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

Jackson, an associate principal at Colonie High School. I always heard that Mr. Jackson had an attractive daughter, but I couldn’t believe how gorgeous she was. Diana used to tell me that when she was home she would frequently get prank phone calls from vengeful high school students and Diana would tell them to never fucking call again. The funniest part of Diana’s story was that Mr. Jackson missed his daughter being away at college because he couldn’t swear at his pupils to have them stop calling him.

After that weekend, I started visiting Diana’s room every day, for hours at a time. Since SUNY Geneseo was located in a rural area, talking in somebody’s room was a major pastime for most college students. Even though I was friends with lots of girls, I still wasn’t very sensitive. One time when I knocked on Diana and her roommate Renee’s door and the girls knew it was me, they yelled, “Don’t come in!” I didn’t pay any attention to what they were saying and came in anyway. Renee then said, “Okay, well, I’ll just stay here in my underwear.” I was then kicked out of the room.

Another time at dinner some of the girls mentioned that one guy in line was cute. My response was, “So you’d give him a blow job, then?” I got yelled at, and one of the girls explained, “Just because she thinks he’s cute doesn’t mean she wants to blow him.” Another time I got kicked out of Diana’s room because I asked if she’d ever seen her dad “do the adjust”—as in adjust his scrotum—since I thought it would be funny to see a principal do that. I was dismissed at once.

Still, I liked spending time with these girls. Adolescent boys were too competitive with one another, and I felt intimidated since I wasn’t athletic and definitely didn’t have any sex stories to brag about. When I was hanging out with girls, I didn’t need to be competitive, since I was the one getting the attention. They loved my stories and my jokes, and soon I would come up with my own dance moves. I could tell that Bruce was jealous when he saw the girls come to my room and ask for me. Bruce was very reserved and very much into his computer. If I ever talked about getting a good grade or how challenging a particular course was, he would always try to say that a class he was in or a grade he got was so much harder to accomplish. He had only a few close friends, and he definitely thought he was better than most people. Rich and some of his friends started hanging out with Bruce. Bruce would get jealous if I would say something that made Rich laugh. These were his friends, and they were off limits to me.

After Thanksgiving, I found out that Colonie High in mid-December was going to have its Alumni Day. It was an annual tradition. Usually the day before holiday break, the graduating class from that year was invited to come back and socialize with one another. My mother told me that when she got the invitation in the mail, she threw it out. She didn’t want me to go back to Colonie because she was afraid it could trigger the voices. I had made so much progress, and she was worried I could relapse.

I would often tell Diana and Shannon and my other friends about my former high school crush, Claire, and how she was mean to me and how I would play jokes on her. Pranking started to become a pastime for us. We would look up people we didn’t like and tell them that we heard their boyfriend or girlfriend was cheating on them. One time I pranked Rich and pretended to ask for a girl named Rosemary. When Rich said there was nobody there named Rosemary, I explained that Rosemary applied my hemorrhoid ointment and asked if he could do that for me since I couldn’t find Rosemary. Kaitlin, a friend of Shannon and Diana, had me prank her prom date who stopped talking to her after the prom. I called his roommate and told him that he used to experiment with guys, so watch out. Kaitlin was so happy after I did this—it was as if I had just bought her a new house.

The plan for Claire was that I was going to call her house pretending to be a guidance counselor. I would explain that they forgot to give her the Head & Shoulders Women in Science Award, and the only time she could claim her prize was at Alumni Day. I was going to wear a hooded sweatshirt, put a bottle of Head & Shoulders shampoo in it, and walk up to Claire and tell her, “I’m your award.” The girls laughed when I told them my plan; I think they were shocked when I actually said I was going to do it.

Just before the semester was over, I visited Rich and his roommate in their room. Rich, who always had to convey his tough demeanor, said that he was going to spend his semester break “fucking bitches and getting drunk.” Rich then told me that he had gotten laid before tons of times, and I could sense that he thought I was inferior to him because I was a virgin. I originally wanted to keep my virginity a secret, but Rich started talking about all the wild sex he was having, and when I could not share any stories of my own; he soon found out I was a virgin. Rich was definitely a male chauvinist, while his roommate, Neil, was the total opposite. Neil was quiet, he liked doing musicals, and he was an elementary education major. The two of them got along really well, mainly because Rich was definitely a man’s man. He could never understand why I would want to hang out with girls;