All the Rage Circa 1996

When I was Romy's age, it was circa 1995-96. There was no social media, no widespread cell phone use, and other kids I hung out with didn't have home computers. But, we were in a small town like Grebe, where gossip prevailed through the grapevine entwining the social structure of our one high school.

Of course, date rape happened then. And we all knew the girl who was blamed--because her skirt was so short or her lipstick was so dark. I remember a girl on the fringes of the in crowd who got pregnant and was shunned from then on by the popular, beautiful ones. As an adult, my heart aches for her, but in high school, we all wondered how she could have been so careless. Whispers preceded her in the halls and teachers shook their heads; she eventually dropped out and finished high school by mail. (Snail mail then too.)

If Romy's story would have happened in 1996, there would be printed photos passed around of her, but even then that would be risky, because you knew the tech at the photo shop who developed your photos, and they might get suspicious of an underage girl drunk at a party and tell your parents.

Thankfully in 96, social media didn't exist. It didn't mean there wasn't a social status--we had one and we knew our place socially. I do remember one of the prom chaperons took a photo of each of her students at prom and posted the pictures on a bulletin board. Looking back, it was kind of like Facebook; people just made their comments about your date's hair aloud instead of hiding behind a monitor.

Cell phones back then were expensive and cumbersome. There was no service in our small, one-traffic-light town, and even if there was service, only two families would have been able to afford the luxury. So in 1996, Romy wouldn't have been able to further her relationship with Leon by texting; he would have had to call her landline and probably make awkward conversation with her parents, unless she was lucky enough to have her own line. Judging from her parents, I doubt she would have.

She definitely wouldn't have had a home computer. Most of the kids I knew still had electric word processors--one step up from a manual typewriter. We still submitted handwritten assignments, so you had to have legible penmanship and it took hours to write an essay. Romy wouldn't have been able to pull out a laptop and search hashtags for clues her drunken memory refused to process. She would have either always been left with questions about that night or relied on the gossip at school the next day. (Hashtags--I think we would probably have thought that was something on the menu at Waffle House.)

Some of the elements of Summers' novel would have been different, yes. But the trauma Romy experienced and the social backlash of her behavior would have remained the same in the 1990s. She would have suffered the pressure and gossip of high schoolers back then just as she would now.