Is That Guy Kidding or What?

Over the following months, Scott's behavior began to take several turns for the bizarre. One memorable day saw him show up at school in his robe and pajamas. On another day, Scott inexplicably walked out of a third period class, saying he "needed to take a quick drive to clear his mind". He didn't realize where he was until he was approaching the outskirts of Milwaukee. His grades, once a solid B average, began to suffer.

Late at night, Scott would lock himself into his bedroom, flipping through his old school yearbooks. He kept stopping at the picture of one of his former best friends, a kid named Raymond Chen. Scott and Raymond were best friends for several years until they began to grow apart in the eighth grade. Scott fell in with the athletes after discovering his talent for basketball, while Raymond remained the nerdy bookworm who never seemed to get a grade lower than an A minus. Two years later, Raymond and his family moved to southern California, and he never even told Scott. After several nights of obsessively looking at yearbooks, and remembering Raymond, Scott would begin referring to himself as "Scott Raymond Chen". This new name kept flashing through Scott's mind at all times of the day. He would find himself signing homework assignments with that name, puzzling teachers. The kicker came when Scott was assigned to write a short story for his creative writing class. He contributed a rambling note saying that "Scott Alan Childers died that night", and how "Scott Raymond Chen came to replace me"...which earned him a few visits with school counselors.

Despite all of his personal demons, Scott did manage to graduate with the rest of his classmates. However, after seeing his athletic career end on such a violent note, and the subsequent academic nosedive he took, college was no longer an option. Before the riot in December, Scott would've taken any opportunity to play a fast game of one-on-one. Now he wanted nothing to do with basketball at all. Or college.

To the horror of his parents, Scott took all of the money that he had saved over the years, along with the trust fund set up by his parents for what they were hoping would be a four year stint at a major American university. Instead of blowing it on mindless consumerism, Scott moved out of the Childers residence into an oddly shaped, furnished apartment a few miles away. He didn't seem to care about or mind the spiral staircase that seemingly led to nowhere in the middle of the hallway connecting the living room to the kitchen. At least Scott could brag about being the first one from his class to move into his own place, at least a couple of months before whoever else was leaving for college.

On the morning of May 29th, 1995, Scott uttered the phrase that would become his trademark: "Loneliness can't be all bad. I'm just new to it. I bet this would be fun if I'd been an only child." It had flashed in his mind nearly a million times since the basketball debacle the previous winter, but in his despair, he couldn't help but say it out loud. After that, he finally started exploring the spiral staircase. Scott went everywhere and nowhere in those first few months, but he still felt empty and unfulfilled inside. He was still grappling with his own identity crisis, not truly understanding the reasons why he distanced himself from his family name.

The true "death" for Scott Alan Childers came less than two years later when he made the first of the thousands of sexual conquests of women. Feeling in control of himself for the first time since the riot, and having discovered his other true talent, Scott "officially" renamed himself Scott Raymond Chen. For the next ten years, Scott would insist that his pseudonym was his true name, and he would change the subject whenever someone asked him, or presented anything that suggested that he wasn't who he really said he was. Oddly enough, no one ever questioned Scott why he was clearly a Caucasian, but he had a Chinese surname.

But still, there was that nagging feeling in the back of his mind...

1. In conclusion...

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