by Shilo Dawn Goodson

Created on: June 15, 2009

Most of East High School sat entranced by the man's story. It seemed crazy to them that the man standing in front of them had been beaten on a daily basis from the time he was a toddler until he was eight. It disgusted and yet interested the teenagers as the man talked about how he had been treated like a slave by his own parents. He'd been locked up in a closet and chained to the floor if his parents felt he wasn't obeying them or sometimes just because they felt like chaining him up. Many of them had heard the stories or read about the kids who were severely abused, but most of them never thought they would actually see someone who had gone through such ordeals.

It fascinated and yet disturbed them all to hear that the man standing before them had almost died when he was eight. According to the man's story, his parents had left him tied up in the basement one time when they left for the weekend. A neighbor had heard scratching and screaming in the basement and had called the police. The police expected to find a kitten or a puppy that got stuck trying to climb out of a basement window. Instead, they had encountered a child that none of the neighbors had even known existed until that day, a child whose whole world had been inside a house and mostly inside a small basement closet with chains.

The man standing before the students of East High School then went on to tell about the rest of his childhood. He'd spend the rest of his childhood in and out of foster homes. At twelve, according to the story, he had ended up in juvenile detention for the first time. Several more times he found himself on the wrong side of the law. Just a few months before his eighteenth birthday, he found himself in a foster home where he found love for the first time. Although he resisted the love at first, the man told the students that he had come to view this family as his own. Over time, he had changed his life, and he ended his speech by telling the students that he was now an extremely successful computer programmer.

As the students left the gymnasium where the speech had been given, there were a mix of emotions. Some kids had trouble believing the truth of the story and found themselves doubting that anyone could really be that terrible to a child. Others felt sadness that the this man had experienced such a hard childhood. Many of them were happy that the man had eventually found a real family. Only the son of the man giving the speech felt real anger. Nathan's anger was

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