Missing the Big Picture (8 page)

I was involved in a lot of activities my junior year. I joined the mock trial team because I wanted to be an attorney. Just like every other club in school, there was one day when we had to take a photo for the yearbook. The club advisor reminded me that the yearbook photo was going to be after school that day. I was nervous and found myself in a predicament. I was very insecure and didn’t want to be perceived as a geek. On the other hand, being an extreme people pleaser, I didn’t want to disappoint the advisor and not show up for the photo. So, my seventeen-year-old mind came up with a brilliant plan. I was going to show up for the photo, and before the light came on, run out of the photo before anybody noticed. However, I realized that I wasn’t faster than the speed of light, so when the flash went off, I went running out of the way. The photo that was used in the yearbook consisted of me running out of the frame with a bunch of studious Asian students looking at me. Instead of avoiding attention, that picture would catch anybody’s eye. Between work and clubs, I didn’t have much of a social life.

I had a little crush on Zoey. She was cute, and if I could get over the voice, I think it would have been good. As springtime rolled around, I decided to ask her to the junior prom. I was too scared to ask her in person, so I decided to look up her address in the phone book and mail her a card asking her to go to the prom. The card that I picked out was probably a poor choice, though. The front said, “I was thinking of you,” and the inside said, “I got gas.” Then I wrote, “Will you go to the prom with me?” I had no game when it came to dating. She mailed me a note back saying she didn’t want to go. I didn’t end up going to junior prom, and when Randy and other people asked, I would simply say, “I can’t make it to prom this year—I have a fencing tournament.” I never did fence; I just thought it was a good excuse.

My favorite class my junior year was a business class from a local community college called Organization and Management. The teacher, Mrs. Teague, was a Colonie High icon during the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. She was known for her laid-back persona and for being a grandmotherly figure. She always pronounced my name “Looseish” instead of “Lucas.” Once, when the class got off topic, one student said at twelve-thirty that marijuana was so easy to get, he could score some by two o’clock. Mrs. Teague responded, “Now, what if I wanted a hit man instead?” Mrs. Teague told every class a story about a girl who, instead of handing in her homework, handed in a suicide note. Mrs. Teague called the guidance counselor, who had the student’s phone number, and was able to talk to the student’s parents in time.

Sometimes we had to give class presentations. Once we had to pick an advertisement and talk about it in front of the class. My ad, which I picked out of a library newspaper five minutes before class started, was for Macy’s. However, the word “Macy’s” was cut out of the ad, so I didn’t know what it was for thirty seconds before I had to give a presentation about it to the class. Luckily, Mrs. Teague said, “Well, he doesn’t have to even say it—that’s an ad for Macy’s.” I was lucky enough to fake my way the rest of my presentation. Another time I remember I had to give a presentation and I noticed that I had a hair hanging from my chin. While I was listening to everybody else’s presentations, I vehemently started pulling at my chin hair, which I did successfully again thirty seconds before my presentation started.

My favorite part of the class was that it was very diverse, and everybody got along well. There were only fifteen students, three of whom were juniors. Another junior, Martin, was openly, flamboyantly gay—one of the few brave souls out at the time. In middle school, he received attention for tap dancing in spandex during talent shows. By the time he reached his junior year of high school, he was known for once saying to a gentleman outside of school, “If you got the length, I got the strength.” The other junior, Nora, was the class president and class heartthrob. She probably set a record for number of erections induced.

As my junior year of high school came to a close, I started to get more depressed. Colonie was a big, suburban high school that had a lot to offer, especially socially. There were always parties on the weekends that would give the students something to talk about on Monday. Occasionally, somebody would get naked or go topless or a scandalous hookup would happen. However, it was the type of school at which even if somebody did something embarrassing, the person with the worst reputation would be the person who was never invited to the cool party.

I was going to high school with kids who had spent all their lives feeling that the teenage years were supposed to be glamorous. Most kids my age had to fight with their parents to stay up later to watch
Beverly Hills 90210.
They were listening attentively when Zack Morris from
Saved by the Bell
said in one episode that high school is the best time of your life. From
Pretty in Pink
to
The Breakfast Club
to
Can’t Hardly Wait
to
American Pie
, tons of teen movies popped up every week promoting the idea that nothing was more important than having a tight-knit group of friends.

When I was a junior, I would listen to my classmates talk about parties and getting ready for the prom, basketball games, movies, and concerts. I, on the other hand, was working at McDonald’s and spending the rest of my free time masturbating into a sock.

In the spring of 2000, I told my mother how depressed I was and that I had thought about committing suicide. I didn’t have any plan, but I always felt inferior to people—always the outsider—and I was lonely. I was young, a very diligent worker, and got good grades, but I was only looking at the present moment. My mother was alarmed, but she never really took it seriously. She would ask me from time to time if I had suicidal thoughts, and I would lie and tell her I didn’t. The thought of going to a psychologist scared me. What if he or she would just lock me up in a psychiatric ward surrounded by other mentally ill individuals? So I just pretended that everything was okay. But it wasn’t.

During the summer between my junior and senior year, things got better when I started to look at colleges. I realized that there was going to be a day when I didn’t have to worry about who to sit with at lunch or what to wear. I was torn between attending Union College and SUNY Geneseo, both of which were very competitive to get into.

Since I wanted to get into a good college, and since I wanted to get a scholarship instead of paying an exorbitant amount of money for school, in my senior year I decided to take AP English, two math classes, AP Chemistry, college-level Spanish, college-level psychology and sociology, and college-level economics, for which I got credit from the University at Albany. I was able to skip Spanish 4 and rejoin my senior class thanks to Ms. Franklin, my Spanish teacher, who spent time after school preparing me for the Spanish 4 final exam. At the end of eleventh grade, I took both the Spanish 3 and 4 finals, which helped me skip a whole year’s worth of Spanish.

The first day of senior year I was one of the lucky students who drove to school. Just a month before school began, I bought a used 1994 Chevy Cavalier, for which I saved from my part-time job at McDonald’s. Since my mother didn’t drive me to school, I would often arrive late. This never happened before I started driving to school. My attitude toward my senior year was, “Let’s get this over with.” I was so ready to move on from high school.

On the first day of senior year, I decided to sit at a table where Eric and Dan were eating lunch. Although, I didn’t want to and I know I was not invited, there was nowhere else to sit. I sat at the end of the table, and they were taken aback but didn’t say anything. Eric had all this anger toward me, although I could never figure out why. He was always tormenting me and always trying to give off this masculine persona. Eric loved stirring up drama, like his life was a reality television show. What made it worse was that his group of friends, especially Dan, would agree with or do anything that Eric told them to do.

Even though I was sitting at their table, I tried to just focus on myself; but couldn’t, and was overhearing their conversations. I soon realized that not much changed between Eric and Dan. Their main topics of conversation were smoking pot and playing guitar, which were as important to Eric as breathing and having normal bowel movements are to a regular person. Eric bragged about his favorite English teacher and how he got her to say “boobies” in front of the entire class. That was a big accomplishment for him. When Eric was in eighth grade, he loved to brag that he got his Spanish teacher to say the word “balls.” Again, nothing had changed.

One new topic of conversation I noticed involved their friend Carmine. Carmine was different from Eric and Dan’s usual friends. Dan wasn’t studious at all and had to take chemistry three times before he passed it. Eric and Dan were taking tenth-grade math as seniors. Carmine, though, was taking AP classes and had already taken precalculus as a junior. Plus, he had a reputation for being a really nice guy.

Even though I didn’t like Eric and Dan, I was jealous of them and still wanted to be friends. These were my elementary and middle school friends, and now, as seniors in high school, they had a large group of friends and were admired by their peers. They liked to party and had very entertaining social lives. I was jealous, and it just made me angrier; I had become a very bitter and angry seventeen-year-old. I didn’t know why I couldn’t be friends with them. I wanted to be able to go to the parties they went to, have friends always greet me in the hallways, have girls and other friends smile and laugh with me when I first got to school.

In the beginning of senior year, I was thrilled when I was able to give my friend Melanie, on whom I had a crush, a ride home. I had known Melanie since middle school; we were in plays together, and our parents were friends and grew up together. She was a pretty girl, and I thought it was so cool to be able to drive her home. She was the first girl I gave a ride to in my car (and would be the only one for a while after). Of course, on my 1994 Chevy Cavalier, the mirrors and directional blinkers didn’t work. Soon after, I became friends with Melanie’s best friend, Taylor.

I had known Taylor through our church, Our Lady of Mercy. Taylor, Melanie, and I were all on the retreat team, which was a group of older students who provided religious education retreats to younger classmates. We used to always joke how our religious education instructor and director, Mrs. McNeil, looked like Austin Powers. When Mrs. McNeil yelled at me for being late to a retreat, Melanie and Taylor both started laughing hysterically and then gave me hugs immediately afterward. Once Eric saw that I was giving Melanie rides home, he began talking to her. Melanie had no interest in me romantically, and we were just friends.

During my senior year of high school, I quit working at McDonald’s and got a job at the Gap. I left McDonald’s because I didn’t like the smell of grease all over my clothes, and I wanted to work in a cleaner environment. During breaks at the Gap, I would often visit my friend Sam, who I knew from McDonald’s, at Soup Kitchens, which was a restaurant in the same mall. Beyond that, I didn’t have much time to socialize my senior year, given my work and my heavy course load. I did sometimes hang out with my cousins Alex, who was in the same grade as me, and Bob, who was nine years older than me. We would play basketball and go out to eat afterward. Bob never had any relationships and had tons of pornographic material, which I liked. Bob and Alex were closer friends than I was to them, but they would invite me to hang out.

In the beginning of my senior year, I also started having trouble during physical education class. Usually in the locker room, this huge jock would come over and whistle at me, as if I sexually aroused him. He would even bend over in front of me, so obviously he thought I was gay. Everybody thought he was just messing with me, since he was this handsome muscular athlete, but I was convinced that he liked men. Of course, even though this jock didn’t know me at all, he told all of his friends that I was hitting on him.

High school couldn’t get any worse at that point.

In high school, I’d seen boys tease other guys by calling them gay and winking at them or blowing kisses. Jake, this well-known track star, would purposefully block my way in class so that I would have to touch his ass to get by. Jake was a popular athlete, and girls liked him. Of course, nobody would think that
he
could possibly go both ways.

During the first part of my senior year in high school, I never took a lunch. Instead, I would spend it in the library studying or sometimes socializing with other people who had free periods then. I didn’t like the cafeteria and had no desire to go into the senior lounge. I remember I would come home from school starving.

Just before school started after Christmas break, I remembered receiving this strange instant message when I was on America Online. The sender pretended to be from Chicago, and I kept telling him that I was at Colonie. Soon another peer at school helped me figure out that it was Carmine, Eric and Dan’s friend. I couldn’t understand why he would instant message me, and he even joked that I didn’t know who he was. I guess it must have been Eric and Dan trying to play some joke on me.

Unfortunately, I enjoyed talking to Carmine and was desperate for a friend. When he wasn’t online, I would e-mail him—almost every day. He wouldn’t write back most times, but it became like having a blog, and for some reason I kept doing it. I knew that he would show Eric and Dan my e-mails and even occasionally post them in the senior lounge. I was always a quiet kid, so when I was talking about my classmates and sharing my different opinions, it sparked some curiosity.

Eric, like he usually did, would always find something to cause drama. In the e-mails, I would make fun of Eric and Dan, which definitely came back to bite me. One time, when I was leaving school, I heard Eric and his friends throw a water bottle down the stairs and yell, “Stop e-mailing him!” Another time, I was leaving the school parking lot and noticed somebody tailgating me. In my rearview mirror, I saw that it was Dan and thought Eric probably put him up to something as retaliation for trash-talking Eric in the e-mails. I guess I was a pioneer in cyber bullying. I was curious to see how far Dan would follow me or if he would get out of his vehicle, so I drove down side streets with no agenda, just to see if he would follow. Of course he did, and the only time I lost him was when I went through a drive-through at KFC.