Breakthrough (9 page)

How could this have happened?

Only now was I hearing the full story. The diagnosis had come too late. Way too late. By the time he received the news that he was sick, the cancer had already spread. That meant it was too late for surgery to remove the tumors. At that point, everyone knew it would be only a matter of time. Everyone but me, that is.

“Maybe if we had found it earlier.” That's what the doctors all said. Now the cancer had taken him. He was gone.

I sat down on my bed and tried to make sense of it all.

Why did this happen?

What am I going to do now?

Why do all these awful things keep happening to me?

It felt like there was nothing firm in my life to hold on to anymore, nothing stable to help me regain my balance. Everything was shifting too fast.

Worse than thinking about all the happy memories I had of Uncle Ted was the thought of all the future moments that the cancer had robbed from me. Now our last moments together, at least in this life, would be spent at his funeral.

When the day came for his service, I was emotionally empty. I didn't cry. I sat there, in a fog, as friends and family took turns saying great things about how bravely he had fought and telling funny stories about him. I was no longer in control of my own body. It was like I was watching from afar as a tiny Jack Andraka walked the line of pews to the casket. On the hour-long car ride home, I couldn't remember a single thing anyone had said. I blankly stared out the window, wondering when I was going to finally wake up from this never-ending nightmare.

I began feeling again the minute I stepped back into my school. A few days after Uncle Ted passed, I was sitting in class when my teacher instructed us to read about this church where the congregants travel around to different parts of the country and stand outside to protest at the funerals of gay people. They hold up these
hateful signs spewing venom that the dead gay person is in hell and basically try to do whatever they can to disturb those who are mourning the loss of their loved one.

I kept staring at the words on the page, reading them and rereading them. It didn't make sense.

How could someone . . .

Why would . . .

What the . . .

If you've never felt depression, it's hard to explain. It was as if a massive blanket of hopelessness had draped over me. It was heavy, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't shake it off. In a way, I was so depressed that I didn't even want to shake it off and be happy again.

The problem was not just the issues I had faced—the problem was me. I was a hopeless human being, and I couldn't imagine ever arriving at a place where things were better. I wasn't even sure I knew who I was anymore.

The loss of Uncle Ted. The haters. The rejection. Having to hide my sexuality for so long, even the process of coming out, it was all too much for me to handle. I felt like I had exhausted every option. That was it. I was done.

I asked for a pass to the bathroom, walked out of class, and locked the door to the stall. I wanted to hurt myself. I didn't have a knife or anything sharp around me, so I broke off a piece of my
pencil and began jabbing the sharp end into my wrists. Again and again. I challenged myself to go farther and farther. To cut deeper and deeper. I wanted to feel more pain. I wanted to see more blood.

I was daring myself to end it. I always was a dare guy. And now I was daring myself to end it all.

The thought of death didn't scare me. Death felt like a relief. If I cut enough, it would all go away. That's really all I wanted.

Everything was becoming a blur. I was in a weird state between numbness and autopilot.

Eventually, I realized I wasn't going to be able to kill myself. The broken pencil wasn't sharp enough. I walked out of the bathroom. Logan and another friend in the hallway saw the bloody marks on my wrists and went straight to the guidance office. A moment later, I was surrounded by counselors.

Next thing I remember, my parents were there at school. After that, it all goes dark.

After my botched suicide attempt, the school informed my parents that I wouldn't be admitted back until I got some professional help. My parents were equal parts confused and horrified. They were determined to do everything in their power to help pull me out of this abyss.

They found a local LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) meeting place. They thought it would help if I could talk to other teens who had shared similar experiences, but when I arrived, I was the only teen there. What happened next was a lot of me talking to some random old dude who didn't know me or anything about my deeply personal problems. It's hard to have any kind of healing when you feel awkward and uncomfortable.

Truthfully, I was just sick of talking about it. I wasn't even sure
what to say anymore.

What would Uncle Ted say?

He had fought so hard for those extra moments that I was ready to just throw away. If he were sitting next to me today, I thought, he'd begin by asking me about my next project.

More than anything, I really wanted to get back to what I loved—science. There was another science fair coming up, and I had been working on a new idea.

Drawing on my seventh-grade project, I had started on a new one that investigated the effects of metal oxide on certain forms of marine life. This is important because metal oxide is highly toxic and is found in everyday household items like suntan lotion, which often ends up being flushed down our shower drains and into our water supply. I specifically studied its effects on a kind of freshwater plankton called Daphnia magna and the marine bacteria Vibrio fischeri. My results showed that metal oxide behaves differently in marine and freshwater environments. The more we understand about how it interacts with the surrounding environment, the easier it will be to prevent more damage.

But would I even be able to compete? Would I just walk around the rest of my life a damaged head case always in need of attention? As had become the case with seemingly every question, I just didn't know. One thing I did know was that if I wasn't able to rid myself of this heavy blanket of depression, that would mean no more science
fairs, no more creek hopping, no more navigating rapids. Nothing.

It wasn't just science that I wanted to get back to. It felt like forever since I'd been on a kayak or white-water rafting. There were so many rivers I still wanted to explore. I had always wanted to kayak the Grand Canyon. Would I ever be able to do that?

Then, out of the blue, my brother began to come around. Luke's favorite lacrosse coach had overheard him making some snide remark about my sexuality and pulled him aside to tell him a personal story about his own experience in college when he learned that his roommate was gay. At first he had a lot of the same thoughts that were probably going through my brother's head—What would people think about him if someone so close to him was gay? How should he act? But the more time the coach spent with his roommate, the more he began to see how, no matter what he may have thought of his sexuality, first and foremost, his roommate was a human being. And a really cool one at that. The coach told my brother that the two became lifelong friends.

After the heart-to-heart with his coach, my brother slowly began to accept me again. He went back to harassing me like he did before he found out I was gay. Oddly, that went a long way to making me feel normal again.

Fortunately, I was allowed to enter the science fair. Thank goodness, or I wouldn't have graduated and would have been forced to repeat eighth grade. That was something I wanted to avoid at all
costs. My project, called “A Comparative Study of the Toxicity of Metal Oxides on Vibrio fischeri and Daphnia magna,” won first place. It was the third year in a row that I'd finished first overall. It was a huge accomplishment, and I should have been beaming. On the outside, I managed to turn on the smiles. At this point, I had become an expert at faking the emotions people expected me to feel.

I muscled through the last few days of eighth grade and couldn't have been more relieved to walk out of school on the last day. I had no plans to go back.

The start of summer vacation meant math camp. I didn't know what to expect this time. I still had a bad taste lingering in my mouth from my coming-out-to-Anthony debacle after seventh grade. Still, I hoped for the best. Over the past two years, I had seen my two best friends move away, been shunned and humiliated by my classmates, come out of the closet, attempted suicide, and lost one of the people I felt closest to in the whole world. I figured eventually things had to get better because I didn't see how they could get much worse.

This year's camp was being held in Colorado again, where I had had such a great experience after sixth grade. I took this as a good sign. On the first day of camp I met a counselor named Jim. He was smart and I liked the light, easy way that he spoke. Jim didn't seem to have a care in the world. The first weekend of camp, we went on a field trip, and on the bus ride home, I overheard someone mention
that Jim was gay. I couldn't believe it. Unlike me, Jim seemed so well adjusted and devoid of any internal chaos. How did he do it? I wanted to learn more. As soon as I got back to my room, I wrote a two-page letter spilling my heart out. I told him about my struggles. About hiding my sexuality. About Anthony. About that day in the bathroom with the pencil. When I was sure no one was looking, I quietly walked to his cabin and slipped the letter under his door.

A few days later, he pulled me aside.

“I got your letter,” he said, looking concerned. “Let's talk.”

Jim told me his story. He had fought many of the same battles that I had, and he shared his experiences in coming out to his friends and family and overcoming the hatred people felt toward him. Jim was the first person who understood, intimately and personally, what I had been through. But more important than sharing the story of his past, Jim shared with me his hopes for the future. When I looked at Jim, I thought to myself that I, too, could have that kind of future, and more important, that I deserved it.

“Listen, Jack,” he said. “You are a smart kid. In the end, it is all going to work out.” Jim was the kind of guy who could explain complex math problems in simple language and remain calm in a sea of crazy teenagers. When he said that things would work out for me, I believed him. The two of us talked late into the night.

The last weeks of camp went by too quickly. On our final day, a group of campers and I decided we needed one last adventure. We
piled into a car and drove up to Pikes Peak. I didn't have the stomach to look down as the car climbed higher and higher. It was so high that even in the dead of summer, the road was coated with ice and snow. Once we arrived at the top of the 14,115-foot mountain, we jumped out of the car and took positions behind the rocks and trees and started a massive snowball fight. When we were fully drenched with slush and hoarse from screaming and laughing, we retreated to a nearby doughnut shop. We sat, dripping, in one of the booths to dry off while we drank hot chocolate and ate doughnuts. Sitting with my friends, I could see down to the surrounding peaks out the window. For the first time in a while, life felt easy.

That night was filled with long good-byes to all the new friends I had made. Before leaving for the airport, Jim approached me. He had one more piece of advice.

“You have heard a lot about my story and how I got through it,” he said. “But Jack, now this is your story. We all have our own paths, but the only one who can decide where it goes from here is you.”

Talking to Jim had helped me fully understand that there wasn't anything about me as a person that needed to change. I was done with pretending to be something I wasn't to make other people like me. In accepting that there really was nothing wrong with me, I could deal with the haters in a whole new light. I could choose to ignore them.

I flashed back to the day when I scanned the internet for a
solution. Ignoring the haters was part of the advice I had read, but I hadn't been able to implement it. With the state of mind I was in then, Alan Turing himself, the father of theoretical computer science (and one of my favorite scientists), could have risen from the dead to give me advice and I'm not sure I would have known how to take it.

See, ignoring the haters was the easy part of the solution. The hard part was first refusing to allow my self-perception to be defined by others. Refusing, in other words, to believe that I deserved to be treated differently because I am gay.

Sometimes I still struggle. There are awkward moments, especially at family get-togethers. Some of my extended family have religious views that make them intolerant of my sexuality. To be honest, it's not something we talk about. It's one of those things—I know where they stand and they know who I am. Because we have respect and genuine affection for each other, we leave it at that. For now, that's fine for me.