In middle school there were these two bullies named Rob. I couldn’t remember which last name is which so think of them as Big Rob and Little Rob.

Big Rob was big, in every way except fat. Years later when we’d all gone through our growth spurts he was still big, at the time it was absurd.

Little Rob… never seen a guy that better fits the term “ratlike”. Not scrawny, just wiry.

Little Rob was, well, not the brains but the cunning. Big was the muscle. They made PE a real bitch. (Cuz God knows they weren’t in any of my honors classes.)

(That was the premise of one of my greatest triumphs though. Our teachers - a hilariously stereotypical drill instructor/volleyball butch pair - were running some athlete training program and just left everyone else on the other side of the gym with some balls to freestyle with.

This one kid Joey, who was scrawny, not a bully but a jerk, was going around pegging people with dodgeballs while they talked. Acting naturally, I maneuvered myself between him and a Rob - forget which one - and pretended to look somewhere else. When he released I hit the floor, the ball hit Rob, Rob hit Joey, the drill instructor came and hauled Rob off to the office. Good times.)

Anyway, when we went off to high school we were never in the same classes. Given the firm layout to class track (to, um, class track) correspondence, we were rarely in the same hall.

The last time I saw them was towards the end of senior year. Big Rob came out of nowhere, came up to me, and told me that he’d realized he had been a huge dick in middle school and he was sorry. I forgave him. Given his size I think he’d been held back a year, and knowing no one, having no social place, but being huge I can see how you’d end up that way. That’s how those guys happen.

Little Rob I last saw in the parking lot, surrounded by police cruisers. He’d dropped out years before, done a lot of drugs including meth the night before, and laid in wait for someone with a knife. Some gentle giant of a linebacker walking by saw him with the guy up against a car door, walked over, and dropped him with a single thump to the back of the neck.

Years later I wondered what happened to Little Rob. “Probably in trouble. No, probably in jail. Probably in trouble in jail.”

Looked him up on Google, he was the manager of a franchise restaurant. Only the picture was Big Rob, so I’d fucked up the names.

Looked him up and holy shit did I call it, 2 weeks earlier an article about how he was being investigated in connection with the overdose death of a fellow inmate in county.

Went back for Christmas, in a bar, told this story. Big laughs. Except one guy who calmly said that he’d known Little Rob back in elementary school and he remembered the guy always having burn marks on his arms where his stepdad had put his cigarettes out.

Which yeah. I could see that. That’s how those guys happen.

But still? Fuck those guys.