Matching Tracksuits

“You’ve got kind of a big nose, huh?”

The words fell like grenades as the three of us bobbed about the shallow end of the pool. My best friend was talking to my new girlfriend my first girlfriend, truth be told who’d been the axis of my existence for the previous week of band camp.

The words hit her fairly hard, too, for her eyes teared up and she swam away.

I said something icy and hateful to my friend and swam off to comfort my lady.

Truth be told, she did have a nose that was a bit on the large size, though of course I was not foolish enough to admit it when my friend protested later, “But she does have kind of a big nose.”

“You didn’t have to say anything,” I thought. I said, “No, she doesn’t!”

She herself admitted it sometime later, with a laugh, even.

We were all twelve, and yet somehow my friend had not yet learned that you don’t have to say everything you’re thinking.

Many of the boys I work with daily, at age fifteen, even sixteen, still have not learned that either. If I go into work with a bit of razor burn, I get comments. Endlessly. If they think my clothes are somehow unfashionable, they let me know, then stand around in a circle and laugh about it as I stand there.

It’s funny — when I was their age, I did the same thing. But my friends and I talked about teachers’ razor burn or mismatched wardrobe in hushed tones, and we would never be presumptuous enough to think that we could mock the teacher as if he were a peer. But that is exactly what many of the boys at the center do.

The worst was the first time I cycled to school. When they saw me in typical cycling clothes everything spandex, basically they howled with laughter. “Oh my God!” one literally screamed. “Look what a faggot Mr. S looks like!”

Part of what I try to do on a daily basis, then, is to encourage them to whisper among themselves instead of talking among themselves. And this is particularly frustrating, because it seems to them that I’m simply annoyed by their behavior and trying to punish them in some way or other. Quite frankly, it’s easy to ignore such immaturity (and that’s really all it is), but that’s not my job — and therein lies the frustration.