December 1989: Phil Collins' "Another Day in Paradise" was #1 on the charts in America, Chile had just held its first free election in 16 years and Wallace and Rosa Freitas were drunkenly celebrating their first Christmas together as a married couple in the tiny apartment they shared on San Miguel, an island in the Azores region of Portugal. For 10 years, the family stayed in that same apartment. His father was always gone in the morning before Wally got up for school, working long hours as a fisherman. A profession, it had already been decided, that Wally would also work in once he was old enough. But things changed before he would have a chance to protest. More on that soon. Wally's mother worked from home, doing odd jobs that ranged from hemming pants to watching the other children in the area. Her pay was never much, but she always set aside some of it to give to her son for allowance. A secret they share to this day.

A month before Wally's 10th birthday, his father came home in the middle of the day. Which was unusual in itself, but add to that the fact that the normally docile man was shouting and panicked; Wally knew something was terribly wrong. In the weeks leading up to this, the older man had been working on a plan with his partner that would help expand their business, incorporate more boats and allow them to increase their hauls. As it turned out, the money Wally Freitas Sr. had put toward this effort was now lining the pockets of the man who had double-crossed him. Furious, broke and humiliated, he thought he had no other option but to move his family from the only place they'd ever identified as home halfway across the globe for a fresh start.

Enter: Raleigh, North Carolina. For a long time, life wasn't easy for any of them, but they believed that as long as they had each other, things would be okay. While they got on their feet, they had to borrow money from people they barely knew, people from church who had heard their story and simply wanted to help. They would bounce around from home to home, staying with these same people, sometimes having to resort to shelters when there wasn't any room for them elsewhere. For Wally, the hardest part of all this was the language barrier. His parents had never learned English and because of that, didn't see a reason for him to either, but now that they lived in the United States, it had proven to be a mistake. All he wanted to do was make friends and do well in school, but without knowing the language, he thought it was impossible. This was when he started his life of crime. Taking books from the library and not returning them, spending hours upon hours trying to phonetically teach himself the words that were so foreign to him. One woman they'd been staying with noticed his struggle and tried to help him with the books, correcting him as he read aloud and helping him with the tougher words. She also bought him a portable CD player and gave him a few CDs. Garth Brooks, Elvis Presley, Neil Diamond... if they had a greatest hits album, she shared it with him. What she didn't know was that she'd created a monster. Being exposed to all this different type of music had turned something on him that he knew would never be shut off and, once again, he developed a case of sticky fingers, pickpocketing a compact disc whenever he had the chance. While it was one way to help with his learning of the language, it was also helping him find something he had never experienced before -- Passion. A love for something that he didn't quite understand, but still wanted to learn everything about and be as much a part of it as he could. He "borrowed" a guitar from the church and started teaching himself how to play it by ear. He longed to play the piano, but that proved to be a little harder to slip under your jacket and walk out with. Music had infected him and he didn't want to find the cure.

By the time he was 12, Wally's family finally had an apartment of their own and his father had just bought a restaurant. He would handle things in the kitchen and his wife would take care of the front of the house. The reason their marriage worked so well was because they'd always had a great sense of teamwork and it only served to make this venture a success. It wasn't long before they were getting reviews in the paper and being put on hidden gem lists on Food Network programming. His parents may have found a way to circumvent speaking English, but Wally didn't think that approach would work for him. His skills had improved in the past two years, but he knew he still had a lot to learn and was embarrassed by his thick accent. Now that their lives had made a turn for the better, Wally had discovered the joys of the half hour sitcom and dubbed them his bible. Joey Tribbiani taught him everything he needed to know about flirting, Bernie Mac let him know it was okay to talk to an invisible audience and George Lopez gave him hope that maybe, one day, he too could have his own show. From there, he started watching as much TV as possible, embracing all the lessons he could and marveling at the way any situation could be resolved with a punchline or by sleeping with the neighbor.

Through the years, Wally continued to learn how to adapt. In high school, he flourished in drama, finding solace in the way he could make other people's words his own and still find a connection with those around him. He wasn't part of the popular crowd by any stretch of the imagination, but he also wasn't being shaken down for his fruit cup in the lunch room. Middle ground in a place full of people he'd most likely never see again was just fine with him. He wasn't against socializing, but he spent the majority of his "glory years" focused on his studies (with a little prodding from Dad, of course). This meant he spent a significant amount of time utilizing the internet. Eventually, he'd get bored with citing sources and his pointer finger would raise a white flag in surrender to all the left-clicking, so he found himself venturing into chat rooms. Within one of these rooms, he started talking to a girl. As time went on, they talked more and more and it wasn't long until he felt himself developing feelings for her, feelings he had to deal with on his own because, at the time, it wasn't the sort of thing you could mention in casual conversation. By the end of his high school career, Wally had lost all common sense and they mutually decided to apply to colleges near where the other person lived. If one of them got in, they were meant to be. If they didn't, then maybe it was time to let go. As fate would have it, they both got accepted to the University of North Carolina. As for the girl? She broke up with him a week after classes had started.

A slightly more withdrawn Wally emerged from the ordeal, but he's made the most of these past few years in yet another foreign land. His course load is geared toward a Bachelor's in Communications Studies and, ultimately, he has his sights set on one day attending North Carolina Justice Academy, but for now he's content protecting the law one ink tag at a time in his security job at University Mall. As far as he's concerned, life isn't so bad. There are always new songs to hear and more shows to watch, which may seem like simple things to relish, but if the little things can't make you happy, what will? Besides, things could always be worse. He could've wound up in Jersey.

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