I froze.
In my peripheral vision, I saw them: a man in a fancy suit standing beside a boy of about 15. Good clothes, too. Nice backpack. Hair done with more effort than I put into mine on my wedding day, back when I had one.
“You think skipping class is funny?” the man went on. “You think blowing off homework is no big deal? You want to end up like that? A failure covered in dirt, doing manual labor your whole life?”
There was a pause.
A man in a fancy suit was standing beside a boy of about 15.
My jaw tightened. I kept my eyes glued to the chicken, trying to pretend I didn’t hear them.
“Well? Is that what you want your future to look like?” the man pressed.
The boy replied in a low voice, “No.”
The kid looked uncomfortable.
The father leaned closer to him. “Then start acting like it.”
Something twisted in my chest. Not because I had never heard people talk like that. I had. A lot.
What got me was the kid, and the way he was being taught, right there in public, to measure a man’s worth by how clean his shirt was.
“Is that what you want your future to look like?”
