• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 526 0

concert shirts. He liked straight clean black clothes, with nothing printed on them. But the way we dressed was one thing people criticized. Most of the other kids, they either wore sports clothes, like Tommy Hilfiger stuff, or if they were country people, they wore flannel shirts and cowboy boots and belts with giant buckles. So we stood out because, even though Damien and I dressed different from each other, we was also different from everybody else. And the music we liked was different from whatever they was listening to, too. I introduced Damien to Metallica and he introduced me to Pink Floyd. He too wasn’t living his desired life, and just like my mom, he suffered from depression. I think that our friendship helped him.76

Jason would later recall,

Damien and I also did a lot of walking. We used to walk to the local Wal-Mart and bowling alley all the time, even when we didn’t have any money. Neither of us ever had any money. We definitelynever had twenty bucks! We could maybe get five or ten to go to the bowling alley or the skating rink, where we would just enjoy being around people, especially the girls. That is basically why we went to these places, was to meet new girls, shoot pool, and play video games. We would hear of concerts and things in Memphis, but we never had the money to go to them. Plus, my mom said that I wasn’t old enough to go to one yet. My mom was very protective. At the time, whenever I went anywhere, I had to make sure to check in every hour. If I didn’t I would get grounded.77

Jason’s parents had been divorced for years by the time he met Damien. His father had disappeared from the family when Jason was four, and though the father lived in Arkansas, except for a Christmas visit eleven years after he’d left, he’d had virtually no contact with the family. “I don’t care for him,” Jason said. “He don’t care for us.” Jason was close to his mother, and as the oldest child, he felt protective of her. He appreciated how hard she worked to support him and his brothers, despite battling such severe depression that she had once attempted suicide. “It was pretty devastating,” Jason wrote later in a school essay. “I was the one who found her and called 911 and kept her alive. But I am lucky. My mother is well and happy now and so am I.”

While Damien had dropped out of school, Jason still attended and was a good, if unexceptional, student. His best classes were art and English, and with the encouragement of one of his teachers, he was beginning to think of studying to be a graphic artist after high school. By the tenth grade he recognized that he was something of a nonconformist, at least by the lights of Marion High. There was the way he dressed, which was linked to his tastes in music, both of which were outside the prevailing sports and country styles. He wore his hair long, pulled back in a ponytail—another departure from the norm. And if asked, he acknowledged harboring an atypical indifference to religion.

Jason believed in God, he believed firmly in right and wrong, but by high school he considered religion a comfort “for people on their deathbed.” Damien, by contrast, was extremely interested in religious ideas, especially those that traced their roots to the distant past. That’s why he was drawn to Catholicism and, later, to Wicca. But though Jason did not share Damien’s interests, neither did he mind them.78

By the time Jason and Damien were in high school, they had come to the attention of Driver and Jones. Jason had gotten into trouble in 1990, when he was twelve years old and newly arrived at Lakeshore. As he related the incident, there was a tin building adjoining the trailer park, with one wall missing, a rusted roof, and rusted car frames inside. “Giant grass and weeds grew in there. You could just walk in. It was sort of a clubhouse for us kids.” One day, when Jason was there with his brother Matt, who was ten at the time, and two other boys, “the police charged us with breaking in.”

The official account of that episode paints a more serious picture. Police reported that the boys