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the band and with eighteen-year-old Attleboro guitarist Joe Rando in particular. Hundreds of friends and neighbors showed up to enjoy the night. The next sibling after Coleen in the family, fourteen-year-old John Fanning, passed a hat and collected thousands of dollars to pay for the bash, his first entrepreneurial experience.

The band became part of the Fannings' social circle, and in time Coleen began dating Rando, who was smart, good-looking, and from a wealthier family. A couple of years later, after Coleen told Rando that she was pregnant, their romance ended. She kept the baby, and the young Shawn Fanning joined the already-overstuffed household in 1980, before it moved to nearby Brockton.

The first few years “were hell,” according to Coleen, a small, freckled, blue-eyed woman who laughs a lot and speaks with a pronounced Boston accent. She moved from one tough area to another, then married an ex-Marine and truck driver named Raymond Verrier. The couple had four more children, and it wasn’t the happiest of homes. “Money was always a pretty big issue,” Shawn said. “There was a lot of tension around that.”

They lived near Brockton’s projects for a time, and Coleen could see her already-shy son withdrawing from what he saw happening around him. “He went inside himself real deep and said, ‘I want to get out of this.’ Even though it meant losing him a little bit, it’s what I wanted for him,” said Coleen, who was working then as a nurse’s aide. During a split between the Verriers, when Shawn was about twelve, he and his siblings had to move for several months into a foster home until the couple reconciled. Always a strong student, Shawn tried to escape by concentrating on school and by playing guitar, basketball, and baseball. When the family was through the worst of the hardship, the Verriers moved to the small middle-class town of Harwich Port, on the elbow of Cape Cod. The new house was nice enough, if still crowded, and the neighborhood was full of pine trees and songbirds.

As Shawn kept playing sports, his mother encouraged him, thinking the whole time about scholarships to college. Shawn was especially strong at baseball, even though fear gripped him at each trip to the plate. He batted over .650 one year at Harwich High School, a small school with some very good teachers. As Shawn grew, Coleen wanted to give him more than she had had, more than she could give him directly. “We don’t

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