By Wilson Koewing
Back in high school it was me and Lonnie ran together. We worked at the movie theater up in Charlotte. If we weren’t working, we were at a house party somewhere. I remember one Friday, Lonnie said a girl he met in study hall wanted to join us. Lonnie wasn’t much of a lady’s man so that was unusual.
When we picked her up it made sense. Her name was Wren. She dressed old fashioned. Like going to church. I wasn’t sure if Wren was new to town or if we’d just never noticed her. She was a grade behind. She might have dressed funny and been a year younger, but she had something about her sure made it seem like she was a lot older than she was younger. We passed a bottle of vodka around the car. She took two swigs and started screaming out the sunroof.
We lost her as soon as we got to the party. She was full out. By the time she resurfaced whispers were she’d gone behind closed doors with four different guys. It hardly mattered to me, though Lonnie looked deflated.
We dropped her off at home around sunrise. Entire ride I was worried her dad would be outside with a shotgun. She played possum in the backseat, but once the car stopped, she sprang to life.
“I’m so sorry, daddy,” she said. “Don’t be mad. I fell asleep at Susie’s house. No, I wasn’t drinking. I hate drinking.”
She winked and skipped away as we tore out of there.
Wren never returned to our high school. Word was her parents put her in a Catholic school up in Belmont. Rumors circulated about the goings on at the party. For about a week it was all anybody talked about. I guess there’s no denying how it looked. No denying how easy it was for us to act none the wiser.
I graduated that same year and we all lost touch, me and Lonnie and all the people at all the parties around where we grew up. A whole town of folks. Just seeped away.
A decade went by then one day I got a Facebook request from Wren. It was Christmas, and I was headed home. It had been years since I set foot in the Carolinas. After high school I visited New Orleans and liked it so much I moved. Got work as a doorman on Bourbon and been there ever since. Rent a little studio a block over on Dauphine. Kind of an insular life, but there’s a never-ending magic to the Quarter. Lonely sometimes, though, even surrounded by so many people.
After I accepted the Facebook request, Wren invited me to a Christmas party at her house. Turns out she didn’t live far from my parents.
I arrived at a nice house in a cookie cutter neighborhood. Minivans outside. Inside it was parents and kids. I spotted Wren. She motioned me over and introduced me to her husband. He was a radiant guy, strong, healthy and utterly happy. They pointed at their three kids. Wren showed early glow of a fourth.
Her husband went off to play host and Wren made us cocktails. I considered asking what happened back in high school, but she only seemed interested in talking about me. She seemed impressed by my living in New Orleans. Curious about how different our lives were. It occurred to me it was the longest I’d talked about myself in years.
After that, I hung around awhile, skirting the edges and drinking. The sun set and they lit a firepit and before long there was a sway about everything. And there was good music. Then at some point, I was falling over, almost into the firepit, and the children’s horrified faces in the glow from the flames.
I came to in the car with Wren’s husband. He was pulling into my parent’s driveway.
I took a day to recover sitting on the screen porch with my dad. In his retirement he drank and smoked and watched YouTube on a tablet out there. How-to videos. It dawned on me why he liked them. When I was a kid, he did all the handiwork around the house to save a buck. I’ll forever remember him in the garage cursing while changing the oil in our cars. Crazy that now all he’d have to do is search a YouTube video. The time he would have saved.
I left him to go inside for a beer then wandered through the house. Not much had changed. It was like a museum. Only thing that had changed was the technology. There was a table with family photos. I stared at a picture from my high school graduation. I could hardly recognize myself.
The next day I got a message from Lonnie. Hadn’t heard from him in almost as long as Wren. It was like the internet was telling people I was in town.
I drove over to Lonnie’s. He lived in a trailer out in the country. He was sitting under an oak tree. We shook hands. He was drinking cheap beer and reached in a cooler and offered me one. I cracked it open. Lonnie’d been working at Freightliner for a decade. Same repetitive job every day. But he was a decade closer to retirement. He said he lived in the trailer because it was cheap and what did he care anyway. He didn’t have no wife.
I stayed awhile drinking and catching up. Long enough for it to get dark and cold out. It was strange seeing him. I could see the Lonnie I knew when we were younger in his face, but there didn’t seem to be any youth left in him. Eventually I sort of stopped paying attention to what he was saying. Every other sentence started with, remember back in high school.
Wilson Koewing is a writer from South Carolina. His books JADED and QUASI are available from Main Street Rag/Mint Hill Books and Anxiety Press, respectively. His debut poetry collection DETRITUS HOMME is forthcoming from Nut Hole Publishing. His latest short story collection ROLLING ON THE BOTTOM is forthcoming from Cowboy Jamboree Press.