In 1987, I was a high-school sophomore, hanging out with friends, going to the movies, spending time with family, writing short stories, and pining for, getting, then changing my mind about a boy I'd had a crush on since junior high.

In 1987, Shannon Sharpe was a high-school freshman enduring horrific emotional and physical abuse at the hands of her father, Richard Sharpe, whose decades-long reign of terror ended one summer day last year, when he shot to death Shannon's mother, Karen, at her home in Wenham, Massachusetts, as Shannon's younger siblings slept nearby.

"It was like living with a terrorist," said Shannon in a Boston Globe story the day after her father's November murder conviction.

I was living the normal, angst-filled life of a teenager. Shannon was living with a terrorist. All the while we sat, side by side, as lab partners in our high-school biology class. And I never knew.

I remember little about my relationship -- or lack thereof -- with Shannon Sharpe. I can summon a fuzzy image of her face, and I have a vague recollection of where we sat in class, but everything else has been lost in the hazy blur of adolescence and young adulthood. But I do know this: Shannon and I were not friends. Maybe it was the year between us, or the established high-school social circles that leave little room for new friendship. Or perhaps, more simply, it was that I made no effort to engage her in anything more than classmate small talk. Whatever the reason, Shannon Sharpe was merely a girl in Mr. Nicol's biology class with whom I happened to share a laboratory table and, if memory serves correctly, the experience of slicing open the underbelly of a frog.

But hearing details of the tragedy that has been Shannon's life, and realizing that my own path once intersected with hers, however briefly, has given me pause. How many people do we meet in the course of our lives who are enduring a hell to which we'll never be privy, nor ever be able to assuage, simply because we never think to ask? Because we choose not to extend ourselves? I wonder, now, about others I've seen, or even met over the years: the little boy who wearily tagged along behind his mother at the supermarket, sniffling as she pulled fiercely on his wrist; the co-worker who for months on end wouldn't, or couldn't, make eye contact; the woman in the car next to mine at the stop light who just looked sad. Could I have done anything for any of these people? Called for help? Asked for a professional opinion? Simply said hello? Could I have done anything more than I did for Shannon?

It's hard to say. I know how caught up I get -- how caught up most of us get -- with daily routines, busy schedules, and the mundane details of living. We rush past the panhandler because we're late for work. We refuse to smile at the woman sitting across from us on the bus because she's a stranger. We don't make small talk with the cashier at the grocery store because there's a line of people building behind us. But for every person we choose -- consciously or otherwise -- to bar from our lives, what are we missing? Someone who could've been an acquaintance, a friend? Someone we simply could have helped? In high school, as Shannon Sharpe no doubt sat in class plagued by terrifying, all-too-fresh memories of abuse at the hands of her own father, I passed her the scalpel, passed the pop quiz, and went about my teenage life.

We're taught, as children, to mind our own business. But I wonder when we'll decide that old rules of propriety are not only outdated, but no longer polite. In an age when victims of domestic violence, perpetrators of that violence, and even international terrorists are living among us, how prudent is it, really, to mind no one's business but our own? Perhaps if I'd reached out, even a little, to Shannon, I could have done something to make her life more bearable. Maybe if those who knew Richard Sharpe dug just a little bit below the surface, they'd have exposed him for the criminal he was. And what about the terrorists in our midst? If we weren't so busy minding our own business, could we have stopped them, too?

Without the benefit of time travel, I'll never be able to return to my sophomore biology class, take my seat next to Shannon Sharpe, and ask her how she is. I won't be able to bring her to the high-school guidance counselor and urge her to divulge her family's painful secrets. I won't be a friend, a confidant, a support system, for a girl who surely needed all the help she could get. But I can do this:

I'm sorry, Shannon. For everything.

Tamara Wieder can be reached at twieder[a]phx.com..

Issue Date: December 21 - 27, 2001