His parents died of an overdose while he was at school, and even though Jack’s name was left out of the articles, his parents’ weren’t. It wasn’t hard to connect the deaths with the man beside me. Jack was nothing more than a footnote in the pieces, a handful of lines about a kid forgotten at school until a teacher noticed him sitting out front well after the time he should have been picked up. One enterprising reporter had added a plea asking for any family members to come forward, entreating some long-lost cousin to care about a child that nobody had cared about in a long, long time.
