I hesitate to ask her permission since she has been clear that she is not pleased with my choice of friends, but I do it anyway.

“Mom, can I hang out at Victor’s house tonight?” It is a Saturday evening, and I find mom on the porch reading the paper.

She looks at her watch. “Jack, it’s a quarter to nine. Isn’t it a little late to be going out?”

I give her an incredulous look, the same one she has given me since I was two. “I’m in high school now, Mom. A quarter to nine is early.”

“Okay, okay. You can go. Just come back before midnight.”

I smile. “Thanks, Mom. I’ll see you later.”

I know it is hard for Mom to let me go. She raised me as a single mother. Mom and I used to do everything together, and although she will never admit it, I know that my growing up makes her sad. I think about this as I ride my bike to the next neighborhood and into Victor’s driveway. I find Victor and his two best friends, Hank Dacey and Glenn Eadburt sitting on the porch.

“Hey, Jack,” Victor calls out to me. “We were just waiting for you.”

“Thanks for having me.” I realize how awkward I sound. I look around nervously and notice Victor and his friends are wearing the school’s black and gold letterman jackets. “So,” I say, stuffing my hands into my pocket, “what are we going to do?”

“We wanted to go to the movies, but nothing was showing, so we decided we’d let you pick,” Hank says.

“We could, um, go to the park,” I offer.

“What are we, five? That’s lame, Jack.” Victor says. I know he doesn’t mean anything by that, but it still makes my cheeks flush. “Why don’t we go to St. Andrew’s and leave them a little surprise before next Friday’s football game? I have a paintball gun that’s perfect for the occasion!” St. Andrews is our rival school; they’ve beat us in every sport except girls softball for the past ten years. St. Andrews and paintball gun in the same sentence makes me want to run home. I don’t want to go, as my family has a long history of attending St. Andrew’s: my mother, grandfather, and great-grandfather all went to school there.

“I don’t know, that sounds like trouble,” Glenn says. Glenn is always the voice of reason in our group, and usually Victor, Hank, and I just ignore him. But this time I agree with him.

“Of course it’s trouble, Glenn, that’s why we’re doing it,” Victor says. “Jack, are you coming?”

“Well, I—” I begin.

“Are you coming with us or not?”

I sigh. “Of course.”

“Glenn?”

“Yeah, whatever.”

“Now, let’s see. Jack, your shirt is too bright. You’ll need something to put on over it.” Victor runs inside and brings out another letterman jacket. “It’s my brother’s old jacket. Put it on.”

I do as he says, but the jacket doesn’t fit.

St. Andrew’s campus is about half a mile from Victor’s house so we walk. It is easy to spot: they always have their red and blue school banner flying high on the flagpole. As we get closer to the school I’m reminded of all the stories my Mom has told me and of all the pictures of my family in front of the school. I begin to feel like I should say something to Victor, but I keep my mouth shut and just go along with it.

Victor takes the paintball gun out of the backpack and carefully lays out each of the gold pellets. Something tells me he’s done this before.

“I’ll go first, then Jack, Hank, and Glenn. The goal is to cover as much of the main building with paint as possible.” He takes his aim at the front door and gold is splattered everywhere.

“Your turn, Jack.” He hands the gun off to me.

I line up square with the building and mimic Victor’s technique. I decide it is best not to think about it too much so I quickly pull the trigger. My eyes are glued to the paintball as it veers off course and begins to head towards a statue of St. Andrew. The gold ball rams into his head, knocking it off the rest of his body.

“What did you do, Jack?” Hank asks as he scrambles to pick up the pellets and put them into the backpack.

“I—I don’t know!” I hear a car engine start and see the flashing lights of the campus police car. I feel my heart sink into my stomach and at this moment, I would give anything to be home.

It’s about ten o’clock and I am still reading the paper on the porch. I have the phone next to me in case Jack calls. When the phone finally rings, I do not check the caller ID because I am sure it is him.

“It’s about time you called!”

“Are you Elizabeth Faine?” a husky voice asks.

“Yes.” I feel my heart skip a beat. “Who may I ask is calling?”

“This is Officer Clarke of the St. Andrew’s Campus Police. We have your son, Jack, here. We need you to pick him up.”

I go through the motions of turning off the lights and locking up the house but I am numb as I drive to pick up my son. What is he doing at St. Andrews? I think to myself. When I arrive, Jack is sitting on a bench with his classmates. The first thing I notice is the letterman jacket he’s wearing. I’ve never seen it before.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see Victor Cadarn, Sr., walk in the door.

“What’s this all about, Victor?”

“I don’t know, Dad. Jack suggested we come, and he brought the paintball gun you gave me.”

“Yessir, Mr. Cadarn,” one of the other boys said. “He took Victor’s gun and tried to shoot at the main building, but he missed and he shot the head off of their St. Andrew statue instead.”

“Is this true?” Mr. Cadarn asks the third boy. He nods.

“Come with me, Jack. I need to ask you a few more questions,” Officer Clarke says. Jack gets up off the bench and looks back at me with an expressionless face. His gaze shifts to his friends, but they offer no sympathy. Without a word, he dumps the black jacket on the floor and shakes his head.

“You boys are free to go, by the way,” Officer Clarke calls out to the other boys.

I watch them as they walk out the door but before Mr. Cadarn leaves, he shoots me a knowing glance and we both know that the truth was not told. I’m left standing there wondering what to do next.

At around midnight, Officer Clarke releases me from the campus police office. My mother and I get into our Honda without exchanging a word. We are about halfway home when she finally speaks.

“You actually thought they were your friends, didn’t you?”

I understand the sarcasm in her voice. “I did. Not anymore.”

“I just can’t believe you would do something like this,” she says as she switches lanes on the highway.

“I didn’t mean to, Mom. I’m sorry!”

“You’ll need to come up with a better excuse than that, Jack! You should know what’s okay and what’s not.”

I feel my blood begin to boil. “I said I didn’t mean to!”

“It doesn’t matter if you didn’t mean to! The fact is you did it!”

“I get it, Mom, I made a mistake! You act like you never make mistakes! Well, guess what, you do!” I realize I’m way out of bounds here but I can’t stop myself.

Her face turns red. “You were never one to go along with the crowd, Jack. And it disappoints me that you did. I thought you were different.”

But I am different. That’s the whole point. I’m so different, I can’t find a single place where I fit in.

Two months have passed since the St. Andrew’s incident. I knew when Mr. Cadarn and I shared a look that night that there would be no repercussions. His son was as guilty as mine, so the school downplayed the incident and repaired the damage. To the outside world, it was like it never happened. But between Jack and me, everything changed. I don’t think he’s spoken ten words to me since then. I thought it would be impossible for him to avoid me for this long, but he’s managed to accomplish it. Every day, I pick him up from school and he says very little to me. He just glares out the window and waits until we’re home, then he lugs his books to his room and locks himself inside.

I didn’t realize how much this incident was affecting Jack’s schoolwork until Victor Cadarn, Sr. called me in for a meeting this afternoon.

“Have you been keeping up with Jack’s schoolwork, Ms. Faine?” he asks me. He is sitting behind his oversized mahogany desk, shuffling a small stack of papers in a manila folder.

“Yes, I know his grades have slipped, but it’s been a difficult time for us. I thought he would get past this.”

“I see,” he says with concern in his voice. “Well, I just thought I would show you his portfolio. We update it with his essays and tests every term, and this is what we have for this one.” He hands me the manila folder.

I thumb through the tests and essays and I realize that things are much worse than I thought. But something else happens to me as I’m sitting there listening to Mr. Cadarn talk about responsibility and expectations. I realize that my expectations of Jack were based on who he was years ago and not who he is becoming. I still see him as that eager-to-please six year-old and I realize that he’s trying to find himself and I haven’t made it easy for him. More importantly, I realize that in his own way he is crying out for my help and I simply haven’t wanted to see the change. So I have looked the other way.

The night of the St. Andrew’s incident changed everything for my mom and I. I couldn’t face the fact that I disappointed her. I kept to myself and though it seemed that I was immersed in my studies, it was the complete opposite. I stopped trying and my grades reflected this.

The Monday after the incident was painful. I saw Victor and he greeted me as though nothing had happened. He and his friends actually laughed about it and expected me to laugh, too. But I couldn’t forget what I had done and though I continued to hang out with them, I realized that we could never be friends. It was like the letterman jacket I wore that night: it didn’t fit.

Since September, I have been going through the motions of each day. I get up, I go to class, and I come home. After the incident, I slowly pull away from Victor and the other guys and though I feel a bit lonely, I don’t feel out of place anymore.

Two weeks ago, my mom told me she had been called to a conference with Mr. Cadarn and I fully expected a long and painful lecture from her on the drive home from her meeting. But the only thing she asked me was if I was okay. There was no lecture, no yelling, no accusations. This completely confused me since it seemed that all she had done over the past two months was yell at me.

I can’t explain why but after that drive home I felt that something had changed. I can’t say that I brought my grades up immediately, but I slowly felt the old me coming back. I can’t say that my Mom and I were getting along famously, but it was better and we weren’t yelling at each other all the time. I don’t know what changed in her, but something changed. And even more importantly, something changed in me. I regained my motivation for school and began to pick my grades up. I also began to accept the fact that I was different, and that maybe this is a blessing.


Webster’s Dictionary defines change as “making the form, content, or future course of something different from what it is or from what it would be if left alone.” I realized that being friends with Victor was wrong for me and everything about that night was completely out of character for me. It was changing me into someone I was not. But the events that happened as a result of that night made me realize who I really was: someone who doesn’t go along with the crowd. It also made me see my mom in a different light. I began to understand where she was coming from when she said she “thought I was different.” She still thought of me as that “different” six year-old who always wanted to spend time with her and wasn’t afraid of what other people thought of me. In some respects, I still am that six year-old. But I am also maturing and trying to find my place in the world. I’m still not sure who I’m supposed to be when I grow up but at least I know that I can survive the change. And so can my mom.