When kids are asked what they want to be when they grow up, it's safe to say the teachers hear a lot of repeats. Doctors, policemen, firefighters, teachers, baseball players, and famous are probably the most often spouted with the occasional weird kid that throws out the word dentist because maybe his dad is one or maybe he just likes the looks of dread and fear he gets from response in the other children. Oliver Cobb was one who liked to be the reason behind such looks but it was with a certain earnest that he had taken his paper at seven years old and simply written, 'not here.'

It didn't help that Oliver's dad spent as much time as possible away from their home that he could. He'd claim long hours at the garage but come home with his clothes smelling a combination of beer and cigarette smoke that distinctly meant bar. Which was better than when he didn't come home along. Those days the hours meant weekends and he'd saunter in on a Tuesday with pizza and a smile as if he had just left that morning. With his mom genuinely working overnights at the hospital and his dad eager to skip out on as many parenting duties as possible, Oliver and Janie were left very much to raise themselves--something that Janie proved to do well with and Oliver not so much. Janie became independent in ways most children weren't. She was reliable and responsible and, sure, she could perfectly forge her parents' signatures but it was a talent saved for permission slips and PTA notices. Oliver floundered. There was no one to tell him what to do or when and he took it as an opportunity to not do anything. While Janie mastered the art of cooking dinner and wrestling their broken washing machine into submission, Oliver learned the art of skipping school. Things only got worse when one day Victor Cobb left and didn't come back with a pizza. And while it wasn't entirely unexpected, it still strained the small family as they struggled with trying to ensure ends continued to meet. Lorna had to pull even longer hours and suddenly, at only 13, Janie was expected to run the household. Oliver, being Oliver, got off easily enough. He was expected to help Janie around the house (though he was strictly forbidden from cooking after he got a little to eager with the idea of holy shit there's fire in the stove top) and do his schoolwork, both of which he did little of, but mostly he was just told to stay out of the way and not make things harder than they were.

Only it turned out that Oliver was really good at making things harder than they were. Some of it was his fault, like deciding playing video games was more important than tomorrow's math test or oversleeping because he accidentally set his alarm for 7 PM instead of AM (okay, well, the first time was by accident anyway, after that it would have been a shame if he didn't use such a perfectly legitimate 'mistake' as an excuse more often). Others, however, weren't. He was still just a little kid with too much energy that never really grasped how to focus on a task at hand. He began to fight with Janie constantly, the older child resenting her younger brother for dodging so much responsibility and often screwing up the few tasks she delegated to him and Oliver arguing back that Janie didn't have to do anything she just did so because she was a prissy suck-up. Lorna wasn't around much to mediate and when she did come home the two simply took to arguing through the hushed whispers they'd heard between their parents before them.

Getting older only made things harder and by the time that Oliver hit high school and was long past the acceptable age of being excused from responsibility, he still shucked it. He skipped school and spent as many nights out at friends' houses as he could. Desperate not only to escape the work he was supposed to be doing but the growing disappointment he felt radiating off of his mother and sister. He found himself getting intro trouble constantly, falling into the wrong crowd and then pushing them away to fall into a worse crowd. Friends were a constant turn over in his life as Oliver found it best to never stop moving. It's when you stop moving that you get comfortable and it's when you expect things to stay the same that they all go to shit.