Homeschooled

What story do you tell yourself to make your life make sense—and what does that story cost other people? In Homeschooled (through the short story “Life Lessons”), Stefan Merrill Block argues that we survive by turning pain into narrative. His narrator, a nineteen-year-old with severe facial burns who failed out of basic training before Iraq, builds a persona—Inferno Man, Sloth, Grotesque Pumpkin Head—to control how others see him. Ava, his brilliant, wounded, manipulative best friend, builds a different survival mechanism: lies so audacious they create room to breathe. The book contends that storytelling is both medicine and toxin; the same narrative that gives you purpose can anesthetize you to the harm you cause.

You watch a semester spiral from dorm hallway jokes to a fake pregnancy, a fistfight, an arrest, an eviction, and a sex act that lands like a punishment. Sixteen years later, an AA amends email lands, and one meeting in a hotel lobby reopens old questions: Who were we, really? What were we doing to each other? Is telling the truth an adult skill—or just another performance? Block’s core argument is unsettling but clarifying: identity is a story we keep revising, but adulthood begins when you accept accountability for the debris those revisions scatter across other lives.

The Survival Kit: Pity and Performance

After a training stun grenade disfigures him, the narrator is discharged from Walter Reed with a therapist’s prompt: keep a list of “life lessons” to teach your future child. He translates pain into maxims and banter. On campus in 2003 St. Louis, he routinizes his disfigurement—Rorschach his scars, kiss his biceps, bellow “Heeey, yoooou guuuys!” like the Goonies’ Sloth—because pity feels less like a trap if you can turn it into a joke. But the attention he harnesses as a shield also isolates him; he’s the circus act others can applaud without seeing.

Ava’s survival kit is different. She keeps her Idaho past padlocked and refuses straightforward no’s with men. Instead, she spins: a dead brother in the towers, terminal illness, a violent PI husband. With the narrator, she co-authors an escalating repertoire of “get-out” stories. Their private theater is intimate and intoxicating—until it pulls an innocent person into its undertow.

When Fiction Meets Power

The house at 544 Etzel sits in a majority-Black neighborhood, owned by Andre DeWitt, a grieving father trying to stave off foreclosure after his daughter’s death. The white student tenants treat the blight as adventure—their quote board turns life into punchlines—and Andre becomes their “crazy character,” a nightly cameo that flatters their myth of edginess. When Ava sleeps with Andre and later fakes a pregnancy to dodge intimacy, a private fiction collides with public power. The narrator’s single punch—backed by police deference to a disfigured white veteran and by a house consensus that Ava is “drama”—gets Andre cuffed and Ava evicted. Their theater suddenly has real stakes.

Consent, Condemnation, and the Story You Can’t Stop Telling

When Ava climbs into the narrator’s bed the night before she’s forced out, the sex reads not as long-delayed tenderness but as verdict. “I’m done pitying you,” she says—then leaves for good. Sixteen years later, she reappears, newly sober, to apologize. She also drops a final bomb: the pretend baby might not have been pretend; she says she got pregnant “in the end” and placed the child for adoption. Is this confession, manipulation, or both? He chooses not to press—the adult move, he hopes—but he never fully escapes the gravitational pull of his old narrative. He still whispers her name when shame floods back.

The ideas that matter here are intimate and civic: how trauma tempts you to perform a version of yourself people can handle; how deception, when normalized, turns other people into props; how whiteness and pity can become force multipliers of harm; how “amends” can be another story unless tethered to accountability. You’ll see how a list of life lessons can keep you alive—and how the bravest lesson might be refusing a story that lets you off the hook.

Across the remaining ideas, you’ll unpack: pity-as-performance; friendship as collusion; race and power on Etzel Avenue; the escalating cost of “white lies”; how we keep remaking ourselves; and what real atonement requires. By the end, you’ll have a map for noticing the stories you default to—and tools to revise them with care.

Block shows you how quickly pity can harden into a role you perform—and how that role can become your prison. After a flash-bang accident ends his Army future, the narrator arrives at college with burns that draw stares and silence. His solution is to grab the microphone first. He names himself “Inferno Man,” “Grotesque Pumpkin Head,” and “Sloth,” goading laughter before anyone can offer pity. He turns his scars into a parlor game—“What shapes do you see?”—and kisses his biceps as a punchline. It works, sort of. People laugh. He belongs—sort of.

Owning the Narrative—And Getting Owned By It

By telling the campfire-shroom lie in the dorm hallway, he reclaims power. Strangers stop asking what really happened. They accept his cartoon. This is a common survival move (see Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life): when you fear being reduced to a label, you exaggerate it, because parody feels safer than pity.

But a role can backfire. The “freakshow” routine gives permission for others to keep him as spectacle. The T3ers—Kenneth, Victoria, Chad—cheer the bit but don’t see the person. Even Ava, who sees more, first validates the myth (“An RA told me all about it”) to open a door. The performance gets him attention but not intimacy. It’s camouflage that turns sticky.

The Therapist’s Prompt—and Its Double Edge

In the Walter Reed burn ward, a therapist named Dr. Weitzer prescribes meaning-making: keep a running list of “life lessons” for future children. He complies—partly to earn discharge—and discovers the power of addressing an imagined child’s ear. He writes things like, “Never sign up for military service to gratify your parents,” and “If you fail to secure financial aid… self-immolation is a good Plan B.” The impulse is noble: string suffering into sentences you can live with (Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning makes the same move).

Yet the lesson list also rehearses detachment. If you speak from the safe distance of a future parent, you can avoid today’s messy first-person needs. The first person becomes third. A voice-over replaces a voice. He carries this narration strategy into college, and it prevents him from asking for what he wants—in love, in friendship, and when the moral stakes get real.

“Good Guy” Theater

There’s another performance here: the disingenuous “good guy” best friend. The narrator and Ava are “besties,” “non-sexual life partners,” “fuck buddies without the fucking,” as Kenneth quips. He plays the ardent ally who shares Ava’s secrets and complicity—while quietly hoping proximity earns him love. He helps craft lies to dodge other men, then seethes when Andre’s hand finds Ava’s knee. The script lets him feel virtuous and wounded at once. But this too is theater—a way to be central without responsibility.

(Context: Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams dissects how pain invites performance and how empathy can become another show. Block’s story shares that skepticism: pity and performance feed each other until someone says stop.)

The narrator and Ava build a tight, intoxicating friendship on one non-negotiable: no questions about the past. He won’t press about Axel, Idaho or her family photo with seven siblings grinning behind a road-kill moose; she won’t force him to relive the grenade, the burn ward, the suicide attempt he withholds. Their bond lives in the present tense—books torn in half and traded, matinees treated like classes, gossip about made-up boyfriends. When intimacy feels too raw, they invent a story to deflect it.

The Rules of Their Game

Rule 1: Do not name real needs. Rule 2: Solve discomfort with spectacle. Rule 3: Make wickedness a salve. Ava won’t tell a man “no.” Instead, she and the narrator brainstorm escape hatches—a fake PI husband named Kurt, terminal pancreatic cancer, grief over a nonexistent brother lost on 9/11. They cackle as if transgression can cauterize insecurity. For the burned boy who sidesteps pity with jokes, this is perfect. He can be transgressive without risk; the lies are a bubble-wrapped intimacy he’s allowed to touch.

But their pact has a blind spot. If you never ask for someone’s truth, you can’t protect them from yourself. And if you turn other people into foils for your in-jokes, you’ll eventually draft someone who didn’t volunteer.

Sex, Money, and the Camera

Rent is due. Ava’s solution: an old acquaintance wires cash for nude photos. He wants upgrades—angles, lighting, better image quality—so she enlists the narrator as photographer. He complies, proud to be helpful, euphoric to witness her body through the viewfinder. She pays her share; he gets a private reliquary of images he transfers “from computer to computer to computer” for sixteen years. It feels consensual, even clever.

Yet it’s also a tangle of blurred boundaries and asymmetric desire. He isn’t paid. He isn’t her partner. He doesn’t delete the images. And he never asks the basic question friendship requires: “Is this actually safe for you?” Their collusion converts danger into a joke they both can survive—until the joke lands on someone else.

The Fake Pregnancy

When Andre grows serious, Ava panics. The narrator suggests a nuclear option half in jest—“Tell him you’re pregnant”—and Ava pulls the trigger. She calls Andre, declares she needs space to decide about “the baby.” At first, it’s just another plot twist for their private show. But unlike an invented PI or pancreatic cancer, this lie trespasses into someone’s sacred grief: Andre’s little girl just died. The fiction is no longer insulation; it’s intrusion.

(Compare to Sally Rooney’s novels, where secrecy and ironic performance often substitute for care. Block is less romantic: the bill for irony always comes due.)

The story’s moral center of gravity sits on a cracked sidewalk in St. Louis’s majority-Black neighborhoods, where a Georgian Colonial on Etzel Avenue lures white students with its decay. Block doesn’t sermonize; he stages. You watch how space, grief, and whiteness amplify the damage of small deceptions.

Gentrifying as Adventure

The T3ers arrive like tourists in catastrophe. They love the “miasmic fug,” the missing balusters, the mushroom-smelling basement. Their broker nearly says the quiet part out loud—“bring some class back to the place”—and the group laps it up. Quote boards on the wall immortalize their wildest lines (“Orgy! Orgy! Orgy!”) while Annabelle DeWitt, the landlord’s mother, sweeps the sidewalk “like a kitchen floor” and curses them—“I hope my grandbaby haunts your dreams.”

To the students, Andre is a “crazy character,” the “only Black person in regular attendance,” a delightful cameo in their nightly ragers. Their boozy myth-making turns a grieving father into flavor. This is the power dynamic before the plot turns: the house is a stage, the neighborhood a set, the residents local color.

Police, Pity, and the Punch

At the Halloween-eve party, Ava’s lie detonates. Andre arrives; Ava drinks shots with “Tripod,” a white Oompa Loompa with a swagger. The narrator points Andre toward the scene—“Her body, her choice”—and then freezes as Andre leads Ava upstairs. After a muffled argument, the two spill to the street; Andre, flooded with grief and rage, grabs Ava’s shoulders and shakes. The narrator lunges. There’s a blackout minute. He wakes with a shattered Phantom mask, bloodied lip, and Andre on the ground, one eye swelling shut.

Enter Officer Fillopovic. He smiles at the disfigured white veteran: “Next time some thug like that bothers you, you just give us a call.” The line is surgical. It frames Andre—a landlord, a father who’s just learned he’s been lied to about a pregnancy—as “thug.” It elevates the narrator’s impulse control failure into heroism. Whiteness plus pity equals instant credibility. Andre is cuffed. Within a day, Ava—deemed “drama”—is asked to leave the house. The campus costume party props (masks, wigs, sexy nurses) feel tame compared to this real theatre of power.

Andre’s Humanity

The morning after, Andre knocks. He’s bruised but measured. “Clocked me good,” he says, then asks after Ava. In the drunk tank, he’s been “worrying about her.” He reveals a version of Ava’s past—“Things her brother did to her”—that the narrator never earned the trust to learn. Andre also intuits the narrator’s role: “Y’all are just a bunch of kids, playing at grownups.” This line reframes the story: Andre is not a caricature; he’s the adult in the room, the only one whose grief has stripped away self-mythology.

(Context: While Block sets this in 2003 St. Louis, the pattern tracks broader critiques of “ruin porn” and gentrifier theater. The story anticipates the post-2014 St. Louis discourse after Ferguson: whose pain is legible, whose is criminalized.)

Not all lies are equal. Some are self-protective evasions; some weaponize another person’s deepest wound. The fake pregnancy sits at the center of this story because it teaches the hardest lesson: convenience can be cruelty when you draft an unsuspecting other into your coping script.

From Bit to Bomb

Until the phone call to Andre, Ava’s lies stay mostly inside a social game: she keeps suitors at bay without saying “no,” and the narrator gets to collaborate. They prank the world together. But pregnancy crosses a line. It’s not a quirky cover story; it’s a claim on someone’s moral core. Andre, whose daughter has just died, hears “I’m pregnant” as summons to adulthood—care, protection, future-making. When he discovers it’s fiction, he doesn’t just feel duped; he’s re-traumatized.

In the moment of confrontation outside 544 Etzel, three currents collide: Andre’s grief, Ava’s panic, and the narrator’s pent-up jealousy. A single punch rides those currents to their logical endpoint: police, cuffs, and the quiet consolidation of house power against Ava. The narrator’s shrug to Officer Fillopovic—an almost-confession—disappears under the halo of his veteran status and visible scars.

“House Meeting”: Group Morality as Alibi

The next morning, Victoria bangs a pot: “House meeting!” The verdict is swift: “It just isn’t right, that Ava brings this kind of drama into our house.” Everyone knows the narrator swung first. Everyone benefited from Andre’s nightly hospitality. Everyone cheered the very lies they now cite as grounds for eviction. But “house” talk—clean, managerial, “homey”—launders complicity. The narrator realizes with a gut-punch that Ava likely got the room only to comfort him, the pity project. His invented monster persona didn’t save him from being a charity case; it concealed that he was one.

Punishment Sex and Parting Shots

That night, Ava comes to say farewell. She mounts him—“I think we really should keep the baby”—and, in his telling, the act feels like condemnation. “I’m done pitying you,” she says, then vanishes from his life. Was the sex consent with a hidden motive? Was it care turned violent by accumulated humiliation? The story refuses to tidy this. What’s clear is that their shared method—turn reality into performance—has finally corrupted intimacy beyond recognition.

Sixteen Years Later: The Reckoning That Isn’t

Ava’s AA amends email arrives. In a hotel lobby, they exchange adult small talk—his technical writing job, her lawyering—and she offers a clipped apology. She also floats a last narrative bomb: maybe the baby was real, born “in the end,” placed with “nice folks.” He wants to doubt, and yet he prefers the possibility—choosing not to interrogate, labeling restraint as maturity.

(Note: This echoes Joan Didion’s “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” with a caveat: other people have to live there, too.)

Identity in this book isn’t a stable fact; it’s a draft you revise under pressure. Block tracks how a young man turns trauma into an origin myth, how he edits that myth to attract love, and how, years later, he pries himself loose from it—partly.

Origin Story: Inferno Man

Before the flash-bang, he had “Black Irish good looks,” and they were the only reliable fact he knew about himself. Afterward, he reframes the accident as superhero genesis—“I walked into that fire as a normal boy and emerged as Inferno Man!” The joke shields a harder truth: he might have wanted the grenade to go off; his parents certainly suspect it. The burn ward’s “life lessons” list becomes a scaffold to climb out of despair, but it also cements a habit of turning first-person pain into third-person instruction. The self becomes narrator.

Editing the Self for Love

With Ava, he adopts the “bestie” version of himself—the safe, witty co-conspirator. He avoids asking for more. He hides his jealousy behind moral concern. He edits desire into “helpfulness,” shooting Ava’s nudes and co-authoring alibis. When he finally gets sex, it isn’t the triumph his myth promised; it’s a collapse of the performance’s scaffolding.

Revisions at Middle Age

Sixteen years on, he has grafts that soften his facial scars, a job in technical writing, and a practiced story he “often displays on first dates.” He knows how to “seal away the combustive energies… into a safe and harmless story.” Yet the myth still owns him at key moments: he whispers Ava’s name when shame returns, he keeps the photos, he opts for ambiguity when certainty might hurt. Growth is real—but incomplete.

Block quietly layers a meta-argument about storytelling itself. What if, like in the excerpted Oliver Loving that follows this story, we really do live in many universes at once—one above our heads (how others talk about us), one beneath our skin (what we actually feel)? The narrator learns that moving between those universes requires more than a better script; it requires responsibility for the harm your script has done.

(Context: Oliver Loving, the novel excerpted after this story, explores a family’s competing stories about a son in a coma and the mythmaking that follows violence. Read together, Block’s works argue that we are “homeschooled” by the stories we live inside—and un-schooled by the ones we refuse to question.)

Apologies are easy to say and hard to do. Homeschooled asks whether “I’m sorry” can be another performance—and sketches what it would take to make amends real.

Amends or Alibi?

Ava emails from AA: she’s “at the step where I’m supposed to make amends. LOL!” The lilt in the “LOL” matters; it’s the old Ava showing through, apology shading into bit. In the Omni lobby, she offers a clipped sorry, dodges specifics, and then detonates ambiguity—“Today that baby is fifteen years old.” The line pulls them both back into the theater: is this confession or invitation to collude again? Without details, “amends” becomes another story to blunt pain in the moment.

The Apology They Don’t Make

The truest amends would center Andre and Annabelle: the trespass into a family’s grief; the police call that framed a landlord as “thug”; the eviction that sent Ava scrambling; the punch that reasserted white comfort by force. Neither the narrator nor Ava makes that call. He jokes about it—“Maybe we should both go try to apologize to Andre DeWitt”—then lets it fade. The unmade call is the book’s ethical negative space.

Accountability Has Three Parts

• Name the harm, not just the feeling. “I’m sorry about how we lived back then” is fog. “I told Andre a lie that exploited his grief; I hit him; police treated him like a criminal because of me” is air clearing.
• Repair what you can. Money, phone calls, public truth-telling, direct apologies without self-justification—something material needs to change hands.
• Change the pattern. The narrator keeps Ava’s photos; he still uses his scar story as an icebreaker. Those habits may be gentle now, but they’re echoes. Atonement asks: what do you stop doing?

Choosing Uncertainty—With Care

When Ava hints the baby exists, he decides not to press. Mercy or avoidance? The book leaves you in the tension: sometimes adulthood is choosing not to extract a confession you’re not entitled to; sometimes it’s cowardice dressed as grace. What tips it one way or the other is whether you also do the hard, non-theatrical work of repair elsewhere.

(Context: Twelve-step amends are powerful when concrete. Block’s scene warns how easily apology can relapse into performance if you don’t anchor it in repair.)