1970. Late Summer.

Fight Night.

Bucky Carlton was pitted against Logan Manring. Both of them seventeen-years-old.

Both of them incarcerated in the reform school known as Sandbury Housing for Boys. SHB.

Of course, SHB wasn’t much of a school. Sure, they provided classes in English, Spanish, math, science, geography, and history. But since the facility housed boys aged thirteen to seventeen, the in-depth levels of these courses differed.

Very few of the boys paid much attention in classes. Most of them just wanted out. Most of them just wanted to survive.

For all intents and purposes, Sandbury Housing for Boys was a juvenile prison. A detention center. A place meant for reform, but that rarely occurred.

Most of the population, when they aged out of SHB, simply transitioned to an adult prison, depending on what brought them to the school in the first place. If they were released to public life, odds were that they would commit worse infractions and end up in an adult prison anyway.

There were, though, a handful of boys who did not belong in SHB. They wound up there due to some stupid mistake they might have made, parental neglect or maliciousness, an incompetent lawyer, an overzealous prosecutor, or a corrupt judge. These individuals were more often than not “good boys” who took a wrong turn somewhere or made a bad decision. Or they were simply cast away by an uncaring family or a dysfunctional system.

Bucky Carlton was one of the good boys. His crime? Having a deceased mother and a deadbeat father who was missing in action.

Sentenced to SHB until he was eighteen. All because he had been caught squatting in an empty vacation home near Peace River. A trespassing charge and no guardians to keep him “in line.”

Unfortunately, Bucky had also made the mistake of attempting to escape and run away. He was caught in the act, a serious violation.

The boys’ camp guards had a routine of punishing runaways or any of their wards they thought were troublemakers.

Fight Night was one of the tools.

Boy against boy in an Anything Goes fight to exhaustion.

Bucky had mostly kept to himself in the camp, but he had developed the reputation as a badass in the time he’ d already spent there. Thus, the boy he was pitted against had to be not only big but also psycho quality violent.

Logan Manring fit that bill. He outweighed Bucky by fifty pounds, was taller by ten inches, and he played dirty.

Fight Night always happened hours after dinnertime, when the boys would normally be going to sleep. The guards put out the word to the various kids who the administration called “ helpers,” but the rest of SHB’s population called “rats.”

“Fight Night tonight!”

The message traveled through the system, eliciting excitement—and fear—among the boys. It meant that at ten o’clock, they would all be called to the gymnasium to witness the fight. Sometimes more than one, but usually it was a single bout featuring a boy who had committed some camp infringe-ment against someone who would beat the crap out of him. Occasionally both boys had been caught disobeying a camp rule, in which case the odds were more or less even.

Bets were taken by all the guards on which boy would disable the other first or who would cry soonest.

Once he had been told he was participating in Fight Night, Bucky knew it was not going to go well for him. The butterflies in his stomach made him ill for most of the day. Nevertheless, he was the type of kid who put up a good front. He never let his fear show. He put up the bravado that he was going to beat Logan Manring’s butt.

Two beefy guards brought him to the gymnasium right on time. The rest of the population sat on bleachers on both sides of the gym floor. A large mat covered the space where ordinarily the boys played basketball. The rules were that neither boy could exit the mat’s boundaries by choice. Sometimes a boy might be thrown out, but that was all right. But if either fighter moved off the mat to escape his opponent, even worse punishment might be inflicted on the offender.

Bucky took his place at one end of the mat and faced Logan, who stood confidently on the other side. Neither boy wore boxing gloves. Fight Night was always a bare-knuckle ordeal. It was meant to be old-fashioned boxing, but if one of the kids happened to know martial arts, that was permitted. In fact, nothing was off limits.

A guard served as the referee, but all he really did was shout, “Fight!” There were no rounds. No breaks. The boys were to fight until the referee felt like calling it finished.

Most of the time, the boys observing the fight did so in silence. They all knew that Fight Night was a terrible thing. Only a few of the more aggressive residents shouted or cheered on a favored fighter.

Logan lumbered toward Bucky like a tank. Bucky stood his ground, his fists properly raised and in position. He had been in fights before. He knew how to box. Unfortunately, he didn’t know how to stop a battering ram.

Logan swung. Bucky blocked the blow, but Logan swiftly punched hard with his other fist. Bucky fell to the mat, dazed. Logan then kicked Bucky in the ribs and moved away.

“Get up, loser!” Logan shouted.

After a moment, Bucky managed to rise on all fours. He finally stood, blood pouring from his mouth. He spit on the mat and then charged.

For the next four minutes, Bucky gave the fight everything he had. He succeeded in landing many blows, even knocking Logan down once. But by the sixth minute of the fight, Bucky was tiring and weakening. Logan’s size and weight mattered, and it wasn’t long before the heavy artillery aspects of his attacks multiplied. Bucky fell again . . . and again . . . but he repeatedly stood and shakily kept going.

When Logan broke Bucky’s nose in minute nine, it was all over. Bucky dropped to his knees, barely hanging on to consciousness. Logan moved around behind his opponent, got on his own knees, and wrapped a heavy forearm around Bucky’s neck.

The guard referee negligently stopped the fight a few seconds too late.

Bucky Carlton did not survive Fight Night. Logan had crushed his neck after a brutal ordeal.

It was too common a story for juvenile detention centers in Florida and elsewhere in the United States. One of many tales that were swept under the rug by employees of the facility and by management.

It was the kind of thing that still occurred over fifty years later.

TODAY

Trayvon sat at his table alone.

Being solitary was what he desired the most, and it was what he had been used to.

The fifteen-year-old boy wasn’t really by himself, though. At least thirty other boys of varying ages sat at a dozen tables eating lunch in the small cafeteria of B Camp School for Boys.

Trayvon remembered that when he had attended kindergarten—an eternity ago—the teacher had played soothing music on a stereo system while the kids ate lunch, did arts and crafts, or simply played together. Here, the only sounds were plastic spoons scraping plastic plates and the occasional soft whispers.

The guards insisted on quiet. No noise. The walls in the place tended to reverberate the slightest hums, thuds, and chatter. Trayvon would have liked to shout “Hey!” just to hear his voice echo in the cold room. Instead, though, the boys were conditioned to display calmness and composure.

This outward appearance of serenity was a far cry from the terrifying reality that Trayvon had witnessed in his twenty-five days at B Camp in Sweeton, Florida.

Why had his mother allowed that “health services” person to bring him there? He knew the answer, of course. His mother was a junkie, a woman who went from man to man just to survive. The most recent boyfriend was also her dealer. Trayvon hated him. Bruno.

When his mother and Bruno were saying their goodbyes just before he was driven off to B Camp, she told Trayvon that she loved him “very much.”

Right.

Trayvon kept his head down as close to the lunch plate as possible. The few times he felt brave enough to look up and scan the room only resulted in magnifying the fear, making it difficult to breathe. He would lose his ability to feel his arms or his legs. It was like staring down a dark tunnel, something that recurred in his nightmares.

What was the so-called food on the plate? Some kind of meat-mash that reminded Trayvon of dog food. Oh, look, there were a few bits of macaroni noodles that weren’t fully cooked! And was that supposed to be broccoli? It was brown and yellow! At least the apple juice tasted somewhat normal.

Trayvon felt unsafe among the other boys. Many were bullies who sucked up to the guards. Being of small stature, Trayvon’s instincts told him that he needed to make a move that would land him back into the protective walls of a solitary confinement cell. He had felt somewhat secure there when he’d done something wrong on his fourth day and was placed into one. Trayvon wasn’t sure exactly what his transgression had been, but the burly guard known as Perkins had simply grabbed him from behind, growled, “Shouldn’t have done that, kid,” and thrown him into solitary. It might have been for three days, but Trayvon wasn’t sure. It turned out to be a blessing. No one bothered him. He could really be alone.

Maybe he could go back.

Staying in the general population of B Camp was unpleasant and dangerous. The big boys picked on the smaller ones. Guards turned blind eyes away from horrible things that happened. Especially at night.

He hated confrontation, he hated his inclination to cower, he hated that he was a target. It’s as if he’d had a bullseye drawn on his back from the moment he had stepped foot in B Camp.

Trayvon couldn’t understand why he was there. He knew he hadn’t done anything wrong. He was a good kid. His teachers had said so, that is, when his mother had stuck around one place long enough to enroll him in school. Trayvon often got compliments on his drawings. At least B Camp allowed him to have a sketchbook. He loved to draw cartoons and superhero figures. And he also documented things that went on in the camp. He had to be careful that none of the guards actually looked at his sketchbook. That would be bad.

Yes, he had been sickly as a younger child. His mother hadn’t put up with that, as if it were his fault that his health was poor. She couldn’t fathom that it was their transient lifestyle and the squalor in which they often found themselves that contributed to his illnesses. Live with dis-ease and you get diseased. Made sense.

It was true that for the past couple of years Trayvon desperately wanted to be free from his mother. It would have been the best thing for him, to get away from her and Bruno. But not like this. Not here.

He didn’t think he could survive in B Camp. Some of the older boys had let him know that it was his turn that night. He didn’t know what would be worse. Nighttime with the older boys or being sent to the Little Red House. Where special punishments occurred. The horror stories about that place were enough to give him nightmares for life.

The safest place in the facility was solitary confinement. No one could bother him there.

Do it!

It was now or never. Trayvon stood, turned, screamed at the restraint guard, Perkins, who was standing at the door directly behind him, and threw his plate of food at the man’s feet. The last images Trayvon registered were not what he had expected.

Perkins smiled and gave a nod as if he were sending a kind of hidden message to someone behind Trayvon.

The fifteen-year-old boy’s legs folded. Something snapped. As he hit the ground, the immediate pain made it clear that his left knee had been broken by the same boot that was now kicking him in the side, stomach, and head. Repeatedly. Then Perkins dropped onto Trayvon’s chest with the full weight of both knees. As the boy struggled to breathe, the man’s bulk pushed harder onto the sternum and throat.

The boy’s struggle for air was almost over. As the bright lights in the room became total blackness, for a mere second Trayvon smiled.

He was about to be free at last.