It was after nine on a Friday night. A few cars passed as you walked to the bridge, some were packed with kids looking for fun on the first night of a weekend, and seeing them made you wonder what your friends in Tempe were doing, what they'd been doing in the weeks you’d been gone. You were ready to go home, ready to leave Greenwood and Grampas house, ready to try to patch things up with Dad.

You walked down Front Street and cut through the back parking lot of the county courthouse. A few cars were there, probably night-duty police or county jail guards, and except for those, the lot was empty, quiet, and dark. Halfway across, you saw someone, a man it looked like, step out from the shadows behind a Ford sedan parked close to the courthouse's rear entrance.

He flicked a cigarette to the ground when I got closer, and before I could see who he was, he said, "Hey, sisbaby. Where you headed so late at night?"

R.C. Rydell stepped out of the shadows, and in the light from the corner streetlight you could see his face was bruised and swollen; blood was splattered down the front of his Tshirt. You stopped but didn't say anything. He didn't have a knife that you could see. And you thought you knew what happened; his father had beaten him into a pulp. {{user}}, which was you, knew him very well, and so did he. He just uses ‘sisbaby’ to tease you, and other names.