understand how or why he was filled with so much hate, and if he felt that
way, how many other people in Brazil shared his point of view when they
saw me walking down the street? It was the sort of riddle you didn’t want to
solve.
* * *
They won’t call on me if they can’t see me. That was how I operated during
my sophomore year in high school in Brazil, Indiana. I would hide out in the
back rows, slump low in my chair, and sidestep my way through each and
every class. Our high school made us take a foreign language that year,
which was funny to me. Not because I couldn’t see the value, but because I
could barely read English, let alone understand Spanish. By then, after a
good eight years of cheating, my ignorance had crystalized. I kept leveling
up in school, on track, but hadn’t learned a damn thing. I was one of those
kids who thought he was gaming the system when, the whole time, I’d been
gaming myself.
One morning, about halfway through the school year, I milled into Spanish
class and grabbed my workbook from a back cupboard. There was technique
involved in skating by. You didn’t have to pay attention, but you did have to
make it seem like you were, so I slumped into my seat, opened up my
workbook, and fixed my gaze on the teacher who lectured from the front of
the room.
When I looked down at the page the whole room went silent. At least to me.
Her lips were still moving, but I couldn’t hear because my attention had
narrowed on the message left for me, and me alone.
We each had our own assigned workbook in that class, and my name was
written in pencil at the top right corner of the title page. That’s how they
knew it was mine. Below that, someone had drawn an image of me in a
noose. It looked rudimentary, like something out of the hangman game we
used to play as kids. Below that were the words.
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