March 2020
Kitty Walks On By, Calls Your Name
BEN PARKED, and we sat in the car for what seemed like a very long time, not saying anything, staring grimly ahead as if we were about to go into battle.
“It’s not too late to back out of this,” he said finally. “There’s nothing in the universe that says you have to go to your high school class reunion.”
Ten years. With everything that had happened to me over the last ten years, it seemed like a century ought to have passed. On the other hand, I could still remember what it felt like to walk down those stinky school halls and worry about grades and graduation and the rest of it. Ben was right, I didn’t need to do this, I didn’t need to be here, and I certainly didn’t need to drag him along.
He was wearing a suit and tie, his courtroom best, a fresh shave and brushed hair, all the polish and not his meeting-clients-at-the-county-jail-at-two-in-the-morning scruff, which meant he was taking this seriously. I was in a very mature cocktail dress, black with a red belt, in a style that showed off my figure. My blond hair was up, and I’d put on makeup. Retro elegance. Looking in the mirror before we’d left home made me think I ought to dress up more often.
Did I really want to do this? We could start the car back up and turn around right now.
I wouldn’t even have known the reunion was happening except Sadie Martinez sent me an email. She’d reached out and practically begged me—she didn’t want to be here alone. Sadie and I had been best friends, study partners, double dating to prom, all of it. And I hadn’t talked to her since junior year of college because I hadn’t talked to anyone since junior year of college. The year I’d been attacked by a werewolf and transformed into something that didn’t normally think much about high school class reunions.
My life fell into two halves: before I was turned into a werewolf and after. High school was before. It had happened to someone else. Now, I’d walk through those hotel ballroom doors and wouldn’t know anyone, and the ones I did know would be angry that I’d stopped talking to them. If they didn’t run screaming because I was a monster. Because I wasn’t just a werewolf. I hosted a talk-radio advice show on the supernatural and had been caught shape-shifting on national television. I was a famous werewolf.
Part of why we wanted to turn around was the off chance someone might have brought a gun with silver bullets, thinking they’d be doing the world a favor. But I felt like I owed it to Sadie, after all the years I’d dropped out of sight.
“Did you go to your high school reunion?” I asked. Ben was enough older than me that his ten-year reunion had happened before I met him a few years ago.
“Oh hell no,” he said. “I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.”
“You weren’t even a little bit curious about what happened to people?”
“Nope.” He grinned. “My dad was in prison by then, I had no interest in explaining all that to that crowd.”
I was suddenly daunted. I was going to have to explain the werewolf thing over and over again. “Maybe I don’t want to do this,” I murmured.
“Okay,” Ben said. “Just to get it out in the open, why are we doing this?”
“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 finer
y, 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.