After my last session with Dr. Rice, I told my mother I planned to go back to Walker’s the day after Thanksgiving. I knew the price of being allowed to stay there was to pretend I was OK, which meant I only had to keep it together for the three weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas. At that point, I’d have another two weeks to regroup before spring semester.
When I returned to campus, teachers made allowances; students gave me a wide berth. I tried out for the basketball team and made varsity, I dug in to English and history, I continued to suck at French and math and chemistry. But I could do three weeks.
By Christmas, the family had decided enough time had passed. There were no toasts, no concessions to Dad’s absence. Donald and Ivana had a baby in tow in addition to their toddler, Donny, which made it easier for me to slip away. I went down to the basement. I didn’t want to turn the overhead fluorescent light on, so I fumbled around in the dark trying to find the switch that turned the bar lights on. After I found it, I sat on a barstool and opened my well-worn copy of The Martian Chronicles.
When we got back to the Highlander that afternoon, my mother told us she had one more present for each of us. They were, she said, from Dad. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up until she explained what she meant. After my grandfather closed my father’s checking account, he gave the money to my mother to give to us. She had used the proceeds to get us Christmas presents—from Dad.
She handed me a velvet jewelry box. Inside was an emerald ring. Emerald was my birthstone, and the ring itself was beautiful, a classic emerald cut set in a yellow gold band. I didn’t wear it often—I was afraid I would knock it against something and lose the stone—but I brought it with me wherever I went. Years later, I had the jewel appraised. It was glass.
By the time the second semester of junior year began, I felt more rested, less anxious. I still had trouble falling asleep; I still had nightmares, but they were different, less threatening.
I played basketball, and I tried out for the part of Sandy in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. I didn’t get cast, but the director made me the understudy. It didn’t really end up meaning anything, but it made me part of the cast. I filled in at a couple of rehearsals and helped out the crew. I had tutors to help me catch up with math and French. I had to improve my grades as quickly as possible for the sake of college applications. I still worked my ass off in American history, but it was English that got most of my effort and attention.
My teacher, Mrs. Nelson, looked like she’d stepped out of the frame of a 1950s TV show—the only thing missing was an apron—but she didn’t suffer fools. Her course, more than any I’d taken before, had a profound impact on how I approached reading and writing.
Her reading list was eclectic and idiosyncratic and covered every genre. She assigned Archibald MacLeish’s J.B. and Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night; the poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome; but it was William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury that changed my life.
Mrs. Nelson’s English class saved me that year, not only because of the reading, but because she took me seriously. She was not a warm and fuzzy person, but I felt more supported by her than by anybody else, even though we never discussed anything beyond the work.
Spring brought possibilities. The air was thin and the April light spread through it, bright and sharp, with a clarity I hadn’t felt in a long time. As I walked from one building to the next on my way to classes or the gym or my room, music blared from open dorm windows—songs from The Who by Numbers, CSN, Chariots of Fire, Pretenders II, Beauty and the Beat, Soft Cell’s Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret, a weird mélange of classic rock and whatever was in the Top 40—and it was easier out in the open to feel like I belonged, even if the feeling was illusory.
I made friends, but for the first time in my life, it took effort. I was altered, I knew I was altered, a feeling that pervaded everything I did and rendered me self-conscious. But I didn’t know how to find the way back to myself. Suddenly, nothing came easily. I became insecure, which made me try too hard; I walked around wounded and often felt misunderstood. I became the kind of person other people mocked and talked about behind her back.
The only place I had left was camp.