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

I was always the shy, quiet kid who played by the rules, so buying pornography was an awkward experience. I stopped at a local convenience store, and amid the steady flow of customers, I grabbed the Penthouse and covered it up with a newspaper. I was waiting in a very long line, and the store employees decided to open a second line. “Sir, anything else other than the newspaper?” an employee yelled to me over a group of customers. I stepped out of the line and pretended to shop some more. When I was finally checking out, as the cashier was ringing up my purchase, an older female customer tried to reassure me that there was nothing wrong with Penthouse and that she, too, had bought pornography. When I was driving the twenty minutes home, because I went to a convenience store far away from my house to ensure that nobody would see me, I saw a classmate from Saint John’s stuck in traffic with me. He had another male passenger in his car and actually smiled at me and beeped his horn. Since I was waiting in traffic, I held the magazine up against the window so he could see it. He started laughing, and I drove away.

As I was walking to homeroom the next day, I saw Tyler on the staircase. I had a song by Creed in my mind. As we passed each other, Tyler and I made eye contact. I heard Tyler’s voice in my mind say, “He is singing a Creed song.” I ran down the hall, frightened about what was happening.

During my senior year, first period was math class and second period was government class. I heard Eric’s voice in my head saying, “So Tyler thinks that he can read your mind, too.” I responded to Eric’s voice by saying, “Well, I thought it was him.” Eric then told me that the entire senior class had heard about what was happening to me.

Amid my change in mental health status, I decided to quit my job at the Gap and work for Friendly’s making ice creams and running the cash register. I left Gap for two reasons: first, retail business was slow after the holidays, and second, a lot of the preppy kids from my class had started working there and they made me feel uncomfortable. Of course, I now laugh at the fact that I actually wondered to myself, Why are all the preppy kids working at the Gap? When I started working at Friendly’s, I was working both Friday and Saturday nights, plus Sundays during the day, for a total of twenty-five hours a week. I also was taking four college courses.

On one Monday during math class, the white presence struck again. Now I was feeling the sensation with a fourth person. Tyler, Carmine, and Eric weren’t in this math class. There were a lot of boys in this class, so it took me a while to figure out who it was, but I eventually thought it was a friend of my cousin Alex named Gabe. Alex used to talk about Gabe a lot, since they both worked together at the same supermarket. I would hear Gabe talk in class and knew who he was, but I had rarely ever talked to him before. The first time I heard his voice, I was unsure. The next time this occurred, Gabe came in late and the only open seat in the class was in front of me. It was soon after I had bought the Penthouse magazine, and I told the kid sitting next to me that I was going to let him borrow it. So, in my mind, I told Gabe, “You know I’m going to give him the Penthouse right now. You better look behind you.” It must have been a coincidence, but at that moment, Gabe turned around. “So this is really going on between us,” I told him in my mind.

Still, it was about a week into this—whatever “this” was—and I hadn’t told anyone about the voices. I was trying to do my best to ignore them and push them out of my mind, but it was impossible. I dreaded going to school, and I would purposely stay up late so that I’d be tired for school—so tired that I wouldn’t concentrate on the voices. It didn’t work. By late March, I felt that I was communicating with Gabe during first period, Eric during second period and fifth period, and then Tyler during eighth and ninth periods.

Third period I had sociology, which once again had only a few boys in the class. Shortly after hearing Gabe’s voice in math class, I began to feel that I was communicating with Zach, who actually had the same last name as Carmine’s girlfriend. I knew they weren’t brother and sister, but they were related somehow. Soon after that, in English class, I began to hear another voice, that of a junior named Henry. Henry and I had never talked before. All I knew was that he was friends with Carmine; I didn’t know how they knew each other.

The only class periods that I didn’t hear somebody’s voice in were Spanish, sixth period, and lunch, seventh period. The last voice that entered my mind was Sam’s. This was different than the rest of the voices that I’d heard. Everybody else I would never talk to. Sam and I would talk occasionally, and I would see him when I worked at the Gap in Colonie Center. Ever since I made the move to Friendly’s, I didn’t see Sam as much. When I started hearing his voice in my mind, I hoped that he’d acknowledge that this was happening between the two of us and I would realize that I wasn’t a schizophrenic. The next day after I heard his voice, I said hi to Sam and he said hi back—then we stopped talking to each other.

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