On Hiding

A lengthy account of my first weeks of high school, from a distance of many years, with references to the Fab Five, Stephen Crane, circus music, and TLC's "Waterfalls"

The early days of high school—the first weeks, first months—linger in my mind mostly as a string of minor humiliations. Nothing awful at all, nothing remotely earth-shattering, but somehow these little humiliations stick around all these years later. And the first one arrived before my time at Jesuit even officially started—because of a baseball cap. 

It was my Michigan cap. I’d never been to Michigan, never knew anyone who’d been to Michigan¹, but I loved the Fab Five. I’d just read the paperback of Mitch Albom’s Fab Five: Basketball, Trash Talk, the American Dream, and what stuck with me the most was the epigraph. Not the one from Samuel Johnson, whoever that was (“Age looks with anger on the temerity of youth, and youth with contempt on the scrupulosity of age”), but the other one, the one from the Fab Five themselves: “Let your nuts hang!” 

By this point, most of the Fab Five had moved on to the NBA, but in my mind they were still the coolest thing that had ever happened to sports. Chris, Juwan, Jalen, Jimmy, and Ray, a brash basketball brotherhood in baggy maize shorts and black Nike socks², representing the holy trinity of young masculinity: friendship, confidence, and athletic prowess. So I bought a Michigan cap at the mall, thinking that I would gain some coolness by association. I, too, wanted to let my nuts hang.

It shouldn’t surprise you, then, that I wore the Michigan cap to Strake Jesuit College Preparatory a few days before school started, when we had to pick up our schedules and our books. This crucial piece of apparel would send a message to all the private school boys who would be my new classmates: Watch out, badass coming through.

In typical badass fashion, I was accompanied by my mom. I wasn’t the only one, though: pretty much everybody had a mother with them that day.³ I got my class schedule and then we went to the school gym, which was set up like a book fair, tables full of books filling up the basketball court. We had to buy all the required texts for each class, from our math and science textbooks to the novels we’d be reading in freshman English.⁴ This was new to me: I’d never been required to buy a single book in the history of my public school education. 

So we bought my books and then went looking for all the classrooms on my schedule. The school was set up more like a college than a high school, with different buildings for the different subjects, connected by walking paths and well-manicured expanses of grass. This place would become deeply familiar to me, but at the time it only filled me with an intimidating sort of awe.

Our self-guided search for my classrooms was going fine until we entered the farthest building from the gym, our very last stop. We were walking down a quiet, empty hallway when an older gentleman came around the corner, walking towards us. A priest, in his black outfit. I’d hardly ever seen any priests in real life. As he walked towards us, my mom—I have no doubt about this, despite the fog of memory—must’ve offered him a polite smile. But even though he was looking right at us, he didn’t smile back. In fact, he looked annoyed. Angry, even.

As he got close, he scolded me. “What are you doing, young man? No caps in the building! Show some respect! Take that cap off right now!” 

I stared at him, the blood rushing to my face. He waited until I took my cap off and then stormed past us, out of the building, still shaking his head, saying nothing else. That was the first time in my life I’d ever interacted with a priest.

Maybe I was too sensitive. Maybe I should’ve just brushed it off. I could’ve quoted the wise words of Samuel Johnson: “Age looks with anger on the temerity of youth, and youth with contempt on the scrupulosity of age.” But no. I was humiliated. This stranger, this priest, had berated me in front of my mother for not following a school rule I hadn’t even learned yet.

I can’t remember if my mom and I even said anything to each other about it after he was gone.⁵ It felt almost like the priest had scolded her, too, for allowing her son to be so disrespectful. Except he hadn’t even acknowledged her presence, which somehow made it worse. You don’t berate a kid in front of their parents. I thought everyone knew this.

That moment left me flustered and embarrassed for the rest of the day. I’d managed to get in trouble before the first day of school even arrived. Was this a preview of my high school experience? That suddenly seemed like a dark but real possibility.

***

When school started, I had to follow other rules beyond No Hats in the Building. Dress-code compliant collared shirts must be tucked into our dress-code compliant pants at all times. In addition, belts must be worn at all times. Moreover, all freshmen must wear name tags and name tags must be visible on their shirt at all times. Also: no cutting through the grass on the way to class. Breaking any of these rules would result in a PH, which stood for penance hall—a pretty messed-up name for lunch detention.

I was not a rebel. I had no real problem with the dress code. But I was forgetful. I couldn’t keep my shit together. I’d never worn belts to school before, and I couldn’t seem to get in the habit now. And the name tag was tiny, easily lost in the musky chaos of an adolescent bedroom. Plus, the school—on Bellaire Boulevard, in the middle of Houston’s Chinatown—was pretty far from my house in the burbs. Not like I could just ride my bike home if I forgot something on the way, like I could in middle school. Being tardy also resulted in a PH.⁶ There were lots of ways to get a PH.

The primary enforcer of all the school rules was Brother Casey, a Jesuit legend who’d been handing out PHs from time immemorial and who somehow, despite calling every student “boy,” had every freshman’s name and face memorized by the first day of school. Brother wasn’t a bad guy—he was truly dedicated to the school and he’d smile and laugh⁷ when the boys razzed him—but he was absolutely relentless in his application of the school rules. That was his job.

Word was passed down to the freshmen right away: if you broke a rule, Brother Casey would find you. No matter where you were on campus or when it happened. He was everywhere.

And so, on Wednesday or Thursday of the first week of school, when I forgot my name tag for the first time, I should’ve just accepted my fate. I should’ve just turned myself in to Brother Casey himself and dealt with the consequences. But no: I tried to hide.

To my credit, I made it to lunch without getting my first PH. I’d been pretty scared of getting caught, but then none of my teachers had noticed the lack of name tag, and Brother Casey, despite his omniscient rep, had not appeared in any of my classrooms or in the hallways during the passing periods to bust me. Maybe this guy wasn’t as sharp as everyone said.

When the lunch bell rang, I strayed far from the cafeteria, far from the courtyard outside the cafeteria, all the way to the other side of campus, near the theology classrooms—theology was a word I’d just encountered for the first time—to a solitary bench in the middle of a grassy field. Quiet, peaceful. We were allowed to eat anywhere on campus, so I wasn’t breaking any rules there. Got out one of my school books so I could pretend to read if necessary.

The bench in the middle of the field was far enough from the main path that no one could see my missing name tag from that distance. A teacher or enforcer would have to walk all the way up to me to see that I was breaking the rules, and why would anyone disturb a nice boy eating alone with his school books on a bench?

After a while, I got comfortable. The sun felt good on my skin. This was actually better than eating in the cafeteria, where I’d been an awkward non-football-playing appendage to the freshman football table, trying to scoot a chair next to my middle-school buddy Ronnie, who’d already made a bunch of new friends because of football and because he was just gifted at making friends. Maybe I could come out here every day. I finished my lunch and actually started to read my book. It was The Red Badge of Courage, which had been our required summer reading. I began to breathe easy.

“What are you doing, boy?”

The voice made me jump. And there, of course, was Brother Casey, standing in front of me, unsmiling.

“Just…reading,” I said. I clutched the little golden paperback to my chest, covering up the spot where my name tag should’ve been.

“Where’s your name tag?”

“Huh?” I said.

“That’s a PH.”

“I won’t forget it again, I promise. Can you give me one more chance?”

“You gotta wear your name tag every day, boy,” said Brother. “That’s a PH.”

And then he walked away, leaving me alone in the field.

I held out one hope, though: he never called me by name or wrote anything down. Maybe I was the rare exception, the one student whose name he didn’t know. Or maybe he’d have a change of heart, a sudden surge of pity for this solitary freshman. But when I checked the PH list the next day, my name was right there in the middle. I was a rule follower, and yet somehow, at this new school, I kept breaking the rules.

In the weeks that followed, when I forgot my belt or my name tag or both, I tried hiding in more remote places, like the Field House or the study carrels upstairs in the library. But nothing ever worked. You couldn’t hide from Brother Casey.

***

There was—and is—an all-girls school right across the parking lot from our all-boys school: St. Agnes Academy. Our proximity to St. Agnes was another source of minor humiliations. At lunch time, after eating, most of the boys would walk across the parking lot over to the courtyard at St. Agnes, where they could mingle for the remainder of the lunch period with their female peers. During the first days of school, when I wasn’t hiding from Brother Casey, I walked over there, too. Seeing girls, and possibly even talking to them, sounded very stimulating.

It turns out, though, that at age fourteen/fifteen I couldn’t possibly approach a girl I’d never met and engage in conversation out of nowhere. No chance. And so I ended up walking over there and either a) talking to Ronnie or b) standing by myself in the post-summer heat of the courtyard, watching other Jesuit guys talk to St. Agnes girls. How did they do that? How could they just walk up and talk to them? It was like seeing someone pole vault at a track meet—highly impressive and utterly outside of my own capabilities.⁸

When the warning bell rang after lunch, I’d walk back across the parking lot feeling worthless. I was the weirdo who hovered just outside of other people’s conversations. Or even worse: the creep at the edge of the crowd who stared longingly at the St. Agnes girls and never said a word to anybody. (“Who’s that freak looking at us? And why isn’t he wearing a belt?”) After a few extremely awkward trips to that courtyard, I decided I’d never go back again. I’d rather reread The Red Badge of Courage.

When I’d convinced my parents to let me go to Jesuit, I genuinely thought that going to a new school with an almost entirely new group of people would make me a new person: more confident, easier in my own skin, free of the increasing awkwardness I’d felt throughout 8th grade. But that, of course, was magical thinking. If anything, it was even harder to be a confident version of myself around new people, in a new place, under the strange new circumstances of an all-boys Catholic school.

Fortunately, the administrators at Jesuit paired each freshman with a senior Big Brother mentor during those early weeks. On Big Brother/Little Brother Day, your assigned senior would pick you up from your house, take you to breakfast, offer their wisdom, and dress you up in the costume of their choice to be mocked by the rest of the student body for the entire school day.

Nobody in the history of Strake Jesuit believed in the promise of Big Brother/Little Brother Day more than I did. I hoped the senior they assigned me would become something like a real big brother to me, for the rest of our lives. I hoped he’d show me the ropes, take me over to St. Agnes to talk to girls, teach me how to remember my name tag, everything. Most of all, I hoped he’d be really cool and that his coolness would somehow rub off on me.

On Big Brother/Little Brother Day, I waited in eager anticipation. But when my Big Brother showed up at my house that morning, he wasn’t the generous and gregarious figure I’d imagined. In fact, he seemed visibly nervous, uncomfortable with this whole situation. He reluctantly introduced himself—what was his name? Kevin? Brian? I can’t remember—and we walked to his two-door Honda Civic in silence.

He sat facing forward for a second, without starting the car. I looked at him and then stared straight ahead, too. Finally, he asked me if I wanted to listen to some music.

“Sure!” I said. Maybe he’d show me some senior-type music that I’d never heard of.

He flipped through his CD booklet. “Do you like circus music?” he said.

I smiled, thinking he might be joking, but then I saw in his face only a painful earnestness.

“Sure,” I said.

He put in the CD and the music began to play. Part of me wanted to believe that traditional circus music was trendy among the seniors, and another part of me wanted to believe that he was messing with me, but I knew that neither one of these things were true. My Big Brother just liked circus music.

We drove to his house, listening to his circus music, hardly speaking. When we got there, he told me he hadn’t had time to think of a costume for me to wear, so we just went to his closet and he picked out some of his old clothes for me to wear. I put a large brown flannel shirt on over the shirt I was wearing. “That’ll be good,” he said, and I nodded sadly. I hadn’t realized how much I wanted to wear a crazy costume until he gave me that brown flannel shirt.

I don’t remember if we had breakfast together that morning or not, but based on my other memories, it’s likely that we ate cereal silently in his kitchen. I do remember hearing that a big group of Big Brothers took their Little Brothers to breakfast together at the beloved Buffalo Grille. In my mind I saw them all laughing and having fun as they ate their pancakes and crispy bacon.

When we pulled into the school parking lot, I saw my classmates dressed up as bananas and Where’s Waldo and the school’s chemistry teacher, Dr. Palasota. Some of the Big Brothers were making their Little Brothers do ridiculous things, making the banana boys dance in the parking lot or whatever. But my Big Brother had drifted away, leaving me alone in his flannel shirt.

“What happened?” other freshmen would say, in between classes. “Your Big Brother didn’t dress you up?”

And I’d say, “No. He did. This is it.”

“Oh,” they’d say.

***

There was a dance that Friday, a Back to School Dance. It was mainly for the freshmen, but all the grade levels were invited. The St. Agnes girls were invited, too, along with some of the other all-girls schools. Big Brothers were encouraged to bring their Little Brothers. But my Big Brother made no mention of taking me to the dance and, in fact, I never saw him again after Big Brother/Little Brother Day.

Maybe that was for the best. But I was still jealous of certain classmates that got driven to the dance by a senior instead of by their mom or dad. How confident would I feel arriving with a really cool Big Brother, the two of us yukking it up together as we walked through the door?

Still, my good buddy Ronnie would be at the dance. We could yuk it up. We were always yukking it up, or at least talking. Best case scenario, though, I wouldn’t have to talk to Ronnie very much. Ideally, without any effort on my own part, I’d somehow meet a pretty St. Agnes freshman who found me intriguingly different than the other private school boys (“Sugar Land? Wow. What’s that like?”) and we’d talk and laugh for the rest of the night, before finally slow-dancing to Boyz II Men. But if that didn’t happen, I could just talk to Ronnie for the entirety of the dance, until it was time for my parents to pick me up.

For a while, everything went according to my Plan B. On the outskirts of the gym, I talked to Ronnie, pretending like the main reason I’d come to this dance at all was to catch up with him, even though he lived less than a mile away from me and we saw each other every day and had in fact seen each other a few hours earlier at school. Ronnie humored me, responding kindly to my idle conversation, but his eyes were on the dance floor. There were girls there. There were people actually dancing.

I can’t remember what exactly he said before he left, but it was something like this: “Man, let’s go out there. Let’s go talk to some girls.”

“Go ahead, man,” I said. “I’ll be out there in a second.” I made this statement knowing that I’d be out there never. I didn’t consider myself a dancer. Or a talker. More of a stander or a lurker. Ronnie left. I hardly saw him again for the rest of the night.

After he left, I looked around for someone else to talk to. I didn’t desire human conversation so much as I desired to not be seen standing alone. I didn’t know anybody else very well, but I recognized some of my classmates scattered around the margins of the gym. Maybe a couple of us marginal characters could band together to pretend like we were having a good time.

I attempted to make that happen, talking to a few other classmates, some of whom seemed just as uncomfortable as me. We talked over the sound of Montell Jordan and TLC.⁹ Each time I talked to a classmate, we would chat for a couple minutes about topics that neither one of us were interested in (“How about that geometry, huh?”) and then finally just stand there staring at the bold, beautiful, blessed people on the dance floor, until one of us drifted away. And then I’d be back to standing alone.

Have you ever been in a social situation where you find that your mere presence, your mere existence, in that particular time and place feels so excruciating that you just want to go hide somewhere? That’s how I started to feel. Like I couldn’t stand there silently on the edge of the dance floor for another minute. I couldn’t do it anymore.

If I’d been older, with my own transportation, I could’ve just bounced, slipped away without anyone knowing, pick up some Whataburger. But I was stuck. And in those pre-cellphone days, my parents wouldn’t be picking me up until the dance was scheduled to end at 10pm or whatever it was.

So I went to the bathroom. I didn’t need to actually go to the bathroom, but I went. I stayed in there for a little while until some people came in, at which point I started washing my hands like I’d just gone, and then I left. I hoped that maybe I’d emerge from the bathroom a different person, but I ended up just standing there on the edge of the gym again. Except now my tolerance for standing around was even weaker. Soon enough, I went to the bathroom again.

After going back and forth a couple more times, I just stayed there. I went into a stall, locked it, and stood inside. When I got tired of standing, I sat. When someone came in, I’d mess with the toilet paper a little bit. I could peek through the sliver of space between the door, but nobody could really see me in there. It was basically a pressure-free environment. I liked it in there.

At the same time, I was ashamed of myself. I felt like a failure. I was hiding from life. My life was pretty easy and somehow I couldn’t even handle the basic circumstances of growing up. I was like the guy in The Red Badge of Courage, overwhelmed with fear and running from war, except I was fleeing a high school dance. Hiding was humiliating in a different way than having no one to talk to out there. It was privately humiliating.

Brief flash forward: A few weeks later, after I’d joined the cross-country team, a senior dude named Roger, standing with a few other senior cross-country dudes, would call me over to the group in an innocuous-sounding way and then shove me into a storage closet in our locker room and lock me there. I sat there in that dark closet, hearing him laugh outside the door—in my memory, his teammates didn’t laugh with him—and then after a few minutes someone opened the door and let me out. A little freshman hazing, tame and basically harmless, but also a jerk move.

I remember how I felt in that storage closet, though: totally fine. Calm. Patient, waiting for someone to unlock the door, as I knew they would. Unhumiliated. As immature as I might’ve been, I was at least mature enough to know that Roger was the guy who should be embarrassed, not me.¹⁰ If I’m remembering right, he seemed disappointed when I walked away from the storage room looking only mildly annoyed.

Hiding in the bathroom stall, though, I didn’t feel fine. I felt a scalding self-inflicted humiliation. I regretted hiding even as I was hiding. But I couldn’t make myself leave. Why was I this way? Why couldn’t I just go back out there and enjoy this very normal thing?

I don’t know how long I stayed in there, but it was a long time. Thirty minutes, maybe? An hour, even. Long enough that I heard many, many young men urinate. And then something else happened. A group of boys all came into the bathroom at once, loudly.

“Close the door, close the door,” one of them said. “Hurry up, get him in here!”

Through the little sliver, I saw a few big seniors and a pretty small freshman. The seniors brought the freshman over to the sink, where he immediately started vomiting.

“Guard the fucking door,” one of the seniors said, and another one went outside. I put my feet up in the stall. The cursing gave me a sense that I’d be in danger if they discovered me there. I tried to be very still.

While the freshman threw up in the sink, one of the seniors—his Big Brother, I assume—told him that he couldn’t tell anybody that they gave him alcohol or they’d all be in deep shit. “Nobody, understand?” The kid was too sick to talk but eventually they got him to nod.

I tried not to breathe. The kid threw up some more.

And then, after warning him one more time not to say anything about this, the seniors left the kid in the bathroom to fend for himself, hunched over the sink. Seeing this, it occurred to me that maybe my Big Brother wasn’t the worst, after all.

I wish I could say that after they left, I took care of the sick kid, nursed him back to health, and learned a lesson about attending to others instead of focusing on myself. And then that kid instantly became one of my best friends. And at the end of the night, after he sobered up, we won a dance contest together, choreographed to TLC’s “Waterfalls.” But I didn’t help him. I kept hiding until the kid left, too.

When the night finally ended, my dad picked me up outside. “How was the dance, buddy?” he said.

“Good,” I said.

I kept my humiliation private (until now, at least). But it turns out that sometimes the private humiliations can hurt worse than the public ones.

I wish I could go back in time and talk to my younger self before the dance, be my own Big Brother, and tell him, Don’t hide, dude. Whatever happens, don’t hide. I’d try to explain—and maybe I can explain this to my own kids, who’ll be in high school soon enough—that sometimes it’s an act of courage just to stay in the place you desperately want to leave. To do the excruciating-but-necessary thing even when there’s no apparent reward. Maybe it’s not the kind of courage that anyone else will applaud or even notice, but each time you show this kind of courage, you grow up a little—in a good way. And that can’t happen if you’re hiding.

I’d also tell my freshman self to be patient. It’ll take a little while, but you’ll make friends here who’ll be part of your life forever. You’ll even dance with some girls. And eventually you’ll become an adult and feel much more comfortable in your own skin. The desire to hide will go away—mostly. You’ll also suffer other humiliations. That’s life.

But maybe it wouldn’t have made a difference if my freshman self heard any of this. And maybe it won’t make any difference if my kids hear it, either. Some things you have to learn yourself—over and over again.

1. I still haven’t been to the state of Michigan, sadly. But I now happily know many people who’ve been there. I even know some people who were born and raised there. My adult years have been blessed with occasional Michigan connections. And yet I’ll be rooting for my alma mater to beat U-M in football this weekend. [Editor’s note: They did.]

2. The other thing that stuck with me from Albom’s book: the Fab Five bought those iconic black socks at Houston’s Galleria, a fact that thrilled me and made me feel deeply proud of my city and its vast consumer offerings. (Although I technically lived in Sugar Land.)

3. I still remember overhearing a preppy-looking kid berating his mom as they left the school that day. “No, Carol. That’s not what we’re doing. No. Just be quiet, Carol.” Something like that. This was the first time I’d ever heard someone call their parent by their first name. (The mom’s name wasn’t actually Carol; I’ve changed it to protect the innocent. The kid’s name was Brendan, though.)

4. Fab Five wasn’t one of the required texts, unfortunately, but my freshman English teacher did assign Shoeless Joe, the W.P. Kinsella novel that was the source material for Field of Dreams. I loved it. Highlight of freshman English, by far.

5. I wonder if she even remembers this moment. Let me know, mom! [Editor’s note: She has no recollection of this moment.]

6. Later, I would receive a PH for standing at my desk when the bell rang.

7. Brother Casey had a nice smile, although it wouldn’t have been socially acceptable to voice that opinion among my peers. But it was nice—genuine, even warm. For a photo featuring that smile, and more on Brother Casey (and his possible Sicilian mafia ties [!!!]), check out this incredible remembrance by the great Houston writer and Jesuit alum John Nova Lomax, who passed away last year. Rest in peace to both of them.

8. Much later I realized that the situation was actually more complex. Sure, there were some freshmen boys who were bold enough to just walk over there and start a conversation with a St. Agnes student. But most of the boys who were talking to girls in the courtyard during that first week of school were middle school classmates with those girls. Private school! Even I could’ve done that! Probably!

9. I very clearly remember standing against a wall, watching my new private school peers rap/sing along to “Gangsta’s Paradise.” But I think that might’ve taken place at another dance, some months later, in the St. Agnes gym. (Coolio always brought the house down.) Wish I could remember exactly what they played at that first dance, though. “Here Comes the Hotstepper”? “Big Poppa”? That Better Than Ezra song? “Tootsee Roll”? “Cotton Eye Joe”? Circus music?

10. And maybe he was embarrassed, who knows? Maybe he never locked anyone in a storage closet ever again. Maybe that incident, as harmless as it was, led him to be kind forever after to people who were smaller than him, as an act of penance. Who we are as seniors in high school is not always who we end up being.