1989, 2012. Scene is brightly lit.

High school is a really fun time. The day I graduated, one of my classmates driving a convertible ran a red light in celebration and got decapitated by an oncoming truck. The year before that, a friend who used to toss the baseball around with me (he was better, headed somewhere with his athletic skills), got smashed into a dozen pieces when his family's car rounded a bend in the highway north to Ukiah and head-on into a large semi whose driver had swerved into their path. The father, two sons, and daughter were all killed instantly, while the mother lived on life support for weeks and eventually recovered.

An exchange student from Japan who used to make us laugh with his unintelligible antics smoked at lunch in plain view, talking about Japanese culture and all the amazing videogames and consumer electronics they already had there. But he loved California. He said he was going to try to stay and attend UC Santa Cruz, if he could get his grades up. We all thought this was unlikely since he partied every weekend and every day after school until late at night, and really during any break during school if he could. After graduation he slit his wrists and his parents took receipt of their only son in a body bag, his smile gone.

When I was younger and more quiet, I was picked on by those who thought that meant I was weak and awkward. I never got beat up because the bullies weren't bigger or stronger than me, or quicker. And they were afraid. But they talked a lot, and that made the girls go for them instead of me. I tried to understand why I was attracted to girls so vigorously when they exhibited behaviors like that. Then for one or two years I decided to be more aggressive and run my mouth and act like a badass in basketball and around the lockers and at break. I laughed at people who were insecure. A fair number of girls showed interest in me, and I was popular and won an election for treasurer and a bunch of awards from teachers. My last year I was not really even in high school, though physically I still had to be. My mind and heart were elsewhere. I had moved on. I kept to myself or spent time with my clan of exchange students and poets and musicians, and my popularity fell predictably, but no one knew what to make of me outside my circle, so they ignored me. I think I probably got offered weed more often.

Yeah, high school was incomparable. The biology teacher made us do pushups if we missed pop questions, the history teacher challenged male students to freethrow contests after school for money, the typing teacher only helped you with your form if you were an attractive underage female, and my gym teacher, like all gym teachers, talked about work ethic and being responsible for being dressed and ready on time while he watched us do our private business down the long line of urinals and slapped out butts when we made "good outs." My English teacher was the worst; he made me read Catcher in the Rye, The Stranger, Catch-22, Heart of Darkness, Hamlet, and Cat's Cradle all in the same year, and gave me as a going away present "Franny and Zooey" by Salinger.

The school looks a lot different now. People have nicer cars - a lot nicer. The whole place seems to have gone two-storied. The varsity baseball field I never played on looks better taken care of than ever. Dark green grass mowed in perfectly alternating lines, professional chalking of the infield. The parking lot is redone, girls look like they have implants and people are actually dunking on the outdoor hoops. Driving by I got glares from kids half my age who I could literally kill within 10 minutes. I saw an obvious drug transfer complete with ziplock bag and cash just while trying to find a place to park. Most of the quality teachers seemed to have retired or moved on. The guys that made you do push-ups are still there. I didn't see many white kids, and there a lot more Asians than I remember, but that didn't bother me. What bothered me was that they'd painted the entire place army green and orange, demolished the penned-in bike racks (does no one ride to school anymore?), and there was a security guard wandering about who just silently nodded his head to me, a 30-year-old guy with no business being there.

I couldn't gain access to the gym, but the yearbook room was still using Macintoshes and the girls were still unobtainably pretty and the business office was completely redesigned. In fact once I learned the staff consisted of no one I knew, I hastily left since it reminded me too much of the place at which I was working at the time. I forgot to check in on the library, where I spent so many lunches speed-writing essays that were due next period. It was probably full of computers now. The lockers themselves were locked up by a metal fence, and I kept thinking the whole time... well, I guess I just kept thinking "why?" You know, Why. I was older and more removed, and less alive, and I could see what bureaucrats had done to the youth of the country, and it wasn't much different than what happened to me. The difference was I never cared, not truly.

Now I am a very successful person with a post-high-school record that is inpeccable, a wife and two point five kids in a two-storey house with a lab puppy and two cats, one of which adopted us as a stray. Business requires long hours but it's stable, and it's Good People. I have to fly to Phoenix next week to show them our prototype so we can finally get this thing off the whiteboard and into production. I don't miss any of those sublime moments in art class, or the unplanned trips to San Francisco, museums and car hotels and unlikely makeout sessions with beauties from other schools. I don't miss the murmuring stars I used to stare at from the backyard when I couldn't sleep. How could I? I'm too busy taking care of the fam and dreaming about that new powerboat. My stock is going nuts right now, so you never know.