The Friend I Sent to Prison

Summary

In the summer of 1980, after the college entrance exam, my friend Lucas Grant came out to my house and clapped me on the shoulder.

"Evan Cole, you missed the cutoff by twenty points. College was never in the cards for you. Let it go."

I believed him.

The next day I went south for work.

Over the next four years I learned a trade, repairing imported precision machinery, the kind nobody else would touch.

Then Meridian Chemical Works, twenty minutes from the house I grew up in, hired me on as a specialist machinist.