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

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