It took a while to get back to the garage, change his shirt, then get in the car and head back over to the hospital. John wondered every inch of the way why he was doing this and figured it was probably a mistake. But, as he’d told Chad, there was a little tradition in the Bradford High School Class of ’88 for people to take care of each other when they were in trouble, and now it looked like it was going to be his turn.

It wasn’t as if he liked Sally back then, because he hadn’t. Not many people had; she was a stuck-up God-boxer who had the habit of waving her salvation in everybody’s faces, and naturally that put a lot of people off, John right at the head of the list. But, for whatever else had happened to her in the almost fifteen years since he’d seen her, that much had pretty obviously changed. He couldn’t help but wonder what had happened – and why.

John usually got back to Bradford every year or so to see his folks, although they were starting to think about retiring and moving to Florida in the still unforeseeable future. When he did get back up north, he always made it a point to check in with a few of his old friends. There weren’t many left in Bradford; the local slang for kids leaving town after graduation to go to college or find jobs was “taking the on-ramp,” referring to the Interstate access outside of town that would take them somewhere else. These days, there weren’t many of the Class of ’88 who hadn’t taken the on-ramp, and John had done it sooner and more solidly than most.

But of the handful left behind, foremost among them was Emily Jones – well, Emily Holst now, but he still thought of the girls by the names they’d had in school. He’d seen Emily back last summer, when he’d been able to make his annual visit home coincide with the wedding of classmates Dave Patterson and Shae Kirkendahl. The wedding had turned into an informal class reunion of sorts. There were people present he hadn’t seen for years. Emily now ran the local newspaper, the Courier, and was the mayor of Bradford, to boot. For a number of reasons, she was pretty much the magnet who held at least part of the class together, writing an annual newsletter and trying to keep up with everybody.

Thinking back to that informal reunion, John could remember Emily talking about kids she had totally lost track of – about a third of the class. Some of those she literally hadn’t heard about since the day they graduated, and Sally Hanson was one of those people. If Emily had no word on what had happened, even way back then, well, it aroused his curiosity a little. Well, more than a little; it would be nice to fill Emily in on a classmate rather than the other way around, which was usually the case.

And it was Emily who years before had started the tradition of class members helping each other out in times of trouble. John had been peripherally involved in a couple of the incidents and had heard much about some of the others, so there was that motivation, too. At worst, he didn’t want word to get back to Emily that he’d turned his back on a chance to help out a fellow ’88 in need, no matter how distant or disliked she had been – Emily would never let him live it down! Kevin Holst had sure gotten lucky with her, he thought. It would have been nice if he had been half as lucky, but he figured that some things just weren’t meant to be.

He remembered Emily saying back at the tenth year class reunion four and a half years before that there weren’t a lot of Bradford ’88s, so they had to stick together and help each other out when they could. He remembered the story of Shae Kirkendahl and Eve McClellan showing up out of nowhere at Emily’s behest to rescue Dave Patterson and his kids after his wife had been killed when the World Trade Center went down. You don’t let a precedent like that get past you, he thought. At least it probably can’t hurt to find out what’s going on.

Still, this had all the smell of trouble, and he hoped he wouldn’t have to get too involved with it. He’d managed to keep woman trouble out of his life for a while, and he liked it that way.

The thoughts kept him occupied all the way back to Cocalatchee General. Yes, this could be trouble, but it could be a good deed well done, too. He parked his car in the Emergency Room parking lot and walked in; it didn’t take much looking to find Sally, sitting outside one of the treatment rooms with a worried look on her face. “So,” he said, “how’s it going?”

“They’re in working on Teresa,” she replied. “They’ve had to knock her out so they could set her legs.”

“I was pretty sure that was going to happen,” he said. “I don’t want to say that a pair of broken legs aren’t anything serious, because they are. But she can recover from them, and in two or three months she’ll be good as new.”

“I hope so,” Sally shook her head. “Damn, with everything else happening, now this had to happen. John, she may be all right in two or three months but I don’t know how I’m going to take care of her for that long. I don’t even have a place to stay. We were, uh, sort of living out of the car the last couple days, and I’d been hoping I could find a cheap place in Atlanta. At least it was out of Miami.”

“Your folks aren’t likely to help?” he asked.

“Hell, no,” she spat. “Not after the way they treated me. I haven’t talked to them since before Teresa was born, and I don’t want to start now. I don’t even know if they’re still in Bradford, or what, but I’d be a streetwalker before I asked them for the time of day.”

Clearly something had gone very wrong there, and right at the moment John didn’t want to hear about it. There was no point in getting Sally even more wrought up than she already was, at least not now. “Well, if it’s any solace, I don’t think they’re in Bradford anymore. At least the last time I talked to Emily about what had happened to everyone, she said they moved away years before.”

“Emily?”

“Emily Holst, used to be Jones,” he replied, a little surprised. “You remember her?”

“Of course,” she said. “She was in band with me, and was class president when we were seniors. What’s she got to do with it?”

“Emily is still sort of the de facto class president,” John smiled, remembering that most of the kids figured that Emily had also been one of the girls who Did, but only with her several-years’-older fiancé, who she married within days after graduation. “She tries to keep in touch with everyone. She put together a class reunion a few years ago, and we’ve kept in touch since.”

Sally shook her head. “Wow, I haven’t thought about her in years,” she said. “I’ve really lost touch with everyone, but then I wanted to.”

“Right. Emily said she hadn’t heard anything about you since we graduated.”

“It was pretty ugly,” Sally said. “I had a better reason than most to get out of town and stay out of town. I’ve really tried to put all that shit behind me, especially all the church shit they used to shove down my throat. They finally tried to shove me a piece that was too big, and well . . . fuck them. I don’t really want to talk about it. What are you doing these days? Working for some ambulance outfit?”

“Not really,” he said. “I’m an EMT, but I only fill in for companies when they’re shorthanded. I’ve got a little sales business down in Sarasota, about a mile south of the airport, just off Tamiami Trail, if you know the Sarasota area.”

“Don’t know anything about it,” she said, “but then, I don’t have any reason to. This is the first time I’ve been in the area, although God knows I’ve been everywhere else that I figure my parents won’t be.”

This sounded bad, John thought. There was some real pain and hate there. He’d probably find out more about it than he want to, but still – “So what have you been doing?”

“Whatever I can,” she said. “You name a cheap-ass, degrading, minimum-wage job and I’ve probably done it at one time or another. I’ve tried to keep things together for Teresa and me, but it’s really been a stretch at times. I just don’t know how I’m going to deal with this one. How the hell am I going to get along with a girl with two broken legs when I have no place to stay?”

“We’ll come up with something,” he said. “Look, I don’t know how long they’re planning on keeping her here, but it probably won’t be more than a day or two. She’s still going to be a hurting girl for a while, but she’s young enough she can get over it pretty quickly. If push comes to shove, I suppose you could stay with me for a few days until we can get figured out what you’re going to do next.”

“What’s your wife going to say about that?”

“Not a thing,” he said. “I’m not married. Sally, I’ve been through three wives. It was almost four but I caught myself in time,” John replied, realizing that it would probably be best to be casual for a while and put his guest at ease a little before they got down to the serious business, whatever it was. “It wouldn’t have been any more successful with her. I’ll never know how Mandy and I managed to put up with each other for five years, two living together and three married after that. The other two didn’t last long, only four months with Susan, a little over a year for Lisa.”

“Three wives?” she shook her head. “I seem to recall you got around a little when we were in school.”

“Well, I did,” he said, “but that was then. It’s been, what? Six years now. The first one was Mandy Paxton, you probably remember her.”

“I never got along very well with her. You married her?”

“Long story. But after three and almost four wives, I realized that I’m not the kind of guy who’s supposed to be married, so I’ve tried to avoid it since.”

“I don’t know that it’s been much better for me,” she said. “I only got married once, but it was an absolute disaster. That was one of those things my parents forced down my throat, and even thinking about it again pisses me off.”

One thing was for sure, John thought, the way she swore pretty well proved that Sally wasn’t the prissy little God-boxer that he remembered. There had to have been a hell of a lot that had changed. “Then maybe we’d better get away from that subject,” he suggested.

“Sounds good to me,” she said in obvious relief. “So what happened with some of the other kids? I mean, I heard about Jennlynn last year, and that was a hell of a shock. Jennlynn is absolutely the last person you’d have expected it of.”

“Boy, that’s the truth,” John smiled, remembering. Of the girls who Didn’t in high school, Jennlynn had absolutely been the most adamant about leading the list, even more so than Sally. While she’d been the valedictorian and sharp as hell, she was also a fundamentalist Christian, very serious and hardnosed about it. “But I already knew about part of it. I was at the reunion where she dropped what Emily fondly refers to as ‘the bomb.’ I think I’ll remember that as long as I live. Here’s Jennlynn at the reunion, looking absolutely gorgeous, and Emily had already passed the story around that she’d flown in to the reunion in her own Learjet. So, when Emily had us doing introductions, she stood up, explained that she was a design engineer and executive with a research company, a PhD, had an airline transport license, owned another airplane along with the Lear, ran her own charter company with a retired general for a chief pilot, and was a multimillionaire. I mean, when you get right down to it, not really that surprising, we all knew that whatever she did, Jennlynn was going to do pretty good in her life, right?”

“Well, yeah,” Sally nodded, with a little smile.

“Darn right,” John grinned. “And then she said, ‘My folks threw me out of the house on my ass in 1990, so, to get through college and part time ever since, I’ve also worked in Nevada as a licensed legal prostitute.’ She also explained she was known as ‘Learjet Jenn, the fastest woman in the state of Nevada.’ I’ll tell you, I never heard such dead silence in my life.”

“Even when I saw that deal about her on TV last year, I didn’t believe it. That was really something.”

A little more than a year before, Jennlynn had been riding in the first class section of an airliner when it was hijacked. Swinging the heel of a Manolo Blahnik like it was a cargo hook, Jennlynn, along with a big black woman with a black belt and another man, an elderly veterinarian, she was part of an immediate counterattack that regained control of the airplane. Successful though it was, the counterattack didn’t come in time to keep the flight crew from being injured in the process. Even though Jennlynn had never flown anything as big as the airliner, she had an airline transport rating in the Learjet and landed the plane without incident, the landing shown on national TV. In the aftermath, there was a media feeding frenzy when her part-time job had been revealed. When John had been in Publix a couple months afterward there were three supermarket tabloids with her on the cover. The stories were absolute bullshit, of course; he knew better, and from Jennlynn herself. “Now Jennlynn is probably the nation’s best-known prostitute,” he smiled.

“Local girl makes good,” Sally shook her head. “You sure don’t expect something like that out of our classmates. So what else has anybody done?”

“Well, until that happened, the biggest news was that Dave Patterson’s wife rode one of the twin towers down back on September 11.”

“I had no idea,” she shook her head. “We watched that on TV.”

“A neat story about that,” John smiled. “Dave had been evacuated from his nearby apartment and was sitting in some shelter with his kids, totally despondent, when who should show up but Shae Kirkendahl and Eve McClellan. Emily sent them to get him. Shae worked on some kids TV show . . . ”

“Avalon,” Sally nodded. “I’ve seen her when I was doing some babysitting.”

“Yeah, she was working in New York, and Eve was visiting. She’s a clinical psychologist, and she just wouldn’t let him or his kids get to brooding. If you haven’t been in touch with the class, you probably wouldn’t know about Eve.”

“I don’t remember the name,” Sally shook her head.

“Neither did anyone else when she stood up at the class reunion back in ’98 and introduced herself,” John grinned. He’d been there and it was still pretty flabbergasting to him. “She’s a very pretty little blonde, hair halfway down her back. Emily said she didn’t remember her, and Eve replied, ‘I suppose I’ve changed more than anyone else, but I’m happier now than I ever could have been when I was Denis Riley.’”

“Denis Riley?” Sally said, eyes open and jaw agape. “You’re kidding!”

“I honestly thought it was a setup,” John shook his head. “You look at Eve, and you just don’t see that little wuss we all knew and disliked. It was later that evening before she and her husband and Shae convinced me. She’d been preparing for her sex change while we were still seniors, and graduation was the last time she presented herself as Denis. Only Shae and Eve’s folks knew about it until the night of the reunion.”

“Denis Riley?” Sally shook her head again. “My God, I can’t imagine it!”

“It takes some believing,” John laughed. “Don’t get me wrong, I’ve never seen Eve in anything but a party dress, but she has one hell of a body, some fairly big boobs, and she says they’re all natural, no plastic added, just estrogen therapy. According to Shae, she had to keep them bound our senior year, and when she graduated they were bigger than maybe a third of the natural girls in the class. Anyway, Eve and her husband adopted a couple of Russian kids, and according to Emily they are just about the most doting parents you ever saw. Shae and Dave got married last summer, and had a kid last fall. There are a few other stories out of the class, Emily keeps us up on things, but those are the big ones of the last few years.”

“It sounds like we have quite a class.”

“A little out of the ordinary, but I don’t think that far out,” John told her. “I guess everybody else is pretty normal, well, except for Dayna, of course.”

“Dayna? Dayna Berkshire? What’s the deal about her?”

“Another long story,” he said. “The short version is that she and her girlfriend Sandy Beach are musicians and fairly successful at it. By the way, when I say girlfriend, I mean girlfriend in that sense. They don’t admit they’re lesbians, but there’s no doubt about it when you talk to them. They’ve been pretty successful. You ever hear, oh, Pick Me Please, or Experience of Survival?”

“Experience of Survival is our Dayna? That’s something! But she didn’t do Pick Me Please, did she?”

“Oh, yes she did, except that the version you usually hear on the radio is a cover by some teeny-bopper, I don’t recall the name. It was Dayna and Sandy who wrote the song. Anyway, they sort of base out of Bradford, but they’re gone a lot.” He let out a sigh and continued. “Everybody else is pretty normal, some successful, some not so successful, most pretty ordinary. I mean we have a dentist, a couple truck drivers, a couple waitresses, and who knows what else.”

“Still, it’s pretty interesting,” she said. “I hadn’t thought about some of those kids in years. I mean, I’ve had a pretty good reason to stay away. I’m glad you told me about them, though. It’s taken my mind off Teresa a bit.”

“Well, that was sort of what I hoped for,” John admitted. “You were wound up pretty tight, and I think you’ve relaxed a little.”

“Well, I’m still worried about her,” she protested.

“She’s going to be all right,” John told her. “It’s going to be a little bit complicated for a while, but she’ll come out of it just fine, and you will, too.”

“I don’t know how,” she replied glumly. “The car is gone, not that it was anything but a piece of shit. I don’t have any money. I stopped down in Ft. Myers to see if I could get a few bucks from a friend and I couldn’t find her, not that I could have gotten very much from her. The only hope I had of getting to Atlanta was to steal some gas – that’s one of the few useful things I learned from that bastard I was forced to marry. Now Teresa is in the hospital and I have no idea how much that’s going to cost, not that I could pay for it anyway. And if I don’t get up to Atlanta pretty soon, even the chance I had at a job is gone. John, what am I going to do?”

“There are ways,” John smiled. “I can probably help out with some of that.” If he did it right, a lot of it could be a tax write-off, although he’d have to juggle things a bit to pull it off. And, if push came to shove, he could always call in Emily, who could probably manage to take up a collection among the ’88s, or hold a benefit, or something. She was good at organizing that kind of thing, especially if it was an ’88 in trouble. Still, there was no point in bothering Emily if he didn’t have to. “Look,” he continued. “All that is stuff for tomorrow. Tonight you need to worry about Teresa. I’m sure she’s going to be all right in the long run, but the short run, well, like I said, we’ll work something out.”

Just then a scrub-clad doctor with a mask dangling from his neck came into the lounge. “Mrs. Hanson?” he asked.

“Yes?” Sally replied in some agitation.

“We’ve got your daughter’s legs set, and it went all right. I’m afraid she’s going to have to be in a wheelchair for a while, though. We’d like to keep her at least overnight for observation, considering the possibility of head trauma. It could be two or three days before she’s released.”

“If you have to, I guess,” she replied. “Can I see her?”

“You can if you want,” the doctor said. “She’s still under sedation, and it’s going to be a while before she comes out of it.”

“I just want to make sure she’s all right,” Sally said, getting to her feet. John got up with her, and they followed the doctor to one of the treatment rooms. The girl lay on a gurney, mostly covered with a sheet, and totally out of it. With tears in her eyes, Sally took her unconscious daughter’s hand and held on tightly while John and the doctor looked on.

John waved his head at the doctor, to lead him out in the hall. “How long do you really think you’re going to have to keep her?” he asked when the two of them were outside.

“A couple days at a guess,” the doctor said. “She was pinned in the car and had some secondary injuries.”

“I know. I was one of the EMTs who got her out,” John nodded. “I’m guessing she’s going to need some follow-up care, especially if she’s not going to be ambulatory.”

“A fair amount,” the doctor replied. “For practical purposes, with both legs broken she’s probably going to have to be in a wheelchair for a couple months. It would be tough for her to get around on crutches, even if we put walking casts on.”

“I was afraid you were going to say that, although it’s about what I expected,” John said. “I may be an EMT but I don’t get into that end of the business much. I just drop people off here and let you guys worry about the details.”

“I’m afraid the girl is going to need a lot of home care,” the doctor said. “What’s the home situation like?”

“They don’t have one,” John told him bluntly. “I went to school with the mother, and I guess that means I’ll be the one to take them in for a while. Her mother wasn’t really a friend, but as far as I know she has no one else to turn to.”

“Well,” the doctor said. “I hope it works out for you.”

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.