On the second-to-last day of eighth grade, just hours before the graduation ceremony—which he was refusing to attend—Sean began making plans to skip school the next day and go skating. It was the annual “Go Skate Day,” and his friends were all ditching classes.
I had been working in my basement office and came up to check in with the boys, who were in the kitchen making after-school snacks with three friends, watching YouTube videos, their skate shoes piled in the mudroom atop a sculpture of backpacks and boards. That’s when I overheard them talking about Go Skate Day. I googled it and learned that the rogue holiday—scheduled on the summer solstice, the longest day of the year—encouraged skaters to blow off every obligation and just skate. I had to admit, it sounded innocent enough, almost cute.
Then again, hadn’t every day been “go skate day” lately?
Sean was telling the others they should warm up at Inner Space first, then hit the streets. But Leo was waffling, thinking about just going to school.
“C’mon, Leo, it’s gonna be a good sesh,” Sean said, and the other boys hassled Leo until he agreed to join them.
“Wait, wait, wait a second,” I finally intervened. “Nobody said you could take the day off.”
Sean’s argument: The school year was done. Middle school was done. Why make a curtain call?
And we were off and running, Sean and I arguing about the value of the next day’s classes and of finishing the year with grace. The other boys shuffled outside as Sean and I, like two boxers in a ring, took jabs at each other, a version of the same scuffle we seemed to have all the time.
“Middle school isn’t learning,” Sean said, in his go-skate defense, and I countered (lamely) with, “But don’t you want to say good-bye to your teachers?”
In Sean’s case, he’d hardly earned a day off. In recent weeks we’d gotten calls from the vice principal (Sean took a laptop from the library without permission) and the Seattle Police (Sean and friends, skating on private property, taunting the owner, again). He’d been having a tough time lately, his grades flirting with the danger zone.
I spent brutal evenings with him, painfully finishing homework that he claimed he’d already turned in, a few of which I found crumpled under his bed. It was as if he’d finished them to prove he could, but saw no upside to giving them to his teacher. But then he hunkered down and did a ton of work to catch up on missing assignments. Mary worked with him, too, and even hired a math tutor. Sean had pulled back from the brink of failure and would be able to graduate on time.
And yet . . . Sean had little interest in graduation. It was difficult to accept how disconnected he was from the whole middle school experience, how we all were. Self-inflicted or not, I think Sean felt like an outsider looking in. He’d reached the finish line, but it gave him no sense of accomplishment. He’d done what was needed to close the book on middle school, more than ready to turn the page, even if he might’ve felt a twinge of regret for not trying harder.
So. When he asked-slash-demanded that I let him skip the last day of eighth grade and go skating . . . let’s just say it was a complicated equation.
Late that afternoon, I negotiated a deal: “Go to graduation tonight and maybe I’ll let you skip school tomorrow.”
Hours before the ceremony, Sean finally, somewhat sadly, agreed to put on some nice clothes and attend.
The ceremony was held in the school parking lot on a warm, sunny evening. Students filed into their seats as Mary and I stood off to one side—the sheepish parents who deserved the back row. We’d missed so many middle school rites. No soccer games or class plays, science fairs or spelling bees. My kids wanted to spend as little time as possible at Whitman Middle.
We were relieved to find Sean listed in the program but confused by the asterisk beside his name. During the ceremony, after a few heartbreaking words of remembrance for Joey, the principal described how she would announce each graduate and they’d come to the podium to get their diploma. She explained that students with asterisks by their names were being recognized for academic achievement. I turned to Mary, who looked at the program again to make sure—at one low point we feared he might fail everything except gym.
I was usually the weepy one, but when they called Sean’s name Mary started to cry, surprising us both. As Sean bounced up to the platform to grab his diploma I left Mary and sprinted from the back row, just in time to get a photo of my boy striding past his classmates, grinning a toothy grin. He hadn’t wanted to be here, and now his friends were whistling and clapping and the sun was shining and he seemed proud and relieved and it just killed me.
After the ceremony, Sean, Nate, Max, and Willem posed for goofy pictures in front of a Whitman Wildcats sign, flashing peace signs and making faces. Mary asked Sean to hold up his embossed certificate (which we’d learn was for high scores on his standardized tests): “to Sean Thompson in recognition of Outstanding Academic Achievement.”
That night, I called Willem’s and Max’s dads and we all agreed (reluctantly) to let the kids skip the final day of school for Go Skate Day. The next morning, a gang of boys came by for breakfast, a blizzard of cereal flakes, jam-smeared toasts, the chugging of OJ. They were so jacked up and cute that I was glad that I’d cut them some slack.
Then Leo changed his mind. He wanted to go to school. Sean was stunned he would choose school over skating. He pleaded with Leo, the two of them suddenly, strangely near tears. Maybe the emotion of actually finishing middle school had caught up to Sean. Caught up with both of them. Or maybe Leo just needed a break.
“I’m not quitting skating, Sean,” Leo said. “It’s just sometimes I don’t feel like skating.”
Sean finally backed off, slung his backpack and board over his shoulder, and gave Leo a hug.
“Love you, Leo.”
“Love you, too, bro.”
Later that morning, after Leo walked to school and Sean and his gang went off to skate, I called the vice principal, to catch up and to thank her. I knew she’d been meeting with Sean, trying to find ways to help. Still, he’d been sent to her office so many times I was convinced she must have hated my kid.
Instead, she told me about her daughter, the skateboarder. The one whose boyfriend was a pro skater. Turns out she knew exactly what we’d been dealing with, having had similar tussles with her “live in the moment” daughter, as she put it. The vice principal explained that she saw something in Sean, something that needed a nudge.
She could also tell Sean was sensitive and, despite his outward bluster, a little insecure—someone who didn’t respond to punishment, but to patience. She described the day Sean skipped a class and came to her office, asking if he could just sit there. She didn’t scold him but let him sit quietly, and after a few minutes he asked her about the family pictures on her desk, about her childhood, her parents. When she told him her parents were Japanese immigrants who’d been held in an internment camp during World War II, he asked more questions . . . How did that happen? What was it like? Could it happen again?
“That’s not a conversation a lot of students would have with me,” she told me.
I was stunned. Sean had actually developed a relationship with the vice principal?
She said she understood his attraction to the shadowy edge of skating, how the classroom could not compete with the street. In a tone bordering on admiration, she described Sean’s wide-ranging curiosity, his sense of right and wrong, his insistent (if sometimes shrill) righteousness. She told me how Sean rarely backed down when he got in trouble, how he’d seek loopholes, boldly challenging the logic of a teacher’s rule and repeatedly asking why or why not.
“The thing is?” she said. “He’s really a deep thinker. He has the foundation to do great work.”
I wasn’t sure where this was going . . .
“And these kids who always ask ‘why’?” she continued, then paused, maybe afraid to say too much. “The ones who ask ‘why?’ . . . Well, those are the people who can change the world.”
I couldn’t speak. My throat cinched tight, and I took a deep breath to keep my cool.
We’d come so far the past few years, with so many authority figures scolding our noncompliant sons for not following the system. And the implication was: you’re bad parents, doing it all wrong. Bad!
Now someone was telling me our son wasn’t so worthless after all. In fact, she was suggesting there was hope, that our complicated, recalcitrant, antagonistic, confrontational little man might one day be a force for good. She saw what we saw: the promise (and challenge) of a kid who’s been let off his leash, who thinks for himself, who follows his own meandering if imperfect path. Of all things, Sean’s middle school vice principal was the therapist I didn’t know I needed.
As we talked I jotted notes on Sean’s pre–high school summer reading list, scribbling in the gaps between Kurt Vonnegut, Ian McEwan, Jhumpa Lahiri, Dave Eggers, Tom Wolfe, Sherman Alexie, Zadie Smith, Salman Rushdie—writers who’d been my teachers during my own periods of asking why and why not.
I thanked the vice principal for her help, hung up, and mixed a huge Manhattan.
While waiting for Mary and the boys to get home, I started highlighting names on the reading list—Cormac McCarthy, Donna Tartt, Tobias Wolff, David Shields—and quickly found myself crying, tears dribbling onto the marked-up reading list. I’d always been an easy crier, a trait inherited from my mom, my eyes leaking on cue for sappy TV commercials, corny songs, heartfelt movie scenes. Today’s tears felt justified and earned. We’d reached some culmination of the things I’d tried to tell myself—my kids are unique and challenging boundary pushers with so much potential and all I can do is love them, believe in them, give them room, wait and hope and pray. And sometimes drink.
We’d heard all those typical bad-boy diagnoses over the years, all those acronyms, even if the doctors, therapists, teachers, and counselors never seemed quite sure. Even Sean at times wanted to know: “What’s wrong with me? What do they call it?” He wanted a name. We’d received many. But none of them fit.
Now we had another name. One that made more sense. He was a boy who asked why. A lot.
Mary finally got home and joined me with a cocktail and I started telling her about the vice principal, but I had to keep pausing, struggling to get the words out, trying to keep my composure, but failing. “She told me . . .” I tried again, but couldn’t speak without sobbing. “She said kids like Sean . . . that they ask why . . . that they change the . . .”
Before I could choke out “change the world,” Mary knew. She started to tear up, too. I put my face in my hands and I let go, a boozy, weepy fucking mess.
As I often did at times of parenting drama, I desperately wished I could’ve shared Sean’s graduation saga with my mom. But I also realized that she would’ve surely reminded me of my own inglorious departure from middle school. And she would’ve added some snark, like “apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, does it, NT?”
In the sunny final days of eighth grade, I’m sitting in the back of Mrs. Beihl’s class, my mind already on summer—late ’70s, AM radio, hostages in Iran, bad hair—when the spell is broken by my mom’s appearance at the door, her face crimped in a scowl. She gives the urgent “come here now” finger curl and I walk out of class, toward my comeuppance.
Minutes later, we’re at the Sparta Police Department, in the office of Sergeant Irons. On his desk is a check made out to Sparta Sporting Goods for $65. In the notes section of the lower left, in my own black-ink scrawl, “Happy Birthday Neal.” Printed in the top left corner is the name and address of a neighbor, i.e., not my parents. And Irons is pissed.
“Is that your handwriting there, Mister Thompson?” the officer asks, and I’m already shaking my head no.
The check had come from a classmate’s house, though I can’t recall whether Don and I stole the checkbook while hanging there after school or, worse, if we broke in later. I do remember Don and I each tearing out a few checks and Don’s brother holding on to the rest. I’d used one of my checks months earlier to buy a ski sweater, telling my curious mom that Don had given it to me because it didn’t fit him anymore.
“Don’t you dare lie to me, young man,” Irons said, raising his voice to scary-cop level.
I turned to my mom for help, but she kept looking down at her hands, seething and ashamed. Irons slammed his fist on his metal desk and barked, “Mom’s not gonna help you out of this, son. You need to tell the truth.” On the car ride home, after I’d tearfully confessed, my mom looked so disappointed and hurt: “What the hell’s wrong with you? That’s not how you were raised.”
That night, despite my pleading, my dad drove me to the neighbor’s house, and on their front stoop I stammered an apology. They agreed not to press charges.
I still look back on that day as my adolescent dumb-ass wake-up call. Or one of them. Sergeant Irons didn’t quite scare me straight, though. There was more idiocy to come.
Maybe that’s why Sean’s middle school completion, while a relief, also left me a bit uneasy. Would things settle down in high school? Having put my parents through the wringer in high school, I knew the answer. And it scared the crap out of me.
So. With Sean soon to start high school, and Leo entering his last year of middle school, I felt a ticking-clock urgency to spend more time with them, cling to them, be a better dad. That’s when I remembered Leo’s idea from the previous summer as we were driving through Utah with my dad.
And I planned a road trip.