The Cruel Kids

This is a very short one. Part of the reason it's taken me so long to get this one up is because I felt like it needed to be longer. So time and time again I would come back and mull over it, wondering where I could add length to it.

My problem was that even at this brief length, it was communicating everything I set out to communicate.

It was then that I decided that brevity in and of itself could be a virtue.

(On a sidenote, I'd like to ask that if you enjoy these stories, do me a favor and try to tell someone else about them, too...)

Anyhow, Enjoy:

I imagine it’s never an easy thing to hear that someone you knew a long time ago killed and raped a little girl. You think back and you wonder if there was anything you could have done to change what had happened. The most frightening thing about Jack Thompson is that I really feel like we could have.

We grew up in the same neighborhood, fifteen years ago. He was younger than the group I would hang out with, but his older brother was part of that group and he was always hanging around.

Back then, he wasn’t wanted at all, we never wanted him around at all. He would ride around the neighborhood, following us and whatever we were doing on a girls bike in bare feet that were constantly as dirty as his face. He was a weird kid and didn’t have many friends and naturally he would gravitate toward the crowd his older brother congregated with.

But we were all brand new teenagers, kids really, and kids can be cruel.
The time that haunts me the most was on a bright summer day. The trees in the neighborhood did their best to shade the sidewalks and the streets, but the heat was so overpowering that you fried like an egg anywhere you stood, shaded or otherwise. We traveled in a pack, roaming the neighborhood without a specific goal or destination in mind. Some days, we’d play games encompassing an entire block, other days we’d simply move about like a group of wolves sniffing out something to do.

On this particular occasion, we were on the hunt. We had no leader, it truly was a pack mentality, and for some reason, perhaps it was the heat, we were all supremely annoyed each time Jack would ride by on his bike, staring at us coldly.

Things began to race downhill when his brother, Jared, began to shout, “Quit following us!”

Without a word, Jack kept pedaling by.

The next time Jack circled the block, Jared shouted again, louder this time, “Will you go away?!”

And once more, silently staring, Jack pedaled by the five or six of us that were there.

“Why can’t he bug his own friends?” Jared asked us.

I had no answer, but I vividly recall falling prey to the mob, “Yeah. Why can’t he?”

Another voice from the pack chimed in, “Stupid brat. Why can’t he leave us alone?”

As Jack rounded the corner to buzz by us a third time his brother once again picked up a rock at let fly. Without thinking, so did the rest of us. Of the group, only two of us actually made contact. Like a firing squad, none of us knew who fired the blanks and who fired the kill shots, but the effect was still the same. We knocked Jack down from off his bike, he spilled onto the pavement, scraping his hands, legs, and what little of his pride there was left.

Watching him go down like that, I would have hoped that my sense of empathy would have kicked in. Were it to have happened to the me of today, I’d certainly be able to feel the hot tears flowing down his dirt-caked cheeks, the sting of the pavement, the deep rejected hurt of his peers. But on that day, all I could do was laugh. All we could all do was laugh.

And laugh and laugh and laugh.

God damn it, kids could be cruel.

After three suppressed sobs, Jack picked himself back up from the pavement, turned his girls bike back on the road and pedaled to the sound of the continued haranguing of his older brother, “Go home and cry, you little bastard!”

This kind of scenario wasn’t an isolated incident. This was just one instance that our group seemed to make a concerted effort to make this poor kid feel unloved and unwanted.

As a kid, I didn’t realize that this sort of behavior could have lasting negative effects beyond the potential for getting into trouble with my own parents. And even now, I can’t point to this incident and say, “This is the reason Jack Thompson killed and raped that poor little girl.”

But I have to say it weighs heavily on my mind.