Life After Death: The Shocking True Story of a Innocent Man on Death Row

went. I never had to say much of anything; he’d carry the entire conversation. He couldn’t even make himself stop talking during class. Everyone else did their best to avoid him, so we had our own table every day at lunch.
    I believe the reason I didn’t extend myself or try to make other friends is that I couldn’t compete. We were dirt poor, so I didn’t have the latest sneakers, I had no idea what videos were playing on MTV, I hadn’t seen the latest movies, and I didn’t own a single article of trendy clothing. I didn’t have to compete with Kevin. I could be wearing sackcloth and no shoes for all he cared, as long as I listened to him talk about his stuffed animal collection and nodded every now and then. Other than that, there were no expectations. I think pretty much everyone else in the world abused and made fun of him, but as long as I let him hang around, he didn’t care. In hindsight, I also believe some part of me had given up. By the age of twelve or thirteen, I had decided life was hopeless.
    I had to repeat my first year of junior high because I failed. I don’t remember completing a single assignment during the entire year, and it showed when report cards were handed out—I had an F in every single subject. I didn’t pass anything, and I didn’t care. As the school year came to a close, I was looking at another long, brutal, lonely summer in what my family still refers to as “the white house.” This year I would carry an extra piece of darkness home with me. Right before we were released for vacation, another thirteen-year-old tried to commit suicide by hanging himself.
    Joseph was in three or four of my classes. He even sat right in front of me during one of them. He was never without a large duffel bag full of books, paper, colored pencils, protractors, and anything else you could possibly need to navigate your way through the seventh-grade world. He was no friend of mine, but I knew who he was. A couple of weeks before the end of the year he stopped showing up at school. Soon the entire student body knew he’d tried to hang himself. He survived, but spent the next few months in a mental institution. The image would haunt me all summer long with a power that nothing before had. I couldn’t get it out of my head.
    Late at night I’d lie in bed with my ear pressed to my little radio so that no one else could hear it. If Jack heard the slightest hint of music he would throw a fit and claim that I had kept him awake all night. I would lie there wondering if perhaps Joseph had been listening to music when he decided life was no longer worth the effort. Did he wait until nightfall, or did he do it in the daylight? What did he tie the rope to? Did he jump off a chair? Why didn’t he succeed? If I had said anything to him, would it have made a difference? It drove me to tears more than once. Lying in bed covered in sweat and staring at the darkness, I didn’t even feel the mosquitoes biting me as I replayed the scenes I’d imagined over and over. I thought that if anyone knew how lonely and miserable I was, it was that kid. The anguish and the ghosts that haunted me evaporated like mist under the light of the morning sun, but would be waiting on me when darkness fell. I couldn’t seem to shake it off. That’s how I spent my summer vacation.
    The beginning of my second year of seventh grade didn’t start out a great deal differently from the first. I wore my secondhand clothes and collected my free lunch. Kevin wasn’t around this year, as it was decided over the summer that he was better suited to attend a special school for kids with learning disabilities. I was on my own.
    One day a week during study hall we were allowed to spend thirty minutes in the school library. It was on one of these excursions that my life was drastically changed when I came across a superior literary publication called
Thrasher
. For those who don’t know, it was
the
skateboarding magazine. This was the first time I was exposed to the world of skateboarding. It wasn’t just an activity—it was a culture. I don’t remember seeing any skaters in our school, so I don’t know how the magazine found its way into those humble archives. That magazine became my bible. All I could think about was skating, and after months of begging I received my first skateboard for Christmas. It was a cheap, heavy thing, with no nose and very little tail. It was piss yellow, with a Chinese dragon graphic on the bottom.