Life doesn't end with a bell ringing.
That's the first thing you learn once you leave high school. There is no closing song. No teacher steps forward and says, Congratulations, you have completed youth. You just walk out one day... And somehow, you never really walk back in.
But when I look back, I can still see it.
That last summer. The river bending dark under the willows. The Bean rattling like a myth held together by rust. Jimmy yelling my nickname like it could stop time. Dougie laughing at death like it was a joke he could outsmart. And Teppie Stewart... Sitting on a rock with one headphone pressed to her ear, listening like music was a doorway.
The summer felt endless when we were inside it. Now it feels like a cassette song: three minutes. A fade-out. Gone before you understand what you just heard.
I graduated in the spring of 1984.
Stockton stayed Stockton. The river kept moving.
Jimmy played football senior year like his life depended on it. Maybe it did.
Dougie healed completely, though he still has a scar on his arm the size of a silver dollar. He calls it his lawn dart tattoo. It's a popular attraction during the town's Spring Fling and Harvest celebrations. And I swear the legend of Dougie the Amazing Jart Catcher grows bigger every year.
Rick left first. Community college down south, then somewhere else. He became the kind of man who always has his hands on the wheel — steady, quiet. The pilot.
Dougie took longer. He stayed close. Married young. Had kids early. He became the dad who cannonballs into pools on purpose, just to make his children laugh. Some people never lose the brave part.
Jimmy surprised me. He didn't stay trapped in Stockton. He didn't become the ghost he feared. He joined the service after graduation. Traveled places we used to only hear about on the radio. He wrote letters at first. Then fewer. Then none.
That's how life is sometimes. Not dramatic. Just distance.
But every few years, out of nowhere, I'll get a call. And the first thing I'll hear is: "Baloney."
And for a second, I'm seventeen again.
Me? I did what I always did. I followed the music.
I left Stockton. Not right away. Not in some dramatic escape. But slowly, deliberately, like someone walking toward a horizon they finally admitted was real.
I played. I toured. I built a life out of sound. I fell in love. I became a husband. A father.
And one day, I heard myself doing it — using songs as teachable moments, pointing out lyrics to my daughter, trying to protect her from the parts of love that sound romantic but aren't.
Time is funny that way. It loops. Like tape.
And Teppie?
People always ask about Teppie. Not directly. But in that way people do when they hear a story and want the missing chapter.
The truth is... I never saw her again. Not in person. Not on a riverbank. Not under willow trees.
She didn't come back for graduation. She didn't appear in town like a plot twist. She left the way she said she would. Tomorrow.
I heard once, years later, that she made it to San Francisco. That she lived with an aunt. That she went to art school. That she became real, fully, somewhere far from the porch where storms sat drinking beer.
I don't know what's true. I don't know what's rumor. But sometimes that feels fitting. Teppie was never meant to be a permanent character. She was a door.
She was the first person who looked at me and said: Don't let Stockton make you small.
And she was right.
I still have the tape.
It sits in a box somewhere, wrapped in the soft dust of memory. SIDE A: LEAVING SONGS.
I've never listened to it again. Because some things don't belong to replay. They belong to the moment they changed you.
That summer changed me. Not because it was perfect. Because it wasn't. Because it cracked. Because it ended. Because it taught me that childhood isn't something you lose all at once... It's something you slowly hand back, piece by piece, until one day you realize you're carrying it only as a story.
A nickname. A smell of bacon. A radio countdown. A girl on a rock. A group of boys in a van, believing they owned forever.
Saturday mornings aren't the same anymore.
The floorboards don't creak with my mother's footsteps outside my door. She passed in 2018. I think about her and those buzz-a-bees every day.
Bugs Bunny doesn't sing opera in the living room anymore. He's been replaced by a talking sponge who lives under the sea and some young lady named Dora, who they can't ever seem to find.
The Walkman is gone. Casey Kasem is gone. The Bean is definitely gone.
But sometimes, if I listen closely I can still hear it. A distant voice across a football field. A prank that became a name. An entire playground shouting something ridiculous into the California sun:
"Baloney!"
And I smile.
Because now I finally understand what Kendrick meant all those years ago. Nicknames aren't insults. They're proof. Proof that once, for a moment — a brief golden moment... You belonged.