He sat in the first seat, second row of my 11th grade Honors English class. I’ll call him Jonathan to protect his real name which shall never, ever leave my mind.

Right from the beginning of the school year, I could tell that Jonathan was an extraordinarily intuitive kid who had a great sense of humor. His insights into the personalities of people were amazing. He would show me caricatures of teachers and students he had drawn with his pencil. They depicted their unique mannerisms in perfect detail. I told him, “You could be a cartoonist.” He fought back a smile and said, “Can’t make any money doing that.”

One day, he had sketched a portrait on the blackboard of Willy Loman, the main character of Arthur Miller’s iconic play “Death of a Salesman.”

“Willy is going to want his son to follow in his footsteps and become a successful businessman,” Jonathan said, “but his son isn’t going to want to. You can tell he’s lost respect for his father.”

Jonathan’s prediction was spot on when Willy’s son catches him having an affair. He decides he’d rather work on a horse ranch out West than become a salesman. Father and son then come to an emotional breakdown that drives Willy to commit suicide.

What Jonathan was understanding about Willy and his son, he was also revealing about himself when one afternoon he brought his American Dream project to class. The assignment was to demonstrate what the drumbeat of your heart was telling you to do to utilize your talents to attain personal success and gratification.

As Jonathan removed his project from a large bag, I was thinking of the day I took the class to the auditorium to perform the short plays they had written. Before the stage was a piano, and Jonathan rushed himself onto the bench. Suddenly and beautifully, his fingers danced upon the keys. He played classical piano like I had never heard before. We stopped in our tracks and listened to him play his melody, and when he was done, I said, “Wow, Jonathan, that was beautiful. Where did you learn to play like that?”

“I didn’t learn how to play,” he replied. “I never took a piano lesson. I guess it just comes natural to me.”

Now he stood before our class holding a large, round origami creation of the world he had made with thin white paper. Around the paper globe were geometrically cut out shapes of the continents. He placed his project on the desk before him.

“This is my American dream,” he said softly, “to become an artist and to travel the world and create interpretations of all the countries I visit.”

Suddenly, Jonathan picked up a large book he had placed next to him. He raised the book above his head and with one violent motion, he crushed his project.

“And there goes my dream,” he said.

I remember the girl who sat nearest him. She gasped and jumped up from her desk. The class was in a state of silent shock. All I could think of saying was, “Your project was beautiful, Jonathan.”

I asked him to stay after class. “What’s going on?” I asked. He said that his parents had planned for him to attend Rutgers University to study architectural engineering, a field his father and his grandfather had turned into lucrative careers.

“I don’t want to be an engineer,” he said with tears in his eyes. “You all saw here today what I want to do.”

Jonathan insisted that nothing would change his parents’ minds. It’s a cultural thing,” he said. “You do what your parents tell you to do and that’s that.”

I spoke to his guidance counselor and told her what he had done with his project. She knew of the family and said they lived a rigid and disciplined lifestyle, and from early on, their children’s futures were planned and programmed.

For the last two months of the school year, I watched Jonathan withdraw. No longer did he show me any of his pencil drawings. When I asked if he would play piano for us, he respectfully declined. On the final day of class, he shook my hand and said, “Thank you.” When I greeted him in the halls during his senior year, he acknowledged me, but didn’t speak.

After we read “Death of a Salesman,” I asked this question to the class. “Was Willy a happy man a moment before he crashed his car and killed himself?” The answer was yes. He had escaped the torture of his reality by creating a fantasy world inside his head, a world where everything goes right and happiness is forever.

Two years after Jonathan had graduated from our high school, a colleague showed me a newspaper article with the headline, “Rutgers student killed by train.”

My jaw dropped when I saw his name. Jonathan was in his second year as an engineering major. The article said the “accident was under investigation.” I figured I knew what had happened that night. He walked alongside the tracks waiting for the train to come by, and just as it chugged a few feet behind him, he jumped in front. The investigation confirmed my belief.

At the funeral, his tearful mother spoke. “Please listen to your children. Let them follow their dreams, no matter what you might think of them. We did not listen to Jonathan and now we have him in our family no more.”

His dream was crushed and his life was lost, but when I think of that moment before he stepped in front of the train, I can only hope that Jonathan put himself in Willy Loman’s state of mind and felt no more pain.

He had escaped into his fantasy world, “where everything goes right and happiness is forever.”

Rich Strack can be reached at richiesadie11@gmail.com.