He pulled up a picture on his phone of his girlfriend, whom he’d been dating for the past 18 months, describing her proudly as “way smarter than I am,” a feminist, and a bedrock of emotional support. Let’s leave it at that.” If I had closed my eyes and described the boy I imagined would never open up to me, it would have been him.īut Cole surprised me. His friends were “the jock group,” he’d tell me. His neck was so thick that it seemed to merge into his jawline, and he was planning to enter a military academy for college the following fall. At 18, he stood more than 6 feet tall, with broad shoulders and short-clipped hair. Cole would later describe himself to me as a “typical tall white athlete” guy, and that is exactly what I saw. It was totally unfair, a scarlet letter of personal bias. He was staring impassively ahead, both feet planted on the floor, hands resting loosely on his thighs.
As I rushed down a hallway at the school, I noticed a boy sitting outside the library, waiting-it had to be him. The afternoon of our first interview, I was running late. I knew nothing about Cole before meeting him he was just a name on a list of boys at a private school outside Boston who had volunteered to talk with me (or perhaps had had their arm twisted a bit by a counselor).
