Reunion
“Name, please.”
“Joshua Baker.”
The woman looks up. “Josh?” she says, all excited and giggly. “It’s me, Dana! Dana Rosen!”
I look at her with only the slightest measure of recognition.
“Oh, hi,” I say lamely. “Nice to see you.”
“Wow, and you too!” she says. “Not that anyone could forget you. She hands me something, her fingers lingering a second longer than necessary. “Here’s your ID badge and ticket for the door prizes.” I fumble with the badge, eventually pinning it to my coat crookedly. “Now don’t run off,” she says, looking around conspiratorially. “I’m going to find you. later.”
The room is filled with shades of people I knew in another lifetime, people who now resemble my memories of their parents. Classmates from twenty years ago who were frozen in my mind as teenagers have turned into fatter, strangely transformed versions of themselves. It’s surreal, and I fight the urge to run into the bathroom and look at my own face in the mirror. Squawking Euro-pop blasts over the oversized speakers in the corners of the room. Blue and yellow crepe paper is draped over everything like frosting.
I head to the bar, needing something to brace me up. People glance at me as I walk by them, and I see recognition flash in their eyes. Some of them smile and nod, others just kind of look away. Whispers follow me like a hot, dry wind. At the bar I take a long drink and then turn around, surveying the crowd. Inside the confines of this old, decrepit gymnasium, we are seventeen again, clustering in groups of remembered cliques and old prejudices. I clutch my glass tighter.
After a while the Dana woman comes across the room and takes my arm. “Come and dance with me?” she asks.
“I’m not much of a dancer,” I answer, staring past her into the push of sweaty, middle-aged frumps who seem to have left cool behind in a barrel somewhere in their parents’ garage. She reaches down and slides her fingers lightly over my thigh, gurgling in my ear, “Well, then, how about a walk outside?”
I look at her, remembering her at last.
It’s been twenty years. Twenty years since I was bullied and teased relentlessly, twenty years since I cried and cut myself with a knife. Twenty years since I started with smaller things, stray animals and pets, before moving on to larger prey. Twenty years of honing my craft, of learning to rid the world of injustice and menace and plain bad taste. Twenty years of practice with that knife.
I look at her, my lips curling into a smile, my body relaxing for the first time.
“Yes,” I say. “Let’s go out back.”
