I finished up my breakfast and found, after some searching, my backpack which contained all of my schoolbooks and papers. If my fifteen-year- old self was true to form, I knew my homework wouldn't be done and my assignments wouldn't be read. That was something I would have to rectify, I figured. One of the things I regretted later in life were my poor high school grades and study habits, which precluded me from getting into a top-rated college. How hard could the work possibly be now?
A knock on the door signaled the arrival of Mike Meachen, my best friend back in high school. Mike was a year older than I and had always been the dominant member of our friendship. From Mike I learned how to smoke marijuana, how to drink beer, how to smoke cigarettes, how to cut school. Mike would drop out in the eleventh grade and work a few menial jobs for a few years before taking his GED and joining the Air Force where he was eventually dishonorably discharged for marijuana use. I hadn't talked to him in years but the last I'd heard he was still living with his parents. Could I steer Mike onto a different path? I wondered as I went to the door and bade my family farewell.
Though I was expecting it, it was still startling to see him as a sixteen-year-old again.
"Sup?" He muttered to me, his version of 'what's up?'.
"Not much." I told him, careful to give no hint of the startling change in me just yet. I closed the door behind me and we started the two-mile walk to our high school.
I was surprised at the immaturity of his conversation as we trodded to school. It centered on his phony sexual exploits with girls I'd never met, which girls at our school he'd like to fuck, and other adolescent posturing. I had to remind myself that my conversation back then had been pretty much the same and that I now had seventeen years of maturity over him. I nodded and responded to his statements with appropriateness. He noticed no change in me. I'd always been quiet anyway.
As we got close to the school feelings of unreality washed over me again. I was seeing people that I hadn't seen in years. But I was seeing them as they were then, not as my mind was telling me they should look now (I had to keep reminding myself that NOW was THEN). They were in ones, two, and even groups of six or more, heading for school. Boys and girls both. I saw Steve Johan, who would join the Army after graduation and be killed in a helicopter crash. I saw Nina Blackmore, a skinny, nerdish, friendless girl who would go to medical school and work as an emergency room doctor at Spokane's trauma center. She would also acquire good looks early in college as her body filled out and marry a rich neurosurgeon. I saw Carrie Founder, one of the best looking girls in the school giggling with some of the other elite. Carrie I knew, would marry a loser and pump out four kids before divorcing. During that period she would put on nearly a hundred pounds. Eventually, she would end up living in a trailer park with some other white-trash loser. As I paramedic I would one day pick her up for overdosing on anti-depressant medicines and pretend I didn't know her. I saw lots of others that I hadn't thought of in years and others who's faces I recognized but who's names I could not come up with.
I would be lying if I said that my attention was not distracted by the girls. Like many men there was a special place in the part of my mind that controlled lust that was obsessed with the idea of bagging a teenager. It was no doubt because they were forbidden. It was something I'd never done or attempted to do before, knowing that the risks were not worth the benefits. But things were different now, weren't they? A horny part of my mind asked me. I was a teenager now! I could do it legally!
I had been shy back in high school, a phase I'd gotten over later in life. But as a result of this shyness, I did not manage to get myself laid for the first time until I was a senior in high school (and to be honest, it was late in the year at that). But I wasn't shy now, was I? My eyes began tracking through the crowds, taking in the lean forms of the fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen year old girls, their tight asses, their firm breasts. I began to imagine the possibilities and my fifteen-year-old dick began to stir in my 501s. Although I intended to do as much good with the gift I had been given; there were so many things I could change or prevent now that I had pre-knowledge of it; it certainly wouldn't hurt to have a little fun; would it? Of course not.
My musings were interrupted by Mike.
As we came to the front of the school he jerked my arm, pulling me backward. "We'd better go around the other side." He said, alarmed. "Richard Fuckface and his asshole friends are standing over there."
I looked where he was indicating and saw a real blast from the past. Richard Fairview was one of many bullies at our high school. He was about six feet tall and about as dumb as a person could get while still remembering to draw breath every couple of seconds. He'd been one of the terrors of our school, his scam, when he wasn't beating people's ass for the fun of it, to post himself at an entry point and rip off lunch money from arriving kids that were dumb enough to approach him. As always he had five or six companions lounging there with him. They were all smoking cigarettes and eyeing the approaching throngs, looking for targets. I'd had my ass beaten by him a time or two. Had that happened yet? I wondered, unable to place just when those occurrences had taken place.
A smile formed on my face. In the ensuing seventeen years I'd learned a lot both about psychology and physical combat. Bullies, I knew, relied mostly on the complacency of their victims. They relied on their size and intimidation to get what they wanted. Very few of them actually knew how to fight. I, however, had worked for years at a job where physical assault by one's patients or one's patient's family members was an almost daily happening. Though somewhat of a wimp in high school, life had taught me a thing or two about hand to hand fighting. The most important thing I'd learned was that, while getting hit by a fist was painful, it wasn't THAT painful.
"C'mon." I told Mike, smiling still, heading directly towards Richard and his co-horts.
"Are you high?" Mike asked me. "He's got his friends there. I could kick his ass any day one on one but his friends will jump in."
"No they won't." I told Mike confidently. "Just watch. Stand back and don't do anything. His friends won't get in on anything."
"Bill?" He said, alarmed, but I strode purposefully forward. Reluctantly, he followed. I had to give him credit. He was loyal, willing to back me up in the face of these six guys.
"Trust me." I assured him. "Richard's about to fall from grace, big time."
As we approached the gang of bullies Richard himself eyed us and stepped forward, blocking our paths. To our right were the chain- linked bike racks. To our left was the school's perimeter fence. It was Richard's kind of tactical situation all right, blocking his victim in.
"Hey Billy-fag." He hailed, his gray, stupid eyes boring into me. "You got change for a dollar?"
I stared back at him, barely able to suppress a smile. "Yeah." I told him, my voice full of mocking contempt. "But you ain't getting' it."
He looked at me in shock, almost stepping backwards at my boldness. I think that he would have backed down right there except for the fact that a group of junior and senior girls were happening by at that particular moment and, hearing my words, stopped to see what would transpire.