I never got a bucket of ice water dumped on me for refusing to go to school, in part because I was so well trained that I never talked back or questioned my mom about anything, but also because I genuinely loved going to school.

My first school, Summit Hall Elementary, was right across West Deer Park from our apartment. It was exactly the kind of school you’d want your kid to go to. Super-cute. Little classrooms with walls covered in colors and shapes and kids’ arts and crafts projects. I was the poor kid with the weird mom, but when you’re that young, you can make friends with pretty much anybody and you don’t notice who’s poor or who’s got a fucked-up home. You might notice who’s got Super Nintendo and who doesn’t, but when you’re at their house, you’re so happy to be playing Super Nintendo that you don’t think about it that much. School was the one place I got to go and be like everybody else. I was also different from my mom in that I genuinely liked people. I hated being alone all the time. I was so hungry for normal relationships with normal people that I couldn’t wait to run into my classroom every morning.

But as I moved up through the grades, my love of school started to wane because so many of the teachers and administrators started treating me like I was a rotten apple. And sure, I was a cutup and a class clown and I was fidgety during story time, but A) I was bored and I wasn’t being challenged, and B) I had a bony ass because we didn’t have enough food to eat. If you have a bony ass and it’s time to sit crisscross applesauce—which is what they say now because you can’t say “Indian-style” anymore—then you’re going to be fidgeting and getting up and lying down and moving around because it’s uncomfortable to sit crisscross applesauce when you have a bony ass because you’re not getting enough food. I didn’t have any problems other than we could have used some more food stamps, but instead of getting me more food stamps the school decided I was a problem that needed to be fixed.

There were a few teachers who knew that I was underprivileged, so they were extra patient and went the extra mile. But the truth is that most of them didn’t give a shit. They all thought I was fucked up even though I wasn’t. I’ll grant that, statistically, they probably weren’t wrong to think of me the way they did. Odds are that a fucked-up situation like mine is likely to produce a fucked-up kid. But I was the exception, and they couldn’t see me as an exception.

In fourth grade, the school started making me see a therapist. We found one, but it wasn’t ever really about what was the best for me so much as who took the insurance. I started seeing this one therapist named Mary and this was at the height of the ADHD craze and this therapist Mary said I had ADHD but then maybe I didn’t have ADHD and then maybe I did. So she convinced my mom to put me on Ritalin or whatever’s the cheapest generic form of whatever Ritalin is. So for a while I was on Ritalin and what I remember most about being on Ritalin is that everything… slowed… down… and… became… really… really… really… boring. It was like the world of all the things I enjoyed became dull so I could focus on other shit, like math. I’d be in school absorbing all this information and it was like I was present but I wasn’t. Things I used to love and care about, I didn’t give a fuck about anymore. If anything, it almost made me feel depressed. And then my mother had a falling-out with that therapist, so I wasn’t on Ritalin anymore.

After the Ritalin failed to fix me, they had people start coming into the classroom to monitor me and see how I behaved, and of course the diagnosis was “He’s constantly moving and fidgety and jittery” and all this other shit. So then there was this big meeting with the principal and my teacher and my counselor and they brought in my mom because they feared there was “an issue at home.”

Which, obviously, there was.

Everyone at the school knew that my mom was nuts. She could hold it together long enough for when the cops came by or when social services visited the house to do an inspection or whatever, but at school, with her picking me up and dropping me off every day and having to regularly interact with humans, there was no hiding it. And when she went into this meeting, she lost it. She started rambling and screaming about how she’d been raped and she’d been sodomized and telling all the fucked-up stories she used to tell me, and all these school administrators sat there with their jaws on the table like, “Holy shit.”

After the meeting the administrators made me take this aptitude test that measures how fucked up you are. Whatever the standard is for “fucked up,” apparently I met it. They said that I needed to be taken out of Summit Hall and sent to a school for the emotionally disturbed. I put up a fight about it. I kicked and screamed and said, “I don’t want to go!” My mom didn’t want me to go, either. She fought back. But the ultimatum was “If he doesn’t go to this other school, then we’re going call social services and they’re going to take him away.” We had no say in the matter. We never did. No poor person does.

So they took me out of Summit Hall and now I was the kid who had to ride the short bus. Instead of a five-minute walk across the street to school, I was on this route where it literally took the driver three hours to drive around and pick up the fucked-up kids from all over the county so they could corral us and dump us off at a central location.

I hated it immediately. The school itself, Shady Grove, was just a regular school with one classroom of special-ed kids on campus. So all the “normal” kids had their homerooms together and I was stuck in this special-ed class. Back at Summit Hall I’d been the kid with the weird mom and all the kids were cool with it and I fit in with no problem. In the special-ed classroom, everybody was the poor kid with the weird mom. Now I was the normal one by comparison. Most of the kids had severe issues. There were extremely slow kids. There were autistic kids. There were a bunch of violent hood kids with anger management issues who always wanted to fight and argue and start some shit, like this one black kid who would always sniff his upper lip and was a fuckin’ bully and an asshole.

If you acted out, you had to go into this room called ASC. I can’t remember what the “A” stood for but I’m pretty sure the “SC” was solitary confinement. It was a padded detainment room where there was one lonely window and all the walls were covered with those blue vinyl mats they have in gym class. The teacher and the aides would be in there like asshole cops, pinning the kids’ arms and stepping on their backs to hold them down because they were going crazy and having tantrums. The kids would be crying and screaming, “You’re hurting me!” and they’d have to stay there for like thirty or forty minutes until the teacher said they could come out again. It was fuckin’ gnarly.

I had to go to the padded room a few times, usually for dumb shit like being a clown or sassing the teacher or the time I got into an argument over snacks. But these other kids were going into the ASC all the time because they were just violent. I got bullied and picked on constantly, kids pushing me and messing with me. I wanted to fight back but I knew I couldn’t. I knew if I fought or incited or participated in violence in any way, I would further prove their point that this was where I belonged. So I didn’t. I allowed myself to be bullied, and I took it and took it and it fuckin’ sucked and I fuckin’ hated it.

I’d sit there in class and think to myself, over and over, “I don’t belong here.” But then I did the same thing at home, too. I’d be up in the middle of the night, listening to my mom scream, thinking, “I don’t belong here.” I’d be walking home from the store two miles in the snow carrying thirty pounds of groceries, thinking, “I don’t belong here.” Everywhere I was, I never belonged, but I felt it especially in that special-ed class because at lunch and recess we’d go and be with all the regular kids and I’d play with them and I got on fine and I knew that was where I belonged. I even met this cute girl named Sarah and I would sit with her every day at lunch and we were fifth-grade boyfriend and girlfriend.

But it also sucked outside the special-ed class because so many of the normal kids liked to bully and beat up on the special-ed kids. I remember getting pinned up by this one asshole in gym class. He was a fuckin’ jockstrap and he grabbed me by my neck and shirt and pinned me against the lockers in front of all the girls and held me up and made me feel powerless, and I know he only did it because he was jealous that I was talking to all the girls and they liked me better than him even though I was one of the special-ed kids and he fuckin’ hated that.

The whole thing was fucked up. One of the worst experiences in my life. The kids were so mean and it fucked me up so much to the point where I couldn’t stand it anymore and eventually my mom decided to take me out and homeschool me. She found a desk for me to sit in and this ghetto chalkboard that she nailed to the wall and she even made me this fake badge for a fake school. She took my picture with a disposable camera and she cut it into a square, like an ID photo, and then she laminated it onto this card that made me look like I was enrolled at some academy that didn’t actually exist.

The badge looked legit, so one day I put on a nice collared shirt and some khakis and I clipped the card to my breast pocket and got a clear plastic bucket and went over to the nicer neighborhood right behind my neighborhood in the back of Summit Hall Elementary. I knocked on people’s doors and said, “Hello, my name is Bobby, and I’m here for the Poor People of America Fund. Would you like to donate a dollar or more to the cause of blah blah blah or whatever?” And all these rich white people, they didn’t even give a fuck. They were like, “Yeah, whatever. Here’s a dollar. Just get the fuck out of here.”

I was killing it, hitting all these houses and getting at least a dollar each, and sometimes more. Pretty quick I upped my ask. Now it was “Would you like to donate five dollars to the cause of blah blah blah or whatever?” and some of them would go for it. But then I pushed it too far because my dumb overeager ass started hitting the same houses twice and this one dude was like, “Let me see me your credentials.” I showed him my credentials and he said, “Something’s not right about this. What the fuck are you doing, kid?” So I ran, and that was the end of the Poor People of America Fund. Before it was all over I made out with like seventy bucks, which was the most I ever got out of homeschooling because my mom was into it for maybe two weeks and then she was like, “This is too much work. I’m over this,” and she quit.

She didn’t teach me shit. Literally the only thing I can remember from my mother homeschooling me is addition, subtraction, and Hooked on Phonics. She’d sleep until two or three in the afternoon and I could only see my friends when they got home from school, so I’d wake up and fuck around the apartment with nothing to do—and the little kid who loved school because it was the one place where he could go and be a normal kid and hang out with other normal kids and make normal friends, that kid never loved school ever again.