The dark gray sky belched rain onto the floor-to-ceiling glass of Joe Harper's high-rise office. The noise was loud enough to be distracting, but Joe had long ago mastered the art of tuning out everything else in the world when he was working on a new project. This could be the one that put his name on a nice, oak-paneled office in the executive leadership wing, and he was determined to make sure this acquisition went off without a hitch.
His phone began to flash and ring on his desk. Joe glanced at it; irritation etched on his features.
"I told you no calls, Janet..." he grumbled under his breath as he picked up the phone.
"Mr. Harper. I have an urgent call for you," came the clipped, professional sounding voice of his secretary.
"I told you I didn't want to be disturbed."
"I'm sorry, Sir, but the gentleman was quite insistent and said you would be upset if this call didn't go through."
"Who is calling, Janet?"
"He said his name was Billy Walker?"
Joe sat up straighter in his chair.
"Billy..." he breathed quietly.
Billy Walker, it was a name he hadn't heard in over twenty years, one that brought back a flood of memories.
"I'll take the call."
His secretary dropped off the line, and there was a momentary delay before the new call was connected.
"Hello? Joe?"
"Billy?"
"Crazy Joe Harper! It's been a long time."
Joe winced at his old nickname, but hearing it again made a picture pop into his head. He could see them all as clear as day. Billy Walker, Frank Palmer, Tess Julewski, Bonnie North, and himself standing in a circle outside the locker pod, planning their next big escapade, laughing at the chaos their last one had caused. They had been the practical jokers of Harmon High School, and he had been the ring leader.
"It has been a long time," agreed Joe, "It's good to hear your voice again. Jesus, Billy, what's it been?"
"Twenty years, give or take. I guess none of us were very good at keeping in touch."
"Yeah...How have you been?"
"Keeping busy. I just opened a restaurant here in San Francisco last year that's doing pretty well. It offers kind of a fusion of Jamaican and South American foods."
"Sounds spicy."
"It can be, " chuckled Billy.
"You were a tough man to track down. Fortunately, my dad still talks to yours, and he clued me in on where to find you. So, big time investment guy now, huh? Leveraged buyouts, corporate take-overs? I would never have figured you for the suit and tie type."
"Figured I was going to join a rock band and spend my hours playing seedy clubs, right?"
"It would have fit your M.O. better than corner offices and power lunches. Who would have thought Crazy Joe Harper would ever grow up?"
"It happens to the best of us."
"Still, it's hard to reconcile it with the guy who hot-wired the vice-principals car and parked it in the middle of the football field before homecoming, or the guy who bought a weather balloon, filled it with cheap perfume and blew it up in the coaches office so that it blocked the door."
"I had forgotten about all that. Man, when they popped that thing, it made the whole place smell like a French whore house for weeks."
"You never did tell me how you even got in his office?"
"Lifted the keys from the head janitor. I used my dad's air pump to inflate it. Damn thing nearly filled that shitty little office."
"So, I'm guessing you don't drop M80's in the toilets these days."
"No. I'm a nice, respectable businessman now."
"We missed you at the twenty-year reunion. Heck, we missed you at the ten-year."
"I meant to go. I think I even sent an R.S.V.P. for the twenty, but things got busy here..."
"Tess would never have believed you missed either one for business meetings. She figured you were passed out at an Iron Maiden concert or on the run from drug dealers."
Joe had a fleeting image of Tess Julewski appear in his mind's eye. A saucy red-head, with sweet legs who was fond of leather boots and short skirts. Tess had something of a reputation as an easy girl that was not undeserved.
"You still talk to Tess?"
"On occasion. Get this, she married an architect and has three kids. Can you believe it?"
"That's hard to imagine. Tess was such a party girl I could never picture her settled down with anyone."
"As you say, 'It happens to the best of us.'"
"What about Frank? You still hear anything from him?"
"Frank got forced into the Navy by his parents after he flunked out of like three colleges. It worked out o.k. for him. He learned all kinds of technical stuff in the service and turned it into a job as a Cyber-Security consultant. He works in Dallas and is married himself. I don't think he ever had kids, though."
"Wow! I can't even picture Frank doing anything complicated like computers. This was a guy that wore slip-on tennis shoes when we were freshmen because he still hadn't mastered how to tie his shoelaces."
"Don't I know it. I was the one who tied his shoes for him all through middle school."
"I suppose that just leaves, Bonnie," said Joe, not able to hide a tremor in his voice as he said that name.
Bonnie North had been his on and off girlfriend through all four years of high school. He had lost track of how many times they had broken up and gotten back together again by graduation. A petite blond with a little rocket body and blue eyes the color of an August sky, she had been the one thing he truly missed when he had fled his home town. They had tried to get serious for a while after high school, but Joe wasn't ready to settle down, and Bonnie was growing tired of his immature attitude. She had kicked him to the curb, throwing him out of the crappy little one-bedroom apartment they were sharing at the time. He had hit the road and not looked back but never stopped thinking about her. Eventually, Joe came to realize the party couldn't last forever, and he had gone back to college and applied himself. It took a few tries, but he had gotten his degree and started his slow crawl up the corporate ladder, shedding his shoulder-length dark-brown hair and most of his sense of humor along the way.
Through the years, Joe had been in and out of several relationships, almost marrying once back when he was in his early thirties. Somehow with every girl he met, he ended up comparing how he felt with them to how he had felt with Bonnie, and it always came up short. He had picked up the phone a few times, thought about tracking her down, but held back for fear of what he would find on the other end of that call.
What if she didn't feel that way about him anymore?
