The Fence - Dick Lehr [8]
His head spun, but given his nature he said nothing. He didn’t ask for help at school. He didn’t say anything to his parents. “I didn’t want to disappoint my father.” He knew his father had cancer, but wasn’t sure what that meant.
“No one really explained it to me, but I could see he was getting sicker.”
Because of the complicated commute, Mike often missed meeting with his adviser before classes—meetings that were part of the fabric of the academy’s day. One day his adviser caught up with him. He pulled Mike aside. Mike rubbed his eyes and sneezed. He’d begun suffering from allergies, although the condition hadn’t yet been diagnosed. Mike just knew his head was stuffy all the time and his eyes watered constantly. The adviser waited a second and then said he had a question to ask.
You smoke a lot of pot, don’t you? Before school?
Mike was dumbfounded.
You can tell me, the adviser said earnestly. It’s okay.
Mike sat there. To him, the world was divided into two groups—kids and grown-ups. With friends, he felt okay, and “I did what I did. Played sports and was friends.” With adults, “I just didn’t talk. Talking wasn’t my thing.” Facing his adviser, Mike basically didn’t say a word. He did not speak up and protest, did not seize the opportunity to discuss his rough start. “I was just sitting there, thinking, I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The adviser took Mike’s silence as confirmation. You really should stop, he said. You really should.
The meeting ended. Mike left feeling more disoriented than ever, and the feeling just worsened as the year went on. Most of all, he felt alone going through the biggest culture shock of his life, a shock that was not about race. He’d attended a largely white school at St. Mary’s, so being the rare black at Milton was not a foreign experience. It was the wealth; he’d never been around or seen such wealth before. He became acutely self-conscious. Seeing some of his classmates’ mansions left him paralyzed socially. “I was petrified to bring anyone from school to my house. It was just embarrassing, you know. Oh my God, look at the house I live in, look at how these people live.” He dodged conversations on campus when classmates talked about where their fathers went to college—Yale, Princeton, Harvard, and other elite schools. He was embarrassed his aunts and grandmother were maids. He was even embarrassed his mom’s name was Bertha.
Mike could not figure out how to make Milton work. He was a day student when most of the kids boarded on campus. With his commute, team sports, and the piles of homework, he found himself in a hole academically. “I had a lot of D’s and C’s at first.” It wasn’t as if the schoolwork was too difficult for him, he just could not find time to complete it. “The perception was that I wasn’t doing my homework because I couldn’t do it. But I wasn’t doing my homework because, at the time, I was just tired all the time and, I mean, there was a lot of stuff going on in my life.”
Meetings with teachers and advisers did not help—mainly, once again, because Mike let stand their assumption that the work was over his head.
You can’t do this, can you? Mike was asked. It’s really difficult, right?
“I was just like, ‘Yeah, I guess so.’”
By early spring, Mike thought he was making progress. Not playing a sport, he had more time for his schoolwork, and his grades improved. But it was apparently not enough. “My adviser went from ‘You smoke pot, don’t you?’ and ‘You have trouble doing the work, don’t you?’ to ‘You don’t really want to be here, do you?’”
It became a refrain: You’re not happy, are you?
Mike did nothing to rebut the school’s wrongful assessment, a response that was becoming a pattern. The next thing he knew, he would not return to Milton Academy. His mother and oldest sister Cora began working