He adjusted his cap. “Yes.”
“More than once?”
“A number of times,” he admitted. “For a while there, I was pretty much on a first-name basis with any number of cops in Raleigh and Wilmington.”
“Were you ever convicted?”
“A few times,” he said.
“And you went to prison?”
“No. I probably spent a total of a year in county lockup. Not all at once, more like a month here, two months there. I never made it as far as prison. I would have – the last fight was pretty bad – but I caught a serious break and here I am.”
She lowered her chin slightly, no doubt questioning her decision to walk with him.
“When you say you caught a serious break…”
He took a few steps before answering. “I’ve been on probation for the last three years, with two more to go. It’s part of the five-year deal I received. Basically, if I don’t get into any more trouble for the next two years, they’ll clear my record entirely. Which means I’ll be able to teach in the classroom, and that’s important to me. People don’t want felons teaching their children. On the other hand, if I mess up, the deal goes out the window and I go straight to prison.”
“How is that possible? To completely clear your record?”
“I was diagnosed with an anger disorder and PTSD, which affected my mens rea. You know what that is, right?”
“In other words, you’re saying you couldn’t help it,” she said.
He shrugged. “Not me. That’s what my psychiatrists said, and fortunately, I had the records to prove it. I’d been in therapy for almost fifteen years, I’ve been on medication periodically, and as part of my deal, I had to spend a few months at a psychiatric hospital in Arizona that specialized in anger disorders.”
“And… when you got back to Raleigh, your parents kicked you out of the house?”
“Yes,” he said. “But all that together – the fight and potential prison sentence, the deal, my time at the hospital, and suddenly being forced to be on my own – led me to do some serious soul searching, and I realized that I was tired of the life I’d been living. I was tired of being me. I didn’t want to be the guy who was known for stomping on someone’s head after they were already on the ground, I wanted to be known as… a friend, a guy you could count on. Or at the very least, a guy with some kind of future ahead of him. So I stopped partying and I channeled all my energy into training and going to school and working instead.”
“Just like that?”
“It wasn’t quite as easy as it sounds, but yeah… just like that.”
“People don’t usually change.”
“I didn’t have a choice.”
“Still…”
“Don’t get the wrong idea. I’m not trying to make excuses for what I did. Regardless of what the doctors said about whether or not I could actually control my behavior, I knew I was messed up, and I didn’t give a damn about getting better. Instead, I smoked pot and drank and trashed my parents’ house and wrecked cars and I got arrested over and over for fighting. For a long time, I just didn’t care about anything other than partying the way I wanted to.”
“And now you care?”
“I care a lot. And I don’t have any intention of going back to my old life.”
He felt her eyes on him, and sensed her trying to reconcile the past he’d described with the man before her. “I can understand the anger disorder, but PTSD?”
“Yes.”
“What happened?”
“Do you really want to hear this? It’s kind of a long story.” When she nodded, he went on. “Like I told you, I was a bit of a problem child, and by the time I was eleven, I was pretty much uncontrollable. In the end, my parents shipped me off to military school, and the first one I attended was just a bad place. There was this weird Lord of the Flies mentality among the upperclassmen, especially when someone new arrived. At first, it was little things – typical hazing kind of stuff, like taking my milk or dessert in the cafeteria, or making me shine their shoes or make their beds while another guy went over and trashed my room, which I’d have to clean before inspection. No big deal – every newbie goes through that kind of stuff. But some of these guys were different… just sadistic. They’d whip me with wet towels after I showered, or they’d sneak up behind me while I was studying and throw a blanket over me, and just start beating the crap out of me. After a while, they started to do that at night, when I was sleeping. Back then, I was kind of small for my age, and I made the mistake of crying a lot, which only amped them up even more. It’s like I became their special project. They’d come for me two or three nights a week, always with the blanket, always with the punches, just beating the crap out of me while telling me that I’d be dead before the year was up. I was pretty freaked out, on edge all the time. I would try to stay awake and flinch at the slightest noise, but it’s not like I could avoid sleeping. They’d bide their time and wait until I was out. That kind of crap went on for months. I still have nightmares about it.”
“Did you tell anyone?”
“Of course I did. I told everyone I could. I told the commander, my teachers, the counselor, even my parents. None of them believed me. They kept telling me to stop lying and whining and just toughen up.”
“That’s awful —”
“No question. I was just a little kid, but after a while, I figured I had to get out of there, or they’d take it too far one day, so I ended up taking matters into my own hands. I smuggled in some spray paint and went to town in the administration building. I ended up getting kicked out, which was exactly what I wanted.” He drew a long breath. “Anyway, they ended up closing the school a couple of years later, after the local paper did an exposé on the place. A kid died there. A little kid, my age. I wasn’t one of the students mentioned in the exposé, but it was national news for a while. Criminal and civil charges, the whole works. Some people ended up in prison over it. And my parents felt terrible after that, because they hadn’t believed me. I think that’s why they put up with me for so long after I graduated. Because they still felt guilty.”