Youth Gone Wild. Robert "Bob" Sorensen

ripped for other issues. I don’t want to give my tormentors anything else to zero in on. The problem was, I couldn’t see the board without them. I didn’t care. I was more worried about survival than I was about my performance in school. Of course, my grades began to suffer. Sister Alodia, my teacher at the time, was sending progress reports home with me for my parents. My parents were supposed to read her comments, sign off, and return with me to school. I knew once my parents saw these reports, I was a dead man. What can I do to circumvent? Now I have to give myself credit for creativity on this one. Hear me out. As I mentioned earlier, my father was an architect. He had velum (tracing) paper in his basement office. I grabbed a piece of that paper, along with a canceled check from the bank (not sure how I tracked that down), and headed up to my room. I laid the paper over my mother’s signature on the check and traced it onto velum. Once that was complete, I took the tracing paper and laid it over the signature area on the progress report. With a ballpoint pen, I pushed down hard on the signature until I was complete. This made a perfect indention on the progress report. I would then remove the tracing paper and fill in the indented area with my pen. Perfect match! I brought it back the next day, and not a word was said. This went on every week until mid-November, during parent-teacher conference time.

      We headed on over to the school, my parents totally oblivious of what had been happening over the last several months. We sat down, and Sister Alodia dropped the bomb. “Robert is doing terrible in all his classes. You must take a more active role in his studies. In addition, we think his eyes should be tested. He may need glasses. He appears to be having trouble seeing the board, even from the front row.” (I wonder how I ended up there.)

      My parents were shocked and quite pissed off. “Why is this the first we are hearing about this?”

      Surprised, Sister Alodia pulled out the stack of signed-off progress reports and handed them to my parents. Busted! My parents told my teacher they had never seen these and that all had been forged. They also informed her that I’d worn glasses since I was a child. A few more pleasantries were exchanged, along with many an apology. We headed home in silence. After a ten-minute spanking session and thirty-minute verbal abuse session, I was sent to my room, the eye hook attached. Other than school and meals, that was where I would stay for the next two weeks. No crying jag, no head banging was going to get you out of this one.

      *****

      At this point, I need to digress a bit. Over the past summer, I met a new friend in the neighborhood. His name was Stevie. He was a year younger than me, lived five houses to the west of mine, and attended the local public school. He was so different from my other friends. He was nonjudgmental of my appearance, behavior, or tendencies. He, for whatever reason, accepted me for who I was. He was the coolest kid I had ever met in my short life. Little did I know at this point just how much of an impact Stevie would have on my life!