Reunion

It’s Marty Pruitt’s ten year high school reunion. Well, not exactly hers. It’s Kearny High’s Class of 2005 high school reunion and everyone, even people who graduated in 2004 and 2006, are coming. At least according to the social media breakdown. All the invites have been digitally accepted, even Marty’s.

It wasn’t her idea, and she’ll tell you she didn’t want to go in the first place. Brigette made her.

Martha Colette Washburn Pruitt, a name collected from dead relatives, graduated from Kearny Grand High School (home of the Grizzlies, grr-oo-ah!) and moved to the other ends of the earth to get away from her high school. She wasn’t picked on or bullied. She wasn’t particularly odd. She didn’t play a part in the school musical starring Kearny’s biggest drama nerd, Bert Mills. She didn’t spend too many days in a study hall and lose her eyesight. Nor did she too often fade into the library walls or spend after hours as teacher’s pet. None of that made Marty pack up a single bag and hop a plane to Tokyo a week after graduation.

Marty had a few friends in those days. A small collective of misfits who she had known since elementary. They grew into individual people by high school, a collective so generic you could have called them The Breakfast Club. But Marty knew them better than that, knew the nuances and secrets that lived behind the doors of the jock and the princess. This knowledge did not come from a single Saturday detention, it came from years of growing up in each other’s swimming pools and backyards. Watching movies until 2 AM and eating mac and cheese. Competing in track meets together. Holding each other’s hair the first time they got into their parent’s liquor cabinets.

None of these friends would be attending the reunion.

Marty had not intended to be anywhere close to Kern County when the reunion was scheduled. She caught the invitation in Tucson, doing her obligatory social media update in the public library every time she clocked a new location. Her parents followed her there, in the digital world, and it was easier than picking up a phone. Easier than talking to someone and having to explain anything. Using the web, Marty checked in to let her parents know she was okay, alive, and seeing something new. She would hook up her little point-and-shoot Nikon digital camera and upload photos. Photos of her standing at the top of a mountain in Peru, biking through a Nepalese forest, or standing at historic ruins in Turkey. Photos of Marty happy. Photos of Marty smiling. Photos of Marty moving on with her life. Moving on from the incident that Junior year Spring Break at Kearny Grand High School.

It was also in Tucson that she received an email from her mother about Daddy and his condition. As if congestive heart failure was just a “condition” and not a death sentence. Either way, Marty caught the next flight home and stayed in her old bedroom, unchanged for ten years. It had posters of her favorite movies, like Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure and Aliens. It had Nirvana CDs shoved in a shoebox on her bookshelf next to story collections by Amy Hempel and Dave Eggers. The walls were painted pale yellow, her bedsheets teal with bleach stains from the first time she washed them herself. A teddy bear named Squishems.

This is where Brigette came to see her.

Brigette came into Marty’s life in the after. After Junior year Spring Break 2004. A force of joyful lightning pierced every aspect of Brigette, with lifted blonde hair and black-as-oil eyebrows. Her petite frame was more than made up for by an outstandingly tall personality, all pinned together with designer, faux-leather boots and suede, brightly-hued jackets. It was Brigette who sought Marty out. In the after.

Marty had a weekly meeting in the counselor’s office, just a check-in, to see how she was “coping.” You could say everyone wanted to know how Marty was coping. People Marty had never met whispered behind cupped hands, asking people who borrowed a pencil from Marty in Freshman year bio, “How can she live with it?” People two years younger than Marty chirped, hands blocking their lips, “That’s her. How is she okay?”

Only one person ever asked Marty herself. That was Brigette.

Approaching Marty in Kearny Grand High School Counselor’s office waiting room, Brigette appeared through a blur of fresh “coping.” She held a single cookie, a snickerdoodle, with both hands. She asked her flat out, full-faced through freshly glossed lips, “How’re you doing, doll?”

It was Brigette’s idea that Marty attend the reunion. Biting into a fresh-baked snickerdoodle Marty’s mom made to welcome her home, Brigette said, “You’re in town. Come on, everyone will be there.”

Well, not everyone, Marty knew that. But she knew what Brigette meant.

After the incident at Marc’s country house their Junior year of high school, after she met Brigette, Marty would lose herself working at her father’s dental practice, taking appointments and bookkeeping. She took odd jobs driving airport shuttles and delivering food. She took cans to the recycling center. Eventually, she had saved up enough to blast off into outer space if she wanted. It wouldn’t be far enough, but Marty had a mind to escape Kern County and the memory of what had come to be known as the “Spring Break Slaughter.”

Even Brigette couldn’t stop Marty from leaving town ten years ago, not after that. But she would make Marty attend the reunion.

When Marty started the pet taxi service on the weekends, driving dogs and cats and turtles to their vet visits and grooming appointments, that’s when she started adjusting better. Coming out of her shell, her mother would say. Sure, some of the animals never came home. But they were terminally ill. The vet put them down. Or Jinx the cat just leapt into traffic. Or Muffy the toy poodle took off with the leash. She would hang signs, help any way she could. It couldn’t have been stopped. Marty knew what it was like to lose those you care about, and her customers were understanding. 


Marty would tell you the bleach stains on her sheets were an accident. She put in the wrong detergent. The set of guest towels her mother threw away after Marty had used so much bleach it ate through the embroidery, that was an accident, too. Maybe Marty’s eyesight was bad. Or maybe it was the PTSD. A subconscious effort to make sure everything was clean.

Marty’s mom stopped letting her do laundry after that. Her mom just thought the blood on Marty’s clothes was from her period.

First stop after high school was Japan. With her pet taxi money, her driving money, her dental receptionist money, the money she saved, Marty wanted to see the temples at Itsukushima and climb Mount Fuji. Everyone understood, her parents and Brigette, and the few other friends she’d collected in the after. She had to get as far away from the memories as possible. Maybe visit Aokigahara Forest and whisper behind the trees. Hang a few handmade trinkets that just suggested there was nothing left to live for. Not for her, of course. She just wanted to watch some shows somewhere other than Kabuki-za.

After Japan, Marty ferried to China and made her way Northwest. Destination Moscow. Besides the Kremlin and Red Square, Marty had her sights on the Necropolis of Donskoi Monastery. The ashes of political prisoners from Stalin’s Great Purge lay there, and Marty thought it would be appropo to scatter some herself. She had to leave Moscow directly after the fire. Though, as far as she could tell, many believed it to be a political protest.

Sure. Marty was coping better.

At the reunion, the people that talked about Marty in high school like an artifact of tragedy, the people that demanded smiles and jokes in her time of crisis, they were in attendance. Ghosts of high school past that never left Kern County stood in scattered groups around the gym floor.

Of course, the real ghosts were at Marc’s country house. The ghosts of the “Spring Break Slaughter.” All of Marty’s friends, of which Marty was the only one left alive.

These same people at the reunion meet up every other weekend at the same bar, drinking the same drink, trading the same stories, all getting fatter or stupider or more cynical. They planned the reunion in the time of Facebook, when every day is a reunion. The best reason for a reunion is just to trade stories with people outside of each other for a change.

Later on in her travels, Marty saw a woman fall into the Grand Canyon. She watched a man boil to death in a Colorado hot spring. The man who broke his neck falling down the Empire State building, Marty was there. No one at the reunion heard about the freak shark attack in Atol Das Rocas. She visited corn fields in Iowa and got the chance to fertilize them with human compost. Her favorite were the Louisiana swamps. Just the idea of a body being devoured by a gator was enough anticipation to keep holding the girl underwater.

Marty, however, soon found herself being poked and prodded by the masses of her teens. Clamouring around her and asking about Baton Rouge, Memphis, Toronto, Panama. They’d seen it on Facebook. They’d heard about it on Twitter. The life Marty shared with her mom and dad; she had forgotten all these empty souls could see it too, and for some reason they cared. They talked about specific skylines, images they remember seeing, liking, commenting on. It was never something Marty checked. She wasn’t even sure how.

Detective Carlos Sanmartino Ruiz was not in any of her social media shared photos. He’s probably still hanging from a tree in New Mexico. That cowboy. He was just trying to lay down some Eastwood-style vigilante justice. But the horse was too tall, and it was too easy to line the trees with razor wire. Poor bloke, it didn’t even cut him all the way through.

And all these people, these people who only knew her senior year of high school, only knew her because of what had happened, they asked her about Bahrain and Dubai. They asked her about the swimming pigs in Nassau.

They say a sounder of swine can devour 200 lbs of meat in 8 minutes. Marty clocked it at closer to ten.

And all these high school people, who only knew her through rumors, fawned over her for being a jet-setter. A world traveler. A real survivor girl.

What Marty would never admit, not to her high school counselor, not to Brigette or her mother, was the pure rush of living when others did not.

What Marty never told anyone about the madman who attacked six teens in 2004 in a country home in Kern County, the one who got a full chest of rock salt from Marc’s dad’s Mossberg Break Action double barrel shotgun before his head was crushed in by the barrel, is that he let her live. This maniac, who stalked and slaughtered her best friends, let her live just to watch the others die. He let her live long enough to find the basement where Marc’s dad kept the hunting equipment.

Marty didn’t know the shells were rock salt.

This is what no one talks about at the reunion. This is what no one talked about ten years before. Not even Mrs. Rassmussen, the high school-appointed grief counselor, would bring up that Marty shot a man in the chest with two barrels of rock salt then proceeded to bash his brains in with the hardwood stock of a twelve gauge.

This man who didn’t kill her, Marty knows, gave her something to live for. And Kern County stopped being the only place on Marty’s horizon.

When Marty pulled Brigette’s coughing, fitful body out of the high school gym, already three-quarters ablaze from a rogue sparkler igniting the Grizzly-pride wrestling banners, Marty knew she had a traveling companion.

As Brigette watched, rubbing smoke from her tearful eyes, as the rest of their graduating class, and some from classes 2004 and 2006, banged and rapped on the double-doors of the free-standing gym unable to escape the flames, she knew she had something to live for.

Marty, squatting next to Brigette as she squinted at the burning gym, pulled a napkin out of her pocket, unfolded it, and presented Brigette with a single, semi-crushed snickerdoodle cookie.

No one would talk about why the rest of the doors were locked, or why none of those who coordinated the event had keys. Just how no one talked about Marty and her friend’s dad’s shotgun, no one would ask who brought the sparklers.

It was just a tragedy. The tragedy of Kearny Grand Class of 2005 High School Reunion. The tragedy of the Spring Break Slaughter.

Their names were Marc Benson, Chrissy Oswald, Rachel Simmons, Tony Weir, and Christopher Sanforth. But you weren’t going to ask. No one ever did.