Missing the Big Picture by Donovan, Luke (great book club books txt) 📕

was rumored a Saint John’s student was expelled from the school after it was discovered that he had written pro–Ku Klux Klan propaganda and made racist drawings in his notebook. One of the smartest students in the class had an incarcerated parent; another student was expelled from his public school because he brought a gun to school one day.

It was very difficult for me to make friends at Saint John’s. From the beginning, I was an outsider. When we were at plebe training, the student in front of me was marching very slowly in an attempt to make others laugh. This irritated me because I had no room to march and the person behind me was stepping on the heels of my feet. I almost fell a couple of times. Finally, I had enough and tapped the student ahead of me to move up. Little did I know that soon after that, we would turn around and that class clown would now be in back of me. He was getting behind my face, actually talking directly in my ear, even trying to bark—not a good way to make friends on one of the first days of school.

For the first month or so, I continued to hang out with my same group of friends from public school. Toward the end of September, though, I started to have difficulty with them. As a joke, Evan, who I knew from middle school and who had become a close friend of Eric’s, one day started telling everyone that he was going to fight me. When he told Eric that it was a joke, Eric said he thought it would actually be a good idea for Evan to fight me.

I had never been in a fistfight. Eric was a friend of mine, but he liked to see me get upset. He never fully understood the ramifications of his actions on others. He would always call our friend Dan fat. Dan let him and still wanted to be friends with him.

Eric was very good at upsetting me. He would tell Evan personal information about me, specifically about my father. Evan would yell in the hallways, “Get a dad,” and he called my mother a whore—after which I punched him in his face. Evan and Eric would make fun of the way my mother looked, how I walked, that I tried to make friends at Saint John’s and went to a dance there, and that I got good grades.

Finally, after about six weeks of being picked on by people who I once considered very good friends, I decided that I would fight Evan and put an end to this. We actually walked to the woods behind the middle school that we had all attended, and I began the fight by punching Evan in his neck from behind. Then Evan knocked me to the ground and started to slap me before I begged him to stop—which he did. The people I once considered my closest friends, (Dan and Eric), just sat there and acted entertained. I ended up walking home by myself with my ripped jeans and later found out that they went to the mall to celebrate.

Three days later, Dan called and asked if I wanted to go to the corner store where we used to hang out. I was pleasantly surprised that he actually called me. Since I started going to private school, I would always have to initiate contact. Later, I learned that Dan actually told some people that he hung out with me because I would give him a dollar every time we saw each other.

So, I said that I would go to Dan’s house and we then walked to the store. When we got there, I realized that I’d been set up—Evan, Eric, and some of their other friends were there for a rematch. I didn’t want to fight, and I left alone, without Dan. That was the last time I ever spent with Dan or Eric.

There were only a few days of awkwardness between Evan and me. We had all the same classes together, and he apologized and I forgave him. My number of friends drastically decreased. I was shy, and a lot of people just labeled me as a “dork.” I spent a lot of time alone watching television. We had only one television at my house, and when my mother wanted to watch a Lifetime movie, I had to watch it as well. Since I was going to an all-boys high school, there would be some days that Valerie Bertinelli or Jaclyn Smith would be the only girl who I would come into contact with.

I had a hard time fitting in at Saint John’s. I didn’t play any sports and wasn’t athletic. Not being a jock was the school’s cardinal sin. Many of the students liked being in a small school so that they could get more attention playing sports.

There were, of course, cliques at this all-boys school. One student who had a huge following was George, a tall African American who loved to create his own rhymes and lyrics. In between classes he would often sing these songs, such as “Making your butt cheeks feel wet, making your butt cheeks feel wet.” He would also randomly say, “I wave my fist,” thereby convincing several other students to start waving their fists, although nobody knew why they were doing so. George also hypothesized what it would be like to have a student who was in a wheelchair trying to march with us. Most of the entire class started laughing as he pretended to be in a wheelchair: “left wheel, right wheel.” George concluded that if somebody in a wheelchair ever went to Saint John’s, he would have to transfer because everybody would make fun of him so much.

Even though the school taught Catholic values, many of the students were members of different Christian faiths. Still others were Hindu, Jewish, or Muslim. One student who was somewhat of a freshmen celebrity