Читать книгу I Am Nobody. Confronting the Sexually Abusive Coach Who Stole My Life онлайн

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It worked. More and more I wanted to be like him.

Graham sympathized with me, saying that people like my father, who had dropped out of school before high school, could never understand people like us, people who lived a different life inside our heads. One night at dinner, my dad was talking about somebody’s son who was in engineering at university. He couldn’t understand why somebody would go to university to learn how to work on a train. I just nodded and looked away. But I laughed with Graham about it, thinking that he understood me and cared about me. I laughed with my eventual abuser about a perceived shortcoming in my dad. I can’t ever take that back.

Graham told me he could help me develop to the point where he could get me a scholarship to an Ivy League school. He could develop me. He could get me something. It was now all about what he could do for me and how I needed him to get what I wanted. Except, there’s no such thing as an athletic scholarship to an Ivy League school, not that I knew anything about that at the time (there is need-based financial aid, which often amounts to virtually total funding when a student-athlete comes from a family with a low income like mine). A simple sentence, but one with so much embedded in it, designed to position him between me and my dreams. Yet, all I could see at the time was that he was encouraging me to chase my goals.