Ran into a friend of mine just the other day
He complained about college loans and bills he's got to pay
we talked about high school and the days that went before
He said he didn't think they made days like that anymore.

Hometown friends mean a lot to me
but the longer I'm here, the less of them I see
and the further I get it seems the longer I'm away
I guess time equals distance that way
-Phil Pritchett

--- January 30, 2004 - Austin, TX ---

I was walking up the stairs looking for Adam when I saw a familiar face out of the corner of my eye. I looked again and then looked at his name badge. "Chase?!" I asked. I shouldn't have been surprised that he'd be there. He was, after all, instrumental in the founding of the University of Houston anime club. Except that he was supposed to be in Seattle.

He looked over and squinted at bit, trying to place a name with the face.

"It's Alex... Pariah."

"Dude!" he exclaimed.

I met Chase in 1996, through his best friend Kerry. I'd met Kerry by way of my then-girlfriend Christie cheating on him. Throughout that entire two-day drama, Chase could only laugh at us both. "You guys are fifteen. There are so many more important things to life."

The second round - and second heartbreak - with Ora came shortly after that and I was desperate to find something to bide my time. Chase was perfect for that. First of all, no one was less likely to talk about girls than he. No one was more able to help me gain some perspective in life. Lastly, he introduced me to anime.

At first it was late night sleepovers at Kerry's place. Kerry's parents were rarely around and we were able to have our three-man parties. Sometimes four and five. I saw Battle Angel, Doomed Megalopolis, Ghost in the Shell, and a host of other movies. When I went to Florida for my family's annual trip, he loaned me some movies. Jay, who was with me that year, spent late nights watching anything and everything that he'd given us. Except Lodoss War, which was subtitled and by the time we were watching anime we were way too tired to read.

The last time I saw Chase, we talked about the second Crow movie. Shortly after that, the man who thought everyone was too obsessed with relationships stole someone's girlfriend, moved to Seattle, and married her at age 19.

"She left me," he explained. "So now I'm back here trying to hook up with some old friends."

I told him that I was sorry to hear that. We talked about the University of Houston, the anime club (which I was never a member of, but had some connections to), and a lot about ACME. "I've tried the internet chat rooms, but they're all is completely inane."

"Yeah, we're not fifteen anymore, I guess, but the averate chatter still is."

"Not just that, but in the old days only people with a certain amount of intelligence could actually get online. Plus everyone was all from the Houston area."

I nodded in agreement.

"So many of my friends were online."

"I know what you mean. For a while it seemed like with only a couple of exceptions, my friends were all scattered across the city. Most of us had in common how much we hated high school."

"That's not really what I meant. I had a great high school life."

Oh, nevermind, I thought to myself, I temporarily forgot what a loser I was.

"Of course, I didn't go to Clear Lake."

Clear Lake and Clear Creek were, for a time, the only two high schools in the CCISD. There was naturally a rivalry of sorts. In part because of their proximity to one another, but also largely because of the different demographics. Clear Lake was where the "rich kids" went. Bay Oaks, Middlebrook, El Lago Estates, and just about every primo neighborhood in the area was Lake bound. While Creek was by no means poor, League City was no Clear Lake City and Kemah wasn't Seabrook. When the upper middle class meets the middle class, the distinctions seem a lot more stark than they probably are.

"Yeah. I remember thinking at the time that I probably would have been a lot better at Creek," I commented.

"I think all of you Lake people would have been. Most of the ACME people who went to Creek enjoyed it - well, as much as anyone can enjoy school. You Lake guys all hated your lives."

"Yeah, I guess many Lakers were too well off for their own good and the rest of us were left behind because we didn't have new convertibles."

--- January 23, 2004 - Houston, TX ---

"Alex? Alex Whitlock? Alex Whitlock!" I heard in the distance.

I looked over and there he was, Cody Bricker. "Do you recognize me, man?!"

"Hey Cody, how's it going, man!" I said to the boy who was my friend in elementary school but deigned himself too important to talk to me in high school.

"I wasn't sure if you would recognize me. Ed White Elementary, right?"

"And Clear Lake High School," I corrected him.

"Oh yeah! We had that Positive Mental Attitude class together!" He recalled. I was surprised he remembered, considering that he'd talked to me three times the entire semester despite occupying the seat in front of me.

We talked about a wide variety of things. I recalled that in the fourth grade he won a Daughters of the American Revolution award before moving away. I made a comment about the snobs from Clear Lake. I'd forgotten that he moved from El Lago to Clear Lake (which was why we went to high school together). He took it in stride, though. "Man, you're going to be one of those millionaires driving a Toyota Camry while those pricks are going into debt to afford their Porsches."

I laughed. Old grudges die easy, I guess. He showed me off to all of his friends. None of them knew me because none of them had ever talked to me. One, a former cheerleader, surprisingly said that she had recognized me. I thought she'd been looking at me earlier but I thought that I was probably mistaken (I wasn't sure it was my fellow CLHS alum). They all pretended to know me. "Oh yeah! I remember you! You're that guy! Who was... tall! And... you say you work in IT? Yeah! You were that tall guy who loved computers! Good to see you again Eric!"

"So man, who else have you run in to here?"

"I ran in to Pira Whitley last year. Oh yeah, I actually ran in to Darrin Spillman on New Years."

"Isn't he that guy who never stopped laughing?"

--- January 1, 2004 - Houston, TX ---

I was waiting for Jay to finish talking to his newfound lady friend when I saw this guy wearing only underwear run across Fountain View and back to swerving and honking cars. From a black SUV I heard a guy laughing while his girlfriend hysterically told him to stop. "He could die out there!" I heard her say.

He just laughed.

When the underwear dude ran back to the SUV and all was more calm, I struck up some small-talk with a guy in a maroone SUV that was parked next to me. Several minutes later he was talking to Underwear Dude, Laughing Boy, and Crying Girl by the black SUV. "Hey," the stranger said, "Is your name Alex Whitlock?"

"Yeah?"

"My friend Darrin says that he knows you," he explained.

I walked up to the truck and saw Darrin. He looked vaguely familiar. It took me about thirty seconds for me to place the face. He knew he recognized me from high school but couldn't remember where.

In sophomore theatre class, there was a girl named Keri. She was really my first female friend. I got to know her because I had a crush on a friend of hers and before I knew it she had a crush on me. When everything cooled over, we were just good friends. She was not, to be accurate, attractive in the slightest. She had a nice little figure and was a pleasant person, but there was something about her face that didn't work. As such, most of our classmates were pretty ruthless with her. Some asked me why I hung out with her. Others, including Darrin, liked to do nothing but joke about how she and I were together. All day. Every day. For the entire year. And he'd always be laughing. Considering that she and I were friends - that I was overweight and she was homely - there wouldn't have been anything unusual about us hooking up. But he found it funny nonetheless. We were the neverending butt of his jokes.

"We had theatre together."

"We did? Wait... didn't we also have that one class together?"

"A/V class. Yeah."

We had A/V class together. In that one I had a couple good friends (that were slightly higher up the high school caste system) so I wasn't so much the butt of his jokes.

"Yeah. You guys had that killer music video for your final project!"

"Yeah, we did."

"That was badass, dude! [laugh] I don't remember what it was about or what song it was, but it was badass! [laugh]."

"It was Phil Collins's 'In the Air Tonight'."

"[laugh] You made a Phil Collins song badass? [laugh] That's [laugh] badass!!"

"Yeah, I guess so," I laughed.

Old grudges die easy, I guess.