Teenagers are basically stupid. They do things that their adult selves absolutely cringe at doing. Recently I had been lamenting about my horrible taste in men and how the majority of them suck ass and I'm doomed to be single forever. It was then that I remembered, or rather was reminded, about the boy I met as a teenager who murdered someone and I kept on talking to him as if he was my one and only true love. See? Stupid.
My best friend and I used to be mall rats in every sense of the word. Her Mother worked a store in the mall so she'd bring us with her and we'd literally hang out, buying nothing, for hours upon hours. We met a slew of characters that I just really need to chronicle here for the sake of all Mother's who let their teenage daughters hang out in the mall. IT'S A DON'T, if you hadn't guessed where I was going.
I met a boy named Jeff one day at the mall. He was scruffy and the epitome of the "bad boy". I wasn't necessarily into boys like that but he paid attention to me and that was all it took. He was with his friends and they were obnoxious, annoying and had a car they could drive. I remember driving around the mall in the bed of a truck with Jeff. We never went anywhere but the thrill of being with a boy and leaving the mall and obviously disobeying our parents was so exciting. I never saw Jeff away from the mall that I recall. He was there all the time and so was I. It was our place.
I'd known him about a month I would guess and I'd seen him a handful of times and talked to him on the phone plenty. He was my mall boyfriend. All I did was talk about him and how cute he was. One evening I got my first ever collect call from the local jail and it was Jeff. Despite the collect call charges I was told I'd have to pay, I accepted the call. Jeff told me he was in trouble for stealing a motorcycle that he had actually paid for and it was just a big misunderstanding. Of course that's what happened and I felt just awful for him. What a tragic set of circumstances he was in.
We wrote back and forth for about a month and he called a few more times, collect of course. I had a friend drive me down to the jail at one point to collect his personal belongings. I got his wallet with his driver's license and, oddly enough, his birth certificate. I was Jeff's rock, the only person he could turn to in his time of need and OH MAN that was all I needed to hear.
After some time had passed and my Mom got a few phone bills with these collect charges she asked me what was going on so I told her and I expected her to be just like me, supportive and trusting. Turns out she was the total opposite and I was angry with her when she said I needed to stop talking to this boy. Whatever, I thought, she doesn't know what she's talking about. I made sure, from then on, to check the mail before she got home so I could hide my letters from him.
Well, my Mother's no dummy, even though I could have sworn she was at the time. She found out about the letters and hauled my ass down to the District Attorney's office to talk with the investigator on Jeff's case. I knew I'd be proving my Mother wrong and the DA would tell me Mother to calm down and get a grip. Turns out that I was the one who was about to be proven wrong.
Jeff was accused of murdering a young man who'd just gotten a motorcycle and then he and his friend stole the motorcycle. They hog-tied this young man and left him in the woods for some random lady riding her horse to find. I saw the pictures of this young man. I remember exactly what he was wearing. His hair was that orange-red color, he had pale skin and freckles. He wore the quintessential cowboy outfit of Wranglers jeans, brown worn-in cowboy boots and a plaid western-style shirt. Minus the being hog-tied and being dead part, he was someone I could picture seeing at a local downtown Fort Worth bar.
This was my first experience of seeing a dead body and it affected me like you can probably imagine. My little teenage bubble was shattered. The boy I thought was really into me, wasn't. The trust I extended to another human being was shattered. The realization that someone took another person's life for something as trivial as a motorcycle was just too much for me to understand, still is actually. The whole situation was just so surreal.
I never talked to Jeff again. He called a few times, collect of course, but I declined each call. He wrote a few times and then the letters stopped coming. I had to turn over the letters to the DA even though there was nothing in them that could be used. To this day I've still got his wallet with his license and birth certificate in a box somewhere on a high shelf. I still remember the photos of that man, they are in my brain forever. Those images, unfortunately, those I can't put those in a box on a high shelf. But I really wish I could.
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*My Mom has been right about much more than this. Obviously. Mom's are right more often than not.
