The Stars Misaligned

The front of the school was the same as it was twenty-two years ago, save for a more cartoonish redesign of the bear mascot on the windowless upper stories of the building—like Smokey to Yogi.  The entrance, before the glass doors, was wide and circular.  A concrete walkway lined its circumference, and a miniature park took up the rest of the inner space.

Brian, a forty-year-old man, sat on one of the benches in this miniature park.  It was complete with at least seven other benches, each dedicated to a significant principal, teacher, or alum.  Even now, Brian could pick out certain trees by their distances relative to any of the benches.  Their bark, preserved by strict security and a rule against carving, remained just as dark and rich as they were the last time Brian exited the school, looking back in the hopes of retaining a snapshot in his memory.  By now, the picture had faded.

Brian’s greatest connection with the miniature park, however, was the grass.  As he recalled his almost daily after-school picnics, a montage of easier days played in his mind.  He could only remember the seasons when these picnics took place.  Some of the days involved such random conversation and horseplay that he could not even name the various faces of friends and acquaintances, which had never appeared in his mind since the moment he set foot in a university lecture hall, just months after his high school graduation.

There were other events, ones which had made Brian realize what the principal meant when he emphasized to the Class of ‘87, “These are your formative years!”  Brian could never forget dressing up in a Halloween costume he bought as his first purchase with his own money.  He could never forget when, in the middle of February in his sophomore year, he started his third fight and won it as his first.  He could never forget how awkward his first kiss was.

The patter of an engine reminded Brian that he had not come to his high school to spend his day off reminiscing alone.  His eyes unlocked from the clouds as the old Chevy pickup slowed to a halt at the drop-off lane.  Looking closely through the passenger side window, he observed a brown-haired woman in a white t-shirt arguing with the driver, a bald man in a red buttoned shirt with two front pockets.  The man had a distinctively thin mustache, which Brian only saw whenever the man subtly turned his head in his direction and squinted.  He let the two quarrel at their discretion without his intrusion; neither of them seemed to be the person he wanted to see, after all.

“Hello?” Brian heard a woman behind him just a few minutes later, prompting him to fix the collar on his flannel.  He stood up from his seat, turned around, and saw the same woman.  “Brian?”  Was it really?

“Mandy?”  The woman nodded and smiled.  Brian chuckled in embarrassment, but he could not be blamed for not recognizing her.  Mandy’s hair color was a stark change from her natural blonde, and the years had certainly put wrinkles on her face.  Brian wondered again, just as he had in the last couple of days before this meetup, how else Mandy had changed since they last talked, mostly for better than for worst.  He was certainly an optimist, yet even if he had grown to be cynical, there was no denying that Mandy had the foundational skills and personality—prose and confidence—to make her life greater than most.  “It’s been forever!  How’ve you—?”

The truck sharply honked.  Mandy scowled at the driver and waved him off.  He drove away at an excruciatingly slow speed, causing Mandy to slump and roll her eyes.

“That’s my husband,” Mandy sighed.  “Mrs. Hagert isn’t here yet, is she?”

“She gave me a call this morning saying that something came up.”

“I didn’t get any word about that.  We had to wake up early, and we drove for hours!”

“Must’ve been rough, no doubt.  But you know, we’re here now, and it’s an open campus!  We could walk around, talk, wait for Mrs. Hagert to call us once she’s here.  That should take your mind off things.”

“Sure, that sounds good to me!”

---

Despite being open to the public, the school was almost entirely vacant, save for a few janitors strolling the halls.  Brian and Mandy walked directly to Mrs. Hagert’s classroom.  They could not remember the room number, but they knew the room was opposite a water fountain that nobody used, towards the end of the science hallway towards the end of the main corridor of the second floor.

Their steady journey back to the classroom was a silent one, for they both sought to reabsorb the carefree spirit of high school.  Soon after walking into the school, Brian felt in tune with it again.  He turned to Mandy and noticed that her eyes widened upon every little thing—corners, rows of lockers, classroom doors.  It was no surprise to Brian that she would focus on these random objects, for unlike him, she had a remarkable memory.  As far as he could assume, she was quickly recollecting a greater and more vivid set of past events and little instances.

When they reached the end of the science hallway, they found that the water fountain was gone, and in its place was a trophy case displaying the school’s more recent achievements in science fairs and competitions.  Looking opposite of the trophy case, Brian and Mandy were certain they had arrived at Mrs. Hagert’s classroom.  Though the wooden door was replaced with a steel one like all the other doors had been, it was the only door to flaunt the course title Anatomy, fully capitalized in a banner of letters held up by magnets now instead of thumbtacks.

“It even has the same colors,” Mandy remarked.  “I remember it.  The first A was red, that’s for sure.  The N was blue, the G was green or yellow-green, like the Crayola crayons.”

“I can’t even figure how you can remember any of the colors.”

“The crayons or the letters?”

“The letters!”  Mandy shrugged and tittered.  “If your memory is right, though—.”

“Hold on there, Benny,” she interrupted him, raising her finger.  “You know my memory’s always right.”

“Oh alright, Minnesota.”  She nudged his shoulder, and they laughed.  “Should we take a look inside?”

“Definitely!”  The two stuck their noses against the window in the door, peeking into the classroom together.  The seats were reordered into groups rather than rows, and the floor tiles had been replaced with simple carpeting.  Among these rearrangements were a few fixtures of the past, spread throughout the room, but mostly gathered on Mrs. Hagert’s desk.  Most were trinkets—little toys and models that would take a whole year for students to notice and ask about but took Mandy less than a minute; Brian himself could only remember them when Mandy pointed them out to him.  The most notable object in the room was the human skeleton, standing by the door as it had.  Though it was now missing several bones, it still wore a beret.  Once again, Brian required Mandy to catch these details.

“My feet are tired already,” Mandy eventually said.  “I probably should’ve stretched first.”  She sat on the bench next to the classroom door and patted the space beside her, which Brian took.  “I really miss this school.  Let me just say that, looking back, it was perfect.”

“Well, perfect’s a strong word, Mandy.”

“Heh, I think it was perfect.  We all had this overarching fear for the future, sure, but at least we weren’t actually in it.  When we were still teenagers in high school, most of what we had to think about was just enjoying our young lives.”

“Yeah, I suppose you’re right.  We have to thank Mrs. Hagert for that.  She did a lot.  She was always there for us and didn’t like giving us too much work, which was obviously good for us since we had more time to not worry about homework and exams and all that.”

“I guess that’s one of the bad parts of high school.  But really, when it comes down to everything, none of that really mattered—stressing about tests, quizzes, homework.  All of that bad is overshadowed by all the good of enjoying life as a teenager.”

“I could imagine you don’t remember anything about the learning part of high school.”

“Not really.  Everything else, though?  Everything, down to the serif of the letter.”

“I don’t know, Mandy.  It’s all just haze to me.  I remember so many random things and, obviously, some very important things.  But you….”  Down to the serif, Brian recited to himself.  It was as if no more than a month had passed since Mandy left the school grounds.  Brian’s hairs stood on end, and he felt a chill in his core, not only in the midst of this fact but also upon his sudden realization that Mandy had drawn herself closer to him as he was talking.  The fabric of their clothes brushed against each other, charging Brian with an intense impulse to leave his seat and retreat to the bathroom.

“You have to remember more than that, Brian.  Remember when you and I first talked, and Mrs. Hagert was so…enthralled by what she was seeing?  So when the class switched seats and we asked if we could still sit next to each other, she was more than happy to say yes?”  Shifting her hand, Mandy laid her pinky on Brian’s.  “And we just kept finding classes together.  We didn’t even have to force ourselves to do that.  Everything just fell into place, just perfectly.”  She curled hers around his.  “I just don’t like letting go.”

---

Brian returns the favor, curling his around hers.  On that bench in the town square, they are locked.

“We should head back home by seven,” Brian reminds Mandy.  “Christmas Eve is with the family too, you know.”  She giggles and rests her head on his shoulder.

“Just promise me this’ll never end.”

“I promise, Mandy.”  He kisses her forehead.  “I love you.”

“I love you too.”

---

“Not when the past is so much prettier than—!”  Brian suddenly stood from his seat.

“I can reminisce with you all day,” he sternly said, “but the only Minnesota I’ve had on my mind for the past year is the state I’m taking my wife and kids to for vacation with my relatives.”

“I-I’m sorry, I was just—.”  He stared Mandy down for an answer as she stared at him, tearing up in regret.  “I don’t know what came over me.”  Without so much as an utterance, Brian briskly walked to the men’s bathroom at the start of the hallway.  He hurriedly and repeatedly pulled on the door handle, to no avail, before giving up and walking into the main corridor, not daring to look back at Mandy.  The men’s bathroom in the main corridor, being only several steps away from the start of the science hallway, was thankfully easy to find.

After Brian took a minute to wash his face, he stepped out of the bathroom and stopped to swallow this environment as precisely as he could.  The tiles on the floor were recolored, and the fire alarms were modernized; but the lockers were just the same, as were the lights and the very dimensions of the corridor.  All around Brian was a disorienting amalgamation of old and new.  What similarities lay throughout this school flirted with his mind, pulling him back into that haze in his memory but still never truly clearing it.  The differences, meanwhile, now made him feel like a stranger.

However, this dissociation from the past did not disturb Brian.  He realized it to be a fact of life that he could not remember the past as definitively as Mandy could, but in truth, he did not care.  Brian enjoyed the abstractness of his memories of bygone days; he preferred to walk through that haze with little to no concern for what was in it.

He wondered what he would see in Mandy—old or new—when he would face her again.  When he did walk back down the science hallway and saw her, smiling at him with a desperation to restore an easier atmosphere, he realized that she was neither.  Rather, she was a mix of things, and fundamentally, she was not like this school.  He could indeed see the changes in her face and hair, but the constants were not nearly as concrete.  It was in that uncertain smile of hers, and in her exact observations of Mrs. Hagert’s classroom, that Brian saw the long, lingering hope of a teenage girl in love.  Of course, Mandy even made it verbally clear to Brian that she found the past to be more desirable.  Surely, he believed, her physical gesture was merely an accident—something that just seemed to be the right thing to do in the moment.  Within the context of their separate married lives, such a failure of inhibition troubled him, but he was confident that Mandy was not at all interested in cheating with him.  He began to wonder if she instead had a more particular desire, to return to Christmas Eve in 1986 and relive that day together, even if only for a moment.

“Brian,” Mandy stopped him before he could return to his seat on the bench.  She took her phone out of her pocket and quickly navigated to her voicemail.

You have—one—new message.  New message: “Hello, Mandy!  I hope Brian told you about the delay, because of my family situation.  I very much regret to inform you, though, that I won’t be coming.  The matter is far too important, and I really hope you do understand that I simply can’t make it.  I’m in a bit of a rush, so please tell Brian about this.  I’m sorry I didn’t keep you in the know earlier, and of course I’m very, very sorry that I can’t make it.  The two of you must have very busy lives, but if you’d like to schedule another little reunion, we most certainly can.  It’s the least I can do.”

“What now?” she hesitantly asked.

“Now, I want to just talk.”  Brian sighed and took his seat.  “Why did you do it?”

“Because not one major thing in my life after high school went the way I wanted, Brian.  Maybe you don’t believe me when I say that high school was perfect, but compared to everything that had happened since then, it is all I could have ever asked for.  And I was delirious enough to think that you would want to go back twenty years with me, not so I could cheat on my husband with you, but so we could have that old blissful feeling again.  I’m sorry.”  Mandy covered her eyes and quietly began to sob.  Patiently, Brian waited for her to come to.  “I just never stopped thinking about high school.  Those memories were the only real comfort I had in the first year of college, and they just stuck with me ever since.  This isn’t just because I have great memory, Brian.  I made the choice to look back, over and over again.  I just want to go back to not caring about anything anymore.”  She sniffed and wiped her eyes.  “Should I leave?”

“No, it’s fine.  Mandy, I get it, I get all of that.  Look, how I reacted earlier was a bit harsh, and I know you might be thinking that my life is clearly so much better than yours in one way or another, and that most things went as planned.  But we’re both adults, Mandy, and I’m sure you can guess that I had to go through some hardships too.  I’m not trying to compare what I went through with whatever you went through, but…I hope that lets you know that I understand.”  Mandy managed to break out a grin and reached out to hug Brian.

“Thank you.”  As the old friends hugged each other, Brian could feel the tension in Mandy’s shoulders being released, and he could hear her slowly breathing a long sigh of relief.

“I’ll tell you what we can do.  You and I can walk down this hallway, down the main corridor, down the stairwell to the first floor, and walk out the doors again.  We can go anywhere, to the little park at the front or to some nearby café or diner.  Even at this age, Mandy, we can still find that old blissful feeling.”

“Let’s do it.”  She stood from her seat and began to walk.  “And I’ll be leading the way if you don’t mind!”  Brian laughed and followed her.

“Keep your head straight!”