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a character in a show called, “Goof Troop.” I used
to refer to this character, Pete, as “A Bad Buddy”. I
would later refer to children who could not behave
as “A Bad Buddy”.
I also collected Veggie Tales movies and watched each
one of them. My top five characters in that series were
BobtheTomato, Larry theCucumber, JuniorAsparagus,
Mr. Nezzer, and Laura the Carrot. The things that I can
recall that I learned from the movie are selfishness and
rumors. My parents used to call me the “rumor weed”
whenever I was gossiping about people.
Every day, I would go to Liberty High School with my
parents before and after school. My dad was a math
teacher and a basketball coach and my mom was a
computer teacher. I would ride the bus to and from
Liberty High School and Bedford Primary School. In
the mornings before school, I hung out with my dad
in his classroom and in the afternoons after school, I
hung out with my mom in her classroom. Whenever
I hung out with my dad in his classroom, I would
draw a number line on the board and I could add
and subtract positive and negative numbers. I could
also add alphabet letters like A + B = C or C + M
= P. It took my dad a while before he figured that I
was associating letters with numbers. I would also
subtract letters.
I moved to Lexington, Virginia in second grade
because my dad accepted an assistant basketball
coach’s job at Virginia Military Institute. The school
I attended never had an autistic student before. At
first, they were going to put me in a special classroom,
but my parents insisted that I belonged in a regular




