Long before Ryan, my own brother once tied me with jump ropes to a boy named Timmy and forced us to kiss in the corner of our basement. Christopher and Timmy’s older sisters had married us, at five and six years old respectively, with all the accoutrements of modern-day weddings, including white mosquito netting over my face, before holding us hostage on our honeymoon. If this was love, and obviously it was, I have often wondered, how did we go about labeling other dalliances into the strange world of adult intimacy, such as the stripteases we young girls performed at our cottage, emerging from behind pleated closet doors that opened like spellbinding accordions?
Aloysius and his sisters also played imaginative and purportedly innocent games in which they experimented with physical closeness, one of which they called Ozone. Aloysius would toss a nubby green blanket up over their heads and wait patiently to devour the sister unlucky enough to be caught in the boggy fabric as it descended to the ground in an artichoke cloud. Sometimes his sisters called him Ali—the younger of two boys in a blended family of four, quiet and demure. Other times, they called him Wes, though it sounded more like Wish, as in I wish we had put an end to all this madness sooner.
I myself had referred Wes’s family to Ulrich Law Office, as I often did when friends or acquaintances got into trouble. I had known his mother, Annie, since childhood, when we attended church together. In spite of its robust population—sixty-six thousand—Oshkosh remained a small town. At stoplights, turning to stare at other drivers and passengers is customary. The likelihood is we know each other, or recognize a familiarity. I respond to every mention of a first name with “What is his (her) last name?” and therein begin to map the connections, at most three degrees of separation. We’re one big family tree, a reality every Oshkosh small business owner must acknowledge and overlook in order to remain viable.
Annie was melancholic but charming, softening tragic experiences into childlike and mildly unsettling whimsies like illustrations in a Maurice Sendak book. Dark-featured and somber with a port-wine birthmark on the bridge of her nose, Annie spoke in a sweet fairytale whisper, as if she possessed some spell to convert evil into gingerbread.
Having met Wes through Annie before knowing him in these criminal circumstances, I found him a bit odd but only in the way that acne-dotted, chubby boys with buzz cuts are all, for the most part, bumbling. He avoided eye contact with adults, slouched sitting or standing, a true master of social awkwardness, which would have explained his inept attempt to engage in romance when he put the moves on his sister’s friend during a sleepover—this being Annie’s version of events, based on which I asked Ryan to take the case State of Wisconsin v. Aloysius Jungwirth. Just as Annie knew how to candy-coat her own life story, a spoonful of sugar helped this medicine go down. According to their mom, Wes and Sabrina had been flirtatious for months, evidenced by exchanges on Facebook. When a weekend slumber party turned to drinking, Wes found himself emboldened to act on his attraction. Sneaking into his older sister’s bedroom once the girls were asleep, he sought out Sabrina, eager to test the waters of their coquetry, inept by daylight but hoping to possess a small dose of confidence by darkness. Standing by her bedside, he took a deep breath, and then he burrowed his hand underneath the covers, running his clumsy palm up her thigh and into the notch between her legs. What boy waits until a girl is asleep to practice his overtures? How on earth could she consent if she was not conscious? Wes considered neither of these questions, motivated only by his desires.
Waking from a sound sleep, Sabrina blinked into reality and instantly hissed at Wes, “What are you doing? Stop it.”
Like a cat burglar in a cartoon who fears his own shadow, not as confident as he would have liked, Wes ducked to the floor, crawled under the bed, and emerged on the other side. He escaped to his own bedroom and fell asleep, but by morning time, Sabrina had decided to tell her parents about Wes’s maneuver, and her parents quickly called the police. Within a few days, the DA’s office had charged Wes, on the brink of nineteen years old, with second- and third-degree sexual assault of a child. Sabrina was fifteen years old.
By now, Ryan had been practicing criminal law for almost four years, and he was feeling discouraged by all of the cases in which the supposedly secret world of teen romance had become a breeding ground for the ever-expanding Sex Offender Registry in Wisconsin. Several clients facing sexual assault charges were high-school boys risking consensual sex with their high-school girlfriends. Ryan and I might have qualified for such persecution ourselves, Ryan nearly three months older than me, born in a separate calendar year, but we never thought twice about our young sex lives. Losing our virginity was a rite of passage, a task we checked off our list, like most boys and girls we knew, before earning diplomas. Before reading the criminal complaint against Wes Jungwirth, Ryan believed defending him would require little to no sacrifice of his own professional integrity, as most likely, we guessed, this was a one-and-done transgression, a failure of couth and grace. Sabrina had every right to be outraged, and we applauded her courage in reporting the assault, but we also imagined Aloysius’s offense would be added to Ryan’s list of second-string crimes.
Regardless of where Ryan’s give-a-shit meter was pointing that spring, most of us who knew Wes’s mother, Annie,
