Remember the young girl hanging on the monkey bar with hair touching the ground, the scrawny child who frightened with a cleft palate, the gal you gawked at as though a unicorn had pranced across the playground. Some images are destined to last forever. Classmates from high school are like that. Frozen in adolescence, untouched by age, they drift into the present. Sometimes you read about them in the newspaper or hear a whisper about so and so doing such and such. Some of them die young and turn into legends by virtue of perpetual youth. Their names are mentioned at reunions during the roll call of the dead. These lucky few defy the ravages of time. I see my friend as he was, always will be, and pay tribute to a grin that does not fade because it cannot. Peter’s skin will not sallow, his face wrinkle. He will never require marital assistance or endure the humiliation of breasts where none should be, or errant hair scraggling from an ear. He will remain erect and forthright.
Nowadays, when my contemporaries grow sick and die they are commemorated but seldom lionized. They leave small imprint: a paragraph in the alumni magazine or local paper—worked at. . . . survived by . . . condolences to.
“Phil?” I speak into the phone.
“Yes, this is Phil.”
“Tom Hutchinson here . . . from high school.”
“Who?”
“Tom Hutchinson from the Prentiss School. You and I were roommates freshman year: it’s been a very long time.”
“Tommy?”
“Thirty years, my friend. I hope I’m not calling too late.”
“No, of course not—not at all. Wow, this is a surprise.”
“We missed you at the reunions. I’m on the committee this year and want you to consider joining us this fall. We can drink some beer on the back lawn, eat cafeteria food and reminiscence about when . . . ”
. . . everything was possible because nothing mattered, except waking and making it to class before the final bell, taking chances seemed as ridiculously simple as walking across the campus late at night. Sneaking out after curfew freshman year, rolling down suicide hill, stripping in the cool light of the moon, you and I leaped into the lake, stepped out naked with goose bumps riddling our flesh and gazed at the pallor of skin and complexity of parts. Something delicate stirred within me as I peeked into the depths of who I was. We dressed like dervishes. snuck back into the dorm—unspent and alive. Surely you recall such things?
“Of course, my God—that was such a long time ago. Tommy! I’m sorry, I . . . it’s just . . . you know, I didn’t like Prentiss that much. Didn’t hate it but boarding school was hard, being away from friends and family, not to mention the pressure of getting into a good school.”
From a thousand miles away I nod in agreement.
“You’re a contractor?” I ask. “That’s what it says—living in a town in Vermont?”
“My wife and I own a small business around Elmore, no kids, we keep expenses down. Not much extra cash, we get by all right.”
“Like for reunions, you mean?”
An abyss separates then from now—for most people traversing from past to present is easy enough but for some: where are the eyes that danced? the curved shoulders, pale-white thigh of the boy I once loved who has left the world for places unknown?
“What about you, Hutch?” he asks, referencing the nickname as though it was yesterday. “Where are you? This is unexpected—really, I never imagined . . .”
We chit the chat. I pace like a girl prepping for a date, only this is a different century and I’m married to the man of my dreams with a son trying to gain admission into my alma mater. Extorting money from classmates is part of the process.
“I invest and write fiction on the side,” I explain.
“Like a stock broker or something?”
“Not exactly: I run the family office.”
“Ahhh,” he says and grows quiet before continuing, “good for you—beats working; right?”
“You could put it like that,” I respond amicably before beginning the pitch. “You should come back for the reunion in June. The school has changed since we were students. . . other classmates will be there . . . we could . . . ”
. . . get high on top of the ski jump, smoke a joint of Acapulco gold and hide as others rattle past to some secret rendezvous. We can discuss girls and how much we loathe those who deserve loathing and adore those whose spirits are wild and free but as remote as caverns at the bottom of the sea—and teachers and deans and pass the joint and don’t Bogart it before rolling another and climbing down the rickety ladder constructed long before women attended the school. Flying high, Peter and I unleash ourselves like crazed acrobats floating across a cascade of rocks. We roam the woods like djinn from another age and bound over streams as if levitating from boulder to boulder with the ease of dancers pirouetting across a stage. We are unknown gods, addled deities deranged in giddiness in the midst of discovering who we are and might someday be. At the end of the journey on the outskirts of the woods we pause in exhilaration and press our lips together like caravans colliding, shrugging off the dust, continuing through the desert like mendicants in search of some lost oasis where we might rest until morning.
“You ran on the track team,” says Phil.
“I was the manager—yes.”
“And the newspaper?”
“Editor.”
“It’s coming back: you used to hang out with that guy Derringer and those people from Rye, right? You guys were tight.”
“Us guys were tight, right—Peter was my best friend.”
“I remember. Sure—stand-up guy. You keep in touch with any of those fellas?”
In dreams.
“He passed a few months ago,” I say.
After a slight pause I continue: “I’m sorry to bother you, Phil—your name was first on the list so . . . is this a bad time?”
He hears the crack in my voice.
“I’m sorry, Hutch. High school is funny, you know: none of it true, all of it—I don’t know – more real than it actually was?”
“I guess.”
“Sometimes things . . . how . . . ”
How now?
“ . . . did he die?”
In broad strokes I explain what I know while imagination fills the gaps with details of . .
. . . a once beautiful boy, round and jovial, lying on pink sand off the coast of Eleuthera with an empty bottle and a vial of pills: vodka and valium and an ex-wife with children in Norway sheltered from the bloated corpse found before the tide can roll the remains into the sea for the fish to feed. A girl discovered my friend, an unmoving mound in a swimsuit, and yelled for help as the mother of the mound rushed from a villa to identify and drop to her knees and howl like a wounded animal.
An overdose—the death was characterized as cardiac arrest in the pages of the paper. This was a man of substance. An old sad tale told over and over by different voices in different times and tenses, only this one is mine: all of it real, none of it true, except a lasting image held safe in a place of comfort and light.
A few days after graduation Derringer stood at the bottom of suicide hill with a backpack on his shoulders and indicated with a wave that he was walking down the lane toward the road that led into the future: I wasn’t ready. The figure proffered a final farewell: I watched from a distance and never laid eyes upon him again. We spoke once or twice over the phone. I learned of his story from acquaintances, articles in the paper—whispers in the wind.
“I’ll make the reunion this year,” says the voice by way of consolation. “Maybe we can hoist a beer.”
“A farewell toast,” I say from my driveway in Indiana. “To Peter.”
I hang up the phone, kiss my husband good night and dream of the life that used to be.
