A First Time for Everything by Kathryn Jay

A First Time for Everything
Under the Desk and Other Short Stories
Tenth Reunion - Part One

She knew it had gone too far about one minute after it was too late to do anything about it. Why should it take so long to admit that?

Andrea had thoroughly enjoyed the first two hours of the party, her initial nervousness disappearing as she recognized, and was recognized by, a dozen old friends. It had been years since she'd been back to her old hometown, and she had worried that she would feel out of place. She was in Christmas-card contact with a few people—neighbors, mostly, and a couple of school friends—but really didn't maintain ties to town. Her folks had retired to Arizona shortly after Andrea, their youngest, graduated from high school, and her attention had been elsewhere.

The five-year reunion invitation seemed foolishly premature and she'd felt no impulse to go. But the tenth reunion…well, that was different, somehow. Perhaps it was the nostalgia that came with maturity; perhaps it was the selfish desire to flaunt the successful life she'd finally put together: career, husband, plans for a baby, all neatly in line. Whatever the reason, she found herself thinking about it a lot. It could be fun to find out what everyone was doing, see how many of the old gang were still around.

She'd let the invitation sit on the sideboard for several days while she mulled it over, and ultimately it was Dwight's encouragement that was the deciding factor. "I'd love to see where you grew up. I haven't been back east in years. Don't you want to go, Andi?"

So she had bought two tickets to the formal dinner and dance on Saturday night and indicated that, yes, they expected to be there for the more casual reception at the school on Friday night. The homecoming football game she wasn't too sure about; they'd wait and see if there were better options. Maybe they'd get together with some of her old friends and catch up, or just tour the area and take in the local color. She looked forward to showing Dwight her old stomping grounds, and when he'd suggested renting a cabin by the lake—a luxury she'd dreamed about as a child—she practically bubbled with excitement.

As the date approached, though, excitement gave way to apprehension, and she'd briefly considered canceling the whole trip.

The deciding point came when, safe in Dwight's arms one night, she admitted that she didn't want to run into trouble with old enemies. And Dwight, who could be amazingly tender for such a big man, had held her close and promised her that she had nothing to worry about; he would protect her. And she knew he would. Dwight was her hero, her defender. If it weren't such a cliché, she'd say he was her knight in shining armor. He'd never had the opportunity to dramatically rescue her from a hungry lion or rampaging Mongol horde, but he had engineered her escape from a slew of deadly-dull conversations at interminable cocktail parties, and he knew how to defuse and deflect parental criticism that, however well-intentioned, could still be hurtful. He would look out for her among the possible menaces of Powatan High. She could do it with Dwight at her side.

So they had arrived Friday afternoon, checked in to the resort complex at the lake, then headed into town. The flutter of apprehension she felt approaching the check-in table strewn with nametags was chased away by the delighted scream of recognition from behind.

"Andi! They said you were coming, but I didn't dare believe it. How are you, girl? And who is this handsome stranger you've brought to tempt me?" Michelle hadn't changed much since they were eighteen, it seemed: she had the same bright blue eyes, shoulder-length blonde hair, and contagious enthusiasm. And she was still an incurable but harmless flirt.

Andi grinned in response. "This is Dwight Callahan, and I'll thank you to keep your hands to yourself," she said in mock reproof. "Notice the ring. He's spoken for. By me. And this noisy local," she turned to Dwight with an easy smile, "is Michelle Hudson—no, wait, Michelle Rother, now—and we were the best of friends in high school." As Dwight and Michelle shook hands, each taking the other's measure, Andrea continued. "We were on the newspaper together and in madrigals and –"

Michelle interrupted her with "and lab partners in Chemistry, where it was her job to—" She dissolved into giggles.

Andi was laughing too hard to finish, so Michelle gasped out the finish. "While I poured the dangerous chemicals."

Dwight watched with a bemused air, pleased to see Andi seem to settle in so quickly. And that first tidbit seemed perfectly in character. Andi was extraordinarily bright but also unusually cautious in many respects. He could easily picture her with safety goggles over her pre-Lasik glasses trying to explain to the teacher why it would be educationally sound to balance the equation mathematically without actually having to heat the chemicals in a test tube.

He wished, for the millionth time, that he'd known her back then. Would she have been the naïve and bright-eyed fifteen-year-old he'd imagined? Or had the fear and mistrust already taken hold by then? She struggled to suppress the anxiety, but it was with her all the same. She hadn't said so out loud, but he knew she'd worried that it wouldn't feel like "home," that she wouldn't be welcomed as a returning hero but scoffed at as someone with delusions of grandeur. There were ghosts for her in this town, and he was determined that she not face them this weekend. It was enough that she had come and that she was happy.

They were set upon twice more before they could even pick up their silly nametags. He was quickly introduced to other old friends until he really couldn't tell one from the other. They all seemed to talk at once and they rained questions down on him without waiting for answers. He scowled in irritation. In a peculiar reversal of roles, Andi came to his defense, wrapping her arm around his possessively and drawing the knot of people away from the check-in table.

"Now you all stop hounding poor Dwight. We just got in town a little while ago and we're both a little overtired from the flight. Don't scare him off." Not likely, he thought, with a snort that at least softened the scowl somewhat. He could be intimidating enough without the scowl, he knew, and she wanted to be able to show him off. It softened his demeanor further when he realized that's what she was doing. She described with tantalizing brevity their meeting, courtship, and wedding in Seattle, wrapping up the four very happy years in a few short sentences and trying to turn the conversation around to what everyone else was doing.

Dwight played his part—tall, dark, and handsome—which only made the women more curious and the men wonder what it was he was hiding behind his quiet self-possession. As the deejay kicked in with what appeared to be an array of ten-year-old "top 40" CDs, the knot of old classmates began to break up into smaller groups of dancers and talkers. Dwight was introduced to another dozen people whose names he wouldn't remember, but also heard a couple of funny stories it would be fun to tease Andi with later. A vulgar headline printed in the newspaper under the watch of his prim-and-proper lady? And without clearing it with the journalism sponsor, to boot. There had to be more to the story, he knew, as that just seemed so totally out of character.

As did storming out of trig class during a test, though Andi herself stepped in to clarify that one as someone—Jim? Jeff? Joe?—tried to tell the story. "I didn't storm out," she said indignantly, amid hoots and contradictions. "It was more like slinking out." Dwight saw the flush of embarrassment, but didn't get he reason for it.

"So why were you slinking out of math class?" he asked, amused. She had a rapt audience now of six people. With the sort of broadly dramatic gesture she wished she could have called up the one time she'd tried out for the spring musical, Andi put her hand to her chest and sighed, "Female problems." That prompted laugher all around and was enough to set the group off on another tangent, providing just the opportunity for Dwight to suggest they have a dance before the gym got any more crowded.

"So," he asked again once they were dancing, "why were you slinking out of math class?"

"Not likely." They shared a look of open affection. She hadn't fooled him and hadn't intended to, he thought. Her next words confirmed that, though they were said with some embarrassment.

"I was on the verge of tears. The teacher gave us a pop quiz and the only reason for it was to torment the kids who had cut school the day before."

"And that included you?" That was a surprise. Andi was generally a stickler for the rules, and he knew she had been a good student. Cutting class did not fit his image of her.

"He was just a real jerk. Sort of on a power trip. I had a note excusing me, so he was supposed to give me a day to make up the work. And he refused to. It was just so frustrating. And I knew I was going to start crying and I just couldn't do it there." Frustration almost always led to tears—and not quiet tears that could be swallowed in silence, either.

"I went back to talk to him about it after school. I brought the handbook of student rights and responsibilities and showed him where it said that if you had an approved absence you had to get appropriate time to make up the work. I said I was going to take it up with the administration, and he finally agreed not to count the test for those who had notes." Dwight knew better than to ask if she had apologized for storming out of class.

It certainly seemed like there were some missing pieces to the puzzle. "So why were you out the day before?"

She stiffened in his arms but did not pull away. "Dwight, it was twelve years ago. What are you going to do? Give me detention? If you have an approved note, they have to give you time to make up the work. That was the rule. I had a note. He had to give me the time."

She finally pulled away from him, her forehead wrinkled in consternation. "It doesn't count as cutting if you have a note from your parents. It's not like I was getting high in the south pasture or something. I was probably home in bed catching up on sleep or taking a practice SAT or something. My parents knew where I was, and I wasn't doing anything I shouldn't."

"Except cutting class." He'd meant it as a tease, but the look of sudden betrayal in her eyes said he'd gone too far.

He gathered Andi back to him, half-hugging, half-dancing. "I'm sorry, honey, I was just kidding. You're right: it was twelve years ago and doesn't matter a whit now. We were all teenagers once. I guess it just threw me. It's odd to think of you sort of tweaking noses, ruffling feathers. You're normally such a straight arrow. It surprised me a little, that's all."

She relaxed into his arms, calmed by Dwight's soft words. "It's not like I was wild and rowdy or anything. The reason they could come up with the stories is that those were unusual instances. In many ways I was the same boring, conventional person I am now." It was said with a self-deprecating laugh, but after four years Dwight knew her well enough to know there was pain and insecurity there.

The music changed to something with a stronger beat and they moved naturally apart, her hands in his. He waited until their eyes met. Then in a throaty rumble meant to set her juices to simmering, he said, "Andi, sweetheart, you are many things. Boring is not among them."

The effect was almost instantaneous. Her hazel eyes went smoky and her breathing quickened. The smallest of smiles touched her lips before she seemed to realize where they were and looked around in irritation. What the hell was she doing in a dank high school gym when she could be in bed with her husband? Damn. Reading the thoughts as they crossed her face, Dwight laughed and caught her in a quick hug. Directly into her ear he said, "Yes, good idea. But first let's go impress the hell out of your old classmates, okay?"

Well, that had been much of the reason for coming back east, she acknowledged as Dwight led her from the floor. She had left this town feeling cowed in many ways. She wanted to prove, more to herself than to anyone else in the room, that she had been right to leave, that she hadn't been running away so much as running to a better life. She took a fortifying breath, pasted on a smile, and started toward the crowd at the hors d'oeuvre table. Dwight was, as she knew he would be, right at her side. They had played the scene so many times that both fell into their roles automatically, if not effortlessly.

As they did at every reception put on by Dwight's law firm or the many networking cocktail parties Andi hosted or attended, they both managed to hint at their own success without ever appearing to brag. It was more carefully choreographed than the line dancing that began in the middle of the gym at the first beats of "Achy Breaky Heart." Within a half hour, virtually everyone in the room knew that Dwight was an up-and-coming young lawyer who had clerked for a federal judge before settling into corporate practice where he was "just" an associate who specialized in environmental law.

They also knew that Andi had used her business acumen to talk her way into a litigation support firm, and she'd managed to be there as the industry catapulted from hand-coding of documents turned over as part of discovery to providing wrap-around support of the entire suit process. She was now, at twenty-eight, one of the senior executives in a firm that specialized in 3-D imaging of crime scenes, that could create a simulation so realistic that it was almost a struggle to remember it was computer-generated. Evidence integration was the new buzzword. And where she once had to explain and clarify what her firm did, the recent popularity of prime-time forensic science TV shows meant she automatically had their attention.

All the while, she gently pumped others for information, making sure she showed at least as much interest in their lives as they did in hers.

It was a relief that Powatan was not as bleak as she'd feared. Her years away had let her imagine it to be a hick town with rheumy-eyed losers pumping gas at the filling station. But really, it had never been like that. It had a small-town mix of professionals and laborers, and these were old friends who had no pretensions. They seemed to delight in her happiness but she sensed no envy. It felt more like "home" than her parents' Arizona retirement complex ever would. There she would forever be the baby of the family, and her every decision would be questioned and re-evaluated.

But at Powatan, she could just relax, hear about Michelle's two toddlers, sort out the various marriages and divorces that she never would had predicted at age eighteen, laugh at the traits that persisted so clearly in some and seemed to arise spontaneously in others. Chris Rother, once the class clown, could still have everyone laughing for minutes at a time. JD, once the star of the football team, had actually made it to training camp with the Steelers five years earlier; true, he'd been cut in pre-season, but it was still pro ball. Lori and Malcolm, who were inseparable all through high school, apparently remained so; they had seven children, and Malcolm insisted they weren't "quite done yet." No surprises there.

But who knew that Shorty Sullivan (so dubbed in fifth grade) would hit a growth spurt and add eight inches at age twenty? Or that Brian Jefferson—as much a flirt as Michelle had ever been—would become a priest? For that matter, who would have thought that Andi, "the Brain," would have had the entrepreneurial knack to turn a plodding legal transcription service into a profitable high-tech business in Seattle? She'd never been Most Likely to Succeed, despite her intelligence. Most likely to become a librarian, maybe, not most likely to succeed. But times change and people change, and it was good to feel the changes.

She spent an hour touching base and catching up, and eventually Andi forgot she was working the room and just relaxed. Dwight watched her from across the gym as he filled a cup with lukewarm fruit punch. He was pleased to see her settle in, pleased to see she was well-remembered and well-respected. He'd gotten the impression she'd expected a somewhat hostile reception, though he didn't know why. She rarely talked about her childhood and avoided the subject of her strained relationship with her parents. She preferred the illusion that she'd sprung, fully formed and already admitted to the MBA program at the University of Michigan. Looking back was moving back.

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