There was this really creepy kid I went to middle school with.

He was one of those too-small kinds of people. I mean, we were all kids, but he looked like he was five years old. Glasses, acne, froggy face--the whole dread package. One of my "girlfriends" at the time--scare quotes required to indicate the absurdity of the word, given how romantic two kids can be at 13... rather than a wink and a nudge towards my pubescent sexual prowess--anyway, she lived across two streets from this guy, and there was basically a straight shot from his bedroom window to her house... allegedly. The thing about her house, and I'm not making this up, is that a good 3/4 to 2/3 of the side facing his house was pure glass. I remember riding my bike and being weirded out by it, and when I was there, I felt like I was trapped in an ice cube.

Anyway, she swears that this guy used to watch her house with binoculars. Not look, but watch. She was very deliberate in her word choice. Of course, I was skeptical. Teenage girls can be a little dramatic, and I knew the kid. Of course he was weird, of course he wasn't winning any girls stuffed animals at festivals or getting invited to any fuckin' sleepovers. But me, I was and still am a bit of a charity case. Make no bones about it... I was no saint. I'd talk shit about him behind his back sometimes. I was a skinny teenager and he was fuckin' weird. I couldn't help it. But I was nice to him, and I did give him the benefit of the doubt--I figured he had to have better things to do than to stare into the massive glass wall of some girl's house. I knew for a fact that he played video games and listened to Rammstein. You can only do one of those things while watching a girl eat Cocoa Puffs in her pajamas.

Anyway, I hadn't heard anything about him or from him since some vague and uninteresting anecdote during high school or something like that. Nothing I'd ever remember. Other than pasting his face onto my mental image of the main character when we read A Prayer for Owen Meany in senior English, I hadn't considered the guy. Then a couple weeks ago, I'm at work, and someone from middle school comes in. Honestly, I'm not that happy to see her. Never really talked to her. We probably danced at a church dance once. She started doing drugs or something. Etc. Small town drama that small town kids get into with some pretty heavy consequences. I just remembered being pretty adamant on distancing myself from her since I got good grades and wasn't going to give up going to college and getting the fuck out of that town because I started sucking meth or got some girl pregnant. So she's in town just for the night, probably specifically to get good weed instead of the smelly bag of sticks and seeds you get in smalltown, Ohio. Of course she still lives in our hometown. So we're chatting a little bit.

She asks me, "Did you hear about **** **********?" The asterisks are for this is a true story. I mean, if it wasn't true, I wouldn't point it out. This shit is the honest-to-God truth. I jog my memory and look thoughtful for a second--all this stuff I'm talking about was about a decade ago, and he was just another person whose name I knew for a while.

"Oh, I remember him. No, why?"
"He went to jail for like... ever."
I was pretty taken aback. I felt like this kid had to have been perpetually incapable of physically overtaking anyone, and besides that he was basically a nice guy.
"Jesus Christ," I say, "What the hell did he do?"
"He raped his little brother." Maybe my ex-girlfriend hadn't been overreacting. Then again, maybe this is another dramatization of some poor kid who was born a couple months early or drank too much coffee when he was six. Honestly, I don't really want to know which of these two are true.