Chapter 1

Growing up, self-confidence wasn’t my long suit. I knew I couldn’t run as fast as most of my peers, I couldn’t throw or catch as well as most of them. And those things seemed to be the currency of what made you important, at least for the guys. I wasn’t short, but I wasn’t tall. I wasn’t strong; while I didn’t wear glasses, I read a lot. Those traits alone wouldn’t have set me apart from my peers; but my peers seemed to sense I didn’t understand much about them.

And they never understood the least thing about me.

I’m David Campbell Zimmerman, and to paraphrase Cool Hand Luke’s jailor, I had a failure to communicate ... with myself as it turned out. This is how I turned it all around. I know the things that happened; I’m still a little vague on how. Why? Even more elusive.

First, the close players, then what happened first, then the second set of players, then what happened next. David Zimmerman; me. I was sixteen when this started almost a year ago.

My dad is Lowell Zimmerman; my mom is Cecelia Campbell Zimmerman. Mom’s nickname for Dad, from the first day they met was Lo; mom was Cec, pronounced like the word ‘cease’. Dad is taller than I am, a little, but neither of us are memorable; brown hair, blue eyes. Bookish sorts. Mom is a smidge taller than me too, but her hair is closer to red than brown, funny green eyes that I wish were mine. Dad was twenty-six when I was born, mom was eighteen.

A year and a half after me, my sister Cameron Campbell Zimmerman was born, known to all as CC, the letters; a year and a half after that my brother David Wayne Zimmerman was born. Six months later David died, a heart attack. A year after David died, my mother finished her PhD in math; exactly five years after she graduated pregnant from high school. Not an easy thing to do when you’re single and undistracted; mom is something else when it comes to motivation and focus; she did it married, with kids.

We lived in Oak Park, Michigan; yeah, that Oak Park where all the rich folks live and their kids go to school. That’s us, too. Dad’s parents had money; grandfather ran a chain of pizza restaurants that did very well; my grandmother was in charge of the money and for every dollar grandpop made from pizza, she made three or four from the stock market and another ten or so in real estate. Mom’s father was a college professor; her mother was a part-time professor and a full-time poet. My maternal grandfather didn’t have any money and didn’t make any; Mom’s mother made up for it by being old money with g’zillions of dollars in trust funds. Some of that went to Mom, more went to us kids when grandmother passed away.

Sometimes things change and you can never reach out and put a finger on when it happened. For me, there was a particular incident; one that I’m not likely to ever forget.

I’ve heard a million times that it takes all kinds of people to make the world; like I said before, I’m not really sure why I do things; why other people do the things they do? I’m clueless.

At the best of times, in the best of circumstances, half the time people leave me shaking my head, not a clue why they chose the way they did. I pretend I know why I’ve done the things I’ve done; but it’s fake; all a big lie. If it’s a mystery to me, how can anyone else understand?

And that’s the why; how? I’m told I grew up; well, it’s an explanation. It’s one I have trouble with. I’d already done that, I thought.

The first event is simple to describe; unfathomable to comprehend. My only consolation was that no one else could understand why they did it either. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

I was walking home from high school, about six weeks before the end of my sophomore year. I’m a good student, I’ve never been in trouble and while I didn’t have many friends and had less of a social life, I was reasonably content.

That day my sister was walking about two hundred yards ahead of me, with her friend Anna Clarke; both in 8th grade. Their middle school had gotten out five minutes before the high school, but the two of them liked to walk slowly and talk; when they got to our house, Mom would be there to sit them down to homework. Funny, they were never in a rush to get home.