It was never really anything too bad. Mostly just goofing around with his friends during group work and talking when the teacher wanted quiet. Even as a young kid he’d done this, but as he grew to high school age it got worse and resulted in many afternoons spent in detention. We tried grounding him, but that seemed sort of unfair since he really wasn’t doing anything that bad and he was already in detention enough as it was. We felt we still needed to punish him somehow, though, so we started to limit his computer and TV time, which really didn’t do much good either. He always did his chores, didn’t backtalk us very much, and always got good grades, so we felt bad taking away the things he liked.

Over time it got better, but his first year in high school was pretty bad. I attributed a lot of that to the fact that Kallie hadn’t graduated yet when he began there, and he was constantly being compared to her by his teachers. That had to be annoying; Kallie had tested out of so many things it was ridiculous. She was in all the advanced classes the school offered and had been as far back as we could remember. I’m sure that made things tough on Charlie.

He was on the varsity swim team from his first year onwards and there were always insinuations that because he was such a good athlete, the teachers were letting him slide on assignments. It was completely untrue, as he was very intelligent. He’d chosen not to take many of the advanced classes simply for the amount of work they’d force him to do. I don’t think he’d have minded, but he was so focused on his swimming by this time that he wanted to spend as much time as possible in the pool, and all the extra work that would have been involved had he taken advanced classes would have hindered that.

Alice and I had agreed that we’d let him make the decision to go pro or not after he’d finished middle school, but it was difficult. Even then we were constantly getting approached by national and pre-Olympic coaches, trying to get us to sign off on him and have him go live at their training facility. We staunchly said no every single time, but as he kept getting better and better, it got a lot harder to deny them. Especially when they told us about all the benefits he could have, including the very best private tutors in the country and nearly guaranteed admission at any university he wanted after high school.