Throughout high school, I went through the motions, pretending to be the good student at school and the good daughter when I was talking to my parents, as my mind continued to splinter. With each passing year, I became more and more disgusted with myself. I was convinced that having been raped was my fault, that I deserved it, that what happened in the woods was all a pathetic girl like me could expect. I slept less and less because when I closed my eyes, I could feel boy bodies crushing my girl body, hurting my girl body. I smelled their sweat and beer breath and relived every terrible thing they did to me. I would wake up gasping and terrified and would spend the rest of the night staring at the ceiling or reading myself out of my body and out of my life and into something better. There was no rhyme or reason to what I read: lots of Tom Clancy and Clive Cussler for the pure escape they provided, Harlequin romances because they were so bountiful, whatever I could find in the campus library.
During the day, I went to class, which was, in its way, another kind of escape. Academically, Exeter was intense, way more rigorous than my college classes would ever be. I loved my classes. In architecture, we had to build a vessel that would keep an egg safe if we dropped it from the roof of the building, but we could only use, like, Styrofoam and rubber bands. In an English class every Upper (or junior, to the rest of the world) had to write a Reporter at Large essay—an in-depth project for which we had to do research and interview sources and immerse ourselves in a topic that interested us. Back then I wanted to be a doctor, one of the Haitian-parent-approved professions, so I wrote about a surgeon who was my family’s next-door neighbor. He was patient with my questions and allowed me to observe a surgery over spring break. While I worked on my Reporter at Large, I felt like I was so much more than a lame high school student.
I did well academically. That’s how I had been raised, to be excellent, to never be satisfied with anything less. A B was a bad grade, and if I received an A-minus, I could still do better, so I did better. I did my best. I was always very high-strung about school for many reasons, not the least of which was a pressure to perform and the comfort of knowing that schoolwork, at least, was something in my control. I knew how to study and memorize and make sense of complicated things, as long as they had nothing to do with me. I also knew how much money my parents were spending on my education and so I could not fail. I could not let them down in one more way. I needed, in some small way, to feel worthy of their expectations of me.
I became more and more detached from my body, continuing to eat too much and gain weight. I only tried to lose weight when my parents made me or nagged me enough to give dieting a half-hearted try. I didn’t care about getting fat. I wanted to be fat, to be big, to be ignored by men, to be safe. During the four years of high school, I probably gained 120 pounds. I racked up incredible bills using my Lion Card, the school currency system, buying so much food at The Grill, buying random crap at the school bookstore because there was a rush of solace when I ate or spent money.
As I spent all that money, I was also probably trying to keep up with the wealthy kids around me, who had their own American Express cards that they used extravagantly on weekends in Boston and exotic trips over break to Europe and to Aspen. My parents would confront me about the bills, furious at the waste of money, wanting answers for every expenditure but really wanting answers for who I had become, so different from the daughter they thought they knew. I had no answers for them. I was all self-loathing, for what had happened to me, for what I was doing to my body by gaining so much weight, for my inability to function like a normal person, for the ways I was plainly disappointing my parents.
I still nourished my commitment to being the geekiest drama geek ever to drama geek. My senior year, some friends and I wrote and produced a play on sexual violence. We all had experiences with assault that we had shared in one way or another over the years. On opening night, my parents were in the audience, and after, when I found them in the lobby, their bewilderment was palpable. They asked me how I could have come up with such a thing. It was an opportunity for me to tell them the truth of me, but I shrugged off their questions. I continued holding tight to my secret.
By the time I had to decide where to attend college, I knew I had to do whatever I could to make my parents happy, to make up for being who I was, for being a disappointment. I dutifully applied to colleges, mostly Ivy League schools and New York University. I got in everywhere except Brown University, a slight I have (clearly) never forgotten. I got my acceptance from Yale in the post office at school, surrounded by other seniors who were equally eager to find out what their futures might hold. I opened the envelope and allowed myself a flush of pride. A young white man standing near me, the kind of guy who played lacrosse, had not been accepted to the school of his choice. He looked at me with plain disgust. “Affirmative action,” he sneered, unable to swallow the bitter truth that I, a black girl, had achieved something he could not.
If I had to go to college, and as a Haitian daughter, I had to go to college, I wanted to attend NYU, which had an incredible theater program. Unfortunately, my parents were adamant that it would be too distracting for me to go to college in New York City. And majoring in theater was too unrealistic, too fanciful. The final nail in the coffin of my yearning was their worry that the city was too dangerous, a concern that frustrated me, immeasurably, because I knew where danger really lurked—in the woods behind well-manicured exclusive suburban neighborhoods, at the hands of good boys from good families.
As much as I wanted to attend NYU, what I wanted even more was a break, a chance for all the noise in my head to quiet. I asked my parents if I could take a year off, because I knew I didn’t have it in me to keep up appearances for much longer. I was a mess, barely holding it together, but my request was refused. Taking a year off between high school and college was not what good girls did. It never crossed my mind that I had a choice in the matter once I was told no.
I ended up choosing Yale because they had an incredible theater program and I wanted to work at the Yale Dramat like Jodie Foster had. New Haven was an hour from New York City, so I could spend the weekends in the city, I told myself. It is, of course, a bit strange to feel put upon about having to attend an Ivy League school, one of the best universities in the world, but I was a moody teenager in addition to carrying my secret, my trauma. I was in no position to face my privilege or how I took that privilege for granted.
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