The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace by Jeff Hobbs Page A

energize her son. Maybe this energy came from the way Skeet kept him up to date on his legal processes and enabled Rob to feel like an adult participant in contrast to the way he’d been largely removed from the actual trial. Or maybe he just liked to lay eyes on the man and be heartened by the fact that prison, during these first years, was not enough to break Skeet Douglas. If not surprised, exactly, Jackie was herself struck by how himself Skeet remained after his conviction. The trial had burdened and frustrated him to the point where communication had been hard; Skeet had simply come to exist on a lower wavelength than she. The verdict, while not the one any of them desired, seemed to have released all that pressure and given him a return to his true form. When she did go in to see him now, maybe every third visit or so, he grinned and talked vibrantly about new friends inside while asking questions about old friends outside. He was clearly hopeful about his sentence eventually being overturned. She didn’t know to whom he was talking—she was no longer privy to his legal undertakings, as Rob increasingly was—but Skeet took with him to Trenton State a hopefulness that was not contagious to Jackie as it clearly was to their son.
    In the meantime, Rob seemed to expand through adolescence in every manner. His bones elongated and thickened; muscles followed. Basic math and reading begat abstract problem-solving and reading-comprehension skills. Boy-girl crushes became full-fledged, impassioned romantic pursuits. And his perspective of adults and adult behaviors—no doubt accelerated by his interactions with his father—matured to the point where he fully considered himself one, though he had not yet completed middle school.

    I N THE FALL of 1993, Jackie lost her job due to mandatory cuts at University Hospital. She’d been stretching their finances thin lately, trying to spoil her son a little. She’d bought him a used bike so that he could ride to his friends’ homes. She’d bought some new clothes to accommodate a recent growth spurt. She’d been trying to nourish him better with fresh produce instead of canned. Because of these efforts, she had no savings to carry her through a job search. After two weeks, her severance pay ran out, and unemployment insurance covered only the essentials. She had to take Rob out of Mt. Carmel and send him back to Oakdale.
    â€œOkay,” he said casually. “It’s okay, Ma. We’ll do what we need to do.” He began leaving 100 percent of his work earnings on the counter for Jackie, which she found when returning home late each day after busing around the city applying for jobs.
    Public school was much different in eighth grade than it had been in third grade, in terms not just of physical violence but also emotional stress. From his first day back, Rob had to put more energy into navigating his fellow classmates in order to avoid being jumped or robbed, and this left little reserves with which to maintain his grades, to glean at least some new knowledge from the limited amount being dispensed in those classrooms, some of them packed with more than forty kids at a time. Mt. Carmel was not a high-end private school, but it was far enough removed from Oakdale to make for a surreal contrast. The disparity wasn’t strictly financial, as Mt. Carmel ran on a smaller operating budget per student than the publicly funded school and had no subsidies for books or supplies. The difference lay in the attitudes of both students and teachers. When Rob told Jackie casually that kids were dealing drugs—and a lot of them—at Oakdale, she knew two things immediately: she had to get him back into Mt. Carmel and place him in a private high school next year.
    A part of her had been thinking that he could go to Orange High, just like Jackie had, and easily make it into their gifted student program. But in the wake of these Oakdale