After a six-week hiatus from school, which I started calling “the shittiest spring break ever,” I enrolled in the last six weeks of tenth grade in what would have been my original public high school. I was just in time for the first chair clarinetist in the b-string band, a girl I’d known in junior high, to get the stomach flu for the year’s last concert. I learned her solo, sat in her chair, and tried to reacquaint myself with the sensation of hearing music behind and around me when I played. The bored fluttering of a flutist’s fingers on the keys while she waited out a rest, the smell of valve oil and cork grease, the collective in-drawn breath at the start of a piece—I tried to remember and relearn these things as something positive, but the overwhelming sensation was of waking up way past the alarm clock and not knowing where I was.
The next year, I tried to learn to march with the rest of my peers who had already been doing it for two years and managed, barely, not to slam into anyone. The feeling of grogginess, of not being fully awake, pervaded my junior year, and nowhere was the feeling stranger or more acute than when I was standing in the middle of a brightly lit football field with the bells of tubas and trombones flashing in my eyes and an exploding line of snare drums crossing behind my back. We played ridiculous music during marching season—the theme from Cats and later something about America—and competed all over the state in our stiff uniforms and snapping formations. The return to music, to having a voice and exercising the will to learn something, and to engage with people in doing it, was painful and strange. It both filled my heart and constricted it. Playing lush orchestral arrangements during concert season was the monsoon joy to the desert freakishness and faux-militarism (which was itself weirdly alluring) of marching season. To this day my most frequent anxiety dreams are of marching out to the middle of a field in long identical lines to the steady tick of a snare drum, not having any clue what music we’re about to play or which way I’ll have to dodge when the formations start to move.
In the end, I graduated high school as a section leader in the marching band with okay grades and a date to the prom. Partially as penance and partially to prove to myself that I could be cast as a good kid and not some epic screwup, I became an antidrug peer counselor during my senior year and volunteered my time with at-risk elementary school kids.
Yet I wasn’t a part of this class any more than I was a part of the wild, globe-trotting crowd from Saudi Arabia or the rich, drugged-out academic elite at St. Stephen’s. I show up in two high school yearbooks—St. Stephen’s, understandably, deleted me—but I belong in neither. I still have a few friends I keep in touch with from this period, as many as I can count on one hand, but I know I’ll never go to any reunions because it will take too much explaining for anyone to remember who I am. I have this crippling fear that even though there are roll sheets and grade records, there won’t be a name tag on the table for me to hunt for.
I struggle with this, the degree to which I don’t belong in my own past, and the degree to which I passively and then actively rebelled against the direction my story took starting in the summer of 1993. What would it have looked like if I had learned to adapt better, if I had just let things unfold and let down my guard instead of convincing myself that it was all going the wrong direction and that I had to escape?
More to the point, what would it look like if this cycle of periodic aloneness came for me again, if against every intention I somehow re-created it? I liked to think the boarding school debacle taught me something about the value of asking for help, of choosing my confidantes wisely and then trusting them enough to let their strength support me, and offering the same in return. Putting up a front of silent competence ensured that I achieved the exact opposite, but old habits die hard, especially when the initial setup starts to feel familiar. Would there be casualties the next time I found myself alone and in over my head, and if so, would anyone claim me this time after the damage was done?
CHAPTER 16