My senior year of high school was a weird time for me. Well, I guess it’s a weird time for everyone, really. But being an eighteen year old gay male can really complicate things beyond usual teenage drama.

My high school years were the usual roller coaster ride of ups and downs, marked by disastrous relationships and occasional uncomfortable moments with my ‘less open’ classmates. But really, I didn’t suffer too much for being the only gay guy in my graduating class.

I guess it wasn’t rough for me because I didn’t make a thing of it. I mostly kept to my own tight little group of friends and just let the jocks and queens run the school as they pleased, without treading on their delicate social territory.

I was also a bit of nerd, being a marquee player on the school’s quiz bowl and math teams. That’s where I made of my lot of my closer friends. The nerds never judged you the way the ‘cool’ kids did. They were just genuinely happy to be acquainted with a new, unique person who didn’t have any inclinations to judge them just as they weren’t inclined to judge.

I guess, my point is, I wasn’t the type of high schooler who partied on weekends, and wore school colors for all the big games, and just lived that young, freespirited, adventurous lifestyle. I was a shy, reserved, home body who preferred to read about something in a book rather than go out and experience it firsthand.

My freshman year, I had this great biology named Theo Sinclair. Theo was a small, froppish little man with thick, messy, coarse dark hair that he was constantly shoving across his brow, and those classic ‘science geek’ dark rimmed glasses. He had a wide smile that showed a lot of gum, and he was full of unusual little quirks. All the other students hated him, because he was an unusually tough teacher, but I really like Mr. Sinclair. He was a brilliant guy – way overqualified to be teaching high school science, but his wife was the director of the local museum, and he’d accepted a job teaching at my school mostly because there weren’t any universities in the area of my small town.

Throughout my four years, he served as… not necessarily a mentor… but certainly a role model for me. I took every class I could that he taught, and managed to get him every year except for my sophomore. Now, towards the end of my senior, and near the end of my A.P. biology class with Mr. Sinclair, I was feeling the need to tell him what he had meant to me before I left for college.

I picked one day during the last week of school to hang out a little after the bell, waited for the other kids to clear the halls, and then I slipped into the science lab. Mr. Sinclair was in there, grading finals and thumbing through lab reports. He greeted me and asked what he could do for me.

I was embarrassed and a little nervous. I was so intimidated by this guy and his overwhelming intellect that I just sort of stammered for a minute. Then I was finally able to get the words moving and tell him how fortunate I felt to have had him as a teacher, to challenge me and to prepare me for the next stage of my academic career.

The usually stoic and