The next morning, she marched into school with me rather than dropping me on the steps. I waited outside the principal’s office, catching snippets of my mom’s muddled but distinctly angry voice. I stared at the linoleum floor, wondering whether I was in trouble. After a while, she stormed out, grabbing my hand. “We’re getting the fuck out of here.”
Fifteen years later, I met a man whose daughter was in Nathan’s class, at a different school in a different borough.
“Oh, you should watch it,” I told him matter-of-factly, trying to sound more relaxed than I felt. “He was inappropriate with me.”
His face turned stormy. “That’s a pretty big accusation.”
“I know,” I said, rushing to the bathroom before he could see me cry. I was reminded again that there are so many things we need that can also hurt us: cars, knives, grown-ups. I was reminded how no one really listens to kids.
I switched schools in seventh grade, to an institution whose values aligned with my own, and for six years school was as okay as it would ever be. I wrote poems, sprawling epics with curse words and casual mentions of suicide that didn’t get me sent to the school psychologist. (I’m not sure there was a school psychologist.) We put on plays, some of them about lesbians or cat breeders or both. Our teachers engaged us in lively debate and were willing to say “I don’t know” when they didn’t know. I was allowed to circulate literature about veganism in the stairwell. A teacher and I had a misunderstanding and we “talked it out.” It didn’t feel inappropriate. It felt real.
I was not a perfect student—far from it. I was overmedicated and exhausted, wearing pajamas and a vintage hat with a veil. I struggled to stay awake in art history class. I had an authority problem. But I was living in a world where we were understood and honored for what we had to offer. I was allowed to take my puppy to gym class. My best friend played a didgeridoo he bought off the Internet. It was a best-case scenario for a worst-case problem: the fact that the government says we have to go to school. And when it was finally time to leave, I wasn’t ready.
I bounded into Oberlin, thrilled to have been accepted and ready to learn with a capital L. I was keen on becoming a creative writing all-star and had prepared a “portfolio” of my poems and short stories for the head of the department. Dressed in bookish cords, I waited outside her door during office hours to discuss it with her.
“Well,” she said. “You clearly write a lot.”
“Oh, thank you! I do,” I told her. “Every day!” Chipper, as if she’d given me a massive compliment and not just stated a fact.
“There are some interesting moments, but you don’t have a particular facility for any genre. The poems feel like stories. The stories feel like plays.”
I nodded, like, great point. “Yes! I also write plays.”
“And the story,” she said, “about the fake Underground Railroad. That just feels like satire, like something from The Onion. It’s a bit broad, obvious.”
All I could muster was a tiny “But it really happened to me.”
She nodded, clearly unimpressed.
She let me in, but with reservations, and my rage from this tiny encounter fueled me and I became the most combative girl in every writer’s workshop. The one who crossed out sentences dramatically in front of the writer of the piece. The one who posited the ever-so-helpful “What if ALL of this is bullshit?” I had begged my way in, and now I wanted out. But first I wanted everyone to realize what they were doing to us, these teachers. Draining us of our perspective, teaching us to write like the poets they admired—or, even worse, like them. There were only three teachers I liked. One because he seemed to have other interests, another because he smoked and cursed, and a third because his ex-wife wrote a memoir about him cheating on her with a French teacher that sold fairly well. He was now with another, different French teacher and wore a diamond earring, appearing unfazed.