Chapter 1: Out of the Blue

Ryan Wellspring had been feeling the adrenaline since the day he got the call two weeks ago in his office at Grace Evangelical Free Church in Laguna Niguel, CA. It was from his best high school friend Anthony Tate, who called him ‘out of the blue’ to see if he was going to attend their 20-year High School reunion. Anthony, the quarterback, and Ryan, the wide receiver, were the winning combination on the 1987 CIF Championship football team at Capistrano Valley HS. It was a 42-yard pass from Anthony to Ryan in the final seconds of the final game of their high school careers that sealed the first [and only] title the school had ever seen. From the time they met each other at football camp when they were 14-year old soon-to-be-freshmen until the day they graduated, the two of them were virtually inseparable. But things change, and even best-of-friends take different paths in life, and each path is hectic and everything else is just out-of-sight-out-of-mind. And, then, before you know it, two decades pass by with barely a notice.

Indeed, Anthony’s call was ‘out of the blue.’ They hadn’t spoken since the summer before their senior years in college, when Anthony’s parents were still living in Orange County. That fall, his parents moved up north to Granite Bay, an upper-class suburb of Sacramento because of his father’s job promotion. The next summer, Ryan graduated from Azusa Pacific University and got married to Kimberly…after she got pregnant. They had been dating for 3 years and were planning on getting married soon after graduation, but news of ‘the surprise’ [just 6 weeks before they walked] sparked a shot-gun marriage proposal and a brief engagement period—after all, what bride wants to be showing on her wedding day? Ryan, of course, tried everything to get a hold of Anthony, who, lo and behold, had graduated from Notre Dame a semester early because of the three years of mandatory summer school for all members of the nationally ranked football team. Ryan wanted to ask him to be his best man, but Anthony’s phone number had changed and all this was happening in a bygone era: before cell phones and Facebook and email. It turns out that Anthony got one of those corporate jobs at Sprint in Kansas City and was already working 60 hours a week and making six figures. One thing led to the next and two whole decades had passed and now they were meeting at Santora’s Hot Wings, the place they used to hang with all the boys every Tuesday night for 25-cent wings.

Ryan was shocked that Anthony was even considering going to the reunion. He wasn’t at the 10-year and, of course, he was one of the main topics of everyone’s conversation. Most of their friends seemed far more interested in the mystery of Anthony’s absence than the presence of Ryan with his beautiful wife.

‘Did Anthony fall off the face of the earth?’
‘Did he turn into a Guinness swigging leprechaun at Notre Dame?’
‘Is he embarrassed because he never played a second for the Fightin’ Irish?’
‘Is he gay?’

The class of ’88 had all kinds of theories as to the whereabouts of Ryan’s former sidekick and he felt a lot of shame, and probably a touch of bitterness, over the fact that he had no idea where Anthony was living or what he was doing. That shame and bitterness seemed to evaporate the moment Anthony called to see if Ryan was interested in going to dinner at their old stomping grounds the night before the reunion, just the two of them, to catch up after all these years.