How could it be twenty years already?

Bob Spheris looked in the mirror and checked his tie. It was hard to believe that it had been that long ago when he’d looked in this same mirror and done the same thing, only back then it had been getting set to go to his high school graduation. Where had the time gone? How could twenty years just get away like that? How much light had that mirror reflected across his old bedroom in his parents’ house in the intervening span of years?

Good God, Bob, you’re getting old, he thought.

The concept bothered him. He still thought of himself as a young man, even though he knew he wasn’t. Forty was only a couple years off, and there was no doubt in his mind that forty qualified as middle aged. Thirty had once met that qualification for him, but that was before he got there.

Once again, he wondered if going to his high school class reunion was all that great of an idea. With only a couple exceptions he hadn’t seen any of the kids in all that time, and the exceptions didn’t count for much. He hadn’t really intended to go this time; he remembered getting the card from Emily Holst about the reunion, but he’d tossed it. Colorado was a long way off and he didn’t travel that much if he could help it.

He’d forgotten about the reunion, but he happened to be here in Michigan on business and thought he’d take the opportunity to stop off and visit his folks. He didn’t get to do that very often, and they were getting on up there. He always had good intentions to do a better job of it, but somehow it never quite happened. Then he’d run into Emily in the grocery store; he barely remembered her, but she recognized him on sight and asked if he was coming to the reunion.

At first he was obviously negative about it, but Emily persisted: “We haven’t seen you for a long time, Bob,” she’d said. “Some of the kids have changed a lot, some literally so much you can’t imagine it. We had some real shockers at our tenth reunion, but they turned out to be really neat. We’d like to have you there.”

“I’m afraid there’s not a lot shocking with me,” he said. “I’m still the plain old dull Bob you always knew.”

“I somehow doubt that,” Emily smiled. “Besides, there’s always something interesting going on with the kids in our class. Come on, you’ll have a good time.”

“Well, all right,” he’d agreed, it being clear that Emily was going to go on twisting his arm until he said yes. Emily had been the organizer in high school, always twisting arms to get people to do things that they’d really rather not do. Some things didn’t change; that was true. What had changed Bob’s mind this time, really, was knowing that those people she’d convinced to do the things they didn’t want to do was before they did them, but afterward they’d usually been glad they had.

He glanced at his watch; plenty of time. There was no real point in being early, anyway. His memories of high school were distant, he realized, and a lot of them weren’t very pleasant. He hadn’t had a lot of friends in high school; he’d been a good student, if not a really outstanding one, just sort of there, which was the way he did a lot of things. Still, there was no putting it off any more and he realized that he might as well get on with it.

He went downstairs, told his folks he was taking off. They wished him a good time, and he headed out to his rental car and aimed it for Hawthorne, the county seat fifteen miles from Bradford. There had been some new construction along the road, a few things changed, but for the most part it was much as he remembered it – southern Michigan normal. The one jarring thing was how green things were around here, especially in the country, especially since this was early August. Fort Collins got quite dry in the summer, and the countryside there was just dead brown this time of year. Michigan seemed so lush and green by comparison that he had trouble believing the colors.

Even though it had been years, he remembered how to get to the restaurant in Hawthorne where the reunion was to be held and drove right to it. He parked his car and went inside, noticed a sign that read “Bradford Class of ’88 Reunion” and followed the arrow to a back room. There at the door sat Vicky Varney – well, MacRae now, according to her name tag. He could remember her, at least; she’d been a cheerleader in high school, bright and bubbly, the kind of girl he’d never dared to ask on a date. She’d put on some weight – to be expected – although she still looked pretty good. “Bob!” she said brightly, “Emily said you might come! Long time, no see!”

“Been a long time,” he agreed. “So what are you up to these days?”

“Oh, mostly working with Jason at the shop and raising the kids,” she said. “I got started a little late, they’re only seven and five. How about you? Any kids?”

“None that I know of,” he grinned. “I’ve never been married. You could say I’ve just never found a woman I wanted to marry who would want to marry me.”

“I sort of know how that works,” she replied. “I went through one certified loser before Jason and I came to our senses. Smartest thing I ever did, but it sure was the long way around.”

He stood in front of the registration table chatting with Vicky for a couple minutes, just catching up with each other. Vicky had been the kind of person who was a friend to everyone, but a close friend to very few, and he had not been on that list. Still, it was nice to know that he had been remembered.

The pleasant reminiscing halted suddenly when someone else arrived, a little blonde and a guy, neither of whom he knew. Vicky just about erupted out of her chair, ran around the table and threw her arms around the woman. “Eve! John!” she squealed. “You made it after all!”

“They did some rescheduling at the conference,” the little blonde smiled. “I had to pull some strings to manage that and we’re not going to be able to stay the night.”

“Well, it’s good to see you!” Vicky grinned. “How are Sergei and Milla?”

“Still growing like weeds,” Eve replied. “They’re happy kids, and that makes me happy.”

“Well, good!” Vicky said, and started discussing their kids more seriously. It made Bob feel just somewhat left out; he expected that there would be a lot of that going on. But there was a question that was kicking around in his mind: just who the hell was Eve? He couldn’t recall anyone in the class by that name, and it wasn’t all that big a class, just eighty-one kids graduating. From her looks and the way Vicky greeted her, it stood to reason that she’d been a cheerleader, so he’d have a better reason to remember her, but he couldn’t. There was something vaguely familiar about her, but that was all. He wondered how many more kids from the class he wouldn’t remember. Twenty years was beginning to seem like an awful long time.

After a minute or two, it became clear that Vicky, Eve, and John were good friends who hadn’t seen each other for a while, so he decided to wander off and see if he could find someone he remembered a little better. He remembered Vicky saying something about a cash bar, so he headed off in that direction.

It wasn’t hard to find, and there weren’t a lot of people standing around it. A kid who couldn’t be much more than out of high school was manning it, and asked politely, “Can I get you something, sir?”

Bob wasn’t much of a drinker, but he liked a beer now and then. “Coors, if you’ve got it,” he replied.

“I’m afraid we don’t, sir,” the kid replied. “We have MGD, Miller Lite, Bud, and Bud Light. Would one of those do?”

“Bud, I guess,” Bob replied. Although he’d prefer a Silver Bullet, it was always good to support the hometown industry, and Budweiser had a huge bottling plant right outside of Fort Collins. It was unlikely that any beer bottled in Fort Collins would be here, though.

“Sure thing, sir,” the kid replied. “I can give it to you in a can or a mug.”

He selected a can, on the logic that it might be a little more spill proof. The bartender got a can out of an ice-filled bin, popped the top, and set it on the counter. Bob dug out the three bucks and was just paying the kid when he heard, “Bob! Are you ready to marry me now?”

What in hell? He turned to see a face he could recognize – Sharon Holdenhoven!

He looked down at the short brunette with the big rimmed glasses. She hadn’t changed her hair style from what he remembered, it was still down to her shoulder blades and pulled back into a pony tail. She’d put on a little weight, not very much – mostly she’d just filled out – and she looked pretty good to him in her low-cut peasant blouse and black knee-length skirt. He’d never really had a girlfriend in high school, though Sharon was about as close as he’d managed. They knew each other, and … well, they knew each other. When the prom had come around in their senior year, she’d had a date blow her off with something like a day to go, and had been devastated. Bob hadn’t planned on going to the prom, but he felt sorry for her and decided to come to her rescue. It had been a pretty good date, one of the very few he’d had in high school.

“Well, I still qualify,” he smiled at the memory. “How about you?”

“I do, too,” Sharon replied. “I’ve been out with guys over the years but no one ever rang my bell, if you know what I mean? It always seems like whoever I go out with is some kind of a freak or has kids who just drive me up a wall. I think I’ve really always just been waiting for you to come to my rescue again. I’ve asked around about you, but all I ever heard was that you were in Colorado and I never got out there.”

“Right, Fort Collins,” he replied. “How about you?”

“Buffalo,” she replied. “Actually, just sort of from Buffalo, now. On my way out, you know? I was an account administrator at a mortgage finance company and, well, you know what’s happened there, don’t you? It reeks, I mean, it really does. At least we’re going to be rid of that idiot Bush before long. I swear, starting that war was about the dumbest thing he could have possibly done. But when it comes to stupid, the things that those …”

Bob couldn’t help but smile. A lot of people in school hadn’t liked Sharon, and it was their loss. Most people thought of her as a flake, an airhead. She could skip from one topic to another without notice. You never knew where she was going to come out when she started to say anything. In spite of that, Bob had always sort of liked her, since he knew she was a lot more intelligent than she seemed. Her lighthearted approach to the world always seemed to rub off on him and make him feel better, even though it could be irritating to keep her on track. “So you’re out of work, huh?” he broke into the steady flow of words.

“I’m afraid I am,” she said. “It’s been very hard; I’m going to have to give up my apartment. When I was asked to move to Buffalo for the company I thought I was going to be there for a while. Buffalo is pretty neat but they get a lot of snow in the winter. My goodness, I’m glad I didn’t have to shovel it last winter. There were days the maintenance man spent hours and hours digging us out –”

“What are you doing now?” he interrupted again.

“Oh, I’m drawing my unemployment checks and thinking about moving back with my folks since I can’t find much else to do, especially not in Buffalo. I mean, not that there’d be much for me to do here but at least I could live cheap. It was costing me an absolute ton for my apartment and all they had was a carport. With as much snow as they get there you’d think that they could at least provide a garage, but no, they had to gouge us for every cent they could. So what are you doing?”

My God, he thought, she actually asked a question and is stopping to wait for an answer. How the hell did that happen? “Nothing very exciting,” he replied. “I work in the purchasing department at Colorado State University. It’s nothing special, but I like my life.”

“Oh, I’ll bet you do,” she smiled. “I’ve never spent any time in Colorado, but it seems very beautiful from what little I’ve seen of it in pictures. When I was in Pusan I knew this girl from Colorado, I think she said Grand Junction, although I’m not sure now since it’s been a few years. One time she said to me that it gets very cold there, and she missed the clear dry air. We were right by the sea in Pusan and –”

“Pusan?” he asked. “You mean Korea? What were you doing there?”

“A different job. I’d been working for a phone company and it was dull. I mean dull, always the same thing, I thought it would be right down my line, but I got tired of it so quickly that I couldn’t even believe it. But Pusan, I remembered a girl I used to know who had a job teaching oral English in universities in the Orient, and I thought that might be fun to do for something different, so I did some investigating. I wound up spending two years there, it was a lot of fun and a lot of people speak English, so it really wasn’t too bad of a deal. Korea didn’t really interest me all that much but it wasn’t expensive to go to Tokyo and there’s a lot of interesting things there. Oh, anime! I love anime, the Japanese are so good at it, and you could even get subtitled films there. Do you ever watch it?”

“I know what it is, but I’ve never watched any. That’s like Sailor Moon, right?”

“Oh Sailor Moon! That’s anime, but that’s not really anime. The real anime is so much less childish, there are some great stories there, and the Japanese do it so well. I mean, I love things like Tenshio Hirodia, that’s such an allegory of real life, but that’s not really something a novice at anime should start with. Maybe we ought to sit down and watch something simple like Dragonhalf sometime, you’d enjoy that even though that’s not real anime either.”

“I wouldn’t know,” he broke in. “I really don’t watch much on the tube. I do some Internet, but I like to read a lot. TV has always irritated me.”

“Oh, yes,” she smiled. “You were always the dusty, introspective intellectual, weren’t you? Always brooding over the fate of civilization or something. So what did you study in college? I suppose you were a philosophy major, weren’t you?”

“Well, no,” he admitted. “I thought about it but there’s a limit to how many of those intellectual ideas are edible. After I got out of the army –”

“Oh, you were in the army? What did you do? I thought about joining the army, but I decided that I’d better not do it. It was right about the time the first Gulf War was on and I felt like I needed to do my part, but I thought I’d better finish college first. Then when September 11 came along, I was in New York, and I wished I had done it, I felt like I ought to be able to do something to pay those people back, and I felt so helpless when I saw those buildings come down. I ran and ran and ran, I thought I was going to choke on the dust when the cloud caught me –”

“Hold it!” he said. “You were in New York? There? Not watching it on TV?”

“Why yes, I was,” she replied. “I was interviewing for a job, it wouldn’t have been in the towers but close, and I was just walking down the street when there was this big bang overhead, and I looked up and I could see the fire just gushing out of the building. I mean, my God, it was bad enough to be there, I can’t manage to think how Dave must have felt to know his wife was up there –”

“Dave?” he broke in. “Dave who? Is this someone I know.”

“Well, you ought to know him,” she smiled at him like he was some kind of idiot. “Dave Patterson, you know from our class? Big tall guy, played basketball?”

“Of course I know Dave,” he said, shaking his head. “You mean he was there?”

“Why yes, he was there, although I didn’t know about it until years later,” she replied. “We must have come close to tripping over each other a dozen times that day, but we never saw each other. Boy, Shae sure got lucky with him.”

“Shae? Shae Kirkendahl?” Bob frowned. Shae was a member of their class, a really great basketball player in high school. At six feet, eight inches she was easily the tallest woman Bob had ever met. “What does the skyscraper have to do with it? Don’t tell me Shae was there?”

“Well, not at the time, she was across the river in Brooklyn, but after Emily heard about Dave’s wife riding the tower down, she got hold of Shae and Eve, and the two of them got Dave and his kids out of some shelter and took care of them. Shae wound up marrying him a year later, they’ve got the cutest little kids.”

“Shae Kirkendahl and Dave Patterson?” he smiled. “I have to admit, that makes some sense.”

“Oh, I think it makes a lot of sense,” she agreed. “They really do make a striking couple, even though he’s six inches shorter than she is. Emily told me that they’re planning on being here tonight, but they’re running just a little late, ’cause he’s just back from New York again, something to do with one of his books, a promotion or something. I read his last one, he handles fantasy really well, though it’s awful dark for fantasy. He’s got a new one that’s supposed to be coming out pretty soon, I was sort of hoping he’d slip me an advance copy or something.”

“He’s a writer?” Dave had been a rather bookish guy for a jock, sort of quiet. He hadn’t even been that much of a jock, for that matter. Bob seemed to recall something about him going to school in the east somewhere. Columbia stuck in his mind, but he wasn’t sure that was right. It was a little unbelievable to think that someone from a jerkwater country school like Bradford could wind up going to Columbia, of all places.

“They’re both writers,” Sharon explained. “He writes his fantasy, of course, but she writes children’s stories. They’re quite good too, they all seem to have the ugly duckling theme, about how it’s all right to be different and not everybody has to be the same. I get the impression that Dave’s wife left him quite a lot of money when she died, he and Shae have a big new house out north of town. I haven’t seen it, but a friend of my mother’s has, she says she feels like a midget when she walks inside, the ceilings are all ten feet high and the counters are way up high. I’ll bet that keeps the little kids out of stuff pretty well.”

If you could keep up with Sharon, she actually transferred a lot of information, Bob thought. Of course, sorting through it and putting it together so it made sense could be a real pain in the neck. Her brain seemed to multitask, and her mouth could only struggle to keep up, so it jumped from place to place trying. For some reason, he’d always enjoyed Sharon’s approach to the world. He’d especially enjoyed it in high school – when a teacher called on her it was good for ten minutes or more of rambling answer that could touch on everything from hog futures to aliens in interstellar space when the subject was about, say, verbs in their English class. It drove the teachers absolutely nuts, of course, so Sharon hadn’t gotten called on very much. Bob sometimes wondered if she actually planned it that way. With Sharon, who knew?

“Sharon,” he said, breaking into the rush of words. “What do you say we go find a table somewhere? There’s no point in standing around when we could be sitting instead.”

“A table? Oh, yes, a table! That’s a great idea, Bob! We really ought to sit down, these heels are just killing me, I don’t know what got into me to think that I should wear heels this high to something like this when we’re going to be standing around all evening. Well, at least I hope we’re not standing around, we are supposed to have dinner. I heard some people complaining that they thought the food at the reunion ten years ago was pretty lousy, that’s why we didn’t go there again, wherever that was.”

“I didn’t go to the last reunion,” he said as they turned toward an empty table close by. “Did you?”

“Oh, no, that was when I was in Pusan. I would have liked to come to it, but it was such a long way and an expensive flight for just one evening that I decided I’d better not. I’m sorry now that I didn’t from what I hear it was quite an evening, some things happened that no one expected. I guess I’ve been around the class more than you have, so I’ve heard some of the stories, and you wouldn’t believe some of them. Well, I believe some of them even though they’re hard to believe. I mean, Jennlynn just shocked everyone to death when she made her big announcement. No one would have ever have believed it, her of all people! And Eve! Who would have ever thought? Emily said Jennlynn was going to be flying in tonight, it’ll be good to see her again! Emily got invited to her wedding, she said it was very nice, for being out in the middle of nowhere with the oddest collection of people you ever could think of.”

Sharon’s brain must have gotten way ahead of her mouth, because she was leaving interesting questions lying in her wake like one sonic boom right after another. He knew more about Jennlynn than he was willing to let on to Sharon, but he’d never heard anything about a wedding. And, for that matter, Eve. Just who the hell was Eve? There was still something familiar about the little blonde, but for the life of him Bob couldn’t put his finger on it. “Sounds like it must have been quite a wedding,” he said, just to establish that he was capable of saying something to keep up his end of the mostly one-sided conversation.

“Oh, my, yes, you’d have to ask Emily about it, she was there, she’d know all the details,” Sharon replied. “Oh, my gracious, there’s someone I haven’t seen for years. Sheila, how are you? My, you look fit and bronzed.”

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