The Reunion

It had been Fiona's idea, naturally. Fiona had always been the organizer, the one with the spreadsheet and the color-coded calendar, and twenty years after graduation she had tracked down the other four members of what they used to call, with the unselfconscious grandeur of nineteen-year-olds, the Marchmont Five. The reunion would take place in Edinburgh, in the same pub where they had celebrated their final exams. Attendance, her email said, was non-negotiable.

They arrived one by one on a wet Friday evening. Fiona came first, then Callum, now a slightly overweight and surprisingly cheerful accountant. Priya flew in from Singapore, where she ran a research lab and was, by general agreement, the only one of them who had become what she had said she would become. James, who had once been the most ambitious of them all, had given up law to make furniture in the Borders and looked happier than any of them had ever seen him. And finally, half an hour late and completely unrepentant, came Facundo.

Facundo had arrived in Edinburgh from Rosario at the age of twenty to spend a year studying economics, and had shared the cold, damp, wonderful apartment in Marchmont with the other four. His English at the time had been fluent, confident and occasionally catastrophic. He walked into the pub with his arms wide open and shouted, "My friends! You are all exactly the same. Older, uglier, but the same." It was, everyone agreed, an unbeatable entrance.

Within an hour, the table was covered in empty glasses and the conversation had become a kind of collective archaeology, each of them digging up the past with the confidence of someone who was certain they remembered it correctly. They did not. Callum insisted that the night the fire alarm went off at three in the morning had been Priya's fault. Priya was equally certain it had been James. James said he had been in the library at the time, which nobody believed, since none of them could remember James ever going to the library.

"And the cake," said Fiona. "Do you remember the birthday cake that Facundo made and then sat on?" Facundo was outraged. "I never sat on a cake in my life. It was Callum." "It was definitely you," said Callum. "I have a photograph." He did not have a photograph. It became clear, as the evening went on, that their shared history was largely a matter of opinion, and that each of them had quietly rewritten it over the years to give themselves a more flattering role.

There was one story, however, that nobody disputed. It had happened in Facundo's very first week, and it was, all five agreed, unforgettable. He had caught a heavy cold, and when their landlady, a formidable Scottish widow named Mrs. Baird, knocked on the door to ask why he had not come down for breakfast, he had explained, with great dignity, that he could not eat because he was very constipated.

"She went white," said Priya, wiping her eyes. "And then she went red." "And then she came back an hour later with a bowl of prunes and a hot water bottle," said James. "And a leaflet from the pharmacy," added Fiona. "With diagrams." Facundo put his head in his hands. "In Spanish, «constipado» means you have a cold!" he protested, exactly as he had twenty years earlier. "How was I to know? It is the most unfair word in the English language."

It was, they decided, a perfect example of a false friend, and over the next half hour they compiled a list of every other one Facundo had stumbled over that year. He had told a lecturer that he was very sensible, meaning sensitive. He had said he was going to assist a lecture when he meant attend one. He had asked the librarian where he could buy books, since the Spanish word for a bookshop sounds almost exactly like library. "To be fair," said Callum generously, "he actually ended up speaking better English than me." "Actually," said Facundo, "actually is another false friend. But yes. That is true."

As the pub began to empty, the mood grew quieter. They talked about the things that had not worked out: Callum's divorce, James's years of overwork, the friend from another apartment who had died far too young. Nobody tried to reinterpret those stories. Some things, it seemed, did not change in the retelling.

At closing time they stood outside in the rain, unwilling to say goodbye. "Same time in twenty years?" said Fiona. "Ten," said Priya. "Five," said Facundo. "And next time, I will bring a cake. And I promise I will not sit on it." "You never did," said Callum, and grinned. "It was me. I just didn't want to admit it."