they were the least conflicted and most fiercely committed to the program’s three pillars: academics, labor, and self-governance. They were the kids with whom Shannon always hoped to be paired on irrigation, or dairy, or in seminar. These six, with the exception of Louise, were invulnerable to despair—to crying out for the internet or Taco Bell or central air or their moms. For Shannon, in those years, it was the thought of a Chalupa Supreme, of all the dead-eyed summer days she’d once forfeited to a TV screen, that made her despondent.
In her tent, she dreamt an optometrist had dilated her pupils; she woke with the dawn drilling into her eyes. Her jaw ached, not from a hangover but from arguing with her old friends, from making all the points Buck would have made, if he’d been there.
Her desert survival skills were rusty. She descended the ridge with eight ounces of water left in her Nalgene. The trek across the valley was longer than she remembered. It pleased her to look down at her new hiking boots already covered in dust, as if she still belonged. Lizards rustled the sage. By the time they reached campus, all of them listless and not speaking, Shannon’s sinuses burned. Her throat felt like a sponge that had been left in the sun for days.
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She waits for the two love interests to meet again on the reconstructed set. The actors never dated in real life, or if they did, the paparazzi never caught them. Shannon has no reason to think the two will be especially drawn to each other. Or that watching them embrace will be more satisfying than watching any of the pals—that’s what everyone called them, back when the show was so popular, the pals—embrace. But she needs to know: will the former stars clasp hands and smile, allowing their surgically altered eyelids to crease, as they soak up each other’s significance?
On cue, they do. The actress makes a noise like she’s watching a small animal get murdered. The actor laughs under his breath. They are both implausibly thin, and their clothes are made of money, and at some point their faces were dropped on a hard floor and glued back together. Their hair, though, is so beautiful—no way is it the hair that actually grows from their fifty-year-old scalps. No way were they born in county hospitals, raised among pale yellow refrigerators and brown carpets. Shannon doubts they were born at all.
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As a kid, Shannon ran cross country and went snowboarding on weekends. She considered herself rugged. As rugged as any teenager from Tacoma could be. The skills taught in the valley—horsemanship, cattle driving, milking, slaughtering—were things her grandfather had known how to do. Still, she did not expect to get in. The program was academically rigorous, so exclusive that after two years in the valley students transferred to Harvard or Yale to finish their degrees. It was a great books program, and when Shannon applied she had never read anything that wasn’t assigned in her public high school. But it was the second-years who chose the incoming class, and Shannon won them over with her essay in response to the question, What are parents?
Buck was admitted the same year. On the ridge that first night, as the moon rose over the Sierra Nevada, he offered Shannon his jacket. She accepted, trying to hide her fears: of the temperature dropping, of not getting her fair share of Cheerios, of having joined a cult of teens who wore un-ironic Stetsons and carried knives and argued ceaselessly. She had wanted this, but in her terror she could not remember why, until Buck chose her from the five other girls in their fourteen-person class. He chose her over Louise, who had already grown out her armpit hair and had a skull tattooed on her spine.
Buck was the best of them. He was the embodiment of what the program’s founder had envisioned when he opened the all-male college in 1917: brawny, brainy, and good. Having grown up on a Nebraska dairy farm, he hoisted hay bales onto his shoulders with confidence. He broke up fights between Betty and Pericles, both cows. Before Sunday morning chicken slaughters, he delivered impassioned speeches about his babies, meaning the chickens, in which he detailed their personalities, family conflicts, and preferred roosting places. Then, with infectious reverence, with his sharpest knife, he slit their throats.
For two years Buck carried a single book of Plato’s Republic—an edition of which he’d cut into ten sections—rolled and shoved into his back pocket. The pages were smeared with cigarette ash, stained with bean residue. The day he walked out of seminar—after calmly declaring, “My attachment to justice does not permit me to give Machiavelli the floor”—became valley legend.
Buck was incensed by violations of the program’s long-held policies: no alcohol, no drugs, no leaving the valley. It drove him crazy that Serena kept her BlackBerry charging beside her mattress. He brought it up in every student body meeting. “It’s a distraction, this fantasy that cell service will suddenly descend on the valley.” And Shannon, because she took care not to agree with everything her boyfriend said, would point out that no one else was bothered by Serena’s BlackBerry—and besides, it was also a calculator.
Over time, the student body forgot that Buck had chosen Shannon on the first night, before the two of them had exchanged a word. The consensus was that Buck and Shannon were a couple because they were the smartest. Everyone—from the students to the faculty to Ralph, the ranch manager who had arrived in the valley as a first-year in ‘68 and never left—believed this.
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Once, a visiting professor on loan from Berkeley teased them over dinner at the boardinghouse. “Why are you all so strapping?” he asked, wisely making eye contact with only the boys. He held his fork in his left hand, though there were no knives, the students on kitchen duty had grown weary of washing superfluous utensils, and he would soon be forced to rip into his beef with his fingers like everyone else.
Louise, the most strapping of the girls, shrugged. “We’re in the fields all day. We’re always hungry, so we can’t gain weight. We’re nineteen.”
“No,” the professor said. “I’ve spent my whole career teaching nineteen-year-olds. They don’t look like you.”
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One of the cast members has gotten fat. The internet agrees his is the good kind of fat. He wears it well, like a benevolent uncle, or Marlon Brando. Shannon is open to this perspective until his original headshot, the one his agent sent to the show’s casting directors, fills the screen. He used to be heartbreakingly beautiful. Wasn’t it his duty to stay beautiful?
She understands it was the weight of that responsibility that compelled the other pals to go under the knife again and again. And now their faces are tight in strange places, incongruously prone to gravity in others. Their lips look puffy and plastic. Shannon thinks the cast would still be hot if they had let themselves age naturally. Aging naturally hasn’t worked for anyone she knows—but also, no one she knows started out half as beautiful as the pals.
The one who was the least hot on the show is now the most hot. Having had less to lose, the actress has managed to keep what she had. This is Shannon’s first insight. Her second is that there’s no quick fix for dehydration. You can drink Gatorade until you have to pause your show and vomit torrents of acidic blue froth into a pink toilet, but only time, only a night spent sweating into the ruby-red linens of a cheap motel, will revive you. She hopes.
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Some students complained that the program afforded them no leisure. After their labor and coursework, their weekly rotation of self-governance meetings, they were left with only odd scraps of time: forty-two minutes on a Tuesday morning. Nineteen minutes between lunch and needing to push an irrigation line, ancient and wheeled, through the alfalfa. Shannon’s earnest belief was that the program simply redefined their relationship to leisure, as a concept. Leisure became practicing piano in the common room before anyone else woke up, or playing chess with your roommate until midnight, or ascending the roof of the dorm with Eichmann in Jerusalem and a mug of lemonade (mixed with fresh mint from the garden).
However, Shannon did not play piano, or chess, or read for pleasure. In her free time, Shannon had sex with Buck.
Snow covered the valley in the winter, and they would sneak into the basement beneath the common room, on whose wall someone had scrawled in Sharpie, welcome to Hades, and they would do it among the ripped couches and busted guitars and dusty VHS tapes. In the summer, they went to the reservoir, where egrets and ibises swooped in the daylight and bats reigned at dusk. For privacy, they did it beneath a canoe overturned and propped up by oars, or else they used the spa, which was really a shack at the base of the mountains. Buck would light a fire in the wood-burning stove. With a rusted tea kettle, Shannon would pour boiling water over flat stones. By the time they had both come, perched on that rickety bench, known home to black widow spiders, they would feel desperately lightheaded, on the verge of passing out. Time for what Buck called a cold plunge. Meaning they careened naked toward the reservoir, throwing their bodies into the deep end, the shock of which, they imagined, was like getting high. Often the rest of their cohort would be there smoking, cannonballing, reading sonnets aloud. No one minded that Buck and Shannon had just fucked in the spa, so long as they carried the soiled condom back to campus. Littering in the desert was the unforgivable sin.
One night, toward the end of their time in the valley, Shannon asked him, “Are you scared to leave here?”
They were alone by the water. They had skipped out on the postmortem following public speaking night, which was not allowed, but after two years of good citizenship they were both due a transgression. Shannon could not imagine Buck without the valley—nor the valley without Buck. They needed each other, and Shannon was painfully jealous of that codependency. For herself, she worried about slipping all too easily into her childhood, drinking Dr. Pepper and instant messaging her friends from high school. Obsessively watching the summer Olympics. She did not admit this to Buck. Among her deepest insecurities was the sense that she didn’t belong in the valley—second only to a fear that the valley was no place at all.
“Nah,” he said. “Not scared. This is what I signed up for. I wouldn’t have signed up if it was indefinite. Do I want it to end right here, right now? Of course not. But what’s the alternative?” He squeezed her shoulder. “Having sex in the spa until we die?”
She suspected him of lying. If the program had been eternal, would he not have applied?
“I’ll tell you one thing, I’m never coming back here. And you shouldn’t either.”
She was shocked. She figured she would spend the rest of her life scheming to return to the valley.
“Why not?”
His face was sunburned where the shadow of his hat never reached. “It would hurt so bad, Shan. To come back here and see the mountains like tourists. Like a backdrop. To watch a bunch of new students doing all the things we did. To see it but not feel it.”
“But—”
“Don’t come back. Don’t be a gawker.” This was their word for the birders who roamed campus, binoculars around their necks, surreptitiously peeking into windows. The motorists who conveniently ran out of gas as they approached the school. “Let’s promise we won’t.”
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A parade of celebrities, who did not star on the show, model the pals’ most iconic costumes. Justin Bieber is dressed as a sailor. A reporter travels the world and finds people on the street who admit to watching the pals in their darkest depressive episodes. “Sometimes, the pals were my only pals,” says a woman in Nigeria, blinking back tears. Then a reel of never-before-seen bloopers Shannon is certain she’s seen before. They were included with the DVD extras, or uploaded to YouTube. She was never a fan of the show, exactly. She never binge-watched entire seasons in one sitting, or imagined the pals were her pals.
So how is it she can recite the very lines the actors flubbed? She finds herself mouthing the correct words into the red pillowcase. She has drunk three liters of Gatorade and peed only once.
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Buck transferred to Yale. So did Louise. Shannon did not get into Yale and chose a liberal arts college in Iowa, where students could earn credit for tending a small farm, and where she could live in a ramshackle house with a group of kids who asked her to sign a composting agreement. Who sometimes butchered and ate the roadkill they found lining the interstate. She had hoped the farm and the compost and the roadkill would bring her comfort, would remind her of the program, but her life in Iowa was devastatingly divorced from the valley. She pined for the sage, the sand, the rocky ridges, the coyotes shooting furtive glances over their reddish hackles. And for Buck, who had wanted a clean break.
She should have seen it coming.
On a small TV with a built-in DVD player, she watched the pals. She rented whole seasons of the show from the Blockbuster in town. Laughter crawled up her throat in time with the laugh track. She bobbed her head to the background music, mostly Hootie & The Blowfish. Each time the love interests broke up and got back together (six times, over ten seasons) she wept.
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Last night, Louise, with an excess of eye contact, passed Shannon the flask of tequila and said, “Wasn’t it bullshit, though, how they left us up here? Like, that was hazing. They were no better than fraternity bros. I mean, I was eighteen years old. Flew from New Jersey to Vegas, then took a bus to a fucking brothel in Nevada, then climbed into Ralph’s pickup for a four-hour drive. I was tired, man.” Louise was still lean and muscular. She still wore denim cut-offs with the frayed edges drawing attention to her thighs.
“We did the same thing to the next round of first-years,” Kyle said. The string of his wide-brimmed hat was cinched tight beneath his chin.
Sun in her eyes, Serena seemed to be squinting at the rest of them in derision. “Yeah, well, we shouldn’t have!”
“I actually don’t think they do it anymore,” Miles said, cross-legged on a rock, whose perimeter he had checked for rattlesnakes. “The program has gotten more progressive. More diverse, too.”
At dinner, waiting in line for a plate of vegetarian gumbo, Shannon had noticed three of the current students were black. She was impressed but also embarrassed: that her entire cohort was white had never struck her as meaningful.
“I’m with Louise,” said Serena. “I kind of can’t believe we survived.”
“Oh, please,” Shannon heard herself say. Rather, she heard what Buck would have said, and she said it. “If we hadn’t survived one night on the ridge, we wouldn’t have survived two years in the valley. That was the whole point.”
“The point was sleeping on rocks and walking eight miles back to campus with a box of Cheerios?” Darren laughed too loud.
Louise groaned. “The fucking Cheerios! Were they honey nut or regular?”
Shannon ignored Louise. “The point was to cultivate mental toughness. To learn how to live cooperatively. To develop new skills without the impairments of shame or self-consciousness.” With a wave of shame, she remembered her first time on dairy, how her inexpert milking had given Betty mastitis. Buck had wiped Shannon’s tears and corrected her technique. “We pushed through even when shit got hard. We made our own rules, and we followed them.”
Darren smiled at her. “Still so starry-eyed.”
Louise said, “The program taught me to put up with assholes, if that’s what you mean. Those late-night meetings? Not so different from a writers’ room.”
“Oh my god,” Darren said, “how have we not talked about this? You’re famous, Louise! Tell us about the new show.”
Shannon couldn’t let the conversation veer toward Louise’s HBO dramedy, though she knew she sounded trite, and petulant. “If that night was just hazing, then why are we recreating it?”
“Easy,” Louise said, gesturing toward the Sierras, pink from the sunset and patchy with snow, even in July. “The view.”
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One of the cast members is not well. He slurs his speech. At the casual reminiscing table he mentions the anxiety that gripped him at the height of the show’s popularity. The paparazzi followed him home. They filmed him pumping gas and drinking coffee on hotel balconies. True love was nowhere to be found. Shannon wants the camera to linger on his anguish. She wants the rest of the pals to fix their gazes on him and insist he tell them more. Won’t they wrap him in their expensive arms and make him feel loved and whole? He needs to be reminded. He was once a part of something great.
The pals do not do this—or if they do, the scene is cut from the episode. Shannon finds herself indifferent to the possibility of comfort transpiring off camera. She doesn’t care what happened at Warner Bros. Studios, Burbank that day if she doesn’t get to watch it. The only story she cares about is the one she gets to watch.
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She left early. She was supposed to stay in the valley another night, camping out in the field behind the boardinghouse. There was a plan to build a bonfire in the dry creek bed and mix margaritas in the back of Darren’s Subaru. But Shannon could feel a headache encroaching, her stomach’s opposition to anything that wasn’t water. If she had a drink something bad would happen. She would end up on the ridge, alone, no beef chili, no box of Cheerios. Still no Buck.
The moon was so bright, she briefly turned off her headlights on the pass, just to prove she could. An hour later she reached town, her temples throbbing, and pulled up to a motel whose pointed gables and green trim were vaguely Swiss—while the bean-shaped pool in the parking lot was strictly southern California. The room she rented was red: red quilt, red carpet, heavy red curtains. The room was an internal organ. Before she was compelled to turn on the reunion episode, she collapsed across the mattress and opened the dating app. It was the one that followed you wherever you went, matching you with people who were also horny, also there. A backpacker, having completed his descent, was already interested. She ignored the stack of old messages beneath his—the aborted conversations, as well as those that had led to exactly two dates, no more—and replied, “How was your trip?”
Because she was sick, she was unguarded; she knew she would not be tempted to invite him to her room.
“Incredible. Ten days off the grid. Highly recommend.”
They exchanged the requisite information about careers, poked fun at each other’s profiles. That he had heard of the program did not shock her. This town, forty miles from the valley, was the only town in America where almost everyone had heard of it.
“I thought about applying when I was a kid,” he wrote. “Too intense for me. But I really admire you for going there!”
She second-guessed herself: if the nausea passed, should she invite him to her room? After ten days in the mountains, he might smell a little bad, but Shannon was used to that. Many of them had resisted bathing, had worn the same clothes for weeks on end. Kyle’s D.A.R.E shirt was stiff with sweat and dirt, but he kept it on for an entire term. Twice he showered, but wearing the shirt. He called it doing laundry. Kyle’s smell, like everyone’s smell, became a simple truth about humans, the way stacked circles of shit were a truth about cows.
“Best two years of my life,” she wrote. “But it’s over now. I don’t know why I thought going back was a good idea.”
Three dots appeared and vanished.
“Actually, I do know,” she followed up. “I wanted to see my ex.”
An emoji with its tongue sticking out. “Was he there?”
“No. But his wife was.”
“Ouch lol.”
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The pals induce nostalgia. Not nostalgia for the valley, but for the part of her life just after, those months in Iowa she spent watching the show while reheating takeout from the night before. What she needed, back then, was to integrate her years in the program with her actual permanent life. She needed to be the version of herself who trained her eyes on apathetic mountains and produced answers to the questions of what she was doing and why.
Someday soon, she was certain, Buck would arrive at the same need, and he would have no choice but to come back for her. He would call her from the Des Moines airport, or drive an old pickup truck all the way from New Haven. Khakis, a sweater, a haircut would look so strange on him, but Shannon would accept Buck altered. The distractions of the real world would debase their relationship. But more importantly, their relationship, with its roots in the desert, would make the real world bearable.
The pals cause Shannon to long for a past loneliness. Rather, they cause her to long for a time when she could still imagine an end to that loneliness.
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The reunion episode lasts two hours. When the credits roll, Shannon is unsurprised to see Louise’s name. Louise’s name is everywhere. In the morning, Shannon will wake up feeling well enough to drive back to Los Angeles, where she’s a lecturer at UCLA. It’s not a bad job. It’s not tenure at Columbia, like Buck, but it’s not a bad job.
In the final scene, the pals lounge around the reconstructed set, same spots their characters always chose: the three women on the couch; two of the men in La-Z-Boys; the love interest standing, looming.
The pal who has gotten fat sits with his arms crossed over his chest. He says, “When the show was over, we never got together as a group—I don’t know why, it just never worked out. But sometimes two of us would run into each other at a party or whatever. A party or an award show. And if two of us found each other in a crowd, that was it. The party was dead to us. We sat in a corner and talked all night.”
“What would you talk about?” asks a disembodied host.
“All the things no one but us understood.”