He wasn't much to look at. A slightly overweight teenager with a baby face and a few stray whiskers trying to burst through to assert his adolescent status. The  jeans he wore were generics from the local mercantile, and his feet were adorned with what he and his friends described as "Chinese Nikes", the particular brand of generic knockoff carried by KMart at the time that carried an upside down attempted ripoff of the "swoosh" logo. His shirts were thrift store castoffs, and his hair, dishevvelled on its better days, bore the telltale ragged cuts of the first year beauty college students that usually did the cutting.

Every day he would walk along the busy sides of the state highway, across businesses and parking lots with a backpack full of books and the same desperate, empty look on his face as he trudged towards his destination, a pizza restaurant on the west side of town.

Detours were unthinkable. The clock was being watched carefully, and he knew that more than five minutes' delay would net an increased punishment, an addition to the already unbearable punishment of sentences inflicted on him by his parents; sentences that were to be finished before any outings with friends could be considered, or before requests for trips to the movies or other hangouts would be approved. He would have lost count of the sentences, except he marked them, as a prisoners mark notches on the wall, hoping that one day he would reach the magic number that would release him from the punishment. The sentences now numbered over 500,000, a number he realized was almost impossible, as every minor infraction merited even more.

Through the snow of winter he trudged the same two mile hike, relieved only on the days when his father was not working, when he would have to walk two miles the other way and repeat the drill at home. It was a desperate existence, to be sure; television, music, even his beloved theater were off limits as long as those damn sentences hung over his head.

Some quarter of a million sentences ago, he had decided that he could sneak in a few "missed" numbers, but his stepmom perused and counted, and that little escapade cost him an extra 100,000.

He finally made it to the restaurant, and was directed to his usual back booth. Homework was first, of course, but as soon as homework was finished, it was back to those sentences, which danced in his mind as he slept and preoccupied him even as he went about his daily school tasks.

He was allowed only water as he sat in his booth, watching customers come and go and eat huge, luscious pizzas and salads. Listening to the strains of the jukebox gave him some connection with the real world, but for the moment, he was consigned only to being an observer, lest his father poke around and catch him not being attentive to the gawdawful sentences, and he receive several thousand more.

Who knows where this monotony would have ended were it not for the kindness of his coworkers, who conspired to ensure he got food, sodas, and occasional conversation as he sat back there, occupying his father during that time so that the punishment didn't increase. The coworkers who didn't approve of what he was doing, but nevertheless were dependent on a job in recession ridden Oklahoma.

The night would eventually end, and the routine begin again the following day. The routine would have brought nothing but painful memories were it not for certain acts of kindness.