SOMETHING YOU MAYBE NEED TO KNOW: People call me White Rabbit.

Whenever they serve cooked carrots in the lunchroom, Terrell Patterson sneaks up behind me and yells “Feed White Rabbit!” as he dumps his carrots on my plate as a joke, and then everyone follows his example, until there’s a huge mound of orange.

This started last spring.

The first time it happened, I got really mad because people kept walking by and scraping what they didn’t want onto my tray, which wasn’t very sanitary, especially since I hadn’t finished eating my lunch.

Erin—who sits next to me in the cafeteria when it’s not basketball season—just started eating the carrots off my plate enthusiastically and thanking people until they got confused.

She kept saying, “Delicious! May I please have some more!” all crazily, until people were laughing at her instead of at what everyone was doing to me.

I actually like carrots, so I ate some too, because I saw that Erin’s plan was working and I don’t really care that people laugh when I eat those orange vegetables. I’ll have better eyesight than everyone, I thought, and then just left it at that.

The only problem is that the carrot dumping became a weekly event, and it’s really not funny anymore. I hope people forgot about it over the summer, but I doubt it.

I’m one of the few dozen white kids at my high school. I’m quiet like a rabbit. Eminem’s character in the movie 8 Mile is nicknamed B-Rabbit; Eminem is the most famous white rapper in the world; and I actually sort of look like him.

But the main reason people call me White Rabbit is because we had to read this very sad book by John Updike. It was about a long-ago white basketball star named Rabbit who grows up and lives a miserable life. I’m not a star, but I am the only white kid on our varsity basketball team.

Wes, who plays center and is the only other basketball player in the Accelerated English track, told all my teammates about the Updike book—well, just the part about there being a white basketball player with an embarrassing name. My teammates all started calling me White Rabbit.

The nickname stuck and now everyone in the neighborhood calls me that too.