“What? How can you say let it go? The guy is a racist asshole, and his daughter is a stupid bitch for not knowing better.”
“He’s ignorant,” I said. “He’s an ignorant, racist, asshole cocksucker just like you said, which means he would be too stupid to understand why we egged his house even if we did. In his mind, it would only justify his belief system.”
“Fuck that—”
“You can’t change people’s irrational beliefs, Mickie. Trust me—I know.” I looked at Ernie. “So does Ernie.” Ernie glanced at me and nodded. “And that guy, he’s not the guy you have to worry about. The ones to worry about are the ones who cloak their discrimination behind some other excuse so you can’t call them out.”
Unfortunately, as our senior year in high school was coming to an end, Ernie and I would have to experience those people yet again.
7
Each year the Saint Joe’s trustees, a group composed of parents, alumni, and prominent community members, chose the class valedictorian from a field of the top ten candidates. As far back as anyone could remember, the honor always went to the student who finished number one in his class, and that student, in the graduating class of 1975, was me. So, while Ernie—the greatest athlete the school had ever produced—was on the short list, he had already conceded defeat and had spent much of the week leading up to the announcement pumping me up.
I’d tried not to get my hopes up, but I had to admit that I’d also considered the announcement, scheduled for a Friday afternoon, a formality. In fact, I’d already begun to draft my speech, intending it to be the best valedictorian speech ever given. It had to be. This was another opportunity to prove myself, much the same way I saw my chance to be lector at OLM as a chance to show that I was just a normal kid. I could only hope being valedictorian had a better ending.
I found the draft of my speech inside my mother’s scrapbook labeled 1975.
I never did write a final version.
Friday afternoon during my free period, I was laying out the last edition of the Friar in the journalism room, a portable trailer located at the back of the junior-class parking lot with no hookup to the school PA system. When the bell rang, I hurried across the parking lot into the main school for my physics class, but found the main hall crowded with students hooting and hollering and quickly realized I’d missed something important. “What’s going on?” I asked the first student I saw.
“They announced class valedictorian,” he confirmed. “Didn’t you hear?”
Obviously I hadn’t, and I was wondering why the kid hadn’t congratulated me. Everybody in school knew, at the very least, who I was. In fact, no one passing in the hallway stopped to congratulate me.
At that moment a group of students spilled out of one of the classrooms into the hall, Ernie in the middle of the pack receiving pats on the back and congratulations. In a novel, this would be the place where I told you that Ernie and I made eye contact, or that I graciously marched up and congratulated him. But I didn’t do either of those things. I slunk back into the crowd and quietly slipped into my fifty-five-minute physics class, which seemed to pass like an eternity. When the final bell of the day rang, I hurried to the Falcon without going to my locker and quickly departed. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I especially didn’t want to talk to Ernie. For three years I had been building up Ernie on the athletic fields to the point that he was a demigod at Saint Joe’s and a household name throughout the county. Even national newspapers had been writing stories on him and speculating which of the three dozen scholarships being dangled by some of the best schools in the country he would take. And he wouldn’t have even gotten that far had I not dragged his ass through grammar school.
Did he also have to be class valedictorian—the only accolade I had a chance to win?
I did not immediately tell my mother of my latest slight when I got home from school. Not that she bothered to approach me. My mother had remained cool in the aftermath of my drinking incident. She had not reached the level of acceptance my father had, unwilling to admit I was a man capable of making decisions for myself. My mother had spent her life advocating for me, ensuring that I received the same opportunities as any other child, and her maternal instinct, finely honed from those years, would always be to protect me. But at this moment I knew she was worried as to whether she could protect me from myself. I understood her worry, but I also couldn’t help but be a little bitter. Once again, her steadfast faith in “God’s will” and my destiny to live an extraordinary life had rung hollow.