IN PLAIN VIEW

I.

David Sheridan lived in the Home for Wayward Boys.

Well, that’s not what it was really called. County social services owned a large green patch in the center of my hometown, on the crest of a slight hill. In some ivy-accented brick buildings, they housed teenage boys from broken homes.

Around about my junior year of high school, the county decided to integrate these kids into the local school system.

By the time David Sheridan showed up, I was a regular habitue of the school detention center. Hell, my best friend and I lent it what came to be its long-term name: The Rubber Room.

I was what passed for a local suburban badass. I carried around a copy of Beyond Good and Evil, not so much because I was interested in Nietzsche, but because I knew it would be unsettling. The Rubber Room teacher, with the smell of wine stuck to his clothes, would plead gently with me to read Studs Terkel instead...

II.

Yesterday, my wife introduced me to someone who grew up in the same hometown. We did some quick calculations and concluded that our ages and years of residency did not sync up. I asked him where he had lived.

“Do you know the bowling alley?”

“Of course,” I said. I had bowled there a bunch of times, but had actually spent more time dropping quarters into their video games.

“I lived kind of across the street. Remember there used to be a vacant field right across the street? Man, I think they’ve built that up.”

“Yeah, they have— a bunch of houses.” I probably drove by there not more than six months ago.

“Me and my friends used to play in that field all the time,” he said. His young daughter spun around in her chair and knocked her knees on the table.

III.

One night, probably about three months after he came to our school, David Sheridan and his closest friend were together in that field across from the bowling alley.

That night, David Sheridan’s friend brought down upon his head a large cinder block.

And David Sheridan was dead.