This post discusses the ninth and tenth episodes of the first season of Veronica Mars.

One of the things I’m coming to really enjoy about Veronica Mars is the way, compared to other television shows and movies about being a teenager, social groups are relatively fluid. This was an insight that Mean Girls, which made its bow in theaters five months before Veronica Mars debuted on television, made brilliantly at its conclusion: that being a Plastic was a temporary condition rather than an ontological one, and it could pass with the end of a school year or on the occasion of a momentous bus accident. Veronica Mars actually takes that idea a step further in these two episodes, which serve as an illustration of how porous the 09ers are as a clique. They’re people, after all, rather than rigid a fraternal order, and their social group can’t actually provide everything they want, whether it’s support in being more compassionate than their parents or someone who’s willing to ante up for a genuinely high-stakes poker game. Veronica herself has always been a reminder of that fact, but these two episodes are a reminder that she’s not an exception—she’s actually more of the rule at Neptune.

The Moon Calves subplot in “Drinking The Kool-Aid” is a little half-baked, unfortunately—it’s an over-the-top way to get at a concept that might have been fleshed out on a smaller scale, that being one of the 09ers, and being part of one of Neptune’s wealthy families, is actually a corrosive and disillusioning experience. Casey (Jonathan Bennett, who played Aaron Samuels in Mean Girls), has come to realize that, as he puts it, “I wrote the Jackass Bible, the Jackass Koran, the Jackass Talmud.” His parents, who have been wealthy their whole lives, let the desire to keep consolidating their wealth corrupt their interpersonal relationships, particularly with Casey’s grandmother. “My parents, who call her Grandmonster behind her back, stopped paying attention to her,” he explains. Having him work out those issues through a cult gives Veronica and her dad a case, but it’s also a kind of quick way to dispense.

By contrast, the person who appears to be working out those issues on a relatively large scale and over an extended period of time is Logan Echolls. The show’s taken time to establish the misery that lies behind the gates to his family home, some of the tension between him and his friends, and the ways in which managing his pain at Lilly Kane (Amanda Seyfried, another link to Mean Girls) has lead him to tweak Neptune’s establishment by helping Veronica subvert the whitewashed memorial the Kanes had planned for her. And one of the things the show is doing now that we know these things about him is showing how his relationships with Weevil and Veronica, the main people he hangs out with who aren’t 09ers, are shaping up like fencing matches, shaped by the participants’ needs and the ground they’re willing to surrender.

“What if I run into a pack of you white boys on some clean, well-lit street? I could be bored to death,” Weevil tells Logan when he’s trying to get in on his poker game. The language of the negotiation between them is similar to what it was when Weevil was going after Logan’s car in the pilot. “You people can hand-roll like nobody’s business,” Logan tells him of the Cuban cigars he’s passing around, and when Weevil wins big, Logan tells the other player “Sean, the money box so I can pay the pool boy?” But the fact that Weevil’s seeking out the invitation at all, and that Logan’s willing to grant it—and that when the theft goes down, Logan’s willing to let Weevil search his friends rather than calling security and having him tossed out—demonstrates how far the two of them have come. I’m not sure how their relationship will shape up long-term given that there seems to be a great deal we don’t know about Weevil’s relationship to Lilly, and how Logan might react when he—and we—find out what the truth is there. But the fact that they were both drawn to the same girl, that they both have parental figures who are willing to sacrifice them for their own good, whether it’s Logan for his good name or Weevil’s grandmother who believes he can do shorter time as a juvenile, suggests a similarity to them that is obvious to us, even if they can’t see the extent of it.

And that’s also true for Logan and Veronica as well. Of course, they were friends for real, once. And it means that Logan’s willing to let Veronica back in when she volunteers to investigate the poker game theft. “Annoy, tiny blonde one! Annoy like the wind!” Logan tells her, more affectionately than anyone else. “You are a natural at this,” Weevil tells Veronica when they stop by the Echolls’ ill-fated Christmas party. But the truth is that it’s just as normal for Logan to want people like Weevil and Veronica in his life as it would be for Weevil and Veronica to want in to the mansion, with its catering and its horribly over-the-top Christmas decorations. As Sean’s experience faking it as a member of the 09ers illustrates, it’s exhausting and ultimately unsustainable to posture all the time, even when you do have the money and social position to back up your bravado. Negotiating the minefield of high school is tiresome no matter who you are. And sometimes the best friendships can survive in the clandestine spaces in between cliques, where nothing is clearly expected, and as a result, everything is possible.

Sometimes, it can seem like pop culture is converging on real life: romantic comedies highlight a vein of unproductive thinking, a movie about an aging parent highlights the path forward through a dilemma, an origin story makes certain bits of psychology make sense, even if they lead a character to different and more dramatic ends than our own. So it was with me and high school reunion movies this year. In addition to shooting guns and kissing girls, Channing Tatum starred with his wife, Jenna Dewan-Tatum in the reunion drama Ten Years. The folks behind the American Pie franchise decided that Jim, Michelle, and company had let their reunion slide a couple of years, and held their ten-year reunion thirteen years after Paul was ushered into manhood by Stifler’s mom. Ben and Kate broke with Thanksgiving’s traditional dominance of sitcoms—though there was a turkey-stealing cold open—and sent its characters back to their high school days. Even when I was in high school, I suppose I was looking forward to who I’d be a decade or more after graduation—after we got back from senior prom, my friends and I somehow ended up watching Grosse Pointe Blank*. But even for someone who was born looking forward to adulthood, being reminded that I actually was going to go back to be a grown-up with people who knew me when I was 17, and seeing how awkwardly it all played out on screen proved to be a little much as the actual day approached.

But I survived! And as someone who is in recovery from the social deficiency elements of my geekiness, if not my affection for cultural ephemera that, when I was in high school, carried less social capital than Dawson’s Creek, the experience left me with some insights. Because so many of you were so helpful in preparing me to go to a suburban hotel and drink not very good bourbon with people I haven’t talked to in ten years, I thought I’d pay them forward for those of you in the audience who are contemplating returning to your hometowns in the year to come, but are as nervous about it as I was**.

1. You Weren’t As Bad As You Thought You Were: Most of my memories of high school are of it as a place I was eager to get out of, mostly so I could start over in place where (almost) nobody knew how awkward I was. It turns out, though, that I’m a pretty unreliable narrator of my own life, as I suspect many of us are as well. And it turns out we’re more generous in our memories of each other than we are in our memories of ourselves. Walking through the door of that hotel, I remembered things I hadn’t thought of in years: marathoning Wild Things and the Usual Suspects on weekend afternoons with a friend I’d lost touch with while we were in college, dancing at prom with another, passing notes—these things we Olds had before cell phones—so thick it was hard to fold them up small enough to palm or slip through locker slots. Going to my reunion let me have back good things that I’d forgotten, including my sense of who I was in high school.

2. No Power In The ‘Verse Can Make You 17 Again: As the evening wore on, one of the guys in my class and I confided to each other that there was something supremely strange about revisiting a part of our lives that none of the people we’re close to now know much about. But the thing about going back is that it didn’t transform us: he didn’t get his long-surrendered hair back or lose his awesome wife, and I didn’t suddenly revert to my high school pixie cut and standard wardrobe of a short-sleeved t-shirt over a long-sleeved t-shirt. Our high school selves aren’t people who are lurking in the shadows, waiting to take over our bodies with all the force of demonic possession. The past, in this case, is pretty much past. And we can revisit it in safety.

3. The Things That Made You Geeky Then Are Your Superpowers Now: Okay, this may be more literally true for me than most people. But while not everyone is going to turn their high school obsession with the Star Wars Expanded Universe into a paying job, the number of former geeks in my graduating class elevated by their passions, and the number of formerly popular people who ended up pursuing geeky professions is impressive. They’re working as camera techs on great television shows, actually making music full-time, doing amazing biology research, even working as literal rocket scientists. This isn’t really a Revenge of the Nerds scenario: it’s that after graduation, no matter where we were in high school, we came to a common consensus that sincere enthusiasm is an asset. It’s not about who’s cool and who’s not anymore: it’s about who’s interesting.

Now, none of this will help you confront your high school mean girl or bully, or consummate some unfinished business with a high school crush, or kill it on the dance floor, because I didn’t do any of those things, and I don’t really think they’re essential checkmarks on the reunion list. But the easiest way to trip yourself up in anticipating your reunion—and I certainly did this to myself—is to think that it’s some sort of climactic rebellion, an emotional Battle of the Trident. But the truth is the war is history, and reunion’s just a tournament: done right, everyone survives to go home.

*We also may have gone to IHOP for late-night pancakes. My sense of adventure in high school was calibrated to the same frequency as Liz Lemon’s.

**Which is to say really, embarrassingly terrified, given there was no chance that, unlike in American Reunion there was no chance I’d end up in front of my high school friends in fetishwear a la Michelle and Jim.