He was the toughest kid on the block. As 10-year-olds, we didn’t admit it, but we were afraid of him. He’d take the ball we were playing with and throw it on a garage roof where we couldn’t get it. He’d knock our bikes over and then slash the tires with a pen knife warning us if we told anyone he did it he’d use it on us. We believed him.

So we would sit around frustrated and talk about what we’d like to see happen to him--like his arm getting broken or his accidentally stabbing himself. I said I wished he’d get hit by a bus. A week later running out of the drugstore with candy he had shoplifted, what I had hoped for happened. The police wouldn’t let us onto the street. We watched as his mother came, looked, turned her back on him, and walked away telling the police she wanted nothing to do with him.

I ran home crying, thinking that it was my fault. I told my mother what happened. She didn’t say a word. She just held me like Andy needed to be held by his mother and probably never was.