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Wes Boyd’s Spearfish Lake Tales Contemporary Mainstream Books and Serials Online |
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Wes Boyd’s Spearfish Lake Tales Contemporary Mainstream Books and Serials Online |
“Tonight was not exactly what I expected,” Sonja Tyler commented dryly as soon as the car door was closed.
“Me, either,” her husband Scott replied with a sigh, resting his head on the headrest for a second, just to get his thoughts together. He’d gone easy on the drinking because he had known he was going to be driving, but the ten-year reunion of his high school, the Bradford Class of 1988, this October evening would have been enough to set his head spinning without any alcohol being involved. “You expect people to change in ten years, that’s one thing. But good grief!”
“Interesting classmates you have,” Sonja smiled. “I mean, I figured we’d be among the more unusual couples there, but we’re stone cold straight by comparison to some of those people.”
Scott didn’t need to ask his wife what she meant by that. Bradford was a small country town, rather conservative and very white. There’d been a couple of kids in the class with Hispanic names and skin slightly darker than normal, but they’d been around long enough and were otherwise so well assimilated that they might as well have been white. He and Sonja both had known that she, with her medium brown skin and multiethnic heritage, would be well outside the norm for the class. She was easily the darkest person in the room, but there hadn’t been the slightest comment, especially after they’d learned about some of the other people present. “Yeah,” he agreed. “It’s disappointing, in a way.”
“How do you mean that?”
“To be so stone cold straight, as you put it,” he sighed as he leaned forward and turned the key in the ignition. “Some of those people had some real adventures, unusual stories to tell. Our lives are pretty dull. I mean, I even bore me sometimes. Especially tonight.”
“By comparison, you mean,” he heard her smile as he backed out of the parking space at the Brass Lantern, the nicest restaurant in Hawthorne. There wasn’t a place big enough or good enough for the reunion in Bradford.
“Yeah,” he agreed. “OK, Dayna was no surprise, we’ve heard stories about her for years. But some of those other people, you just don’t expect it, at least not in a little place like Bradford.”
Sonja nodded in the darkness of the car. “I figured Dayna would be pretty far out,” she agreed. She’d known about his classmate Dayna being a wandering medieval minstrel almost as long as she’d known Scott. She and Scott had even gone down and served as volunteer roadies for her while she was recovering from a serious illness during her friend Sandy’s brief, disastrous marriage. Dayna had never admitted outright to being a lesbian, but had never done much to cover it up either. “But I never expected a place like Bradford to sprout such a large crop of unusual people. One maybe, but not that many.”
“No fooling,” Scott agreed as he looked up to check for oncoming traffic. There wasn’t much this time of night, well after midnight. It was a clear, cool evening, and even here in town it was obvious that there were going to be foggy spots along the road. It was going to be late when they got back to his folks’ house in Bradford twenty miles away although that wasn’t totally unexpected. They’d been nice enough to keep the kids, who had to have been asleep for hours, now.
As he got up to speed, Scott thought that there had indeed been a lot of people who had done unexpected things. Gary Driscoll, the class clown, for example – was now one of only a handful of Communist elected officials in the country, although to hear him tell the story, exactly how much of a Communist he might have been was open to question. Shae Kirkendahl had been a star athlete, and it was no surprise that she’d wound up as a sportscaster – but also being an actress on a kiddie show was not what anyone would have expected out of her. Then, there was Jennlynn Swift, daughter of a prominent fundamentalist Christian minister. She was, now a multimillionaire engineer and aviation charter business owner who flew her own Learjet to the reunion – and then announced during the evening that she’d spent the last eight years also working part time as a legal Nevada prostitute.
And if that weren’t enough . . . “I mean, I never in my life figured that we’d be spending the last few hours like we did.”
“That’s for sure,” Sonja laughed. “I certainly never would have expected that.”
“You wouldn’t have expected it,” he snorted as he pulled out onto the highway. “What about me? Hell, I remember Denis from back then. He was a real dweeby little jerk, and we all thought he was gay. For him to turn into a beautiful, accomplished woman is just about the last thing anyone could have imagined! A psychologist with a PhD! And to think that the process was going on while we were in high school and no one suspected!”
“I would never have suspected that she had once been a guy until she told us,” Sonja agreed, thinking back over the last few hours. After the official reunion had broken up, she and Scott had joined a dozen or so others sitting around a back room at the Brass Lantern, having a few drinks while listening to Eve McClellan – her new name – tell her story. “There’s a lot there that I would have never even thought about.”
“It makes you think, that’s for sure,” Scott replied slowly. “I mean, we know that men and women are different, and look at different things in different ways, but I don’t think I ever quite realized the difference until tonight. Sonja, I just can’t imagine what it would be like to be a woman.”
“Are you thinking of signing up for surgery?” she smiled.
“No way, baby,” he laughed. “Don’t get me wrong, I like being a guy, and I especially like being your guy. But I know you feel things different than I do, you see things differently, and I just can’t imagine what it would be like to be in your head. Eve knows both sides of the story, probably as well as anyone can. But after listening to her for hours, I realized that she can’t tell me the difference – even she can’t really explain it.”
“Her husband seems like a nice guy, if a little on the shy and quiet side, but I’ll bet he’s just about as far in the dark,” she snickered. “I’ll agree, it raises my curiosity. It was a fascinating story to listen to.”
“I guess that’s more or less my point,” he sighed. “Here’s this guy I think of as a dweeby little nerd, and it turns out he’s got – well, she’s got – a hell of a story to tell, a unique adventure that few people would ever share. Sonja, I guess I’m a little jealous. I have everything I ever dreamed of having at this point in life. I’m married to the most beautiful and interesting woman I know, I have two great kids, a nice house, a nice job, nice cars, and I don’t have one story to tell, not one great adventure to remember. Not even little stories and little adventures.”
“There was that fracas with my mother back when we first started getting serious about each other,” she pointed out.
“That wasn’t an adventure, it was crisis management,” he said in mild protest. “Seriously, if Jennlynn hadn’t had to head back early, don’t you think we’d have been just as interested to sit and listen to her stories for a few hours? Shae has a few, too, although she sort of got pushed into the background by Eve. We’ve sat and listened to Dayna and Sandy tell their stories, and you know they’ve got more than the ones they tell, probably lots more. And there are others. Where are ours?”
“I hear you, Scott,” she replied soberly. “I know neither of us are big fans of my mother, but you have to admit she’s had her adventures too. I guess we’re pretty conventional, but I guess that’s all I ever wanted to be.” She let out a sigh. “If that means dull, I guess that’s just what we are. Like I said, stone cold straight.”
Not surprisingly, it was foggy and gray when Scott and Sonja woke up the next morning feeling a little cramped in his old room in his parent’s home. They were used to a queen-sized bed at home, and to have to use the double in the spare room meant that they felt like they didn’t have any space to spare. The mattress was old and lumpy enough that it was hard to get comfortable, but it didn’t slow down their getting to sleep – they were tired after the long evening of the reunion activity.
“Jeez, it’s late,” Scott yawned as he pulled himself together, sitting on the bed in his underwear.
“Guess they let us sleep,” Sonja agreed, heading over to the open suitcase on the dresser, peeling out of her nightie on the way.
Scott just sat and watched his wife. It was one of the great pleasures of his life to look at her tawny, lithe, nude body, her black hair well down past her shoulders, touching her breasts if it happened to be in front. She was aware of the fact that he liked to look at her, of course, so she took her time to let him enjoy the show. Ten years, he thought. Ten years and a few weeks since the first time he’d met her, a little over eight since the first time he’d seen her naked. Even two pregnancies had not stolen a bit of the visual delights or added an ounce of fat. It was still a treat to see her slender, shapely body go through its motions in its natural glory. He’d watched this scene many times and it was still a fresh wonder that so lovely a woman could share his life. In the mirror he could see her breasts, firm and round, not too big, not too small, but just right; their dark, nearly black nipples a sharp contrast to the light brown skin surrounding them.
The thought crossed his mind: what do breasts feel like? He knew they were sensitive, for he’d seen and felt her reaction to his touch countless times – but what would it feel like to have them at all? Eve would know how different it would be, for hers were about the size of Sonja’s – but she hadn’t said anything much about it last night, and maybe it was something that couldn’t be put into words. For that matter, Sonja might have a hint. “Sonja,” he said softly, “What did it feel like to grow your breasts?”
“Huh?”
“I’m thinking about Eve,” he admitted. “I guess trying to put on her shoes for a minute. You remember her saying that when we graduated she had bigger breasts than maybe a quarter of the girls in the class, enough that she had to bind them to cover up the fact that they were there at all. They grew more later. I just can’t imagine how it would feel. You would have had to have gone through sort of the same thing a few years earlier.”
“I felt happy, I guess,” she frowned, turning to look at him, and letting him see her breasts directly. “It’s one of the signs of growing up, becoming a real woman and not being a kid anymore. I suppose, like a lot of girls, I wore a bra before I needed to and stuffed it with filler. They didn’t come on real quickly, it took a couple of years, and I didn’t always wear a bra when I was hanging around the house. It was a big day when Dad told me to go put on a bra, that I was waving around too much.”
“Did they ever feel like they were in the way or something?”
“Oh, maybe a little,” she shrugged, making those wonderful orbs bounce around a little. “Really they came on so slowly that I was just used to them, I guess. I talked to a girl one time who had implants, and she went from an A cup to a D cup in one afternoon. She said they hurt like hell for a while, and were always in the way. Does that tell you what you wanted to know?”
“Maybe,” he shrugged as he got up from the bed and walked over to her. “Not really. There’s probably not words for it.”
“If it’s any consolation,” she snickered as she reached into the suitcase and pulled out a bra, then pulled the straps over her shoulders, “I can’t imagine what it would be like to have a penis and balls to get in the way of my clothes all the time. I know there are female to male transsexuals who know how it works both ways, but I doubt if they could tell me what it’s like in a way I could understand, either.”
“Eve said it felt so wonderful to have that stuff gone that she could hardly believe it,” he replied as she turned her back to him, an invitation to hook the bra for her. “But I’m not curious enough about the difference to want to try and find out.”
“But it’s something to think about,” she smiled as he hooked the bra; she felt his hands slide under her arms and come to rest on her freshly-covered breasts. “But I can tell you I love the feel of your hands on my breasts, and I always have.” She turned around in his arms to kiss him, a long, serious kiss; toward the end of it, she felt her bra being unhooked again. She pulled her lips from his and whispered in his ear, “Oh, yes, Scott, I want it, but we better not. Those damn bed springs squeak. Maybe tonight.”
“Yeah, damn,” he sighed, fumbling around on her back to find the loose ends of the bra and fasten them again. “Maybe it’s just as well. I know damn well that I’d be thinking about the fact that that’s something else Eve knows that I never will.”
“It’s bothering you, isn’t it?” she said.
“For the moment,” he admitted. “Just curiosity, I guess. It sure makes you think though.”
As towns go, Bradford is nothing special. It’s just a country town of about 3,000 people, like hundreds or thousands of others, unremarkable enough that people driving by on the freeway with their cruise control on usually don’t take much notice. It’s far enough away from bigger towns with more shopping opportunities like Angola or Providence or Hawthorne that several stores in Bradford serve most routine needs, including a fairly large grocery store. In general, prices are a little higher than you’d find in the Walmart in say, Hawthorne, but when the time and gas to run to one of the bigger towns is figured in, the numbers often change the other way.
The big thing that Bradford has going for it is its location, in Michigan just north of the Indiana border. It’s right in the fuzzy area where TV sets tuned to baseball games can about equally be watching the Detroit Tigers or Chicago Cubs. In a sense of the word it’s located in the middle of everywhere without being anywhere in particular.
The General Hardware Retailers distribution center warehouse right next to the I-67 overpass over Taney Road, just west of town, helps make it the most important intersection in town, but it’s important in other ways. General Hardware is the largest employer in the area, but even an operation as big as General can only employ so many people, and the jobs there are pretty stable. That means there aren’t a lot of jobs for the kids who graduate from Bradford High School. Scott had graduated ten years earlier, and he’d long known that the better opportunities lay elsewhere. Big cities with bright lights have called rural kids to them for decades upon decades, and it was no different here – in the local slang, it was “taking the on-ramp” of the freeway to better things.
Across the road from General sat a huge truck stop, mostly catering to the through traffic, and often its parking lot seemed just as full of semis as the one for the warehouse. While it had a busy twenty-four-hour restaurant, many Bradfordites avoided it in favor of the Chicago Inn, which was on the town side of the freeway just before the on-ramp. The Chicago was a little over-named; it was an aging cinder block building that dated back forty years or so to right after the freeway opened. The locals knew that the prices were better, the food less likely to cause heartburn, and the service was more personal – if you went there very often, the waitresses were likely to know your name and ask about your kids or relatives.
Scott and Sonja didn’t go there very often, but the waitress remembered them anyway, mostly because she was Liz Austin, another member of the Class of ’88 who had been at the reunion the night before, though she’d left early as she had to work the early shift this morning. Scott remembered dating her two or three times in high school – a nice enough girl at the time, but nothing special. In the ten years since graduation she’d been one of the big weight gainers of the class, at least double her high school weight if not more.
The place was busy enough that there was a line for an available table, and the next people to join them in line were Aaron and Amber Heisler. Aaron was another member of the class, and had been close enough friends with Scott that they had gone to each others’ weddings. Aaron had red hair, and was an inch or two taller than Scott, six feet at a guess. Scott didn’t know Amber very well; she was several inches shorter than Sonja, maybe five-foot-four, and had shoulder-length brown hair. Scott had only met her a few times, and had not seen her since the wedding until the reunion last night. Like a lot of kids, they’d drifted apart.
“That was quite a night, wasn’t it?” Aaron grinned. “I guess the Class of ’88 has enough black sheep to go around.”
“Yeah, some interesting stories,” Scott nodded. “You should have stuck around. Several of us went to watch Jennlynn take off for Arizona in her Learjet, and then we went back to the Brass Lantern and listened to Shae and Eve and John tell us the details of their little story.”
“I wish I’d known that,” Aaron snickered. “That must have been pretty wild.”
“Interesting, but not really wild,” Scott smiled. “It makes a lot of sense when you hear the whole story.”
“Denis Riley,” Aaron shook his head. “God, I kept looking at that woman and I couldn’t believe it. I kept thinking it had to be a huge practical joke. He sure turned into a good-looking babe though, didn’t he? I guess we always thought he was gay, and that proved it.”
“After hearing Eve explain it, you realize the word ‘gay’ doesn’t quite cover it,” Scott observed. “According to her, having sex didn’t enter into it much. She just wanted to be a woman, and even if she’d known she had to be celibate she’d still have done it.”
“I tell you what, not me, that’s for sure,” Aaron shook his head. “I can’t imagine what it must be like.”
“I’ve been having trouble trying to imagine it myself,” Scott agreed as Liz came up to them carrying menus.
“Are the four of you together?” she asked. “I just got a table that opened up in the smoking section, but it might be a wait for another one.”
“Might as well be together,” Scott nodded. “So, Liz, which one of the class is setting off the most gossip this morning?”
“Wow, that’s totally a good question,” she shook her head. “Actually, I think Jennlynn, but Denis and Gary aren’t very far behind.”
“It halfway makes me want to go out to the Disciples of the Savior Church just to see how apoplectic Jennlynn’s dad is,” Aaron laughed as Liz led them to a table toward the back of the restaurant. “Six, two, and pick that he’s calling hellfire and damnation down on the whole state of Nevada.”
“That’s only if anyone had the guts to tell him,” Liz smiled. “But Jennlynn a millionaire prostitute who flies her own Learjet? Someone’s bound to tell him sooner or later, and that’ll set off an explosion like when the fireworks store blew up over in Fremont.”
“I think I’d just as soon be home in Okemos when that happens,” Scott laughed as they reached the open table. “It’s not going to be pretty.”
“You two live in Okemos?” Aaron asked as he opened the menu. “We’re right down the road in Mason.”
Liz took coffee orders all around, and as she left, the two couples quickly got up to date on each other. Aaron and Amber had lived in Mason since graduating from Ferris Institute; he was in purchasing at Chandler-Hopkins, a Lansing area factory, and Amber was a billing clerk at Lansing General. They had two kids, Clayton and Cheyenne, four and two, right in the same age bracket as Scott and Sonja’s Sabra and Scotty, four and three. Between them, Scott and Sonja explained that he was an account executive at Harvester Insurance, and Sonja was a stay-at-home mom who worked at home as a technical editor and website developer.
“I don’t remember my mother ever being home, so I was pretty much raised by sitters,” Sonja explained. “We didn’t want that to happen to our kids. It’s nice being at home, but I miss having adults around for so much of the day.”
“Kids are nice, most of the time,” Amber agreed. “But I don’t know how I could handle them all the time. I take it you two met in college, too.”
“Freshman English,” Scott grinned. “We got to be friends, and one thing led to another.”
“Let me tell you, Amber,” Aaron laughed. “In high school, Scott had the reputation of being Mister Dreamboat. Half the girls in the class sat up nights praying that he’d fall in love with them. I think he actually dated about half the girls in the class. There was great gnashing of teeth and rending of garments among about a dozen different Bradford girls when the word went around town that Scott had gotten engaged to a black chick.”
“Actually, I’m not black,” Sonja explained. “I know that word got around town, but I’m not.”
“Sorry,” Aaron apologized. “I didn’t know that. I guess that was what the rumor mill said.”
“Oh, I’m used to being mistaken for black,” Sonja smiled. “When I was at State, I had to tell the Black Student Union to buzz off about a thousand times. They couldn’t believe I wasn’t a ‘sister.’”
“You’re not really that dark,” Amber nodded. “Can I ask, if you’re not black, what are you?”
“That’s not an easy question to answer,” Sonja smiled. She’d long worked out a standard answer, and it was automatic: “I sometimes think of myself as ‘the wave of the future.’ I read a study a while back about how this country is getting browner through immigration and intermarriage. I’m just your typical American in a hundred years or so. For a simple explanation, I’m a mix of Iraqi, Mexican, Japanese, and no one knows what all else, but most likely not white, and possibly black at that. Just to make life interesting, I’m technically a Sephardic Jew since my mother’s mother was an Iraqi Jew. If I have to give a simple answer, I say Israeli, although it’s a lie. In everything that matters, I’m just an American suburban kid, nothing special.”
“I just say a one-woman melting pot,” Scott shook his head with a grin. “It’s simpler to answer that way than it is to go through everything.”
“That’s a pretty interesting ethnic background,” Amber smiled. “You don’t run into someone like you every day.”
“Oh, the background is unusual,” Sonja admitted. “But once you get past it, I’m as normal as anyone else. Maybe I’m more normal than most. Scott and I were talking last night that we’re actually pretty dull, especially when you measure us up against people like Dayna and Shae and Eve and Jennlynn.”
“Anyone would be dull if you use them for yardsticks,” Aaron shook his head. “Now, Dayna wasn’t a surprise, we’ve been hearing some of her wild stories ever since we left high school. But for the rest to come out of the woodwork like that – well, it makes you wonder about the stories we didn’t hear. Amber and I don’t have any like them from our lives, that’s for sure.”
“Well, one,” Amber snickered. “The way we met was a little unusual. Well, actually, a little embarrassing.”
“In more ways than one,” Aaron shook his head. “But it worked out better than it had any right to.”
“Come on,” Sonja grinned. “Now you’ve got us interested.”
“It really wasn’t any big deal,” Aaron shook his head. “I suppose it happens to a lot of people at one time or another. We were both at this kegger in the dorm, got pretty drunk, and woke up naked in bed with each other.”
“Never happened like that for me,” Scott grinned.
“There’s more to it than Aaron said,” Amber grinned. “Yeah, we got about as drunk as a pair of underage college kids can get, both of us passed out. Some of the other people at the party thought it would be cute to strip us naked and put us in bed together so we could wonder about what we’d done when we woke up.”
“We had Midwest regional championship hangovers when we woke up,” Aaron laughed. “If we actually did anything, neither of us remembers it. Over the course of the day each of us decided that the other is pretty cool, and we wound up spending the next night together. Then it got embarrassing. Neither of us wanted to admit that we didn’t know the other’s name.”
“Well, hey, first things first,” Sonja smiled. “Scott and I don’t even have a story like that. We met in our freshman English class, and just got to be casual friends.”
“You know what it’s like in Bradford, awful white,” Scott expanded. “I felt like I ought to get to know people with other ethnic backgrounds, so Sonja seemed pretty exotic to me. Over time, Sonja and I got to be closer and closer friends. No big memorable romance, or anything. We’re not very impulsive people. Just dull.”
“You get down to it, we are too,” Aaron shrugged. “But we’re not alone. Did you notice Emily just drinking everything in last night? I mean, Kevin is a nice guy, and all that, but she married him just days after we graduated, and she’s worked at the Spee-D-Mart ever since. Especially in the first years we were out of high school she was real jealous of the rest of us going to college and having our fun, while she was behind the counter or raising little kids. At least now she gets to ride around on the back of Kevin’s Harley now and then. Amber and I are in the same boat. We got married right out of college, went to work and started raising kids, except that we don’t even have the Harley.”
“It’d be fun to do once,” Amber smiled. “But that’s a lot of money to tie up in a toy.”
“True,” Scott agreed. “We’re pretty much in the same boat. There ought to be something we could do to make our lives a little more exciting.”
“I think you have to go find it,” Sonja said. “It doesn’t come to you, or at least not often.”
“That’s true,” Aaron agreed. “It’s like TV. You can sit there and watch the action, that’s easy. It’s harder to be part of the action.” He let out a sigh and continued. “I can’t even tell you the last time we were to a good adult party, let alone a wild one.”
“Back in college, and that doesn’t count,” Amber nodded. “We’ve been to Aaron’s office Christmas party, but nobody ever has more than a drink or two at the most, nobody ever gets wild.”
“Hell, that’s wilder than you get at an insurance company,” Scott snorted. “You have to be such a straitlaced sober-sides.”
“The wildest party we’ve ever been to was when we were with Dayna that time,” Sonja nodded. “She was still getting over being sick, so she wasn’t drinking, but a lot of the people around us were.”
“What’s this all about?” Amber asked.
“Four years ago,” Sonja said. “It was a few months after Dayna and Sandy came down with salmonella, they were months throwing it off, and that was when they split up for a while and Sandy got married. Dayna had to go do a couple renfaires solo. She really wasn’t up to it, but she had to or she was going to have trouble getting booked in the future. Emily set up a bunch of us to go and act as roadies for her, so all she had to worry about was the shows and not all the other crap with it. Scott and I were with her like a week and a half. Those renaissance fair people are a little crazy anyway, and the Saturday night parties got a little wild.”
“That’s quite a life the two of them have,” Scott added, “Hanging around those people and those renfaires.”
“We still go to them now and then,” Sonja grinned. “There are some people who really get into the roles. It’s a lot more fun if you’re in costume. When we were with Dayna that time, she had me wear one of her belly dancer outfits. It was cool!”
“As Middle Eastern as Sonja looks anyway,” Scott smiled, “put her in an outfit like that, and she really looks the part. Absolutely gorgeous.”
“It was so neat that we bought one for me,” Sonja nodded. “It wasn’t cheap, but it’s really flashy. I thought I might take some classes some time, but I never got around to it. So about the only chance I get to wear it is when we go to renfaires.”
“God, I’d like to see that,” Amber shook her head. “Sonja, you must look awesome!”
“I could model it for you sometime,” Sonja offered.
“Yeah, but it would be so much neater if it was a costume party or something . . . Oh, my God! I’ve got an idea! Halloween is in three weeks!”
“You’re saying party, right?” Scott smiled. “It’d take more than the four of us.”
“Shouldn’t be a problem,” Aaron grinned, taking hold of the idea. “I’ll bet we could put together a pretty good party just out of the people from around southern Michigan who were at the reunion last night.”
“Yeaahhhh,” Scott agreed thoughtfully. “Shelly is in Battle Creek. She’s got a boyfriend, I think. He wasn’t there last night. Andy and Hannah are over near Ann Arbor some place.”
“They don’t strike me as party people,” Aaron protested. “She’s pretty religious.”
“They drink a little,” Sonja laughed. “But we’ve run into them at renfaires a couple times, and talk about getting into costume and getting into a role! Theirs is actually a little scary!”
“It’s possible,” Scott agreed with a smile. “Then there’s Diane and her husband up in Hawthorne, and hell, Liz right here, some others . . . I wonder what the chances of getting Dayna and Sandy are?”
“Hard to say,” Aaron nodded. “I know that to come last night, Dayna had to sneak off from some date she and Sandy were playing down south some place. I bet Emily would know, though. We could get with her before we head back to Lansing; she might know someone else. Your place or ours? We’ve got a pretty big living room that opens onto a large enclosed porch.”
“Your place, I think,” Scott told him. “Our place is on the small side, we’re thinking about getting a bigger place once the kids are in school and Sonja is working more. Which makes me think, Halloween is on a Saturday, we wouldn’t want to have the party then. It’d screw it up for the kids.”
“True,” Amber nodded. “Friday night maybe, start a little late so people coming from here have a chance to get ready and get there.”
“It’d work,” Sonja smiled. “I’ve probably got a little more time than you do, and you’re providing the spot. I can think of several things I can do for food that are a little off the wall!”
“Something Middle Eastern, like goat shish kebab?” Aaron giggled.
“Hey!” Sonja laughed. “That’s not bad! I’d play hell finding ten or twenty pounds of goat meat around here, though. Besides, we’d have trouble grilling it on your enclosed porch.”
“Not really,” Amber laughed. “It opens out onto our back yard. We could grill outside if the weather’s OK. We’ve got a nice big gas grill, too.”
“I could probably use lamb,” Sonja frowned thoughtfully as Liz showed up, arms loaded with dishes full of breakfast and began to set it out around the table.
“Hey, Liz,” Aaron smiled. “How would you and your husband like to come to a Halloween costume party up at our place in Mason the night before Halloween? That’s like three weeks from last Friday.”
“Might be fun,” Liz smiled. “So long as it isn’t a lynching party for taking so long with your food. They’re really stacked up back there.”
“Oh, we know you’re busy,” Scott said. “No big deal.”
“Sounds like a plan,” she replied, setting out the food. “You like Mike and me to bring anything?”
“Oh, some munchies, maybe,” Amber smiled. “We’re still pulling the plans together.”
“Hey, Liz,” Sonja piped up. “Do you know anyone around here that raises and butchers goats?”
“Yeah, Mike and I do,” Liz smiled. “How much do you need?”
“Fifteen or twenty pounds,” Sonja replied. “Aaron suggested we have goat shish kebab.”
“Sounds good to me,” Liz nodded. “You want it cut up into smallish chunks, right?”
“God, you’re not kidding, are you?” Aaron shook his head. “I think I just stuck my foot in my mouth.”
“Trust me, roast goat tastes better than roast foot,” Sonja laughed. “All right, Liz, you’re in for the goat meat. We’ll get back with you on the details once we get them worked out.”
“God,” Aaron snorted ruefully. “You and Liz, just your normal, average, everyday goat-roasting American girls.”
The next few minutes were exciting. Breakfast was eaten slowly as idea piled on idea, some good, some wild, some even wilder, a marvelous four-handed burst of creativity. By the time Liz took away the dirty dishes and tanked up their coffee cups again, they had the outlines of a pretty good party laid out – and, for that matter, the start of a pretty good friendship, as well. Without anyone saying it, they all realized that if the party came off at all well this might not be the last time they did something interesting together.
Finally Scott let out a sigh. “We’ve been talking about all this other stuff, and I don’t have the slightest idea of what I’d do for a costume.”
“Come on,” Sonja snorted. “After what you were talking about last night and this morning, I don’t know why it would take any thinking. You’ll never get a better opportunity.”
“I don’t know,” Scott sighed. “I know what you’re talking about, but it seems a little far out.”
“This is Halloween, and all we’ve been doing is talking far out,” Sonja shook her head. “It’s perfect.”
“What’s this?” Aaron shook his head. “I’m stumped, too.”
“You should have stayed late last night,” Sonja shook her head. “Eve talked for a long time about how she was required to spend over a year dressed as a woman before she could get her surgery, and apparently she did it so well, or he did it so well, I guess you’d have to say, that he never got caught. By the time she got to the surgery she was apparently about as female as you could get except for the anatomy. Scott, there’ll never be a better chance for you to peek over the fence and not have it mean anything.”
“You mean, go in drag?” Amber grinned. “Yeah, Aaron, you could do it, too. It’d be fun to dress you up like a woman. I’ll bet by the time I got done helping you dress that you’d be downright gorgeous.”
“Scott, I think if we worked at it you could be pretty hot yourself,” Sonja grinned.
“I don’t know,” he frowned. “I’d feel like an idiot, or a queer or something.”
“Oh, it’s Halloween, it’s part of the fun,” Amber grinned. “It wouldn’t be as bad if both you and Aaron were in drag.”
“You know what?” Sonja laughed. “I’ll bet that after last night we’re not the only people thinking about Eve. We could have a beauty contest for the best looking guy in drag.”
“Or the most realistic,” Amber grinned. “I like it! That’ll give us an excuse to really do it up right.”
“Oh, yeah,” Sonja beamed, “That’ll be a ball!”
“Hey, Aaron,” Scott shook his head. “We’re screwed, right?”
“Big time,” he nodded. “They’re not going to let it go.”
“All right,” Scott replied. “I will if you will. That way while I’ll still feel stupid, at least I won’t have to feel alone. But Sonja, you owe me.”
“Owe you what?”
“I don’t know yet,” he smiled evilly. “But when I figure it out, you’ll be the first to know.”
Just about then space opened up at a table next to them, and a little to their surprise, Emily and her husband Kevin sat down. “You know what they say,” Scott grinned. “If you’re looking for someone in Bradford, sooner or later they’ll show up here.”
“Sooner or later,” Emily smiled. “I took the morning off today since I figured I’d have a hangover. I guess I got lucky.”
“Sure looks like a second reunion here this morning,” Liz grinned as she brought coffee, apparently figuring Emily and Kevin came into the place often enough that menus weren’t needed.
“Sure does,” Aaron smiled. “Have you got your head back together yet, Emily?”
“After last night, I’m not sure,” the short brunette shook her head. They all knew it had been largely she who had organized the reunion; her friend Vicky had helped quite a lot, too. “After some of the things that came out last night, I’m almost scared to organize another reunion.” She let out a sigh and added, “But I can hardly wait to find out what else we learn, too.”
“And we had less than half the class there,” Scott nodded. “It makes you wonder what happened with the ones we don’t know about.”
“They’ll have to go some to top Jennlynn and Eve and Dayna,” Emily shook her head. “I mean, when I first heard about Eve, it sounded as weird as anything you could imagine, but it makes a lot of sense when you hear her out.”
The six of them sat around discussing the reunion the night before, some of the people they hadn’t seen for years. In just a few minutes, Vicky and her friend Jason, a man a lot older than the rest of them, showed up and joined the discussion. The subject soon got around to Jennlynn. “All I’d ever known about her was her folks had thrown her out,” Emily related. “I never found out why they did, and I didn’t see her again until last night. I do know she didn’t start that stuff in Nevada till after that. You don’t mention her name around her folks unless you’re looking for a real hellfire-and-brimstone rant.”
“No idea,” Vicky agreed. “But whatever it was, it had to have been bad. She’s still obviously pretty pissed off with them.”
“I don’t know,” Emily nodded, a major confession for someone who was admittedly the class gossip – and that reason plus still living in Bradford was why she was tacitly agreed by all to be the de facto class president. Whatever her follow-up thought was got lost in the bustle of Liz bringing coffee refills to their table. Once it had been set out she continued, “But I’ll tell you what, I sure wish it were possible to see some of the kids a little more often than we’ve managed.”
“We were just talking about that,” Aaron smiled. “Would you be up for coming to our place up by Lansing for a Halloween party at the end of the month? We’re talking the Friday night before so we don’t mess up the trick or treating for our kids. We were thinking of having some of the people from around the area. I mean the people from around here, but Shelly, the Bakers, a few others.”
“Sounds like fun,” Emily agreed with a smile. “You mean costumes and the whole bit, right?”
“Well, more or less,” Sonja grinned. “These lechers want me to wear my belly-dancer outfit. But Eve sort of got us to thinking it would be the perfect occasion for the guys to come in drag, just so they get a little bit of the view from her side of the fence. Maybe even have a prize for the most realistic.”
“I don’t know,” Emily said dubiously. “We all dissed Denis bad enough in high school. I wouldn’t want Eve to think we were still making fun of her. If that’s what you’re thinking about I don’t want any part of it.”
“Hadn’t crossed my mind,” Sonja smiled. “What set it off was she got us to wondering about the other side of the gender line, both ways.”
“Me too, a little,” Emily admitted. “And it might be a fun way to play with it a little. But Sonja, this is a sensitive area. Most of us hurt Denis pretty bad in one way or another, and I’m as guilty as anyone else. After last night, we can see what happened as a result of it and when you stop and think about it, it’s not very pretty. Costumes, fine, but drag, even individually? Shae said she had to twist Eve’s arm real bad to get her to come at all last night. I don’t want to put her down for it.”
“I should have thought about that,” Sonja said softly. “After all, I never met Denis; I guess I didn’t realize that.” She let out a sigh. “Damn it, I should have as dark as I am, and technically Jewish on top of it. I caught a lot of shit in high school, too.”
“On the other hand,” Emily smiled. “It is a cute idea. It’d be fun to see Kevin in drag. Maybe another year, it’ll blow over some. Tell you what. This isn’t something that absolutely has to be decided today, is it? I’ve got Eve’s number. How about if I call her up, explain that she got us to thinking, and ask her permission? She seems to have a sense of humor that Denis never had. If she’s approached in the right way she might think it’s cute.”
“And maybe explain it as an attempt to understand her a little, or at least a little of what she had to go through when she was a guy,” Aaron added.
“Might work,” Scott nodded. “I don’t want her to think we’re mocking her, either. It was a damn gutsy move to take hold of her life like that, especially knowing that if she’d gotten caught, things would really have been hell on her.” He sighed. “And I was enough of a teenage asshole that I’d have been right at the head of the pack.”
“I’d like to think I would have been a little more understanding,” Emily agreed softly. “Except I probably wouldn’t have been. If you like, I’ll call, and if she says no or sounds unhappy with the idea, it’s no, OK?”
“Can’t be any other way,” Scott nodded.
“I probably won’t be able to get hold of her till tomorrow night,” Emily observed. “The decision can wait until then, right?”
“Yeah, no problem,” Amber said. “We only cooked this up in the last half hour, anyway.”
“I’ll let you know as soon as I find out,” Emily promised.
“Shows we’re growing up,” Scott replied thoughtfully. “In the good old days it wouldn’t have crossed anyone’s mind.”
