Breakthrough (7 page)

After the music class incident, my identity and reputation were officially etched in stone. I was on the Not Cool list, and there was simply nothing I could do to change that. And it wasn't just the students who were against me. Sometimes the teachers and staff joined the chorus of haters. A lot of them were deeply religious, and their worldviews didn't square with my identity. To a lot of them, being gay was wrong and immoral. That meant that the people I was supposed to look up to as authority figures had rejected who I was. They believed that I,
as a person
, was wrong and immoral.

One day when I had gotten something wrong in class, a teacher blurted out, “What are you? Gay?”

It was just four words, but it crushed me.

Is there something wrong with being gay?

Is there something wrong with me?

If there was a hell, I reasoned, it probably looked a lot like my middle school.

When seventh grade finally came to an end, I felt like letting out one giant exhale.

This year, more than any other, I was looking forward to going crabbing with Uncle Ted.

After we had dropped our traps and drifted out far enough into the water, he asked me about school.

“It's been a little rough,” I said, in a comment that could be nominated for the understatement of the year.

I could tell he knew it was more than that.

“Jack, just remember all the things you have to look forward to,” he said.

“Middle school can be a rough time, but things will get better in high school. You're going to do great things one day,” he said. “I just know it.”

The summer before eighth grade also meant my return to math camp. After the wonderful time I'd had the summer before, I couldn't wait to hop on the plane and get as far away from Crownsville as possible. I was looking forward to being myself again.

This year's camp was held in Wyoming, and during the first week, I met a boy named Anthony. He was smart and fun, and he had the same interests that I did. We quickly became great friends, but by the second week of camp, my feelings for him had grown into
the more-than-friend territory. I liked him. I was getting the vibe that he liked me too. There was just something about the way he looked at me.

Never had I so enjoyed working on math problems with a partner. We laughed and talked as we raced through the quickest ways to solve problems. There were also these moments, like the one night when we were sitting together on the sofa watching the World Cup, and I could feel that tension building up in the pit of my stomach. I wanted so badly to tell him how I felt. He was accepting and kind, I told myself. It would be safe to be my true self around him.

“Anthony?” I said.

“Yeah?”

Every time I tried, I just couldn't gather my nerves. I was afraid talking about it would mess things up.

“Oh, nothing.”

As time went on, I felt an increasing pressure to be honest with him about my feelings. I knew that after math camp was over, there was a chance I'd never see him again. What if my cowardice was jeopardizing what could be the greatest relationship ever?

Finally, on the very last day, I decided—
Screw it, I got this
. The whole camp was playing capture the flag. We were running together when I said, “Stop, there is something I need to tell you.”

“What?”

I wanted to tell him everything I had been feeling over the past
month. I wanted to be open about who I was, but I couldn't get it out. As the silence grew uncomfortably longer, he began to give me this confused look.

“Yeah?” he said, prompting me to speak.

I knew it was now or never.

“I'm gay,” I said.

He looked frozen. Now that I had gotten that out of the way, past the point of no return, I went for the kill.

“And I think you are pretty cute.”

“Okay,” he said. He took a step back. Then he turned around and ran in the other direction as fast as he could. I crouched down on the ground and covered my face with my hands.

He never spoke to me again.

I spent the flight home bawling my eyes out. No matter what I tried, nothing seemed to work. I began fearing that I had become that kid who spent time in his basement experimenting because there was no one who wanted to be his friend.

After returning home from math camp, I could feel the pressure building. I didn't want to see anyone. I didn't want to go anywhere. I just wanted to stay in my room.

One day, I heard my mom talking on the phone downstairs, and I decided to sit down in the stairwell to eavesdrop on her end of the call. I couldn't hear much, but I could hear enough to know it was a serious conversation. It was like the barometric pressure had spiked and the air in the room felt all heavy.

It didn't take long before I realized that my mom was talking to someone about my uncle Ted.

He was sick. It was cancer.

Uncle Ted? Cancer?

I took a second to digest the information and thought about what it all meant.

The conclusion I came to was that there was no reason to get emotional or panic.

I didn't know a lot about cancer, but I knew enough to feel sorry for Uncle Ted because he was going to have to go through all kinds of awful treatments, but there was another part of me that kind of shrugged it off.

Lots of people get cancer now
, I told myself.
They usually do fine. And this is Uncle Ted! Of course he will do fine!

After hearing the click of my mom hanging up the phone, I casually walked downstairs and asked her who was on the phone.

“Jack, let's go on a walk,” she said.

As we began to walk down the trails by my house, she started opening up. “It's Uncle Ted. He is very sick.” She explained that he had pancreatic cancer.

“Is he going to be okay?” I asked.

She hesitated. Her eyes looked strange, as if it was taking a great amount of effort to project calm.

“Uncle Ted has great doctors who are going to do everything they can to make him better,” she said.

After the walk, I went to my room, closed the door, buried my head under the covers, and cried. At the time I didn't know why. I told myself I was just tired. After all, I did have a lot on my plate.
Eighth grade was about to begin, and I was dreading going back to school.

I did get one piece of good news before starting school: I received a text from Logan letting me know that she had finally forgiven me for being a jerk to her back in the sixth grade. It wasn't as if we were best friends, but at least we were on friendly terms again. Given my current social standing, I was glad to have someone who didn't hate me.

The first thing you need to understand about my life as I began eighth grade is that there were really two Jacks. First, there was the Jack I let everyone else see. That Jack had life figured out. He was happy. He smiled, won science fairs, got A's in his classes, and even took the trash out without being asked.

That was the Jack I wanted to be. But really I was leading a double life. Beneath the wide smile and first-place trophies, there was another Jack who was profoundly unhappy, and who didn't have any idea what to do about it.

In looking for a solution, my mind kept pulling me back to the world of science. If I could discover the principles behind why I had become an outcast in my school, I was sure I could solve this problem and get my social life back on track. I evaluated the circumstances and came to the conclusion that it wasn't just the way I had treated Logan or my classmates' envy of my science awards. It was
deeper than that. It was who I
was
that was the problem.

What can I do?

How can I fit in?

Maybe, if I just kept ignoring the pain, I told myself, everything would magically get better. Note to readers: Be wary of any plan that is dependent on magic.

Making the decision to avoid confronting my feelings meant that all that pain inside me had no release. All those terrible feelings stayed bottled up, and with no outlet, the pressure kept building and building.

I knew that
something
had to change. And it needed to change desperately. I looked at the kids who were popular and how they behaved. Most of them weren't raising their hands all the time or blurting out questions. They got good grades but made a point not to show too much effort. I decided that the first thing I needed to shed was my reputation as someone who loved science and math.

What was cool? Apathy, or not caring about anything, was cool. So I became that guy.

Who cares? Not me. I cared about nothing! Or at least I tried. I
never
let on that I did science and math for fun.

What did I care about?

Video games!

Only nerds try hard in school, right? Let's all play World of Warcraft! And after we're done, let's play it again! Then again . . .
and again . . . and again. If my instructor threw out an equation, I pretended to be clueless. I refused to raise my hand or make eye contact. Whenever the teacher called on me, I shrugged.

However, after a few weeks went by, my classmates were still not accepting me. It became obvious that my apathetic act wasn't going to solve the problem. I decided it was time to reevaluate the situation and try to come up with a new solution.

I know the best way to gain acceptance
, I thought.
I'll join them!

Yes—I joined the chorus of haters.

I began by accepting their language and calling anything that was weird or uncool in the slightest way “gay.”

I wore my very best fake smile as I directed the words that had once hurt me so badly at the most susceptible kid I could find. He wasn't hard to find. His name was Andres, and he may have been the one kid in the school who had more trouble fitting in than I did.

Andres was a weird kid. During class he sat in the back of the room all by himself and made these really strange noises. Sometimes he picked his nose and examined it.

Adopting my new persona as a hater, I began my verbal assault by insulting his science fair projects, which was the worst kind of insult at my school.

“Nice project,” I said, in a way that let him know I really meant the opposite. Then I attacked his sexuality.

“Don't be gay!”

“That is totally gay!”

“That's gay, gay-gay-gay, GAY!”

I didn't know if he was actually gay or not. It didn't really matter. I felt like a sellout, not only to the kid I was making fun of, but to myself. Just when I thought I couldn't sink any lower, this ultimate act of self-rejection brought me down to a whole new level.

Inside, the negativity kept piling up and the pressure continued building in a vicious circle as my feelings of detachment and isolation began to grow more and more extreme. By midway through eighth grade, the transformation felt complete. That happy young Jack who spent his summers playing with sticks in the river with his family had completely vanished, replaced by a brooding and confused kid with his hoodie pulled up over his head and his hands tucked into his pockets. I could feel the world around me growing smaller and darker.

When I was alone, I cried. When I was in front of other people, I smiled, but I felt like crying—which is way worse than crying alone.

Meanwhile, I went to visit Uncle Ted during his first round of chemotherapy. I had brought a homemade get-well card. I didn't know what to say, and I handed it to him as an icebreaker.

“Thank you,” he said.

I sat down on the side of his hospital bed. He looked exactly the same. He still was a big, stocky guy with thinning brown hair just like the last time I had seen him. However, our conversations were now
different. Everything felt stilted. He tried to act normal, like nothing was wrong.

“What exactly is pancreatic cancer? When will you be better?”

He didn't want to talk about it and kept changing the subject back to me.

At that moment, nothing was working out for me in my life, and I didn't want to talk about it. Between the two of us, there was not much left to say.

As eighth grade continued, the taunting got worse for me. Every moment I spent in school, I felt as though I were under a microscope. I could never relax, and every time I spoke, it felt as though someone was waiting there to pounce with an insult.

Loser.

Freak.

Jack, you're never going to amount to anything. ANYTHING!

I decided to turn to the one resource that
never
let me down—the internet.

I entered
bullying
into a search engine and found over twenty-five million results.

Unfortunately, not many of them were helpful to me. A lot of the advice on a government-run website that bills itself as a guide for parents to help their children with bullying seemed ridiculously out of touch. There were tips like “Say ‘stop' directly and confidently. Stay near adults or groups of other kids.” Another site suggested, “Sooner
or later, the bully will probably get bored with trying to bother you.” There was also “If you're in a situation where you have to deal with a bully and you can't walk away with poise, use humor—it can throw the bully off guard.”