Reunion Read Free

behind the counter, looked up from his copy of Surf Digest and asked, “What the hell?”
    Then Kurt did a very surprising thing. He reached under the counter and pulled out a baseball bat.
    Gina observed this with great interest.
    â€œYou go, homie,” she said to Kurt.
    Kurt didn’t seem to hear these words of encouragement. He ignored us, and strode over to where the pack of beer lay behind the lotion rack. He looked down at the foaming mess of broken glass and cardboard and asked, again,plaintively, “What the hell?”
    Only this time, he didn’t say hell, if you get my meaning.
    Gina wandered over to look at the wreckage.
    â€œNow, that’s just a shame,” she said, toeing one of the bigger shards with her platform sandal. “What do you think caused it? Earthquake?”
    When my stepfather, driving Gina back to our house from the airport, had asked her what she most hoped to experience while in California, Gina had replied without hesitation, “The big one.” Earthquakes were the one thing we didn’t get a lot of back in New York.
    â€œThere wasn’t no quake,” Kurt said. “And these beers are from the fridge against that wall back there. How’d they get all the way up here?” he wanted to know.
    Kelly and Debbie joined Gina and Kurt in surveying the damage and wondering about its cause. Only I hung back. I could, I suppose, have offered an explanation, but I didn’t think anyone was going to believe me—not if I told the truth, anyway. Well, Gina probably would have. She knew a little bit—more than anybody else I knew, with the exception, maybe, of my youngest stepbrother, Doc, and Father Dom—about the mediator thing.
    Still, what she knew wasn’t much. I’ve alwayssort of kept my business to myself. It simplifies things, you know.
    I figured it would be wisest if I just stayed out of the whole thing. I opened my soda and took a deep swallow. Ah. Potassium benzoate. It always hits the spot.
    It was only then, my attention wandering, that I noticed the headline on the front of the local paper. FOUR DEAD , it proclaimed, IN MIDNIGHT PLUNGE .
    â€œMaybe,” Kelly was saying, “somebody took it out and was gonna buy it, and at the last minute, changed their mind, and left it on the shelf right there—”
    â€œYeah,” Gina interrupted enthusiastically. “And then an earthquake shook it off!”
    â€œThere wasn’t no earthquake,” Kurt said. Only he didn’t sound as sure as before. “Was there?”
    â€œI kind of felt something,” Debbie said.
    Kelly said, “Yeah, I think I did, too.”
    â€œJust for a minute there,” Debbie said.
    â€œYeah,” Kelly said.
    â€œDamn!” Gina put her hands on her hips. “Are you telling me there was an actual earthquake just now, and I missed it ?”
    I took a copy of the paper off of the pile and unfolded it.
    Four seniors from Robert Louis Stevenson High School were tragically killed in a car accident last night as they were returning home from a spring formal. Felicia Bruce, 17; Mark Pulsford, 18; Josh Saunders, 18; and Carrie Whitman, 18, were declared dead at the scene after a head-on collision along a treacherous stretch of California Highway 1 caused their vehicle to to careen past a protective guardrail and into the sea below.
    â€œWhat’d it feel like?” Gina demanded. “So I’ll know if there’s another one.”
    â€œWell,” Kelly said. “This wasn’t a very big one. It was just…well, if you’ve been through enough of them, you can just sort of tell, you know? It’s like a feeling you get on the back of your neck. The hair there kind of raises up.”
    â€œYeah,” Debbie said. “That’s just how I felt. Not so much that the ground was moving underneath me, but like a cold breeze moved through me real fast.”
    â€œExactly,”