11 迷：真假采访（2）

What was your life like during 1998 and 1999?

I worked a lot. I rode BMX freestyle. Got called an Oreo. I had friends but the groups were small. Never really a big group of friends. I played lacrosse, was a bit of a jock. The group of people I hung out with were different from the group of people I was from. I went to concerts, like anything from Wu-Tang to Warped Tour. I was a bit of an outdoorsman, adventure seeker, fishing, camping, learned to ride a motorcycle. Went canoeing. By the time I graduated [Woodlawn] high school in 1998, I wasn’t exactly angry, but I did resent the school.

Why?

When Woodlawn put in the magnet thing, they took out all the vocational classes. Before you would just go down there for drafting, shop, and everyone would co-mingle, and all the students interacted. But when they put the magnet wing in, it was kinda like ‘these people were different from us.’ And they didn’t have to interact with us anymore. They didn’t have to go by us, except to come to lunch, and that was it. But their gym, lockers, parking, was down in the magnet wing. And I found that to be a bit of a slap in the face. Because I knew football had paid for all of that, but there were few football players down there. Football paid for everything at the school.

I didn’t resent the students, I resented the school for setting it up like that.

When was the first time you hung out with Adnan?

I met him while I was still at Woodlawn, so around 1998. Stephanie [Jay’s girlfriend] came to me and said ‘Adnan is pretty cool,’ plus he wanted to buy some weed. I said, ‘Isn’t he a paramedic?’ And she said, ‘Nah, he’s cool, plus he wants to buy.’

I didn’t trust him at first, since he wasn’t like the people I knew — pot smokers you know? I made him smoke one time, he got a little high, got a little weird. Didn’t say that much. He just seemed like someone who didn’t smoke weed too much. He had a professional job in high school, he was a paramedic or something [Ed. note: Adnan worked as an emergency medical technician, not a paramedic.]

From your perspective, what was Adnan’s reputation at Woodlawn?

He was a little pompous, a little arrogant, but he seemed really driven as far as his academics, but all those magnet students were. He was magnet. He seemed a little bit more uptight than the other Muslim kids that I knew. He seemed under a lot of pressure to please. I got the feeling the few times of interacting with Adnan that there was this enormous pressure from somewhere trying to make him into something he didn’t want to be.

When did you two get closer to each other?

There was never a real friendship. I only smoked with him two or three times. It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, we’re down in the park, come on down.’ We were friendly, we were cool. I might have sat next to him in a class, and joked or something. But he didn’t call me unless he needed something. It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, we’re going bowling, and let’s call it in before we go bowling and call the rest of our friends and call Jay.’ I don’t remember ever going to any kinds of functions or endeavors together, or any concerts or clubs together, you know.