Sean Valjean

My street is filled with hooligans. Most weekends, especially during the summer, a group of teenagers is out in the street drinking, smoking, fighting, and yelling at the top of their lungs. And the party usually goes on until the sun comes up around 4:30 or so. Two weekends ago, the shenanigans culminated in a chair being thrown through the back windscreen of our Peugeot. Tim and our good friend and neighbor John were in the living room at about 12:30 when the heard the glass smash. The next two hours were filled with police and different eyewitness accounts, all of them saying the culprit was Sean, the neighborhood troublemaker who lives across the street. This is the kid who decided to saw through the telephone wires on Friday night last summer, leaving the entire street without phone lines for all of Saturday. None of these witnesses were willing to talk to the police, since they’re all in trouble with the law themselves. Great.

Tim and I talked it over, and since we actually like Sean and would like to see him make something of himself, and since we also know that he has no money so asking for the £130 for the windscreen would be futile, we decided to confront him and offer him the chance to fess up and work off his debt in our back yard for three days in exchange for us not pursuing legal action. Sean agreed, and after a stern lecture from me on getting his act together, we decided that he would show up for work at 9:00 Tuesday morning. I had in my mind grand visions of this being just the thing Sean needed to get his life turned around. Three days of hard labor under the watchful but loving eyes of Tim and Greta Davies would turn this troubled teen into a bright young man ready to realize his potential.

Tuesday morning came with a note through our door saying he couldn’t make it because he had meetings all week with his parole officer. These meetings only lasted an hour or two in the middle of the day, but apparently he thought that was reason enough to not show up for duty. But he did pencil us in for all day Saturday and Sunday. Tim explained that we weren’t available Sunday and that he was okay to leave for his appointments in the middle of the day, so asked him to show up for work on Thursday. Sean agreed, but again on Thursday failed to turn up. Tim went and knocked on his door that afternoon and was told by his mother that Sean was ill in bed. I saw him Friday looking quite well and shouted over to ask if he was feeling better. Indeed he was. The sore throat that had kept him from leaving the house was miraculously fine on Friday. He assured me that he’d report for duty bright and early the next morning. But alas, no Sean. When Tim went to enquire that afternoon, Laura told him that Sean had been jumped the previous night. And sure enough, later that afternoon we saw Sean with a very bloodied nose and huge lump on his forehead. I didn’t bother to ask what he was doing out by himself at 12:30; just offered my sympathy and asked him to show up Tuesday instead. Tuesday brought another excuse—this time he was off to do neighborhood clean-up with other young parolees. This morning again brought a missed appointment because he was taken into the police station for questioning in a burglary. We’ve scheduled him for tomorrow morning. If he shows up I think I’ll fall over.

My hopes of transforming this boy are quickly waning, and I’m starting to wonder if we should have just let the police handle it. Apparently he’s never seen Les Miserables and doesn’t realize we’ve played the part of the bishop and he’s supposed to be Jean Valjean.