Steve Weber hadn’t stayed in touch with anyone from the little farm town he left as a teenager. The place was a static reminder of high school glory or failure, early marriage, divorce and custody battles, dead-end jobs, and not much else–the face of endurance masking a vortex of interior desperation.
Forty-one years later, he found himself surfing Facebook and visiting some of his old high school acquaintances’ profiles to see what had happened. Most of them were nearly or wholly unrecognizable due to weight gain and the ravages of alcohol and drugs. Johnny Rodriguez, who had placed in State in wrestling at 155 pounds, now looked like an angry version of the Michelin tire man without the crenelations. In every picture, Johnny’s swollen face glared at the camera with bulging eyes and pursed lips. In one picture, he lay on a hospital bed with a swath of bandages over his chest and an IV attached to his arm. A young man in a military desert uniform stood next to him. Steve’s impression was that Johnny had either been shot or suffered a heart attack, but the comments under the picture hinted at the former.
Moving from one friends list to the next, Steve found Scott Wilton’s profile. Scott had been a shy, thoughtful teenager whose father coached the high school football team and ran the local Fellowship of Christian Athletes ministry. Scott never dated, and he shied away from sports. He associated with only a few close friends, all outsiders. Still, everyone liked and respected him. Now, he lived in a major city and had over five hundred Facebook friends, most of whom were slender, lightly whiskered men. Many of them were shirtless. Scott looked happy, and he too was lightly whiskered.
One of the few women on Scott’s friends list looked familiar. She was a pretty redhead with a slender, angular frame, bright green eyes, and firm, high cheekbones. Her name–Sharon Willard–didn’t ring a bell at first, but then it dawned on Steve that she had been Sharon Quinn in high school, a gangly, pale girl always bustling with energy and saying the wrong things because she was smart enough to perceive the truth but too naïve to know when to withhold it. She had pursued Steve for a while, but he disliked her for being too intellectual and assertive. Now, she was living in a house on the Florida coast, and her profile picture featured her driving a speedboat.
Steve considered sending Sharon a friend request but thought better of it. Instead, he went through her friends list and spotted Bill Warner. Steve and Bill had been on the same football and track teams. They skied every chance they got, double-dated, and partied at some of the best rock shows in the state. Bill was close with his family and especially loved his father Doug and brother Alan. Doug and Alan were both conspicuously missing from Bill’s friends list although the rest of the family’s profiles were there. Bill didn’t seem to be married, and his profile picture showed him standing alone and expressionless on some rocky beach on a cold, cloudy day. The years had worn deep creases into his face.
Steve stared at Bill’s picture for a few minutes, wondering how much time he had left before everything started slowing down and falling apart. He thought about how little he had known anyone back in those days. He wondered if he really knew anyone at all, especially himself. He logged off of his computer, changed into his workout clothes, and went out for a long run.
