Um . . . okay?
I had taken exactly one standardized test in my life. It was an IQ test to get into preschool. I got all the questions right except one where they asked, “Where is your mom in this picture? The beach or the shed?” I answered “the shed” because I thought they meant “the shade.” I knew at age five that my mom was paranoid about sun damage, no way was she hanging on the beach. So in a relative sense, I did perfectly. Anyway, whatever qualifications, I was not letting a stupid bubble test get in the way of this “escape homeschooling” opportunity. The SAT was the Rosetta stone for me. I had no idea what was going on with that thing, but I was gonna crack it!
I scheduled the test for the following weekend (five days of study seemed more than enough) and got one of those thick SAT practice books from the library. I filled out more than one hundred practice tests in five days. No joke. Hand cramped, eyes watering; in retrospect, it would have made a great movie montage with “Eye of the Tiger” playing in the background.
If this story followed classic movie plot construction, I would have failed the test horribly, given up, then discovered newfound resolve through an old homeless man’s inspirational words to try again and ace the results. But life doesn’t follow traditional story arcs. Whether it was by na?veté or the hand of Thor, I have no idea, but when the results came back, I’d gotten an almost perfect score. One of the few answers I missed was a vocabulary question defining “Spartan,” which does NOT mean “warrior-like” but “austere and sparse.” (To this day I still think that is misleading and stupid. I saw 300. What am I, a fool?) But based on my scores, I was definitely, absolutely going to college!
Things were going to CHANGE! I could be on my own. To experience life in bigger social contexts than just me and my brother and my online friends! I would move to Austin, be like Felicity or Doogie Howser, MD, plans plans plans . . . TIRE SCREECH.
Turns out, legally, I was too young to live in the dorms alone. My family’s solution? Move to Austin so I could attend school while living at home.
And my mom ended up driving me to college every day.
For four years.
Sigh.
I entered college just as I turned sixteen, with a plan to double-major in mathematics and music. The math thing was for my dad and grandpa, who were firm believers in Real Degrees. (I capitalize because that’s how they sounded when they said I had to get one. “A Real Degree.”)
You’d think jumping into a school of 30,000-plus students would be intimidating for a girl who’d had only her little brother to hang around for most her life, and you would be right. Luckily, most of my time was to be spent in the music building annex, which was a small underfunded island unto itself. So at least it was the shallow end of the pool I got thrown into without having any limbs to swim.
There were only about six hundred students enrolled in the music school, and people rarely left because it was assumed you locked yourself in a 4x4 practice room for eight hours a day or you were “never going to amount to anything as a musician, so why are you taking up room if you’re not serious?” No peer pressure or anything. The building sat on the fringes of campus and was supposed to house the next generation of artists. It had the aesthetics of a Hungarian women’s prison.
It was cold in the winter and hot in the summer, with elevators that broke all the time. There were long green couches on the first floor that smelled like failure and skin flakes, and no one would nap on them for fear of catching salmonella. I think the whole design was just a nefarious plot to force students back into their tiny LED-lit practice room cages. All senses besides hearing were punished.