Allie and I roll into the postcard-perfect village of Loch Bhreagh, which is all decked out for the annual Celtic festival. More tartan and fiddles than you can shake a stick at. Throngs of tourists in search of an authentic Cape Breton experience. I should charge these visitors money to take them on a little tour out behind the rink and get them drunk, stoned, beat up, or pregnant. That’s why I couldn’t put my marketing skills to use here. If I had, you’d be seeing brochures that said “Cape Breton: Give Us Your Money and Git Out Before We Puck Ya in the Teeth.” Or as they say in the fake Gaelic, “Ciad Mille Fáilche Áielfs: One Hundred Thousand Fuck Offs.”

Over where the high school wing used to be there’s now just a pile of rubble. They tore it down the day before yesterday. The elementary and junior high sections and the common gymnasium are still there, but the asbestos-ridden building where we spent our formative years is no more. The industrial arts workshop where Char gave impromptu table-dancing lessons is gone. The AV room where Allie gave a highly acclaimed and delightfully ironic performance of a Peer Education play called Hugs Not Drugs after eating a handful of magic mushrooms at lunch hour is gone. The janitor’s closet where Willy Gimp found me hiding on Valentine’s Day, crying over Weasel Tobin when I should have been in biology class, and where he held me and let me blubber all over his good shoulder, and where we had our first sober kiss, is gone.

Seeing the heap of waste and destruction that now sprawls across the space where the bricks and mortar of my memories once stood is a shock to my delicate system. A rush of grief gallops through my body, grips my throat, and starts to squeeze out tears. I chide myself before any can fall. I clear my throat, shoving away the choked-up sentimentality.

“What kind of asshole plans a high school reunion for Thanksgiving weekend?” I mutter.

The same kind of asshole who makes the reunion’s theme “A Cape Breton Kitchen Ceilidh.” An asshole named Becky Chickenshit, who is technically an arsehole, not an asshole. Anybody can be an asshole at any given time. But when you’re an arsehole, you’re an arsehole for life. It’s part of who you are. Becky Chickenshit comes from a long line of arseholes. As Mama says, “If it’s in the cats, it’s in the kittens.”

In the old gym, the fiddle music is a-blaring and there is tartan everywhere. Not even the Cape Breton tartan, but the garish blue Nova Scotia one, because Becky Chickenshit is a paper pusher for the provincial government. The banner on the back wall says “Ciad Mille Failte to the Class of ’95 Cape Breton Kitchen Ceilidh.” Every table has a lobster trap centrepiece stuffed with sprigs of fall leaves.

There is no lobster on the buffet table. Which is fine by me because as far as I am concerned, all seafood is revolting. Especially lobster. It eats garbage, for Christ’s sake. There is, however, a mountain of cold cuts and rubbery cheese. Pasty white rolls with no name margarine. Coleslaw and potato salads straight out of the Presbyterian Ladies’ Auxiliary cookbook. Pickled eggs on a bed of iceberg lettuce. Jell-O salads. Three of them: a yellow one with marshmallows and canned peaches, a red one with maraschino cherries, and a green one with black olives, ham chunks, and macaroni noodles. Allie averts her eyes and stifles a gag.