“Because I’m super curious and this is the kind of thing that only happens once, and if I miss it I’ll always wonder.”
“All good reasons. Right. Let’s go. We can always ditch if things go sidewise.”
“But they’re not going to go sidewise. It’s a high school reunion, what could possibly go wrong?”
He gave me a scowling look. Don’t ever ask what could go wrong, I knew that lesson.
We left the warm, late-evening June air and entered the excessive air-conditioning of the hotel ballroom lobby. A few people, also in suits and cocktail hour finery, mingled, talking in groups. There was nervous laughter. I didn’t recognize anyone, not right away. I looked for Sadie with a sudden spike of fear that I wouldn’t recognize her either.
Ben guided me toward a table where a couple of unassuming soccer-mom types were standing guard over rows of name-tag stickers. They seemed familiar—one was brunette, average build, and might have been a cheerleader. The other tanned, dark-haired. Also a cheerleader? Maybe we’d had algebra together?
We found our stickers, and the women’s smiles remained relentlessly cheerful—maybe they didn’t recognize me either. This had been a pretty big high school. So, now what? Just keep wandering around until I recognized someone?
This wasn’t how high school reunions looked in the movies, where the bitchy popular girls came back as stuck-up suburban housewives, the jocks were out-of-shape used car salesman, the oppressed nerds were billionaire tech geniuses, and the people who were most unhappy had found their way while the people who were bullies got their comeuppance. High school reunion: a chance to right old wrongs and take revenge on the cool kids.
But that wasn’t how this looked at all. Everyone was scanning faces, walking past each other like we were at some kind of statue gallery, searching for signs of the people we had been years ago. Searching for familiarity. So many of the men—I had to shave twenty pounds off them before they looked familiar, and it wasn’t that they had gotten fat, but that they filled out. They weren’t scrawny boys anymore. Names hovered on the tip of my tongue. I should have looked in the yearbook for a refresher before coming here. We were like deer in the headlights, amazed that any of us had survived at all. Because enough time had passed to make us realize that nobody in high school thought they were cool, they just acted out on their worst insecurities and struggled to get through in one piece.
High school felt so big while we were living it, but the percentage of our lives those years represented got smaller and smaller as time went on. What was an entire quarter of our lives ten years ago was now, what, fourteen percent? And in ten more years it would be ten percent. And the beat goes on.
“You look like you’re about to start crying,” Ben said.
“I think I’m sad,” I said.
“Let’s go find you a glass of wine—”
“Kitty!” I turned to the call, coming from down the foyer. A woman rushed toward me. She had honey-brown hair in a bob, and was stout and confident, in a cute black dress and loud earrings. Sadie hadn’t changed a bit. Except neither one of us had the confidence and poise for slinky cocktail dresses back in high school. Now look at us, like we were grown-ups or something.
She ran up to me. In wolf language, this—a fellow predator coming at me with arms outstretched—was an attack. But I was a civilized werewolf and she was a friend, and I was just so happy that I recognized her, and she knew me. And this right here made me glad I came. I reached for and accepted the enthusiastic hug. A little of the tension I’d been feeling slipped away.
“I’ve missed you!” she said into my hair, holding tight.
“I’m sorry I lost touch,” I murmured. “You look really good!”
“So do you.” We separated and beamed at each other in admiration.
“How are you? What have you been doing?”
“We have so much to talk about!” She glanced appraisingly at Ben. “And you are . . .”
“Sadie, this is Ben.” I presented them to each other.
“Nice to meet you,” Ben said neutrally.
“Hm,” she purred.
“Do you want to go get a glass of wine or something?”
“Oh God yes.” We hooked arms and stalked into the ballroom. Ben followed, amused.
After acquiring wine and staking out territory at one of the white-cloth-draped tables, we caught up. Sadie had gone to school at Northwestern, then law school, returned to Denver to work for the legal department of an environmental non-profit, which was exactly the kind of thing she always said she’d do, if maybe not exactly the way she thought. She’d had dreams of riding Greenpeace Zodiacs to save whales, which I was just as glad she never did. This was safer. She and Ben instantly bonded over law-school anecdotes and seemed relieved that their areas of expertise were so far apart they’d never had to meet professionally.
As for me . . . I didn’t have to explain much because Sadie said she listened to my show sometimes. As soon as I’d gotten a website with a contact form she’d thought about sending me a note. The reunion finally prompted her to do it.
I couldn’t explain why I hadn’t ever reached out to her. “I . . . had a rough couple of years there. And then I figured you’d be too angry to want to hear from me.” It sounded stupid now, and her frown of reprimand told me that yes, it was stupid.
“So,” she said, idly running a purple-painted nail around the base of her wineglass. “You talk to Jesse at all?”
Jesse Kramer. Another set of memories crashed over me. Part of the old life, again. I shook my head. “I haven’t talked to him since graduation.”
“Ah,” she said suggestively.
Ben caught the tone. “And who is Jesse?”
“Just a guy,” I said, pretty sure I was blushing. I didn’t want to talk about this. Ben arced a brow.
“Her boyfriend senior year.”
“Oh really?” Ben’s brows went up. “Any chance I’ll get to meet this guy?”
“I doubt it,” I said quickly. “He moved away right after graduation.”
Sadie leaned in. “They broke up right in the middle of prom, it was amazing.”
“You’ve never told me any of this,” Ben said admiringly.
Honestly, I hadn’t thought much about it until now. It hadn’t been very relevant to the post-werewolf life.
“He won’t come to this,” I said, almost pleading with Sadie to agree with me. She shrugged expansively.
“So, Sadie, you have any embarrassing pictures of Kitty I should know about?” Ben asked.
I blanched. “We don’t really need to go looking—”
She grinned. “They’ve got some old yearbooks at the front table if we want to go check.”
The place filled up, and I recognized more and more people, and somehow we all looked completely different than we had, and we hadn’t changed a bit, both at the same time.
“Hi, Kitty?” An upbeat woman with her dark hair in a ponytail, wearing a silky pantsuit, came up to me. “I don’t know if you remember me—”
“Amanda, we worked on yearbook together,” I said and accepted a quick hug. We did the one-minute update of the last ten years of our lives, and I repeated the same exchange with a dozen other people. Wolf slowly settled; these weren’t strangers, we weren’t in danger, even though this definitely didn’t feel like our territory. It helped that Ben was looking out for us. He patiently let himself be introduced over and over. This is my husband, Ben. And what do you do, Ben? Lawyer, criminal defense. Yeah, that got a couple of stares. And a raised eyebrow when one of the old marching band crowd asked him for a business card.