Robbie was a kid that didn’t fit in with his friends, when he was with them, he did things they did easily enough, but he didn’t really care about the same things they did. The way they treated girls, the things they thought were important.

But his father was too busy and tired after working two different jobs and trying to sleep in between shifts.

Both were high stress positions, in his day job, his father worked for a construction company, and though he never graduated from high school he was doing the same things and engineer would have done without the degree or the pay.

Then he would go to his other job, working with steel sheets that were cut and stretched into different forms for use in building and insulating homes and some office buildings. Any lapse of concentration in either job could mean that either someone was buried under a lot of dirt and heavy support beams, and in the other the steel could slice you open before you realized what was happening. He had little time for any of his sons, but you couldn’t blame him, together, both paychecks paid all the bills and allowed his wife to stay home, a source of great pride for him.

So he didn’t have much of a home life. His mother was there of course, and he had two older brothers, but neither of them had time for him because both worked and went to school and his mother never knew how to communicate, and as long as things were good she never complained.

While he was at school he was able to be himself for a while, but he found that he didn’t have many friends with similar interests, and so he found guys he could tolerate and became friends with them, but he had lost so much of himself in that exchange that he didn’t know who he was anymore.

Top that off with a healthy taste of testosterone and the voice changing, the hair in “unexpected” places and you get the idea of what he was going through.

He was in the locker room with two of his so-called friends, David Halverson and Mark Blumberg, these two had lately become the leaders of the group, and though both claimed to have total control over the others, they both shared an uneasy compromise and for the time being worked together in whatever they were going to do.

Robbie didn’t like that, he felt that he had traded his parents for others now, that these guys thought they had control over him bothered him and he didn’t know how to tell them.

He was not a big kid, both of them were taller by almost a foot, but he was not afraid either, something that they liked about him. He knew that the bruises and whatever would heal and seemed fearless when it came to fighting, but you had to crank him up first, get him mad enough that he would fight and then let him go.

But he had felt he burned a few bridges when he started with these guys, and he didn’t know if he could repair that, he didn’t even think he really wanted to try, and that’s what he was thinking about when he realized they noticed he wasn’t listening.

“Hey, pendejo!” they said, faking a Mexican accent and not doing a good job of it, “What the hell? You have something better to do than listen to the plan? You want to share that with us or are you just keeping it to yourself?” They asked him.

“I wasn’t thinking of anything like that!” he told them quickly, but they weren’t listening, Mark didn’t like him in the first place, and he took Robbie’s reluctance to “go along quietly” as rebellion and he couldn’t allow that. He thought it was why they should never have two leaders.

“Because you know that if you do, if you went out on your own and robbed the local bank and took a million dollars, you’d still have to share it with the rest of us, you know that right?” he asked, but it wasn’t a question. It was a demand. A condition.

That made Robbie angry, and he turned towards Mark and if there was a word to describe the attitude he was showing it was “bristled.”

“Look, I told you!” he said, trying to keep his voice down, “I have no plans for anything, I am not even sure I like where this is going!” he told them.

Mark looked at David and they both shrugged. “OK,” Mark said, “Fair enough, at least your honest! I’d rather know what the hell your thinking than to try and guess!” he said and they started again, leaning together conspiratorially, anyone that passed by at that time, such as the coach who was doing just that, anyone would have thought that they were praying for a good game, or a better life, or whatever. No one would equivocate what they were doing with what they were actually doing or they might have done more than stop for a moment and wonder. It’s a shame no one looked closer or they would have saved a man’s life.

CHAPTER ONE