The Size of Your Dreams, - [good books for high schoolers txt] 📗

Mirror

Next day, I spent the entire “math” class with my head in my notebook, doodling cubes over and over again. My teeth kept grabbing my lip until I ripped a piece of dead skin that made it bleed; then I licked the wound like a dog. Christy went on about the swim team in the background, but it was all a blur. And no one called my name, not even Mr. Griffin.

I wouldn’t want to talk to me either.

When the bell finally rang, I didn’t look up until I was sure my classmates had all filed out of the room. Once they were gone, I gathered my things as fast as I could.

“Rough night?” Mr. Griffin sat on his swivel chair, his feet up on his desk. His socks had a stupid reindeer on each ankle.

“Whatever.” I slammed my notebook shut.

“Verbose today, I see.”

Was he trying to piss me off?

“Oh, just leave me alone.” I shoved my notebook into my bag. “It’s bad enough you’re going to flunk me in math for blowing off this stupid card.”

“Flunk you? No, if you’ll recall, the assignment is to spend five minutes a day working with your cards. Checking off the app was just a way for me to verify that you’ve done it. But one look at your face tells me you’ve hardly blown off your card.”

“What do you know?”

Mr. Griffin held out his hand. “These scars came from punching my mirror the first time I tried to read an Identity Card.”

“You? Really?”

Mr. Griffin shoved his fist in my face. Thin, pale lines crisscrossed his knuckles.

“You couldn’t do it either?”

He shook his head.

“So…how…?”

“I told you about my classmate, Scott, the artist who took his own life. He slit his wrists about a month after my bloody affair with the mirror.” Mr. Griffin dropped his fist. “I didn’t want that to be me.”

A shiver ran up my spine. “Me neither. But…”

“But what?”

“I just can’t,” I said. “I can’t do it. Even the thought of trying again makes my stomach turn.”

“Then that means you have to do it.” Mr. Griffin stood. “Fear is like a spotlight, shining on the precise areas where we need to grow.” He pushed me toward the door. “Come on.”

I followed Mr. Griffin down the hall, ignoring the fact that I was already late for physics. He stepped into the teacher’s lounge. I hesitated at the door, then followed him in. No one was there except Coach Thomas, who was scarfing down a sandwich with headphones on.

“In here.” Mr. Griffin held another door open.

“The bathroom? With you?” The only time I’d ever heard of a teacher bringing a student into the bathroom was on the front page of the paper.

“Yes. With me,” he said, straight-faced. “Now.”

I rolled my eyes and stepped into the bathroom. At least Mr. Griffin didn’t lock the door. That would’ve been creepy.

“You have your card in there?” He pointed to my backpack.

“I ripped it up this morning on my way to school. It’s in the cafeteria dumpster along with yesterday’s meatball surprise.”

“Then we’ll wing it. Look in the mirror.”

I lifted my head about an inch, then sank back down. “I can’t.”

“You don’t like what you see there?”

The ball in my throat grew painful. “I hate what I see.”

Mr. Griffin grabbed my chin and forced it up. “Face it.”

“I don’t wanna face it!” My eyes welled up, and my reflection became a blur.

“Kelvin, this guy in the mirror, he’s all you’ve got.”

“That sucks! Gimme someone else.” I tried forcing my head to the side, but Mr. Griffin was too strong. All I saw in my reflection was an ugly loser with a face full of zits, who no one liked.

“It doesn’t matter who you wish you were. Take a good look. That’s the guy you’ve got to live with for the rest of your life!”

That’s when I broke down, fell out of his grip, and collapsed on the floor. I sobbed like a baby for what felt like hours but was probably just a few minutes. Mr. Griffin sat next to me on the cold bathroom tiles and passed me some toilet paper to blow my nose.

His face softened, and he said, “As far as I can tell, you’ve got two options, Kelvin. You can continue hating yourself until it kills you, or you can find a way to change what you see.”

“I’ve tried. You know how often my mom’s dragged me off to the dermatologist?” Mr. Griffin actually laughed. “I don’t mean to change the look of your face. I mean to change what you see.”

“You’re not going to have me do one of those stupid things where I say over and over again, ‘I’m beautiful’ until I actually see my zits as beautiful, are you?”

“No, I want to change what you focus on so that you’re so busy seeing what’s truly beautiful about you that you hardly notice the zits.”

“Me? Beautiful? Come on…”

“I’ll demonstrate what I mean. Spend 10 seconds searching around the room for objects that are gray.” Mr. Griffin counted off the seconds. “Stop. Now close your eyes and tell me, how many objects in the room do you remember that are red?”

“Red? I thought you told me to search for gray?”

“I did. But now I’m asking you for red. Keep your eyes closed. How many do you remember?”

“Just the label on my backpack, cause I know it’s there.”

“Now, open your eyes and tell me how many red things you see.”

I pointed to the smoke detector, an information sticker about sexual abuse, and the reindeer on his socks. I could have gone on and on but didn’t bother. “Is there a point to this stupid little game?”

“Why hadn’t you seen all of that the first time?”

“Because you told me to look for gray.”

“Precisely, but your eyes passed over the very same bathroom when you were scanning for gray things as they did when you looked for red. How come you didn’t notice them?”

I shrugged. “It’s not what I focused on, I guess.”

“Exactly. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that you see reality. The world is far too complex for us to take it all in. Rather, each of us tells our brains what to look for, and that’s what we see.”

“If that were the case, then each of us would be living in our own worlds.”

“Exactly.”

“But that’s absurd.”

“Is it? Tell me, when you look in the mirror, what’s the first thing you see?”

“My zits.”

Mr. Griffin tilted his head so he could look me straight in the eye. “Isn’t that interesting? I barely notice them.”

“You’re just saying that cause you’re my teacher.”

“No, it’s not just me, and I’ll prove it.”

“How are you going to do that?”

“I want you to post on social media, and ask a simple question, ‘When you think of me, what are the first three words that come to mind?’ Tell them to be brutally honest.”

“You want me to encourage people to make fun of me?”

“No, I want you to hear what people genuinely think of you. I think you’ll be surprised.” Mr. Griffin got to his feet. I waited for him to say more, but he turned and walked out of the bathroom.

So now I found myself sitting on the floor of the faculty bathroom, all by myself, my eyes no doubt swollen from crying. There was no way I was getting up and going to my next class like this. Did I really want to ask everyone what they thought of me? I knew the answer to that question. No way.

Then an image of Darnell with his numbered shirts ran through my mind. It took serious guts to suffer that humiliation. Could I not handle the same?

Before I lost my nerve, I took out my cell phone and posted Mr. Griffin’s exact words.

* * *

All afternoon, I avoided checking my phone and even went so far as to turn off the Wi-Fi on my computer while I worked on my Catcher in the Rye essay.

But every time I tried thinking about Holden Caulfield, my mind wandered. I saw myself bawling on the floor of the faculty toilet. I saw Mr. Griffin’s scarred knuckles. I even pictured his high school friend Scott, who I imagined had curly blond hair, lanky legs, and tattered jeans. All I really knew about him was that he was artistic. Was he smart? Funny? Did he see in himself whatever Mr. Griffin saw in him?

Then it hit me: he probably had no clue. I bet all he saw were his own version of zits.

After my fifth attempt at writing anything of logical significance on Mr. Caulfield, I knew it was time to face the question I’d been avoiding all day. What did others really think of me? I flipped on my Wi-Fi, and there were sixteen responses awaiting me.

The first response was from Derek, who never missed an opportunity to rub salt in an exposed wound. He wrote that the three words that came to mind for him were “Dweeb, dweeb, dweeb.”

As I scrolled down, I saw his was the only insulting response. All of my Mastermind Group responded. Christy said, “Smart, helpful, and creative.” Jarod also said smart but added nice and good problem solver, which wasn’t technically one word, but a nice sentiment. Darnell wrote “skinny white boy,” with a smiley, then wrote his real answer of “friendly, determined, and smart.”

For some reason, seeing smart written over and over, irked me, despite the fact that I’d always prided myself on my intelligence. But no one mentioned zits, nor did anyone other than Derek say anything obnoxious.

My mother wrote funny, curious, and conscientious. Even my sister was complimentary; she put sweet, clever, and strong (really I was a total weakling, but I suppose I seemed strong to a preteen).

Other responses included considerate, interesting, articulate, and geek, which came from one of my hacker camp friends, so it wasn’t a putdown.

Was this really how others saw me, or were they all just being nice? I’d told people to be brutally honest, but even if the first word that came to their mind was zits, would they share that?

Still, there was no denying that it felt nice reading all of these things about myself. Even Derek’s dweeb comment didn’t seem like such a big deal next to everything else.

And what if they were telling the truth? Why couldn’t I see myself that way? I pulled out a fresh notecard. It was time to try this again. I sucked in a long, deep breath, and wrote a new Identity Card to replace the one now rotting in the dumpster. The image of Scott lying in a pool of his own blood kept popping into my mind, pushing me to write each trait.

I shoved the new card in my pocket, opened the radio app on my phone, and before I knew it, found myself in the bathroom. Again.

I blasted the music and locked the door like the previous night, hoping that this time would be different—that I would be different.

The card was burning in my pocket, so I pulled it out and gripped it in both hands. I swallowed hard and turned toward the mirror.

My stomach clenched, and my chest caved in. Damn loser! I turned away and grabbed the door handle. An image of Darnell in his numbered shirts, taking everyone’s insults because he knew it would make him stronger, flashed through my mind. If he could suffer that humiliation from others, the least I could do was