Missing the Big Picture (12 page)

The next Monday at school I heard one of the seniors say, “It’s a pretty boring party when the only thing that happens is Luke Donovan crashing it.”

On that Monday, things would turn around for me. That Wednesday, May 16, was the AP Chemistry exam. After the test, the class was over, so I knew that I would never hear Tyler’s voice again. One by one, by the end of that Friday, all of my voices were over except three: Carmine, Sam, and Eric.

I used to describe the voices as actual conversations in which I would think something and the voices would respond. I was with most of the voices that I heard for at least six weeks. Some would talk a lot to me; others would say hardly anything, but I could still feel their presence. It was also weird when I would see these kids in the halls because in my mind I’d just been talking to them. In math class, Gabe told me that he was in AP English, that he’d been over to my cousin Alex’s house, that Alex’s friend Dale would steal from Alex, that the two of them would get in physical altercations but still remain friends, that he had sex with one of the girls I had known from church, that how everybody was talking about it, and so on. It was the same with Tyler. I listened to his voice describe his girlfriend, another girl from church. One time I actually told Tyler to raise his hand and ask our chemistry teacher a question about weighted averages. I turned my seat forward and heard him do just that. I did tell Dr. Roberts this, but his explanation was that I was making that up as well. I would still hear Carmine’s voice when I was in the halls and at my house—sometimes by itself or sometimes with Eric’s voice. In government and physical education class, I would still hear Eric’s voice.

I still continued to have weekly psychiatric appointments. All of these appointments followed the same pattern. I acknowledged that I wanted the voices to end, but I would never believe that it wasn’t real. Then Dr. Roberts would reassure me that people talking in my mind wasn’t scientifically possible. During one session, Dr. Roberts asked, “Are you ever going to accept the scientific explanation that this is not happening?” I just shook my head. “No.”

I didn’t just talk about the voices during my time with Dr. Roberts. I talked about how much of an outsider I was at school. I said I knew my mother thought my loneliness in conjunction with my challenging course work caused my mental breakdown. I told Dr. Roberts that if I talked to anybody when I had class with Eric, Eric would then try to befriend that person and discourage him or her from talking to me. Eric and his friends did spread lots of rumors about me—that I was this creepy, quiet kid who had to be gay because I hadn’t had sex by the time I left high school. Unfortunately, a double standard between boys and girls exists in that category. Girls who remain virgins are often see as angelic and pure, while boys who remain virgins are often seen as “losers” or “creeps”; they aren’t real men and must be gay. There are countless teen movies about boys trying to lose their virginity just to please their peers.

One of the few things that helped me keep my sanity was going to the library with Randy and some of his friends during seventh period. We enjoyed talking about Ms. Franklin, our eccentric Spanish teacher, and Randy usually had some quirky anecdotes to share. Randy and I started to get closer, but once again, Eric began talking to Randy about me. Anybody else that Eric would try to discourage would usually tell me what Eric had said about me. Randy, on the other hand, wouldn’t come clean. One time when I saw the two of them socializing, I asked Randy what Eric had said. I knew it was a lie when Randy said they had been talking about music. Eric didn’t really like Randy to begin with.

It was the middle of May when I received my interim report card for the fourth quarter. For the first time in high school, I was actually failing math class, and the rest of my grades had dropped into the C range. Most of the teacher comments, which for the previous thirteen years of school were “pleasure to have in class,” were now “student appears distracted, inattentive.” They also pointed out my high level of absences. I was worried about what my mother was going to say when she saw my report card, as it had only been two months ago that I was admitted to SUNY Geneseo and making plans to go to college. My mother wasn’t too upset, though, and she helped me study so I could improve my grades by the end of the school year.

I didn’t like school to begin with as a senior, and all the mental drama I was going through made it even more difficult. During eleventh grade, I really enjoyed English and writing, but that changed when I got Ms. Carson as an English teacher senior year. Many of Ms. Carson’s students had mixed reviews about her. Most of her students either really liked her or couldn’t tolerate her. She definitely played favorites, and she loved students who had older siblings who were former students of hers. She also only taught advanced-placement and college-level English courses.

In my class, one of Ms. Carson’s favorites was a girl named Stacey—mainly because Stacey had an older sister, Jen, who was another one of Ms. Carson’s favorites. About once a week, Ms. Carson would spend the first three to five minutes of class asking Stacey about her sister and how Jen liked the college she was attending. Similarly, Erin, another one of Ms. Carson’s favorites, had an older sister attending college. Much time was spent discussing how Erin’s sister was adjusting to life at SUNY Albany. One time Ms. Carson asked Erin, “Is your sister going to transfer? Her grades and SAT scores are head and shoulders above what UAlbany requires.”

Ms. Carson showed a different persona to students she didn’t like when she saw them outside of class. Once she approached a former student in the library and told him that he was lucky he passed the final exam, thereby passing the course and avoiding summer school. Even though he did pass her class, Ms. Carson still had to come up to him in the library and yell at him. She had been teaching English for ten years at Colonie, and she didn’t want to teach Regents-level classes. If she did, she would complain to the administration.

In the beginning of one class, a girl named Jen told Ms. Carson that she had just finished touring Union College, where she was hoping to attend. One of most exclusive private schools in New York State, Union College was always very competitive. Ms. Carson walked up to Jen and bent down toward her face. “Well, that’s
if
you can get into Union,” she said. Jen didn’t attend Union College and went to a public university instead. In 2007, however, Jen ended up graduating with a master’s degree from Union College.

The most surprising point about Ms. Carson was what happened at the end of the year. Ms. Carson came to English class late one day because she was in a meeting in which her supervisor told her that she could only teach freshmen and sophomore English and was banned from teaching advanced-placement or college-level courses. As she told our class about what happened at the meeting, she started sobbing. I wasn’t sympathetic to Ms. Carson’s dilemma at all, though. If Ms. Carson didn’t want to teach courses that didn’t have honors students, why did she want to be an English teacher to begin with?

In response to the administration’s plan to bar Ms. Carson from teaching the accelerated-level classes, many of her students wrote letters of complaint to the board of education. In fact, some of the students were pressured into writing letters, just to make their friends who loved Ms. Carson happy.

The students’ attempts at keeping Ms. Carson as the advanced-placement teacher were unsuccessful. In the past Ms. Carson had taught non-advanced courses. Early in the school year, she talked about teaching regular eleventh-grade English and curled her lip in disgust. She often made fun of what the students were writing. Many English teachers complain that their students have vague and unclear theses. In response, many of Ms. Carson’s students wrote “My thesis is….” But Ms. Carson didn’t appreciate this and often mocked students who wrote that sentence. Ms. Carson, in my opinion, was one of the worst teachers at Colonie. She treated her students very unfairly; she loved her AP students who had older brothers and sisters who were also AP students, and at the same time she often refused to teach lower-level English and blamed the students themselves for their academic problems. Zoey, one of Ms. Carson’s students, wrote a letter to the board of education stating that Ms. Carson should only teach college-level English classes. Then she told her friends that the administration was making Ms. Carson “teach all the dumb kids.”

One of the biggest struggles that I’ve had to overcome during my life is to the tendency to prejudge or stereotype people. To avoid this, you must first ask, “Where do young children learn about stereotypes and labels?” The answer is in the schools. Every school has a reputation or a label, such as “special education” or “honors,” that goes along with each class. Students are separated by class averages, and while this might be the best way to group them, these classifications play a role in students’ perceptions of one another. When teachers like Ms. Carson only want to teach advanced-placement students, they create a decisive gap among classmates. If Ms. Carson didn’t want to teach average sophomore English students, why did she want to be a teacher? In the fall of 2001, amid all sorts of rumors, Ms. Carson didn’t return to the South Colonie School District. She later went to a nearby school district, where she taught mostly honors students.

In June, the voices in my mind began to clear up again. Occasionally, I would hear Eric’s and Carmine’s voices inside and outside of school. Our senior picnic was held on June 11, 2001. I was glad that six of the seven “mind-readers,” as I referred to them, were present, and I did not hear any of their voices. It wasn’t until later, when I was at home, that I heard Carmine’s voice. I remember saying to Carmine’s voice, “The picnic was fun.” Carmine’s voice responded, “I saw you there. You were just sitting there.”

I never talked to any of the boys in person about the voices I heard. The only person I talked to before I began to hear the voices was Sam, and I stopped talking to him after I began to hear his voice. I was even a little offended that he didn’t ask me to sign his yearbook. I still thought that the voices I heard were real, and I would get in fights over it with my psychiatrist and mother.

On June 20, 2001, two days before high school graduation, eight weeks since the infamous “hell week” when I began to hear voices at home as well as at school, Carmine’s voice suddenly disappeared at five o’clock. I remember it because I thought it was unusual that for eight weeks prior, five o’clock was when I heard Carmine’s voice outside of school. That would be the last time that I would hear any voice in my mind—at least for a while.

Despite all of the difficulties that I had at Colonie Central High School, I am proud of my alma mater and strongly believe that I made the right choice in attending public school. Academically, I did benefit because I entered college as a sophomore. In fact, on the first day of college I already had earned twenty-eight college credits from taking so many advanced-placement courses and courses offered through SUNY Albany and Hudson Valley Community College. If I had stayed at Saint John’s, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to earn so many college credits. I was able to graduate college a semester early, while still earning a double major. If I had stayed at Saint John’s, I wouldn’t have graduated early and would have had the added expense of another semester of school.

Socially, sure, there was difficulty. For a few years after high school, if I saw one Eric’s friends or somebody I didn’t like, I still felt awkward and angry. When I was twenty-six, a co-worker asked a former classmate if she knew me and apparently she laughed and said she thought I was strange. This girl was, of course, a friend of Eric’s. When I was twenty-seven, I started working with a former classmate who told my co-workers that she went to high school with me. When another coworker said, “Oh, you went to high school with Luke—that’s cool,” my former classmate rolled her eyes.

Everybody in high school assumed I hated Eric and his friends for all the drama that they caused. Looking past the adolescent immaturity, most of the people I graduated with were very bright and kind people, at least on the inside. It’s a shame that the immaturity and social climate of high school forbids more teenagers from becoming friends with one another.

As for the boys who I thought could read my mind, I never ran into any of them after high school—with the exception of Tyler and Eric. In 2004, I saw Tyler at my gym. The first time I saw him I ran, afraid his voice would come back. But it didn’t, and I was able to see him many times at the gym without feeling the strange sensation that we were communicating to each other telepathically.

I graduated on June 22, 2001. I saw Eric, Carmine, and all of my other enemies there. But that night, nothing bothered me. I was as high as a kite floating on cloud nine. When my name was called, instead of shaking hands with all of the school officials, I gave them all bear hugs. As my mother said, “He is so happy to get out of high school.” After the reception was over, the National Honor Society advisor asked where my white hood was; white hoods were worn by all of the NHS students. I wasn’t issued a hood by accident. My initial reaction was to get upset. Then, I thought to myself,
Why get upset? High school is over!

CHAPTER 5

C
OLLEGE—
T
HE
B
REAK

Anger makes you smaller, while forgiveness forces you to grow beyond what you were.

—Chérie Carter-Scott

O
n August 24, 2001, I said good-bye to Colonie, New York, and left to attend college at SUNY Geneseo. I didn’t know what to expect. When I look back at the times that I had at SUNY Geneseo, I think about the late, beautiful actress Farrah Fawcett. When television and movies reference the 1970s, such as
Boogie Nights
or VH1’s
I Love the 70s
, they always include the infamous poster of Farrah Fawcett in her bathing suit during her stint on
Charlie’s Angels.
However, Farrah was only on that show for a year. Yet pop culture would be incomplete without any mention of Farrah Fawcett in the 1970s. I would spend only a year and a half at SUNY Geneseo, but that year and a half was a big part of my life.