Then Mackenzie leapt up from the bed, shook his dorky friend by the shoulders and told him, “Oh, Vaughan! High school will be so much better! It really will. You’ll see. It’ll be the time!”
Vaughan had hoped a little bit that Mackenzie was right.
But only a little.
And freshman year had proven how wise that small hope had been.


Freshman year:
It had begun with insult added to injury. Cedric had never been solicitous of his sons’ wardrobe. In fact he had never had to be since Vaughan was in Catholic school, but now the boy was treated to all manner of taunts and ridicules. His jeans were not only the wrong sort, they were rolled, which was hopelessly out of style. His shirts were ugly. His hair was horrible. He talked like a book. Black people said he wasn’t Black enough. White people agreed. He faced being stuffed in a locker once or twice. Football players made fun of him. So did cheerleaders.
The only hope for him was to join the band--where everyone was a disgrace.
“I wish you would,” Mackenzie said.
“I can’t play an instrument.”
“You could do the triangle.”
Vaughan just looked at his friend through his glasses..
“I was actually serious,” Mackenzie said.
“I know.”
And Vaughan couldn’t figure our where Mackenzie had learned to play an instrument either. What’s more, being on the band did not make him less popular though Coach Foster was a little upset his son did not try out for the football team.
And then there was Coach Foster. It was not his fault that he was the gym teacher, it was just that gym was even worse for Vaughan than math and it was dreadful to be under a man who was his best friend’s father. Mercifully, Mackenzie was not in this class with Vaughan. It all had to do with what times math and foreign language classes took place. Mackenzie was taking French and he was in Algebra. Vaughan was in remedial math, taking Latin. So they wouldn’t see each other much that year.
What Vaughan had was his sister, who was an outcast in a whole other way. Dating the quarterback, beautiful and glamourous, Madeleine Fitzgerald was an outcast. He had Claudia who had cast herself out and Tina who had done the same and seemed doomed to live in the shadow of her sister.
Ashley was no outcast.
Nor was she worth talking about, and so they didn’t.
However, due to the advanced math class on Mackenzie’s part, extreme loneliness on the part of Vaughan, and learning how to cheat a little when it suited him, Vaughan learned at the end of his freshman year that he had the highest GPA by far in his class. Some boy he didn’t know was a distant second. Fourth place was held by Mackenzie.
“I’m so proud of you!” Mackenzie said, shaking his friend, which made Vaughan ashamed for feeling triumphant.
The year came to an end with high school as bad as ever, Vaughan a laughing stock, though a brilliant one, who’d narrowly missed being shut in lockers by basketball players. He was sitting on the large front porch of the Fitzgerald house, Coke bottle glasses down his nose, raspberry colored Argyle socks pulled up to his knees, and looking to his right, to the high school across the field when he made a discovery. Vaughan at the age of fifteen learned what most people never learned at all. It wasn’t high school or any other thing or place that would change him or how people looked at him. It was all him.
And now he was about to change his image.

-- From

The Hidden Lives of Virgins