Maximum Pressure by Sheila Lowe

Chapter One

Friday afternoon, October 6

Everything had changed in Edentown, and nothing had changed. Twenty-five years ago, when Washington Boulevard was the main drag, the high school crowd hung out at the Fox theater on Saturday nights, then walked in a pack to Carl’s Jr. for burgers. There had been a shoe store, a drugstore, a barber shop and a hair salon, a couple of high-end dress boutiques. The no-tell hotel above Guido’s Café that rented rooms by the hour.

Those businesses were gone now, replaced by boxy modern high-rise office buildings, an ultra-modern museum, and a refurbished warehouse that housed upscale fast-food vendors, cheese shops, and a yoga studio. Enterprises that meant nothing to Claudia Rose in the context of her hometown. Making a right turn at Olive Avenue, she felt like Alice in Wonderland—as disoriented as if she had stumbled into an alternate reality.

As she made another right, more than a little uneasy that she might not recognize the old neighborhood, the breath she had held too long whooshed out like a popped balloon. Her shoulder muscles let go. She needn’t have worried. Aside from the odd paint job here and there, the residential streets were much the same as when she had graduated from Edentown High School in 1999.

She had driven the seventy miles from Playa de la Reina to work the registration desk at the opening event, a cocktail party in the school gym, with her best friend, Kelly Brennan. How many of her classmates would she be able to identify at the reunion, her first in all those years?

Despite running late due to the standard stop-and-go traffic that made the 405 famous, she refused to hurry. It was a long time since she had last visited Charter Street, and now that she was here, it felt weirdly like peeping in on someone else’s life.

There was the home her parents had bought when she was in junior high. It had been brand new, part of the creeping gentrification that devoured neighborhoods whole—Godzilla chomping its way to tracts of larger dwellings.

Claudia had loved that house, not least because she no longer had to share a bedroom with her younger brother. With its three-car garage and faux-French Country kitchen, the two-story rambler had seemed like a mansion after their old two-bedroom apartment. Now, her eyes were seeing it for what it was: an ordinary house on an ordinary street, looking smaller than the picture she’d held in her mind.

She stopped the car and sat there, calling up flashbacks of summer parties in the backyard. Hiding behind the bushes with her friends and getting high on weed; drinking beer filched from their parents’ coolers. What had happened to the families she had once known? Some of her classmates must have kids attending Edentown High.

Her first wedding reception had been held in that backyard. Within five years, the marriage had tanked. More years after that, her parents put the house on the market and moved to Seattle. Today, it would sell for close to a million.

Claudia loosed a long, nostalgic sigh. It felt as though she was sitting in the front row at a stage play that had ended long ago, the drama wrung out of it. The curtain had been raised; the scenery revealed as a plywood façade.

The sound of her phone startled the melancholy out of her. Kelly’s ringtone. She touched the answer button. “Yes, ma’am?”

“Where the blipity blam are you?”

“Keep your panties on. I’m five minutes away.”

“I need you here now, girlfriend. Here I am, womaning the desk all by my lonesome, and people are showing up early.”

Claudia knew better than to take the gripe seriously. Parties lit Kelly up brighter than fireworks on the Fourth of July. In the background she could hear the tuning-up sounds of a rock band. “Who’s there?”

“The committee members of course—the three Cathys—”

Three friends who shared a name, each with a different spelling. Cathi Soden, Cathy Brewer, Kathy McCarty. Kelly reeled off more names. “Sharon Bernstein, Espie Rodriguez, Ginny Vernon, Eleni Boukidis, Becky Condren. Lemme think … Mark Lukeman, Don Baker—”

Claudia broke into the litany. “Got it. I’ll see you in a few.”

“No detours.”

Too late.

“No detours.”

She ended the call and entered the school’s address into the GPS—something she had not needed to do twenty-five years ago. The mile-long walk straight up Charter Street had terminated at the rear entrance to the school’s swimming pool. Not anymore. The snippy electronic voice directed her to an underpass constructed years after she had left home.

Chapter two

Claudia entered the gym through the back door, at once hit by the disembodied voice of a young Christina Aguilera singing about a genie in a bottle. She paused there to take in the frenetic preparations for the reunion: A custodian on a ladder, hanging a “Class of 1999” banner. Caterers hurrying to offload chafing dishes of hors d’oeuvres onto a long buffet. Early arrivals milling around the portable bars, waiting for them to open. Volunteers decorating the round tables with baskets of chrysanthemums dyed in the blue and gold of the school’s colors.

Her eyes were drawn to the back wall, where “EDENTOWN HIGH SCHOOL” was freshly painted in six-foot-high letters. The bleachers that normally stood there had been folded away for the evening’s event, but Claudia had not forgotten the countless times she and her friends had stood on them cheering on their basketball team, the Pioneers, to a long string of winning games.

The registration desk was set up on the other side of the gym from where she had entered. Crossing the highly polished polyurethane floor, she could see Kelly laughing and bantering with a handful of classmates lined up to receive their name tags. Whether the reunion committee was ready or not, the party was getting started.

Claudia gave her friend a quick appraisal and dropped into the vacant chair beside her. “The dress rocks,” she said approvingly.

Kelly had dragged her along on a shopping trip, determined to dazzle the mean girls with her adult fashion sense, even if most of the mean girls had matured and forgotten her existence. She had found a sultry blue-grey A-line that brought out the cornflower blue of her eyes. Claudia’s pick was a one-shoulder black number that her husband, Joel, had judged as “extremely sexy.”

Her eyes were sparkling, her extra-white smile gleaming as Kelly pushed a box of name tags towards Claudia. “You look a-mayzing, you auburn-headed hussy.”

Cathi Soden, the reunion chair, had told them that almost half of the class was expected to attend one or more of the weekend events, which meant they had more than two hundred classmates to check in.

“What took you so long?” Kelly asked. “I thought you’d gotten lost.”

“As much as this town has changed, it would be no big mystery if I had.”

Now that there were two of them, several people at the back of Kelly’s line moved to stand in front of Claudia. She looked up at the first woman in line and got a vague sense of familiarity, but no name. The woman wore a pink chiffon dress that billowed on a slender frame, making it look a size too large. And something about the glossy chestnut brown pageboy hairstyle jarred with her pasty complexion, and hazel eyes that burned brightly.

The woman gave her a knowing smile, challenging her with a winding “wrap it up” motion with her index finger. “C’mon, Claudia, I sat behind you in AP English our entire senior year. We passed a bazillion notes to each other—”

Before she could control her face, Claudia’s brows shot up and she felt her eyes widen in surprise. How could this pale shadow be the pudgy, rosy-cheeked classmate of her memory? “Omigod, Andie Adams. I didn’t—I’m sorry, I—”

Andie’s expression relaxed into a good-natured grin. “It’s okay, I’m not the only one here who doesn’t look like they did in high school. Unlike you, I might add. You haven’t changed much.” She glanced around the gym. “Isn’t it weird, seeing all these ‘old’ people and knowing you’re one of them?”

Claudia, thumbing through the “A’s” for her name tag, felt compelled to protest. “Hey, forty-two is not old.”

Andie laughed. “Depends on your attitude, I guess.” She pointed to the box of names. “Could I get Nat’s, too? You remember my cousin, Natalie Parker?”

A clear image of two teenage girls popped into Claudia’s head—Andrea, sweet and shy—the ever-ready gopher to her bossy cousin, the bubbly captain of the cheer squad. “It would be hard to forget her,” she said “Are you two still ‘Nat’nAndie?’” The two had borne the nickname throughout their school years, as though one name covered both of them.

Andie shook her head. “I work for Nat, but these days we have separate identities.”

Wondering whether there was a silent “finally” behind the remark, Claudia handed the badges over with a warm smile. “It’s great to see you, Andie. Have fun.”

“Why don’t you come find us when you’re done here. I’ll save you a seat. We can catch up.”

“Thanks, I will.” The invitation pleased Claudia. After all these years, it felt good to reconnect with old friends.

As Andie started to walk away, Kelly chimed in, “Save a seat for me too.”

She turned back. “Of course! See you both later.”

Waiting until Andie was out of earshot, Kelly cupped a hand to Claudia’s ear and whispered, “When was the last time that girl got some sun? She’s as white as tofu.”

“Her hands were like ice. Maybe she’s been sick.”

“Yeah, sick of following Nat around like a slave, doing her bidding.”

“Let’s hope they’ve both outgrown that by now.”

Kelly gave a small snort of derision. “I doubt it. She just picked up Nat’s badge for her, didn’t she?”

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Excerpt from Maximum Pressure by Sheila Lowe. Copyright 2025 by Sheila Lowe. Reproduced with permission from Sheila Lowe. All rights reserved.