Highschool Reunion
1907 Words
She left me alone. She had to wake early the next morning, and she’d kept my company longer than she expected. She left me with a story and that’s all there was to it. The waiter came by with the check: a breakfast entrée and a side order of mozzarella sticks. I smirked at the little trace she left behind with the order. I left a twenty and a five on the table: tip too much, you’re overly gratuitous, tip too little and…
“I always tip at least fifty percent.” He sat in the next booth over, twirling a straw. He broke it from the paper covering by mashing it against the table and clenched it in between his fanged bicuspids. “They have a hard job you know, servers.”
“That’s just like you; the kiss ass.”
“If they do a good job, they deserve to know.” One of the waiters strode down the aisle. He turned around and gazed uncomfortably long. “Sometimes, too, if you tip a little extra, you get a little extra.”
“Knock it off.”
“What, aren’t I a man, aren’t you a man? We have these feelings, these urges—why do we have to keep them to ourselves all the time?”
“You don’t. There’s a time and a place for—”
“Everything, I know, everything about your little quips and quirks. You’ve always been pretty boring if I were to be perfectly honest.”
“There’s honesty and then there’s being an ass—”
“—hole yeah I know. You’re like a wind-up doll: I say one thing and you have a response to it. I say something else a little different and you have a response to that, too. That’s your problem. You’re predictable.”
“You got me, I guess I just won’t say anything.” He slipped from his booth and came to mine.
“Aren’t you happy to see me? C’mon, we’re best friends.”
“That was Highschool, things are different now.”
“Different in what way?”
“I’m going, I stayed out later than I expected to.” I slid my backpack from the corner of the booth towards me and slung it around my back, leaving him behind, and that’s all there was to it.
“In what way?” he called. I ignored him and kept walking, I pushed the door open and breathed in the heavy, dark humidity of Schenectady’s night time, when the roads are jagged like a beggar’s teeth and the ache of an old, rotten sorrow seeps into your bones. I turned left towards the old college, hoping to shake the wretched demon, but sure enough, he caught up to me at the entry way.
“In what way?”
“Good night Max.”
“We stopped talking after Sophomore year when I—"he paused
“When you what? C’mon, out with it, speak your truth.”
“I didn’t mean it that way, it was supposed to be a joke.”
“Throwing a hunk of ice at my childhood friend’s face isn’t a joke, and we all know you secretly liked her, and felt a certain way whenever they kissed, or when her boyfriend had his arm around her shoulder—it drove you nuts.”
“So, you stopped being friends with me?”
“That’s not all of it, and we were never friends.”
“Well then what else could it be?”
“It’s hard talking to you when you play stupid the whole time.” Tears streamed from his face.
“I really don’t know, Allan, I’m hurt, I’m confused.”
“Oh, cut that s**t out.” He suppressed his sobs with the sleeve of his hoodie and stooped over the ornamental benches at the arch way. Schenectady’s breath fell heavier on my shoulders. There was a cool chill and that strange gravity seething under the asphalt. Again, I walked on, hoping he would go away. A gag of Union students strode in unison past me, on a set destination toward the main road, toward the bars. Their laughter and braying crackled through the night and I was lonelier, colder.
“We hated them.”
“We did.”
“We always had each other’s backs against them. Don’t you remember when I called those guys out for picking on you?”
“Yeah, it didn’t help; it made things worse.”
“I found all their phone numbers on social media and called each one of them.”
“You know they made fun of us more after that; I wish you didn’t do that.”
“I did it because it was the right thing to do.”
“You did it because you wanted to look like the good guy. You did it to help you.” He was silent for a time, pondering as we walked.
“Didn’t you look like the good guy for doing away with me?”
“f**k you.”
“I’m just presenting you with the facts. I mean let he without sin cast the first stone.”
“Quoting Bible verses? I thought you were an atheist. Has that changed?”
“I still don’t believe in g(odd), but wisdom is wisdom.”
I waited for the athletes to pass, I didn’t want them to see me all queer in that manner, talking to someone who wasn’t there. Just as they turned the corner, I lashed my head back at him. “That was different. I was doing the right thing; hitting Becky with the snowball wasn’t the reason why we stopped talking, and you know it.”
He clenched his hair in his fists and emitted a cry of frustration. “What, what did I do?”
“Lindsey Bushnell.”
“She was lying, I told you that.”
“Was Maria Lasco lying?”
“That was a misunderstanding.”
“How about Elaina Derecho, Natasha Benning, Michelle Clayton?”
“Allan, I can explain all of that.”
“You’re also a compulsive liar.”
“Listen, they all hated me, all of them did. They were liars and they manipulated the truth in their favor.”
“That’s what tripped me up about you. It was always someone else’s fault.”
“I know how it seems.”
“Lindsey told me about it. She told me everything, and I did nothing, because you were so f*****g convinced of your innocence.”
“Do you know what you sound like? A cop, or my Dad, or a teacher; all this moral responsibility and shit.”
“She confessed to the police. She went to Ms. Jayne’s office and cried for hours.”
“It sounds like you cared for her.”
“As much as someone cares for their friend’s girlfriend, sure.”
“Oh, Allan is such a good listener. Allan is so smart, and funny.”
“Oh, shut up.”
“You know what? Maybe you should’ve dated her. Maybe then, she would’ve been better off.” We approached the courtyard.
“That’s your jealousy showing, and it’s as obvious now as it was back then.” A thick fog hung over the ground. The lights from the campus were fainter as we walked farther from the school grounds and closer to the woods.
Disgusted and weary with the light banter, I scoffed, “I regret believing you.”
“You shouldn’t; I didn’t do it.”
“I think you did.”
“You’re a f*****g asshole, because I didn’t do it.”
“You always got angry when you were lying, you know that, right? It gives you away.”
Max teared up and looked away, ashamed.
“Just admit you did it,” I spat. “If you have an ounce of courage in that flabby f*****g body of yours”—
“Fine, I did it!” he exclaimed. His voice echoed throughout the woods and then a silence fell all around us. “I did it to her; I thought she wanted it. She was afraid of her mother and”—
“You know that’s a shitty excuse, right? No means no, that’s it, regardless what her mother thinks, it’s about what she thinks is right and what she thinks is wrong.”
“I didn’t at the time—”
“And you do know you pushed Maria up against the wall during a house party and slapped the s**t out of her in front of three of her friends, right?”
“No, I didn’t”—
“How about Michelle? Do you know she cried in Ms. Jayne’s office for hours after what you did to her?”
He cried harder and fell to his knees.
Their names spewed from my lips like venom, names I kept to myself, names that never belonged to me to begin with, and at that time I felt a jolting rage I hadn’t felt since High School; one that rendered me paralyzed and inactive, castrated me from action, motive, direction. With all the hate brewing in me, I kicked him in the ribs and knocked the wind from his lungs in one blow. I turned him on his back, and straddling him, landed every punch square in his face. His head rocked rhythmically against the asphalt. Blood spewed from his nostrils and he coughed raucously. He held his hands in front of him, begging for it to end, but I kept going. He was the part of me that needed to die. I stopped. He was bloodied and broken, barely capable of speech.
“Why are you doing this to me?”
“Because this is how the story should end.” I cracked him once more, and with a last blow to the face, he stopped moving. His body lay pale and lifeless in the field, and his face, with ho way of removing them from all my nightmares, changed forever. Silence filled the field, like air displaced from a submerged vessel. As I walked back out to the main road of the campus, I saw her walking towards me, in my direction.
“I thought you had to wake up early.” She looked up at me, surprised.
“I had a bad dream, not while sleeping, but on the way home, I felt like I’d been shot.”
“Well, let’s walk, maybe you’ll forget about it.” We walked off into the night, as friends, and for once, that was totally okay.
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