Reunion

This is Fiction

Evan

I’ll never forget, it was the summer of 1992. I remember the season because of the heat. They said the tire marks on the highway from the truck that killed my parents were seared into the black tar. I also remember Mrs Staplestorm. A memorable name. She was our third-grade teacher. I was in the care of my aunt. I was alone and miserable, aged nine and without a friend in the world.

All I had were my nickels and dimes from my paper route (which somehow I continued to run on the weekend, despite my grief) and the Street Fighter machine at the milk bar that I ran to after school. I spent hours there, every day. The store owner used to swat me away with a broom at closing time so that he could roll down the shutters and close up for the night. I asked him point blank one day, let me have the machine.

“You kidding? I make more off that thing from you every day, why would I let that go?” he said with a laugh.

So that was my life. Wake up to soggy Weet-Bix, daydream in class for six hours and race to the milk bar. Street Fighter for three hours. Get home. Get ignored. Go to sleep. Wake up and do it again.

But there is one thing I am not mentioning. I only bring it up now because history has a way of repeating itself. It seems the moments in life that you would otherwise think were inconsequential have a way of coming back and making themselves profound, years after the fact.

There were three of them. The stooges. There was Giuseppe Aisito (who everyone called Joe), Adam Pringle and Derek Smith. They were the class clowns, the school jocks, the athletes, whatever you wanted to call them, they were it. They held all the cards. They decided who was cool and who was not. They had made it clear to the class and all others in the third grade exactly what camp we were to be divided into. If you were funny, you were with them. If you attempted to be funny but couldn’t land, like Joey Marcus – you were in the shit camp. If you had a zit on your face for longer than three days, welcome to the shit camp.

They made it known in no uncertain terms where it was that I was allocated. I was not to be spoken to. I didn’t mind, at least they weren’t picking on me. Then one day, they shifted Andy Yung to seemingly interesting status thanks to him inviting them to his tenth birthday party and decided I would make a prime target for their ongoing ridicule project.

So this began in what was already my worst year on record. That’s how I remembered it was the third grade.

They had taken the screws off the cubicle door and held it up on the frame with a wedged piece of paper. Don’t ask me how they achieved this because even to this day, I’m still not sure how the door was able to stand up like it did. It sort of held itself open on an angle. It was the closest cubicle to the exit of the boys' bathroom. It was recess, and we all were instructed to have a quick meal break as there would be an all-year game of handball taking place, and I had some skills I wanted to showcase. I don’t know if I was targeted from the get-go, or I was the closest sucker to the assholes, either way – they chose me.

It was a frozen ice pop stick. Raspberry flavour. They pulled my trouser pants back while my back was turned and inserted the ice block between my butt cheeks and closed the pants up. Squishing cold ice against my backside, causing me to leap into the air in shock, pain and then humiliation. The entire class had their eyes on me and their smiles were firmly planted. That’s when I knew the attack was preordained. I was the intended target and the missile had landed.

So I ran to the bathroom. The plan was to remove my shorts and my underwear and place the jocks in my pocket and then slip the shorts back on. Yeah, I mean, I would be without underwear but at least I wouldn’t be uncomfortable. The ice block had stained the jocks bright pink and they were soaking wet. The shorts seemed to be fine. As I mentioned, the door hinges were removed as I closed it. Although I put the lock into gear the door itself wasn’t on a frame. So when I stood in the cubicle without shorts or underwear on, then when the door itself was taken away, exposing me to an awaiting mass of children eager to point and laugh… Well, you can guess where it went from there.

So it’s forty-three years later and, as I said, I thought I could live my life in the belief that this incident was inconsequential. That I could forget it and just start afresh. I didn’t tell my auntie. I didn’t tell her boyfriend of the week. I made it through the third, fourth, fifth and sixth grades with nicknames plagued over me and a desire to never see these people ever again. I enrolled in high school on the outskirts of town (one good thing Sheila did for me). I worked on my grades, continued my paper run, and got to the leaderboard of the Street Fighter machine before Mister Wilson retired it in the winter of 2001.

—

2035

Giuseppe

I ain’t seen Adam and Derek since High School. We made arrangements to meet at the bar on Oakville Avenue. It was our regular drinking joint when we reached age. I mean, it was a dive bar but we didn’t give a rat’s. It served beer and served it cold. We didn’t have much in common no more, me and the guys. Still it was nice to catch up. They had friendly faces and were good for a laugh, you know? We’d sit around and talk all kinds of shit. Like the time I put the glue stick in Mister Scofallac’s exhaust when he was a first-year teacher. I swear to God, we gave that prick so much shit it’s a wonder he even stayed being a teacher. Some of the students, after we left that were still in school, they came up to me years later and would say;

“Scofallac’s become such a major asshole and it’s all because of you bastards. He now has a take-no-shit attitude.”

I got a laugh outta this. I liked knowing that we had such an impact. We always had that ability to command a situation. You know what I mean? Like in primary school, no one fucked with us. High School, we grew stronger. No one fucked with us. We couldn’t replicate this into life on the outside.

I got into plumbing and then construction. Adam became a building manager and Derek drove forklifts. We were blue-collar guys now. We had wives and we had rent repayments. I had a kid. I think Derek had one too, but he never saw it. We were adults now, the days of pushing people around were over. But it was good to catch up and have a laugh.

“You remember his little prick hanging out when we took the cubicle door off the hinges?!” Derek yelled. We all let out a roar of belly laughs. We were talking about that prick Andy Yung.

“No, it was Evan Pearson,” Derek says.

“Really? I thought Andy?”

“No, definitely Evan,” he reminded me. “I remember because his parents died a few months earlier and we used to give him shit.”

This made us stop laughing. We were three drinks down. Sober enough.

“I didn’t know that.”

“What you mean you didn’t know that? You were the one that called him Oliver Pist,” Adam says. “Because his folks were dead.”

“I said that?”

None of us were laughing now. I didn’t remember saying that.

“Jesus, kids can be cruel,” I said.

We were now eight drinks down and the night was young. It was one in the afternoon. We were day drinking. The following day was a public holiday. It was glorious. My vision was blurring slightly. But there was someone over by the bar. Behind the counter. He wasn’t looking at us but I could see something in his face. I remembered him from somewhere. I couldn’t tell where and the next drink would blur him completely from my sight. Ah well… It will come to me.

—

Evan

I graduated from university with a Masters in Robotics and Engineering. I combined this with a personal pursuit of organic molecular biology. I then pursued a medical degree. Then on the side, I invested in crypto early and managed to amass enough wealth to just be able to float.

I managed to develop a non-invasive injection that can send microscopic robotic agents into the bloodstream and have them target cancerous cells and attack them. Thereby negating the need for harsh chemotherapy treatments. It was still in its infancy, but I was eager to test run the procedure. So I started looking for test subjects to give the technology a try. But before I did that, I wanted to see how much of the technology could be used for tasks not associated with health maintenance.

Like, I wanted to see if I could inject microscopic robots into someone and have them rip a person apart from the inside out?

I followed Giuseppe, Adam and Derek on Facebook and began monitoring their communications. I used outsourced hackers through my university connections to tap into their secure communications and I watched and waited for them to arrange a get-together. Then, to be sure I had unrivalled access, I secured a position at the bar where they were to meet up three months prior so that I would be on shift when the reunion was to be arranged.

I injected the microscopic bots into their beers and I watched as they proceeded to become more and more intoxicated. I held my breath the entire afternoon that my agents would be receptive when I programmed them from my workstation at home.

So I’m here.

My shift has ended, and I’m sitting in front of my software, watching a live feed on three screens of the insides of my old childhood tormentors. I can see the undigested meals they had consumed. I can see that Giuseppe has an undiagnosed swelling in his liver.

I’m staring down at my keyboard, which is awaiting my commands.

I’m giving them another five minutes of freedom before I unleash hellfire on their insides. I do not envy the pain journey they are about to embark on. But as I sit here, about to administer justice, I wonder what the boy who was humiliated in front of the entire school without pants or underwear on would think if he had the knowledge that in forty-three years, this action would be atoned for.

Would he be happy?

I know I am.