WHERE DID THE PARENTS OF the ADHD teen send her when she was failing school? A concentration camp! Sorry, sorry; that is a very offensive joke. I have taken it in and out of this manuscript fifteen times. Let its presence here in the final edition be a harbinger of bad judgment to come.
Where my parents really sent me was . . . boarding school! Can you believe it? A real boarding school, too—not a “boarding school” like Cross Creek Manor. A prep school, like in A Separate Peace. A few weeks after the zine “incident”—the soul murder, let’s call it—I went into my mom’s bedroom with a fucking agenda.
“I need to talk to you about something important,” I said.
My mom muted the television and turned to face me. She was in her chenille chair again.
“Okay . . .” she said.
I took a deep breath. My mom looked nervous.
“I was wondering,” I said. “If it would be possible for me to go away to boarding school.” Relief washed over my mom’s face. “I think it would benefit me, my grades, and the fam—”
“I think it’s a great idea,” my mom said. “I’ll talk to your dad.” That was easy! I thought I was going to have to beg and plead. But my mom seemed all about it.
A few nights later, she called me into the dining room, where my parents were still sitting at the table with the bloody plates and steak knives from dinner.
“We’ve decided that you can go to boarding school,” my mom said. Very serious.
“Really?!” I squealed.
“We feel that you deserve it,” my dad said. “After everything you’ve been through with your sister.” Right.
That very week, my mom and I went to a special consultant and found my new school. I flew up to Massachusetts to interview. I told the admissions woman that I wanted to turn my academic career around. I was accepted to the school.
The night before I left, my father and I took a walk under the stars just like old times. Benny the Bear limped behind us. He had a baseball-size tumor in his snout. It was the Sunday after Thanksgiving, so it was so cold outside.
“Cait,” my dad said, “it’s time to cut the crap.”
“I know,” I answered. I was looking up at the moon. It was really shiny!
“It’s time to make some serious changes, Cait,” my dad said. “This is it.”
“I understand,” I replied.
“It’s time to cut the crap, Cait,” my dad kept repeating.
“I know, Dad.”
At the end of our walk, he gave me a hug. Ack.
“I knooo-oowwww,” I said, and deep inside I did. But by then I was in my head directing the amazing glamorous movie of my new life, and I didn’t want him—or anyone else in my family, but mainly him—to have a role in it anymore.
My new home, Lawrence Academy—“LA,” as students called it—was about thirty minutes outside of Boston, in a very old town call Groton, Massachusetts. It was a private school for grades nine through twelve, and there were exactly four hundred students—half boarders, half day. Everyone was really cute. I like New England guys, don’t you? I mean, the sexy ones are sexy. The boys were named things like Austin Colby, and had red-rimmed blue eyes and holes in their sweaters. They were always cranking Phish and smoking “butts”—Groton slang for cigs—in their moms’ station wagons en route to snowboarding team practice. The girls were fab, too: preppy and athletic, with long, healthy hair. (I stopped wearing my wild clothes pretty quick, let me tell you.)
Five minutes down the road was the famous Groton School, where about a zillion Roosevelts went. Lawrence was a good school, too, and very old and very beautiful. The schoolhouse, the dining hall, and the library were austere redbrick buildings with white pillars. The quad and the grounds were supergreen with old trees that turned electric red and orange and yellow in the fall. And there was piercing-blue sky everywhere you looked.
When I arrived in early December—the first day of the second trimester—the leaves were already off the trees. I rolled my suitcase over black ice to my new dorm, Pillsbury House. It was a white two-story house with black shutters. Classic New England steez. Pillsbury had seven bedrooms, two bathrooms, and one pay phone that got taken off the hook during study hall. I lived on the first floor. The window by my bed overlooked the football field and Gibbet Hill, which people said was haunted because there were public executions up there in the 1600s. Now the hill was covered in cute cows! And at the top, there was half a stone castle—it had partially burned down—with stone walls and a turret. (It was—I would discover soon enough—a very magical place to smoke weed.)
I was immediately happier, and I would stay that way for the next few years. Boarding school was a dreamy, no-parents-allowed teen paradise, just like I’d imagined when I read A Separate Peace. I ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner with teens, then went home to my house-dorm full of more teens. No parents! No yelling.
I was never homesick once that first winter. I was absolutely all good. I didn’t have close friends yet, but that was okay. I loved going to Boston on Saturdays and riding the T and seeing the sunset behind the skyline. It felt so good being in a city—I was grown up! One weekend I even took my “emergencies only” Discover card into a salon on Newbury Street and bleached my hair platinum, which I so, so was not allowed to do. I’ve been blond ever since.
I stayed on campus on Sundays. My roommate, Manjari, had family nearby in Ayer, so I’d have our huge room to myself. I’d collage my walls a bit—I’d brought Marilyn Monroe and Sid Vicious photos from home—then I’d curl up in bed with candy and Doritos and Coke from the student center snack bar and reread The Liars’ Club or Jean Stein’s Edie. I’d eat a Hershey bar very slowly, savoring every square, and I’d pick the new peroxide scabs off my head and stare out the window at the cows. They’d be mooing on the hill, keeping me company—comforting me.
Those same cows were my friends for the next three years in Groton—or so I thought. As I was writing this chapter, I learned that my bovine friends weren’t dairy cows at all! They were actually Gibbet Hill Grill’s award-winning Black Angus cattle, and every August the full herd was taken to a place called Blood Farm to be “processed.” I was looking at different cows every September. God, that’s dark. I’m glad I didn’t know better back then!
That first winter went by fast. I was never homesick once. Everything was better at boarding school. Well, except for . . . can you guess? That’s right: my grades. Ugh. Grades. Oh God. Grades. Grades!
That first winter trimester at Lawrence I got very bad grades. Despite the small classes and roundtable seminar-style teaching (which I did really like), there were things that I just couldn’t nail, especially geometry, and at the midterm of winter trimester I was placed on academic probation. I got my average up to a C-plus before finals, but it was a huge effort—with more expensive tutors. My parents were paying extra for them.
Sigh. I spent most of study hall—seven thirty to nine thirty at night—looking at my new blond hair in a mirror on my desk, anyway. Then there was half an hour of free time before dorm curfew; I’d get a Peppermint Pattie at the student center or something. After ten, it was girl time. Face masks—everyone used that Freeman Cucumber Peel-Off one—and talking about boys and all that wonderful dorm stuff. I was always bouncing in and out of people’s rooms. It was like having ten sisters!
Every underclassman dorm had a token senior selected for her “role model”-ness and leadership abilities. Ellie, our proctor, had the only single in Pillsbury House. One night in spring semester, I was in there after study hall and saw Ellie swallow a pill at her desk.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Ritalin,” she said. “For my ADD.”
I’d heard of that: kids liked to snort it.
“It helps you study?”
“Yeah.” Then: “Wanna try?” Ellie extended her open prescription bottle like a tin of Altoids.
Was Mark Wahlberg Catholic? The pill I fished out was white and round, like a little moon.
“Do I take it now?”
“If you still have homework,” Ellie shrugged. I popped it.
Half an hour later, I was downstairs at my own desk when I felt my first ever stimulant kick. My heart beat a little faster. Then my brain was, like . . . aroused. Turned on. Stimulated—like Tyga in that gross song he wrote about having sex with Kylie Jenner when she turned eighteen. Just horny for homework. I stayed up reading Walden like it was a juicy Jackie Collins novel. And wasn’t it fun, suddenly, to use these highlighters—to take neat little notes in the margins? Then I looked up and it was two in the morning. Geez!
I needed my own prescription, stat. And I knew just who to call.
Now—eighteen years later—my overcooked brain remembers that I ordered Ritalin from my dad and he delivered it right to my door—like a pizza! As in: I’d called my dad and told him all about Ellie and her attention deficit disorder (“I think that’s what I have!” I’d said) and her medicine, how she said it had changed her life. Maybe it would help me, too! I remember babbling all this, as I am wont to do. And I remember that my dad didn’t say much; he just listened. Then my parents arrived the following Friday for a previously scheduled visit; they stayed at the Groton Inn. On Sunday afternoon, my dad came to my dorm room to say good-bye. That’s when he gave me a bottle of methylphenidate (generic for Ritalin). There were 120 ten-milligram pills, to be taken four times daily!
My parents, however, say this is completely insane. They insist that I came down to visit them; that I went to the National Institute of Health to be tested for ADHD (I do vaguely remember this); that I scored higher than I’d ever on any test in my entire life; that I then saw a DC psychiatrist, who wrote me a Ritalin prescription that we did not take to the pharmacy to fill. I returned to Lawrence with nada. Only weeks later, when they visited, did they bring the filled script. (“Your dad wanted time for a serious talk,” my mom says.)
I vaguely remember this talk. It was right there in my freezing-cold-all-the-time dorm room in Pillsbury.
“Blahblahblahblahblah,” my father instructed me. “Blahblahblah.”
“Got it.” I tried not to eye the narcotics on my desk. I couldn’t wait for him to get out of there. “Uh-huh.”
One thing’s for certain. As soon as my parents drove away in their rental car, I crushed up a pill with my Discover card, rolled a slip of paper, and snorted a chunky line off my geometry textbook. It was my first time taking anything up the bracket, as the Libertines would say. Yowza.
After that, it was off to the races. The good news is that you will never have to read about my stupid bad grades again. The bad news is that you will now have to read the phrase “I popped a ___” approximately eighty thousand times.
If you would like some theme music, cue Britney’s “Work B**ch!” on YouTube, because after I got my first bottle of Ritalin pills, that was all I wanted to do. The last trimester of tenth grade—that first “medicated” spring—my grades went from Ds and Cs to Bs and As: honor roll. I assure you that I did absolutely nothing different to drastically improve my GPA other than start doing huge amounts of Ritalin—up my nose and orally. Usually I just swallowed it. After two months, I didn’t need water: I just tossed ’em back.
What can I say? Big pharma isn’t lying to you (fine, they probably are): performance-enhancing drugs deliver, babes. In the short term, at least. I felt so ambitious! I was bright-eyed and chatty at roundtable discussions about the American Revolution; I participated eagerly in language lab. I could sit with anything for hours without getting restless. And doing homework was a blast. I even put myself in supervised study with all of the kids on academic probation, which I’d marginally avoided the semester before. Who does that? (Answer: speed freaks.)
And I am not making this up: I understood things that I didn’t get before, like math equations. It was wild—like all of the letters and numbers in the alphabet-soup swamp in my head aligned themselves to spell out answers for me. Do you remember geometry proofs? I went fucking Good Will Hunting on that shit! I’ll never forget sitting in class one day and just . . . understanding how the “steps” of the proof on the blackboard stacked upon one another like paragraphs in an essay—to prove a solution at the end. I began getting As on math tests. And on essays.
I never felt sleepy sitting at a desk ever again. I was always wired—hopped up. It was great. I never had an appetite. I’d already been skinny, but I got really skinny. My jeans were all a bit baggy, so I ordered a pair of Sergio Valente twenty-three-inch-waist jeans from the Alloy catalog (boarding school girls live for mail order, you know). Twenty-three inches! On my life. They had white cow skulls stitched on the back pockets.
What else? I felt cooler, because I was “on drugs.” I never told the school I had meds or handed them to the nurse. I took my prescription with me everywhere, so I guess no one cared. Or they thought it was antibiotics or something.
“You shouldn’t do that,” Alistair told me when I sat down at dinner with the little orange bottle on my tray. He was a grade above me and had transferred from Cascade School in Northern California; we’d been the new kids on the same day. He was rich, druggy, and from New York City. I wanted to be just like him. “Carry your pills around for everyone to see.”
But I knew what I was doing. I wanted friends—party friends. My Ritalin prescription was like a honey trap for the fast crowd: I had something everyone wanted. Soon enough, cool, druggy upperclassmen (Alistair included) started knocking on my window at Pillsbury House.
“Wanna smoke?” they’d ask.
“Sure!” I’d say. We’d walk across Powderhouse Road and puff Marlboro reds (ugh) behind the pizza parlor Dumpster. Then the seniors would hit me up for pills on the walk back to campus. I always gave up the goods. Back at the dorm, I’d feel pretty dope as I spritzed myself—heavily, to cover the smoking smell—in Elizabeth Arden’s Sunflowers, a light floral.
By the end of sophomore year, I was murdering the game. Not only did I have bomb grades, I was tight with the hottest party girls in the senior class. I sat with them at dinner every night.
“You’re our little sister,” they told me all the time—you know, after we took our walks to behind the Dumpster.
So in May, when the campus was “closed” for a long weekend (meaning I couldn’t have stayed on campus if I wanted to) and I hadn’t made arrangements to go anywhere, I didn’t worry too much. I’d heard my “big sisters” plan their hotel-party weekend, and I figured I could tag along with them. After all, they were taking my Ritalin as much as I was. They always wanted me around.
I split a car into Boston with the two older girls on Friday evening. I sat up front next to the driver. The seniors were in the backseat wearing their clubbing outfits already, smoking Camel Lights with the windows down. When we got into the city, they asked where they could drop me off.
“Uh,” I said. “Do you guys want to grab food real quick?” They shrugged.
My “big sisters” and I were eating salads at the Armani Café on Newbury Street when I broke the news.
“I don’t have anywhere to go,” I said. “Can I hang with you guys?”
The girls made eyes at each other.
After dinner we cabbed it to the Cambridge side of the Charles River to the Royal Sonesta hotel. They marched me through the lobby, which was full of contemporary art, and into the elevator. We got out on the eighth floor and knocked on a door.
A senior jock from school opened it. There was a hotel party going on inside. It was cigarette-smoky in there, and the music was very loud. “Déjà Vu (Uptown Baby)” was playing.
There were about ten dudes from the senior class in the room: half of the varsity hockey team (or rather—since it was May—half of the varsity baseball team).
“Cat needs a place to stay tonight,” one of my big sisters said. “We don’t have room at our hotel.”
“Okay,” the boy said.
“We’re gonna stay and drink for a while,” the other senior girl said.
I wandered over to check out the view. Boston Harbor was twinkly and gold and black. The varsity hockey player was sitting on a chair by the window, “puffing butts” and chilling with a bottle of Goldschläger. He was very manly looking with his beefy physique and sort-of-square head, and his eyes were bluer than a ten-milligram Adderall pill. We were both boarders, so we kind of knew each other.
“Can I bum a smoke?” I said. So cool.
“If you take another shot,” he said, flirting with me. I giggled. The gold flakes glimmered in the liquor. I took a Ritalin and gave one to Varsity, who just slipped it in his pocket. Then I drank the gold.
By the time the senior girls came over to say good-bye, I was sitting on Varsity’s knee like a ventriloquist’s dummy.
“Cat, you’re good?” one big sister asked.
“Of course,” I slurred.
“We’ll pick you up tomorrow to go shopping,” the other said. And then: “Take good care of her, [Varsity].”
“I will,” Varsity said. Then they left, and I was the only girl at the party.
“Can I have another cigarette?” I asked Varsity.
“If you take another shot.”
An hour later, I got up and stumbled over to the bathroom like Keith Moon on animal tranquilizers. I peed and washed my hands—these are the details you need to know—and when I opened the bathroom door to go back into the hotel room, Varsity was standing there smiling—waiting for me. He sort of gently pushed me back inside. I went in and out of consciousness as I had sex for the first time—on a bath mat! And it wasn’t rape or anything. I mean, I’m still going in and out of consciousness during sex today! I always take my sleeping pills too early.
I woke up fully clothed on Saturday morning at the edge of a bed, next to two snoring hockey players. There were three dudes on the other bed, and four conked out on the floor. Varsity was asleep in his chair by the window. I got up and sort of stepped over their hunky varsity bodies to get to the bathroom. Then I used hotel mouthwash and looked in the mirror. Fifteen is such a funny, in-between age, isn’t it? It felt so weird not to be a virgin anymore.
I didn’t know where I was going, but I couldn’t stay there. I grabbed my stuff, took the elevator down, and hightailed it past the long wall of Andy Warhol Flowers in the lobby. Pop.
The summer between sophomore and junior years, Lilly Pharmaceuticals took my whole family to Puerto Rico! Emily was there; she was out of lockup and in a more normal boarding school called Linden Hall, which was in Amish Country. We saw the Lilly factory, where pills were made. Then we rode bareback in the rain forest. Even Mimi came along for the ride! She didn’t know there wouldn’t be saddles, and the horse trotted her very hard through that jungle (I was a tad worried about her pelvis). Later that afternoon, a pharmaceutical rep strolled with us through Old San Juan. It was really nice.
In September, I was thrilled to return to Lawrence, go onstage at the awards assembly, and collect my honor roll certificate for the previous trimester.
“Outstanding!” the assistant headmaster said, vigorously shaking my hand.
“I need more Ritalin, please!” I would ring my mom—never my father; I knew better—from my new dorm’s pay phone. “I’m out! It’s an emergency! Please!”
“Caitlin,” my mom would always say. “Your dad really doesn’t want to be writing these prescriptions any more. You need to find a psychiatrist in Groton.”
“I will, I will!” I always said. “I’m just so busy with all this schoolwork! Just one last time!” It was never the last time. “Please beg him for me, Mom! Please!”
“I don’t think he’s going to do it,” my mom would always say.
“PLEASE!” I’d always get scared. “I need it! My grades are going to slip again!” My mom would sigh.
And so the FedEx packages kept arriving—month after month. Her handwriting was always on the envelopes; my dad’s name was printed on the little orange bottles inside.
I loved my room junior year. It was a corner single in a dorm called Dr. Green, with lots of windows and trees right outside. It was great not having a roommate. I didn’t have to turn the lights off and go to bed, like, ever. I took my new medicine and stayed up doing homework late in the night, hyperfocused and erasing and reprinting my math homework. Branches would bang on the glass and scare the shit out of me; there was also a stupid owl out there that was ridiculously loud and hooty. So I was always practically falling out of my desk chair. (Stimulants make the nerves a bit . . . jangly, you know. Especially at three in the morning.)
I also had a new best friend—right down the hall. Greta T. was from Hamburg. She had dirty-blond hair, light blue-gray feline eyes, huge boobs, and a tiny waist. She wore smudgy gray eye shadow and spritzed on Versace Blue Jeans perfume to cover the smell of the Camel Lights she covertly puffed all over campus like a boss.
“I’m European,” she’d say with a shrug when a teacher caught a whiff of her.
What a fox! The usually cocky varsity-athlete guys just gawked at her, and she barely knew their names. She loved house music. Every night after study hall, she’d crank “Music Sounds Better with You” and “Horny” and we’d dance in her room.
She was the first real party girl I ever knew. Greta T. was also an insulin-dependent diabetic—a sinister combination if ever there was one. Talk about train wrecks! Diabetics risk going into comas every time they get loaded; still, Greta T. spent every weekend in the clubs, downing that sweet sugary booze. Hard-core. On Sunday evenings, I’d find her back in the dorm—pale as death, froggy in the face, and slumped over on her bed.
“I’m so tired, Cati,” she’d sigh, jabbing herself in the belly with an insulin syringe. What a hot bitch. I fucking loved her!
I started going into Boston with Greta T. and the international student boys from my school: the Saudis, the South Americans. They were kind of nerdy on campus, but on the weekends—wow! I was very impressed watching them pay off the bouncers at Avalon with hundred-dollar bills. Inside, I mimicked the other girls and kicked off my heels to dance barefoot on a banquette. God, was that fun! I only climbed down to take licorice-flavored shots the boys kept pouring. (And pouring. And pouring . . .)
I was all good as we left and piled into a taxi. But then . . .
“Blerrrrgh.” I yakked out the window. “BLERRGGGH!”
“Hey!” the driver yelled.
“Cati!” Greta shouted in her German accent. “Stop doing that!”
We finally got to the Beacon Hill building where this rich Qatari junior from our school kept an apartment. The foyer of his place was huge, with glossy white floors.
“BLAAAARRGG,” I . . . well, not said, exactly, right when we walked in. All over the marble! Greta T. marched me to a room with a king-size bed. I capsized on it with my legs splayed open.
“Stay here,” Greta T. said. She was not impressed.
I woke up to someone rubbing my inner thighs and my stomach up under my tank top. It was a chubby Brazilian junior from my school—let’s call him Playboy—and he had his dick out.
“I want to be with you,” he murmured. “Please . . . ”
“Noo,” I groaned.
But he wouldn’t go away. He kept touching me and rubbing me.
“Stoppp,” I kept saying.
Then I went under again. Then next time I opened my eyes, Playboy was kissing me softly on the forehead like a Disney prince.
“You are too sick,” Prince Charming whispered. You think? Then he zipped up.
“Thank you,” I mumbled. I meant it, too. I was genuinely grateful that he walked away.
Other weekends, I went to New York City with Alistair. I felt so cool walking around Manhattan with him in his North Face fanny pack and Diesel jeans. I tried cocaine for the first time at his family’s Sutton Place penthouse. Alistair loved David Bowie, and “Fame” was playing on the stereo. I went out on the balcony and looked at all the lights. It was all so . . . stimulating: the cities, the music, the sex, the . . . stimulants.
My dad would have yanked me out of my fancy boarding school in about two seconds if he’d known how unsupervised I was on weekends. Lawrence Academy relied on the ever-reliable medium of carbon triplicate “sign-out” forms. You’d scribble down a “friend’s” name and phone number, then hunt down your faculty advisor on Friday afternoon to sign off on it. (I always nabbed my advisor in the hallway of the schoolhouse in between classes, when she was distracted.) Then, you posted the signed form on your dorm room door, and that was it! You were free to hop into the backseat of a car service sedan with your friends and head into Boston.
The clubs were fun, but the real scene was the hotel parties. “Prep” schools ostensibly prepare young people for college, but they also prepare them for, like . . . Plato’s Retreat. Sex clubs! The Playboy Mansion grotto. You know—orgy scenarios. Weird stuff goes down when kids jam into little rooms together for days at a time. And that’s what the wildest kids at my boarding school did every weekend. (I’m not going to go into details—writing about teen sex is gross—but . . . trust me.)
The Lawrence Academy party hotel was the Buckminster in Kenmore Square, practically on top of Fenway Park. Maybe it still is. It wasn’t the Ritz, but the shitty concierge let the dealers up and didn’t call the cops on anything. Greta T. and Alistair practically lived there when they weren’t at school. It’s illegal for minors to rent hotel rooms, so it’s also très possible that the Buck accepted credit cards without asking for ID. I’m just speculating, of course.
Also legendary was the McDonald’s down the block, where we all convened on Sunday mornings looking like the mutants from The Cremaster Cycle and nibbled on hash browns to calm our stomachs. Hangovers in high school were hangovers, right? I feel like puking just remembering them, actually. Sometimes, on the ride back to Groton, the town car would have to pull over so someone could hurl by the side of the road. Oh, junior year was fun.
So those were the weekends. Back at school, during the week, I had a new friend who wasn’t in the party crowd at all. His name was Nicky, and he was in eleventh grade, too. He’d been at Lawrence his freshman year, so everyone knew him already except for me. Nicky was from New Hampshire, and his eyes underneath his red Boston Bruins hat were brown and twinkly. We went to the student center every afternoon when I didn’t have soccer practice. The “Stud,” as it was called, was built in weird layers like a tree house, so you could hole up and hide out in the nooks into the rafters. Nicky and I spent hours every day up there, crushing up my Ritalin with the end of a Maybelline Great Lash Mascara wand. We’d talk and laugh—Nicky was so funny—and snort my pills and laugh some more. Then the sky would turn pink and lavender and orange, and we would walk to the dining hall for dinner.
“You guys are obsessed with each other,” Greta T. teased.
“Nah,” I always said. “We’re just friends.”
But that would change soon enough. There’s no intimacy like boarding school intimacy. You do literally everything together: laundry, meals. Nicky’s dorm, Spaulding Hall, was only fifty yards away from my dorm, Dr. Green. We’d message back and forth via our school’s e-mail system. Ping. Ping. Ping. Red flags would pop up next to his name in my inbox all night long.
By Christmas, I’d stopped clubbing with Greta T. and partying at the Buck with Alistair. I just wanted to stay on campus with Nicky. We were having sex, which wasn’t the easiest thing to pull off at boarding school. (Besides, teen lust is so intense and conspicuous. Everyone knew what we were up to!) And safe sex? That was even more difficult to have—well, without half of Groton hearing about it in line at Cumberland Farms, anyway.
“Can I please get some . . .” Mumble mumble.
“What?” the cashier would say.
“Condoms?” I’d whisper. What an operation! Why did they keep them behind the register like that?
Eventually I went on birth control pills. Which I was never very good at remembering to take.
Hmm, I’d think, and swallow two at a time. I was starting to take my Ritalin two or three at a time, too. So was Nicky, who by Valentine’s Day was officially my first boyfriend. I was basically sharing my prescription with him, which meant I had to hit up my parents for more and more. They kept it coming, though. Why wouldn’t they? Ritalin was helping, clearly. I’d go on to make high honor roll my entire junior year.
“I am so proud of you,” my dad said—over and over—when he visited in the spring. He was so happy. I was proud of me, too. It really was incredible, wasn’t it? I’d turned everything around.