After 25 years it probably wasn’t even the same door, but it could have been. It led to the same school, the same fetid swamp of teenage cruelty. My grasping the handle unleashed a fresh deluge of memories. My arm trembled, and my knees went weak.
Obviously, the decision I’d been defending was a mistake. But it was also too late. It was too late not to go to my 25th high school reunion, because I was here.
I’d arrived in Stirton an hour early, having somehow missed the promised freeway construction delays. I freshened up in the tolerably clean restroom of a convenience store, then made my way to the campus where I’d spent the worst thirteen years of my education.
For the last half hour of my drive, my older sister’s voice in my hands-free car audio system had said pretty much what I’d told myself for weeks, even before I bought my reunion ticket online. Vicky and I were both right: “Kat, this is a bad idea.”
Stirton was a small town, where everyone knew everyone, and its only elementary school, only middle school, and only high school were right in a row, along one side of the state highway that doubled as Main Street. All three cinder block temples of learning had been built in the same decade, each just in time, give or take a year, for me to suffer in it.