All these feelings only intensified by the time I entered Bishop DuBourg High School, and realized just how lost I felt. I had no real identity and didn’t seem to belong anywhere—even places I had once felt comfortable. I quit the volleyball team, avoided mass and anything related to our parish, and completely blew off my schoolwork. I even felt myself drifting from Belinda. We were still best friends, but I couldn’t stand the way she obsessed over every three-ounce weight gain, boys who had nothing going for them, and worst of all, the Jonas Brothers and other crappy Disney packaged bands. I could forgive a lot of things, but cheesy taste in music wasn’t one of them.
For a short time, I started hanging out with a new group of kids who I thought shared my sensibilities or at least my taste in music. But they turned out to be even more fake than the popular crowd, spending hours cultivating their emo image, listening to obscure in-die bands no one had ever heard of (and who they’d immediately disown as soon as someone outside the group “discovered” them, too), spending a fortune at Hot Topic and Urban Outfitters to look as if they went to a thrift shop, and in the worst example, drawing fake scars onto their wrists and lying about suicide attempts. I decided I’d much rather hang with Belinda than a bunch of posers—because at least she was authentic in her complete lack of good taste (and even I had to admit that it was fun belting out a Kelly Clarkson song now and then). Mostly, though, I just wanted to be alone with my thoughts and music. In fact, music—good music—was one of the few things guaranteed to make me happy. Much to my parents’ frustration, who thought that fresh air was synonymous with any air, I spent hours in my room, listening to records, writing songs, singing (when no one was home to hear me), and playing the drums. I had picked them up in the sixth grade when my music teacher told me they were the hardest instrument to learn, and although I had long since quit the band, the drums were the only thing I didn’t abandon altogether. In fact, I played them all the time, saving every dollar I made bagging groceries at Schnuck’s, until I could afford to upgrade from my first Ludwig junior drum set to a sick Pearl Masters MCX kit with the coolest maple shells finished in a black sparkle glitter wrap. It was the sweetest thing I had ever seen, and for the first few nights after I bought it, I moved it next to my bed so I could sleep right beside it and then see it first thing in the morning. My parents humored me, pretending to get my fascination with drums. My dad even bought me a Sabian eighteen-inch HHX Evolution Crash cymbal that he researched on his own for my birthday, which was supercool of him. But I could tell they both wished I did something a little more normal and social. Or at the very least, found a quieter hobby.
The only person who seemed to respect and accept me was Mr. Tully, our school guidance counselor, who I was required to visit about my falling grades and the fact that I was, in everyone’s words, not living up to my potential. I pretended to be annoyed when the pink counselor slips came, but I secretly loved spending time in his office, even though he constantly nagged me to sing in the school liturgical choir, join the symphonic or jazz band, or at least play the percussion in our high school musical. (Not gonna happen—any of it.) Mr. Tully was young and funny and handsome with light brown eyes and dimples that showed up even when he wasn’t smiling. But more than his looks or fun personality, he was the only member of the faculty—the only adult, for that matter—who really seemed to get that being a teenager generally sucked and that it certainly wasn’t the best time of your life the way my parents always said it should be and the way it seemed to be for Charlotte. When pressed, I could even get him to admit that some of our school rules were overkill, such as the requirement that every class start with a prayer (although he was an alum himself and promised that one day I’d be proud of it, and if I put my mind to it, this place could be a launching pad for greatness as it had been for the Twitter founder Jack Dorsey). But for all his coolness, I never opened up to him completely. I believed he liked me, but I was well aware that he was getting paid to have empathy—so just in case, I wasn’t about to admit to him just how shitty I felt on the inside.