At sixteen years old, Leo Schofield felt like an outcast. He’d grown up in the housing projects of Fall River, Massachusetts, and he had the working-class New England accent to prove it. But as he reached his formative teenage years, his parents made the move south to Lakeland, Florida, dragging Leo down there with them.
Leo’s father had been searching for a better life. He wanted to get his family out of the projects, and after a couple of failed business ventures, the promises of the Sunshine State called. Leo had an aunt and a cousin who had already relocated to Florida, paving the way for the Schofields to join them there. The family settled into their new Lakeland home, in the Lazy Dazy Retreat Mobile Home Park off Highway 98, a rural twolane highway with stretches of commercial and residential development. Reluctantly, Leo enrolled at Lake Gibson Senior High School. Back in Massachusetts, he’d been just two years away from graduating with the friends and classmates he’d known his whole life. But now, in a new school and a new state, he felt like he was starting over.
Walking down the hallways of his new school wearing ripped-up jeans and a faded denim vest embellished with army pins, Leo found his rebellious personal aesthetic sneered at by the other students, in their cowboy boots and Florida Gators T-shirts. When his new classmates mockingly bellowed “Damn Yankee” in his direction, he wished his father had left him up north…