I Beat the Odds by Michael Oher

Author:Michael Oher
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2010-12-19T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

High School

My first day at Briarcrest was overwhelming. It was already almost halfway through the school year, so there wasn’t anyone else with the first-day-of-school nerves that I had.

It wouldn’t be until the next year that the high school would move over to the huge new campus I’d seen when Tony took Steve and me there over the summer. As I looked around, I couldn’t believe that the “old” campus was so clean and well-maintained. Everyone apologized for how crowded it was because all the grades were using the same building until the high school’s big move coming up that summer. But compared to the schools I’d attended all my life, it was amazing.

Memphis has some beautiful public schools. East High School looks like some kind of a palace. It’s really incredible. That wasn’t the kind of city school I’d known, though. Almost all of mine were nearly identical, big, tired-looking brick buildings with tall windows that opened in five or six horizontal panels all the way down, a sure sign they’d been built before air-conditioning was standard. A teacher could tilt the panels open to catch a breeze when the classroom got too hot, which was anytime from April on. The windows only let in a dirty brown light. Whether they looked so cloudy because they were old or just needed to be washed, I don’t know. I just remember that no matter which school I was in, the whole building—the classrooms and hallways and offices—all seemed to have that same kind of dull, hazy light from all of those old windows.

Looking around the hallways at Briarcrest, I noticed that everyone seemed happy. The students were happy, the teachers were happy, the administrators were happy. People seemed like they were glad to be there, and that they were glad you were there, too. It might sound nice, but it actually felt a little weird.

I am a creature of habit. I like things to be set a certain way, and I like to stick to that routine. I don’t like a lot of adventure or change or to do anything that goes against the grain. I’m naturally kind of shy, at least at first, and even after I get to know someone I’m still usually pretty quiet. Especially when I’m in a new situation, I like to hang back and evaluate everything, to see how people connect with one another and react, just to get a feel for the flow of things. I would have liked to just blend in the first couple weeks at Briarcrest so I could watch and learn about how to fit in there. But from the time the teachers introduced me to the class to the time the bell rang, I stuck out. I was a giant black kid surrounded by a bunch of shiny pink kids. Not standing out was not an option for me.

There were a couple of other black students at the school, and they pretty much all played sports, so Steve had gotten to know some of them.

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