They’re now twenty-one (Forrest Welborn), twenty-two (Maurice Pierce) and twenty-three (Robert Springsteen and Michael Scott).
They no longer hang out together. They aren’t friends. They lead separate lives in different towns and cities. The strongest friendship, between Forrest and Maurice, has been permanently poisoned by the older boy’s accusations. Although one of them earned his GED, when arrested they will all be labeled high school dropouts.
By that summer, Maurice has married his high school sweetheart, Kimberli, and is living in Lewisville, Texas, not far from Dallas. They have one daughter, Marisa, who is five. He has worked at construction, car-detailing and in the shipping and receiving department of a local wholesaler, loading trucks. He still drives fast cars, currently a Mustang.
Forrest is working in a car-repair and body shop in Lockhart. He has one daughter with a girlfriend he hasn’t married. He was caught driving with a suspended license but will soon open his own shop.
Mike has been on the move again, having worked near Austin at an adult video store and as a roofer in Dallas. He drove to Evansville, Indiana, when a friend needed company, then back to Texas, doing automobile repair in San Antonio. Married to a computer technician, Jeannine Marie Stark, he has assumed fatherly responsibility for her four-year-old daughter, Jasmine. In 1999, when Jeannine is given a promotion at UniSys Corporation’s Austin office, they will house-sit a friend’s trailer near Buda until they find their own place.
Rob is in West Virginia, working for minimum wage, flipping burgers, selling newspaper subscriptions door-to-door, living with his mother. By the end of 1998, he will be married, working double shifts at two jobs, renovating a cabin his wife has inherited and living in a small two-story house set on a hillside, taking prescription drugs for ADD and seeing a doctor for chemical imbalances.
If they’re waiting for something to happen, they won’t have to much longer.