Uncensored

by Zachary R. Wood

  I was slated to speak at an upcoming Bullis event about what it meant to be a scholar. The day after I went on medical leave, I spoke to Mr. Delinsky on the phone. “Out of respect, I wouldn’t mind if you chose to use a different speaker,” I told him.

  “Let’s wait and see what happens,” he responded. I wasn’t sure what that meant. What exactly were the factors that would determine my fate?

  I heard back from Mr. Delinsky two days later. “You have a choice to make,” he told me over the phone. “This can go before the conduct review board. Then one of three things will happen. You could get a short suspension, you could get a long suspension, or you risk expulsion.” He paused. “I have to be honest with you,” he said. “I don’t know which one of these is the most likely, but the chances are small that you’ll get expelled.”

  “But there’s a chance?” I asked. I couldn’t believe that sending some e-mails would result in expulsion, but if there was any possibility of it, I knew right away that this was not a risk I wanted to take.

  “Yes,” Mr. Delinsky responded.

  “And if I’m suspended, I’ll have to explain that to colleges?”

  “Yes,” he said again. It was starting to look like any of these three possible outcomes could ruin my chance of getting into a top school. “The other option,” he continued, “is that you withdraw.”

  I sat back in the wobbly plastic chair at the desk in my bedroom. “And I can do that on my own terms?” Mr. Delinsky had presented two options, but it was clear that it wasn’t really a choice at all.

  “Yes.”

  “Will I still have access to my records and college counselors?” The ax had fallen, and now I was trying to salvage what I could from the remains. When Mr. Delinsky agreed to these requests, I told him, “I’ll withdraw within the hour.”

  There was a pause. In the silence I could almost hear Mr. Delinsky nodding. “Zach,” he said, “would you mind telling me why you sent those e-mails?”

  He sounded sincere, and I answered honestly. “I wanted my friends to value me and see that I could help them. I didn’t think it would damage them or hurt their chances in any way, but I understand that it corroded their trust in me. I had no intention of hurting anyone,” I told him. “I just wanted to help.”

  Mr. Delinsky seemed satisfied. “I think this will be for the best,” he told me. “I’m just glad we didn’t have to get the police involved.”

  * * *

  —

  Once I told my dad what was happening, he said nothing about how to transfer or find a way to graduate. It was on me to figure out how to move on from this. It was too late to register at a different high school, so I started looking at online high schools and ended up transferring to Excel High School online.

  My focus, though, was on learning from this, on figuring out how to earn back what I’d lost and to bounce back better and stronger and more admirable than ever. I’d been caught, punished, and exposed, and that fueled a burning frustration and desire to prove once and for all that I didn’t need my mom, the people at Bullis, or anyone else. I could make it on my own; I would make it on my own.

  I thought about all the things teenagers normally get in trouble for and how I’d never done any of them. I’d never tried alcohol. I’d never done drugs. I’d never done anything sexually reckless or ill advised; I didn’t even date a single girl at Bullis. I’d never skipped a single class or gone home and said, “Screw my homework.” I’d never cheated on a test or plagiarized a paper.

  I thought about all the effort I’d put in over the last three years, all the sacrifices I’d made. The late hours up working. The sleepless nights. The four-hour, two-way commute. The time I spent preparing for Model UN conferences and tutoring people in the library after school. I thought about how I’d poured everything I had into putting my best foot forward every day, despite the obstacles I’d faced.

  Sending those e-mails wasn’t just wrong; it was immoral and willfully dishonest. And I’d never felt worse about anything I’d done in my entire life. Yet there was a part of me that could not help but think that if I had been white and wealthy, I would have graduated from Bullis. Instead, I missed out on senior projects, on senior homecoming, and on senior prom; and on graduation day, I didn’t walk across the stage with all the peers whose respect I’d worked so hard to earn. I had made a terrible mistake. And there were tough consequences. So I resolved to deal with them just as I had every other obstacle.

  Alone in my bedroom, I reread biographies and memoirs of some of the men I most admired—Martin Luther King, Frederick Douglass, Bill Clinton, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Ulysses S. Grant, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Barack Obama, Cornel West, Henry Louis Gates, and Kobe Bryant. I was searching these texts for clues about how the men I aspired to be like had confronted their own failures. Each of these people had overcome something unique. The common link between all their stories was that their strength ultimately came down to resilience. I knew that to be strong and resilient like them, I had to refuse to let my worst moments have the last word.

  Reading about Kobe Bryant in particular inspired me to commit to everything I put my mind to the way he committed to basketball. I grew determined to be more efficient, precise, and aggressive, to concentrate on what I wanted and, most important, to go about it according to my principles. Kobe had always been my favorite basketball player, and I had a deep respect for the way he approached the game. For him, it was all or nothing. His coach, Phil Jackson, said that if he set the bar at a seven, Kobe would raise it to a nine. No matter what he was facing off the court, he showed up and refused to give anything less than his absolute best.

  This was the mind-set I wanted to bring to everything I took on. At the end of the day, if all I had was the fact that I’d worked as hard as possible at something I cared about, that was something to be proud of. From that point on, I wanted to do everything I could to help as many people as I could, but I would do only what I was capable of doing. I recognized that I had hurt my friends in part because of who I was to them. They had trust in our relationships, and my actions had broken that trust. I had to sit with that.

  Over the next few months, I spent some part of every day thinking about what I’d done and why I’d done it. I saw that I’d been searching for something to feel good about, and that it would have been better for me to deal with those feelings honestly instead of making them disappear by doing more and more and committing to doing more than I actually could. Through my reading and introspection, I learned what qualities I most admired: understanding and caring about how what you do, what you say, and even how you think affect people.

  I had always been trying to grow intellectually, but now I realized that if I truly wanted to help people, I had to resist the impulse to see things abstractly and focus on the humans behind the data. My thoughts had also impacted my friends as a result of all the judgments and assumptions I’d made about them. They never told me that I had to do all those things to earn their respect. I had taken them all on willingly and then resented them for it. All this forced me to reconcile who I was with who I wanted to be, and face the fact that I wasn’t there yet.

  Going forward, I would act on my principles and my instincts and push myself to do what Kobe Bryant always did, which was use the pressures and challenges and obstacles in life not as something to run from but as something to overcome; to see every instance of self-doubt and self-contempt as an opportunity to rise above it and be better than I was before.

  Academically, online high school was easy, so I spent most of my time doing my own reading—delving into subjects such as physics and the history of science, which I knew the least about, so that I could learn more—and escaping from the house whenever I could. Since I’d moved to DC, putting all my energy into my life at Bullis was the only thing that had kept me going. Now I didn’t have that or any of the typical senior-year events or activities to look forward
to. I’d lost my closest friends and the teachers I’d considered mentors. But I’d be damned if I was going to sit around feeling sorry for myself.

  My cousin DA, who went to high school in Virginia, was a phenomenal baseball player who was having a hard time in school. He had an amazing opportunity to go to an all-star tournament, but he didn’t have the money, and there was some question of whether he was going to graduate from high school. I went down to Virginia and stayed with him for two weeks. During that time, I spoke at his high school, helped him with his schoolwork, and started a GoFundMe account to raise money for the tournament. When he still came up short, I gave him three hundred dollars from my own pocket that I’d earned doing odd jobs for Mrs. Brown and some other neighbors. I did not want to see him miss that opportunity.

  When I had done all I could for DA, I went back on the road, visiting another cousin, named RC, in New York and a friend from Bullis who had graduated the year before and was at the University of Pennsylvania, and doing fly-in programs to visit a number of colleges—Williams, Swarthmore, Brandeis, Amherst, and some other schools that I wasn’t even interested in attending. I just didn’t want to be at home. On these campuses, I had access to extensive libraries and academic journals and could even sit in on classes. This was far more rewarding and enriching than anything I could accomplish at home.

  After all these visits, I decided to apply early decision to Williams College. I had good conversations with the admissions people there and valued the individualized attention students received and the sense of community that Williams strived for. It was a small school, and I liked the idea that I could get to know people personally and see those same people around campus daily. If I was accepted, I was determined to be a great friend to the people I met there.

  When I was in DC, which was rarely, I spent a lot of time with Nicole. I’d gone to school with kids whose parents were millionaires with degrees from Harvard and Yale. They had lavish lifestyles, ample connections, and auditoriums at Ivy League universities named after their grandparents. My sister, like me, had none of that. She was only in fourth grade at the time, but I wanted more than anything to be there for her in ways that I wished someone had been there for me. I was determined to use my knowledge and experience to help her achieve her dreams and find joy and motivation along the way.

  When Nicole was at her mom’s house, I hung out with James. He’d forgiven me, but he didn’t want to be seen with me in public, so we snuck around. I spent a lot of weekends at his house and was grateful that his parents never once brought up the e-mails. One weekend when I was staying with James we were walking down the street to Chipotle when he yelled, “Duck!” I crouched down behind a bush, knowing that some guys from Bullis were on the other side of the street.

  James wasn’t the only person I kept in touch with from Bullis. A friend of mine named Ryan had my back and was my eyes and ears after I’d left. When I was at Bullis, Ryan was determined to improve his writing and wasn’t afraid to ask for help. I was happy to help him, and that continued after I left. Shortly after, he told me that when the school announced that I’d left for personal reasons, people were shocked. In the room he was in during the announcement, there were gasps. I also kept in touch with Drew and continued helping him with some writing assignments, but our relationship grew increasingly distant.

  I was back in New York visiting RC when I got the e-mail that I’d been accepted to Williams. We were planning to see a movie that night, and I was waiting for him in a little pizza place near his job. I’d like to say that I was elated, but more than anything I was heartened and bent on making up for lost time there—developing relationships with professors, making a difference on campus, and finally becoming the leader I wanted to be.

  I called my dad to tell him the news. It was mid-December, and I’d been traveling so much that I hadn’t seen him since Thanksgiving. But when he picked up the phone and I told him that I’d been accepted to Williams, all he said was, “All right, cool.” I hung up the phone and briefly clenched my fist before releasing it onto the table. After all I’d been through and everything I’d accomplished on my own, even the mistakes I’d owned up to, I was underwhelmed by my dad’s response. For a moment I wondered if there was anything I could do that would actually make him proud of me.

  Later that night, I thought about how my mom might react to this news. Since I’d left her house four years earlier, we’d spoken maybe a dozen times. I hadn’t seen her once. Our conversations varied from tense to intense, brief to long and involved. Most of the time, she seemed to want to put everything behind us and act as if we had a normal mother-son relationship. She asked how I was doing in school, if I was dating, and whether or not I was having sex. I vacillated between refusing to tell her anything at all and wanting to share every accomplishment and evidence of normal teenage behavior to prove that she hadn’t affected me in all the ways she might have. Now a part of me wanted her to know that I had done it—that, despite the challenges, I’d gotten through high school and would be going to Williams; and, most of all, that I’d done it without her.

  I called my mom the next day, and when I told her, she screamed with excitement, “Oh, my God, my son got into Williams! It is the best school. Fuck Harvard!” She told me that she wanted to throw me a party to celebrate. At first, I resisted and said that I’d be willing to see her if she came to DC to visit. But it was clear that she so badly wanted to be a part of my success and show me off to her friends and colleagues back home. Eventually I decided that if she was going to make such a big effort, the least I could do was show up.

  I flew to Detroit that February, feeling anxious about seeing her. On the plane, I ran through a million possible scenarios in my mind, all the things that could possibly go wrong and, if they did, how I could avoid being trapped there with her. But as soon as I got to her house, it was obvious that a big effort was being made to make this visit as pleasant as possible. I was happy to play along. We chatted amicably about Williams, and I told her about some summer programs that I was thinking of applying to.

  But after a little while, her true nature began to seep through our polite interactions. When I said something positive about DC or my dad, she turned to me with that look in her eyes. I was eighteen then—a man—and in many ways had been living as an adult with grown-up responsibilities since I’d left her home. It wasn’t the same as the last time I’d seen her, but I hated the fact that that look still had a small amount of power over me.

  The next morning when I came downstairs, she looked up at me from her seat at the kitchen table with a bright smile. It was a crisp winter day, but it was sunny outside. She sat cast in the glow from the window, smoking a cigarette. “Good morning, Zachary,” she said, reaching up to pinch my cheek. Without thinking, I flinched, swerving my head to the side to avoid her reach. I was too old for her to pinch my cheeks. But she recoiled, turning away from me with a wounded expression on her face. “I assume you want to feed yourself breakfast,” she said bitterly.

  I sighed. All in all, the visit had gone better than I’d feared, but there was no escaping the fact that my mom was the same complicated and unpredictable person she had always been. There was potential for our relationship to improve, and I held on to the hope that it would, but it would never be simple.

  * * *

  —

  As the school year drew to a close, I was thinking about the summer. I was used to spending my summers diving into new subjects that I hadn’t necessarily studied in detail at school. Now that I was on my way to Williams, I wanted to get a head start on college courses before I got to campus. Knowing that I’d be at a small liberal arts college made me want to experience what it would be like at a big Ivy League university, so I applied to summer programs at Yale, Stanford, Brown, and Georgetown as a visiting student. I was accepted at all of them and faced financial barriers at all of them. Stanford had the best aid policies for visiting students, parti
cularly for their precollege summer session programs, but there still was a big gap between the aid they offered and the amount I could pay.

  Determined not to let money get in the way of this opportunity, I set up a GoFundMe account and reached out to a few contacts to see if they would be willing to help me get the word out. After Bruce Leshan interviewed me for WUSA9, a local news network, about a dozen media outlets followed. Suddenly, my story was everywhere, and viewers responded by making contributions big and small. I was immensely grateful for their support.

  An arts patron in DC named Peggy Cooper Cafritz heard about me and ended up footing a huge chunk of the Stanford bill. She made it all possible, in the end. Since then, Peggy has become somewhat like a third grandmother to me—always there for me when I needed her, be it for money or advice, or to bounce off random ideas.

  The day I flew to California to attend Stanford, a glowing profile of me appeared in The Washington Times. Certain elements of the piece were problematic. It described me as a “neoliberal,” sympathetic to conservative ideas, instead of a liberal Democrat, open to engaging the other side. It also took some comments I made about Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich out of context. That bothered me, the fact that I was misquoted. I also strongly disagreed with an argument the article made against affirmative action and some negative comments it included about leftist professors. But I did appreciate the feature and the reporter’s interest in my story. As I boarded the plane, reading the piece, I felt that some of my hard work had paid off.

  My summer at Stanford was almost magical. It was the full college experience, living in the dorms and eating in the campus cafeteria. This was a far cry from the four years I’d spent reading in shadowy cramped quarters, and I loved it. Experiencing a totally new learning environment allowed me to grow and enjoy life more than I ever had before. I dated, and I developed some of the most significant, interesting, and meaningful friendships of my life with people I’d give an arm for to this day.