My Sunshine Away Read Free Page B

who would publicly accept any challenge volleyed forth, trying desperately to impress girls the world knew had no interest in him.
    The football coaches at the Perkins School knew Bo Kern as the slow-witted boy who had ballooned into a formidable blocking back in the summer before his senior year. This was the only position he could play, fullback, or blocking back, as it requires zero agility. The sole purpose of this position is for the athlete to turn himself into a missile, a battering ram, and destroy whatever obstacle steps in hisway. His sacrifice makes room for the more skilled running back to show his stuff and light up the scoreboard. It is a position of little reward, fullback, yet Bo Kern had so distinguished himself in the first few games of his senior year that he drew the attention of scouts from Millsaps and Belhaven College, a pair of Division III rivals in Mississippi. This was big news. Banners that read
Bo Knows Blocking
and
Geaux Bo
were written by pep squads and taped up around the chain-link fencing of the football field for the game the scouts were attending. It was October and still warm.
    Before this game was finished, Bo Kern had committed two illegal procedure penalties, three personal fouls, and had been ejected for fighting with a player from our opponent, Dutchtown Catholic. Parents and fans alike looked over to explain to the well-dressed scouts that this was surely the product of nerves, some unfortunate anomaly, but they had seen enough. So, kids my age thought about Bo Kern whenever we flirted with failure. The notion was that if
he
could graduate, there was hope for us all, and he was a legend in this capacity. He was therefore a guy that many people pretended to know all about, as people do, if only to nod gravely at his name.
    As far as the neighborhood was concerned, when it came to Lindy’s rape, he was also a person of interest.
    The fact that physical abnormalities were so rare at the Perkins School, so rare in Woodland Hills, didn’t help. There were no disabled children that I remember. There were no wheelchairs or deformities. We were all middle- to upper-class white kids, all the products of our parents’ success, and when we played with one another at school we played in the mirror.
    In this environment, Bo Kern’s harelip rattled you.
    He was a stocky guy, impossibly so that senior year, and the jagged turn of his lip bared constantly the gums above his frontteeth. He rarely smiled, and even when he did you couldn’t be sure. So, I have to wonder about people like him, about children perhaps doomed from birth by circumstances beyond their control. What chance did he have among us? How early is the future defined?
    I can think of others like him as well, such as a boy named Chester McCready.
    Thin and pale and a classmate of mine, Chester did not shave the dark hairs that appeared on his upper lip in high school. He wore shirts with stains on them, sneakers that stank up the classroom, and had the look of some apprenticing con man, a boy who would rather be left alone in the dark. During our sophomore year, a girl named Missy Boyce claimed that Chester tried to feel her up at the concession stand during a football game that previous Friday. Desperate to be desired as well, other girls soon pretended the same, and the name Chester the Molester followed.
    When we originally asked him about this Missy incident, Chester told us, “Some guy pushed me into her. It’s not my fault Super Bitch was there.”
    He was emphatic about this and, I believe, honest.
    Regardless, many of us who knew him began to pretend that we didn’t, and he was known only as Chester the Molester throughout the rest of high school, a time that must seem to him like an excruciating string of years. Even at our ten-year reunion, his name was still on our tongues, as he had recently been accused of sexual harassment at a local sandwich shop where he worked. This didn’t strike me as irony, as it did some