All characters in sexual situations in all chapters of this story are 18 years old or older.
*
I'd escaped high school ten years earlier, and was living in Manhattan, doing the acting thing; a few showcases here and there, a Broadway production of "Godspell", and living well off some commercial residuals. Then, suddenly, the show closed, the friggin' commercial went off the air, my agent started using word like "unmarketable" to describe me, and my roommate decided to move to back to Rhode Island to sell lobsters with his Dad, and I had to goddamn pay the whole rent for six months. I was broke, feeling like a fuck-up, and needed a job, so when my little sister told me that my old high school was looking for someone to stage their Fall musical production of "Godspell", and that they'd actually pay me $1000, I dumped my crummy apartment, jumped onto a Greyhound to Connecticut, and went back to my teen alma mater.
I walked through the puke-green cinderblock hallways of the school to the theatre's enormous backstage loading doors, pushed them open with a woosh of air, and took in that wonderfully familiar sawdust and glue smell that rose from the stacked sets and flats and twisted lumber in the wings. I loved that smell, and the odor brought back a flood of memories. I suddenly recalled that senior year I had written my name behind the lumber rack. I took a peek and there is was, my scribble: "Mark Venetti". Also there, stuck on a nail, way back in the corner, was a photo of me from that same year. I remembered that I had placed it there, wondering how long it would be before someone found it. I guess no one ever did. I felt like I was opening a time capsule. That photo was an artifact, proof of my youth and my tutelage in this high school. God I looked young and cocky. I put the photo in my pocket, but thought "What the hell?" and tacked it back up on the wall. "Let's see how long it lasts."
I walked out on stage where a hundred pimply kids were waiting to audition. They looked so small. Tiny, even. I wondered if I should have worn a tie or something, 'cause suddenly I felt way old.
I made my way to the back of the house where it was nice and dark, took a chair behind a production table, and began the audition.
As I listened to each kid sing my mind kept drifting to my own time in high school. I'd spent four years pretty much running around with a perpetual hard-on, and I couldn't help think about all the girls I knew back then, and what a dopey, sexy bunch they were, all giggles and boobs. I was thinking of a particular junior girl who was my "first", when a young girl came out for her audition. I immediately perked up because she was seriously cute, a tiny thing in jeans and T-shirt and with an angel face. "What's your name?" I asked from the back.
"Patti Cielo." she said, not too loudly.