Chapter 1: The Reunion

My ten-year high school reunion was life changing. Reunions aren’t supposed to be that way and I almost ignored the invitation completely. I decided to go at the last moment, mostly as a way to avoid a boring night by myself. I expected the reunion to be a minor social event and a pleasant diversion, with time for a cocktail hour and dinner.

Many from my graduating class were there and we were all about twenty-eight years old. There were about two-hundred-fifty people in the ballroom at the town’s country club – alums and spouses or partners. The women were dressed to the nines, and the men were looking suave and studly, many in open neck shirts with blazers. A few of our old teachers were also in attendance and enjoying the mixed crowd. There was a vibrant buzz of conversation.

I guessed that about half of those attending were married already, and I heard more than a few of the women talking about their young children. Some of the single women had brought their boyfriends. Then there were a few single men and women. I was in that category – single guy, still kind of a nerd. My prospects of even having a girlfriend were slim to none, with none the favorite to win.

I had low expectations for the event. I wanted to see some old friends for the first time in a decade, but I was not on any hunt. I didn’t work that way. I didn’t know how to hunt anyway.

There were two cash bars in the room. I’d just gotten a beer at one, and had been nursing it, figuring who I was going to seek out next to talk to. We all had nametags with our graduation picture on it, as well as our name in large print. The spouses had ‘spouse’ nametags that tied them to their mate.

I had not been a jock, in the popular group, or even a very good nerd. I was in the middle of my class, a B+ student, and kept my head down so I didn’t stand out. I’d had a satisfying high school career in that I didn’t get bullied, had a few friends, but only a few of them were there that night and I’d already talked to them. The sit-down dinner was still about a half-hour away.

Just as there had been in high school, there were little cliques of people all over the large ballroom. The difference was that spouses, or equivalent, were hanging with or nearby their mate as the din of chatter filled the room.

The room started to hush, and people near me looked over towards the check-in desk to see what was causing the pause in conversations around the room.

I then saw what the problem was. Stella Manning had arrived – alone, of course.

Stella was conservatively dressed in a somewhat slinky but attractive cocktail dress with a hemline that broke at mid-thigh and shoes with only two-inch heels. She carried a sweater in case the air conditioning was too much, and a clutch purse. She had on a nice shade of lipstick, but not much other makeup. She was pretty but not garish or overly sexy as some might have expected.

Stella was a well-kempt blonde, about fife-foot-five. She was shapely and even filled out the upper part of her dress well, without being too dramatic or flashy about it. She was not promoting anything, just there to be friendly, I thought. She gave the room a slight smile, but was obviously worried about her acceptance.

What set Stella aside from everyone else in the room, and what had dozens in the room suddenly whispering to each other, was that my classmate Stella was a porn star. She was a well-recognized and apparently a well-paid commercial slut. I doubted there wasn’t a male in America that didn’t know her name, reputation, sexual skills, or that couldn’t identify her, including the small tattoo just above her cunt that said ‘Fuck me!’. Every male in the world had jacked off to her at least once, and some, like me, made a habit of it. Someone once speculated that she alone accounted for several percent of all Internet traffic. She was famous. She was infamous.

Everyone in the class seemed to know that we had a classmate that had entered the adult entertainment business right out of high school. Word traveled fast, and Internet links to her videos were shared by about everyone in the class. Unlike many young women, Stella had remained in the industry since she started, making her a force du jour in adult entertainment.

Stella’s videos and the attendant photographs from her many modeling gigs went viral. She was exceptionally popular in the adult industry. I’d heard she did some stripping at one of the clubs in the Vegas. There was speculation that she was a high-priced escort that even slept with one of the candidates for president, and then several foreign princes. Somebody else told me that she had a Sugar Daddy, and that she fucked his lights out four times a day.

The reports I got said that purportedly, Stella had filmed over a thousand videos that were available for sale all over the Internet. She had made millions and was set for life ten times over. She was the world’s biggest slut, but also rich as fuck.

Of course, I also heard that she was a super-slut in our high school, and had fucked just about every classmate and most of the faculty. I wasn’t sure where I’d been, but I missed all that. There were stories about her going into the locker room after football games and thanking the team for the winning day with her body.

I suspected that while there might be an element of truth to one or two of the stories, they weren’t all entirely accurate by the time I heard about them. I suspected that most of them were pure fiction. I was almost the last to know anything in our high school days and even less since then about any of my classmates. I was not part of the ‘in’ crowd, ever.

Moreover, my memory of Stella was that she was a lot like me back in high school. She kept her head down and tried to stay out of trouble, avoided being bullied, and worked on keeping her grades up so she had her options improved regarding college. She had a disadvantage because she had big tits, and without any other explanation, she got a reputation.

As I sipped my beer, I watched Stella migrate into the ballroom, struggling to get the lanyard with her nametag attached around her neck.

What got my attention was that no one went to greet her or say hello. Several classmates had been greeters, but they intentionally turned their backs on her and scurried away. Other people visibly moved away from her path, and also turned their backs on her. Shit! She was being openly shunned. I’d never seen such uncivil behavior.

Stella moved to one of the unoccupied large eight-person tables and set her sweater and purse at an empty open place setting. Another woman nearby, hurried to the table and removed her purse and drink from the table, taking them to another table in an obviously slight. Stella had watched the blatant act of avoidance with a neutral expression.

She looked so pretty as she looked around the room to see whether she recognized anybody that would be a friendly face. She must have come up blank. People avoided her gaze. I was far enough away that we didn’t make eye contact.

Instead, she watched the live quartet playing some jazzy bar classics in a corner of the room. A few people had even danced occasionally to the music.

I watched her. I bet myself that she was hopeful that somebody would come up and say hello, or maybe even just confront her and tell her she was the most horrible person in the world for what she’d done. Being ignored was the ultimate rejection. You didn’t exist. There wasn’t any passion at all – people only cared enough to turn away. You were taboo. People weren’t for you, but they weren’t angry enough to make slurs about you to your face. So, you just got intentionally ignored like a million other people on a city sidewalk that you walk past.

The noise level of conversation in the room gradually returned to what had been normal before Stella arrived. People’s glances around the room skipped over the blonde standing and swaying to the jazz beside one of the tables.

I felt sorry for her.

I thought she had guts to come to an event like our reunion after becoming such an infamous and publicly-known sex-driven woman. Only minutes into her foray into the ‘normal’ world, I suspected that she wished that she’d had more sense and stayed home.

I wondered where her home was. I suspected that she was tied to either L.A. or Las Vegas, since those were the two porn capitals of the country. If you were going to have acted in a thousand videos over ten years, you were probably in or near one of those cities.

I waited to see what would happen. Eventually, Stella gave up on having anybody greet her or even call her names and urge her to leave. Nothing happened. She pulled her cellphone from her purse, and started reading something on it. She looked resigned and slightly bored.

This event was supposed to be a happy event for everyone that attended, and it wasn’t looking good for Stella to end up feeling that way.

I took a deep breath and started walking in her direction. Thirty seconds later, I was next to her.

“Hi. I don’t know whether you remember me. I’m Rob Thomas.”

Stella looked up at me and smiled. “Yes, I remember you. You were a techy as I recall. You did the audio-visual stuff for classrooms and for the school productions.”

I shrugged, “Still am a nerd. Got a computer science degree at the university and work for a software company in town here. I’m sort of a pest control specialist; my job is to find and fix bugs so they disappear – software bugs and network problems.” That understated my job, but she might understand that much, if she cared.