I was six feet tall, having grown six inches in the prior eighteen months. The rapid height gain exacerbated my scoliosis. The condition had been discovered later than it should’ve, as I somehow slipped through the cracks of the embarrassing annual scoliosis checks during gym class. The checks consisted of a line of boys with their shirts off (my head down, wishing I were invisible, my arms matchsticking across my chest), and after a properly lengthy time of mortification I was in front of a disinterested school nurse holding a school-issued clipboard. I bent over to touch my toes, so skinny that my vertebrae stuck up through my skin like the back plates of Godzilla, and the nurse’s cold hand fish-slapped onto my right shoulder blade, her audible “hmmm” and “you look a little off” (me being a little off was her diagnosis) and then she told me to switch to carrying my bookbag with my left shoulder. Since being diagnosed eighteen months prior, I attended physical therapy sessions and slept in a hard-plastic-and-metal-framed back brace at night (the doctor had never insisted I wear it to school, knowing I would not), which improved the curvature in my lower spine, but not in the upper region between my shoulder blades where scoliosis was most difficult to correct, where the curve to the right measured thirty-five degrees. The prospect of spinal fusion surgery loomed if the curvature increased in my upper spine. I wore baggy enough clothes so other people wouldn’t notice the encroaching kyphosis, my curling into myself. No one at school commented on my back, and I never told any of them about it. Maybe no one noticed the burgeoning hunchback because of my other unpleasant physical attributes. We’ve already discussed my ectomorphic build (or lack of build). Additionally, my skin was a raw and angry map of acne. Archipelagos of pimple volcanoes regularly erupted on my face and my back and chest. That no one would ever see my back and chest was a small consolation. Of course, now, on announcement morning, I had a new Mount Washington red nodule, its craggy peak above my right nostril.

In the secondary studio, I sweated under the interrogation lamp. The kid behind the camera breathed too loudly, sucking up all the air. Where was the goddamn go signal? Was Shauna going to purposefully dump me from the announcements, like I was a never-been Z-list celebrity in the talk-show green room, bumped for an animal act that went too long? I’d be trapped standing in this tiny soundproof room forever.

The speaker above the door cut out. The light on the front of the camera pointed at my head finally burned red. I took a deep breath. And I spoke.