Having no parents in the country and no driver’s license made me a custody problem when holidays rolled around, and meant foisting me off on various relatives. I never felt unwelcome wherever I went, and I always enjoyed myself (if not quite behaved myself—I got drunk for the first time with my cousin over Thanksgiving break in Lubbock). But the getting-there part, the logistics headache, made me remember the times in junior high when my newly laid-off dad was supposed to pick me up from after-school band practice and forgot, and all my teachers, and then the principal, and then the janitors each checked their watches and offered me rides, which I turned down on the conviction that my dad was just now on his way. It happened so many times that even now I will gladly pay exorbitant cab fees rather than rely on a friend for a ride home from anywhere.
When it came time to travel, I lied to my parents and said someone from boarding school was giving me a ride; I lied to the school and said relatives were. In reality, I went to great lengths to schedule my driver’s ed hours to coincide with times I needed to get to the airport, and to save enough holiday money for a cab back to school. The only one to ever question my plan was my driver’s ed instructor, an ex-cop named Rodney who had a torso like an overstuffed couch cushion and little, underused legs. When he found out I was flying back and forth to Saudi Arabia by myself over Christmas break, he stared at my profile for a long time while the driving school’s Saturn struggled up the steep hills of the isolated road leading away from St. Stephen’s and then said, “I’d never let my kid do that.”
It was complicated, how I felt when he said that, and I struggled to keep my mind on the road. Bafflement was the first emotion to pop up, with the thought, Why not? Airports are some of the easiest places in the world—there are signs everywhere, and then defensiveness, You don’t know my family and you don’t know me, and then, finally, deep sadness.
It was beginning to happen to me around this time, the long, dark fogs that wouldn’t lift, the depression passed down from my dad. I didn’t yet have a name for it or understand how deep it would eventually get or how isolating. All I knew at the time was that the day’s accumulated tasks—getting up and going to mandatory chapel before classes, eating cafeteria food, checking my mailbox, going to soccer practice, watching the school’s majority day student population get picked up at the end of the day, and then attending mandatory study hall in the library with a mountain of homework for the evening—just felt absolutely pointless.
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At St. Stephen’s, I became a soloist in several senses. There had been a school band in Saudi Arabia, and I had played in it, but the band’s skill level was so abysmal that when we played the warm-up note on the first day of school, hot tears sprang to my eyes and I stopped my breath and let the note die in my mouth.
St. Stephen’s had no band or orchestra at the time, so I was offered private lessons with a university professor. I learned solo pieces to a piano accompaniment, but the pianist could only make it out to our campus in the hills once or twice a month. I was supposed to imagine her line, an abbreviated version of which was sketched out in tiny ghost script over my own so I would know how long to rest and when to come back in. I tried for a couple of weeks to learn the music by practicing in my dorm room, but one day a girl stuck her head in and said that she hated the sound of the clarinet, that it put her nerves on edge. From then on, I practiced by assembling only the middle two joints of the horn, making a headless and footless version of my instrument and practicing just the fingering. I figured I was already imagining one voice in the piece, so why not make it two? Thus in silence I learned part of a Weber clarinet concerto, which, when I finally performed it for a morning chapel assembly, showed amply the pitfalls of silent, solo, and sporadic practice.
I had friends during this period, or at least I assume I did because people were always hanging out in my dorm room. I had boyfriends. I played on the soccer team and made good grades except for Spanish. I eventually earned a driver’s license by taking weekend driving classes. All verifiable facts, but the truth is that I wasn’t there at all. Initially, I’d bonded intensely with my roommate, Melanie, but then she was gone most of the time for tennis tournaments and practices. I had a friend from Saudi who lived down the hall from me, Erin, but she was a legit, lifelong Aramco brat who had grown up with the expectation of leaving home at fifteen for boarding school. None of this, I gathered, seemed the slightest bit weird or lonely to her—on the contrary, she seemed excited and invigorated by her newfound freedom. I tuned out nearly everyone but Lauren, a moody girl with whom I shared a physical resemblance striking enough for us to be continually mistaken for each other. Her pissed-off, anti–boarding school rants found a receptive audience in me, and we hunkered down together in our anger at this place where we were both trapped.