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CLEMMONS -- One morning in May, I showed up unannounced at my old school, West Forsyth High, for the first time since 1975.

Resurfacing like a truant who skipped out before lunch period and had second thoughts 35 years later, I found no one calling the roll.

The student lot where I had made many an escape was full, but the classrooms and breezeways were empty.

“They’re all in the awards ceremony. In the new gym,” said the office secretary who, for the first time I could recall, did not check my hall pass. “You’ll have to talk to the principal.”

Past a bulletin board that said, “13 DAYS TO GRADUATION!” I tracked the sound of applause to its source and hit a wave of heat. It was the kind of heat that only one thing generates: 2,000 teenagers who have been cooped up and standardized-tested five ways from Sunday to get to ... well, almost to ... graduation.

I took my chronological place in the bleachers with parents fanning themselves through the doldrums of a three-hour awards ceremony, and I felt a reverse sense of deja vu.

Down below, my people in the folding chairs were fidgeting, just as I had, willing those fire-safe doors at the EXIT signs to swing wide.

But I wasn’t in their shoes anymore. I knew what was beyond my last bolt from the parking lot and my saunter across the coliseum stage, not bothering to order a class ring or muster more than a grin in my senior class photo.

What I didn’t know, feeling like Rip Van Winkle, thinking I was a stranger in the halls of my own alma mater, was that one teacher remained here after 35 years. Seeing him again would bring me to the most terrifying realization of all.

West Forsyth, “Home of the Titans,” hadn’t been that bad.

“Mr. Coghill!” the girls in the media center teased. “You were hot!”

Gathered in the library to give out the stylish 2009-10 yearbooks, they were instead laughing over a garish, canary-yellow copy of the 1975 “Cronus” I had plucked from the metazoan section of the reference shelf. In it was a black-and-white photo of a young teacher named Jim Coghill.

Now 66, he still lives one street over and has worked at West Forsyth since 1973. First, it was full-time in journalism and athletics, then part-time, now  “sometimes” as a trainer and substitute.

The school has doubled in size in those years, outgrowing its inferiority complex toward its “Society Hill” rival, R.J. Reynolds High School in Winston-Salem.

Mostly outgrown it, anyway.

“Reynolds is like a T-bone steak,” former Reynolds Principal Stan Elrod once told Mr. Coghill, “and West is like a hamburger steak.”

To which the teacher replied: “Yes, but West is best.”

T-bone, hamburger, whichever. In the 1970s, when West was but a two-year, 11th- and 12th-grade school, it was more like a Slim Jim. West was a school where you said, “Hello, my name is ...” one year, and the next, an abrupt, “Adios.”

Senior year, my getaway car was a tan Karmann Ghia that smelled like dusty horsehair and gas. It had a mysterious tic called “vapor lock,” which my parents viewed as a convenient ruse for staying out late.

But cross my heart: The engine would get too hot, excess vapors would collect, and the VW wouldn’t start, no matter how badly I wanted it to.

The main remedy was to sit in the tall grass along I-40 and wait, contemplating the traffic streaming east and west, to points beyond tennis practice, beyond my french fryer job at the Stratford Road Burger King, beyond that hyphenated cancer-stick of a city, Winston-Salem. At this rate, even Greensboro would do.

“In here,” I heard Mr. Coghill say, summoning me back to reality, and my Zac Efron-esque “17 Again” nostalgia tour.

“We turned it into a band room, but this was the old auditorium. It was so small it only seated a couple of hundred people. Do you remember?”

I did. But for the moment, my eyes had to adjust to the architectural challenge of it. Across the hall from the unlit “old” gym, still recognizable with weights and parallel bars gathering cobwebs, I was standing in the spot where, for me, all the laurels of high school sprang.

On cue, I felt a shiver, detected an echo of one-act plays, madcap follies, moonlit Tennessee Williams soliloquies.

But here in broad daylight, as Mr. Coghill fumbled for his master key, it looked wrong.  Theater seats were gone, curtains were gone, and apart from the angle of the floor, there was no trace of where our stage had been.

“Most people,” he observed, “don’t even know it was there.”

Creepy. My house of dreams was entombed like a sarcophagus. I thought of the macabre Edgar Allan Poe story “The Cask of Amontillado,” that our 5-foot-2, Peregrine-gazed drama coach, Carol Petrea, used to read us.

The narrator lures a drunken Fortunato into the catacombs with a rare sherry, then chains him up and covers the opening with stones and mortar.

“In pace requiescat!” Mrs. P. would conclude, burning with Lady Macbeth intensity. “May he rest in peace!”

Her high-def apparition still hovering in the air, we strolled past the chorus room. I remembered another English teacher, Mr. Anderson, at the piano singing, “On the boardwalks of Atlantic City/We will walk in a dream. ...”

Another, Mr. Darden, taught us how to read poems and how to write them in our spare time. Our spare time. Does anyone, other than poets, do that after turning 18?

An uncomfortable idea dawned on me as Mr. Coghill led me past the bulletin board, about to be updated with Monday’s graduation countdown.

Behind that plastered-over wall in that dump of an auditorium that belonged to the “Home of Grits” — as we nicknamed West — was an essential piece of myself.

High school is where our reach first exceeds our grasp — with apologies to Robert Browning — or what is playing hooky for? The inescapable irony: The better the teachers, the more desperately we longed to flee for good.

“Kids are in such a hurry to get to graduation,” said Mr. Coghill, who had started fourth period that morning giving first aid to a student who went AWOL over a chain-link fence, then needed stitches.

“I’ve seen so many of them come back the next year to games and say, 'Oh, my God, I wish I was back in high school.’ Sometimes, the greatest days of their lives are behind them, and they don’t even realize it.”

And I knew what he meant after sitting in the bleachers, looking back through a 35-year wormhole. 

He didn’t mean that it would all be downhill from here. It wasn’t for the class of ’75.

We went to college (not 90 percent of us like the class of 2010, but you take my point). We played for other teams, wrote stories for real newspapers and not just screeds for The Zephyr. We built buildings, danced on Broadway and in capitals around the world.

No, what Mr. Coghill meant was the thing none of us knew in our last moment together, sweating in caps and gowns in Memorial Coliseum, immobilized by a collective case of vapor lock.

It’s possible I had a flutter in the pit of my stomach, a Category One regret that had not fully formed.

But now I am an authority on the subject, and I can explain it to the people in the folding chairs. Let’s just say I’ve been on both sides, like Fortunato behind the wall.

What Mr. Coghill meant was, there is never so perfect a day as graduation day.

The reason is clear.

We don’t get to be 17 again.

Contact Lorraine Ahearn at 373-7334 or lorraine.ahearn@news-record.com