Confessions of a Boarding School Girl

illustration by Michael Linog

The trajectory of my adolescence was interrupted, or redirected, when my family moved before my first year of high school. I’d lived in the same house, gone to school with the same kids, and played in the same sports groups for all those years. Moving from Oakville, Ontario to Norwalk, Connecticut at fourteen was jarring to my insular life. What I did with that challenge was more akin to melting than to solidifying into someone more resilient.

It was during this period of my life, my freshman year in high school, that depression set in as a regular life cycle, much like the monthly blood I was growing accustomed to. There were several differences that factored into the struggle of this first year. The school system was wildly different than where we’d come from, and I didn’t get into the right classes. It became obvious that I had no idea how to make friends. I was a shy kid. Or was I quiet and too stubborn to talk? The hockey team I joined became the only place you’d find me laughing. But none of my teammates lived in my town. When I wasn’t there, I was beside myself. Incorrigible.

And I wasn’t alone. The move was tough on my parents and their marriage. My sister felt similarly – an outcast at school just waiting for hockey practice to feel at home. By the end of the first semester of freshman year, I was catching onto a trend in the hockey crowd – boarding school. It represented an outlet, an escape from the trappings of my life. My parents agreed it might be a good change for me.

I’ve been thinking about this period of my life a lot. There’s an impermanence that sets into life when you leave your family or are left. I remember, in my late twenties, looking back and saying, “Two years is the perfect amount of time to settle into a new place. It starts to feel like home.” I’d lived in six places in the last twelve years.

To say, at fourteen, that my life would be better without my parents and sister with me every day – and brothers who were already at university back in Canada – is hard to look at. There was no amount of academic rigor, social opportunity, or athletic training that could replace what I left, which was a family struggling to put down new roots. Instead of helping, I pruned off a few of the strong, old growth limbs, and used them to burn through my little rebellion. I planted seeds of discord that I’m only now beginning to see the depth of, and the repair required.

This had been on my mind for a few months when I turned to

Rebecca Makkai

’s new novel, I Have Some Questions for You. I was excited to read this book because she’d been hyping it up on her new stack, SubMakk. I read her collection, Stories for Wartime in an MFA class and got to meet her when she visited to do a reading. There I learned that our paths had already crossed in undergrad. I was even more surprised that her new novel was a boarding school murder mystery, and to find a reference to the school I’d attended two decades ago. I read all this serendipity as a sign that the self-reflection was good.

I was not surprised to find Makkai’s new book full of not only page-turning story, compelling love-hateable characters, but also apt psychoanalysis of adolescent development in the context of boarding school.

Bodie Kane, Makkai’s latest protagonist suffered the loss of her father, then her brother. These deaths were followed by her mother’s withdrawal from everyday life. The Kanes are helped by a Mormon family, The Robesons, who eventually foster Bodie and send her to the boarding school where they’d sent their own kids. And it’s in this fashion that she leaves Broad Run, Indiana and enters the upper-class milieu at Granby in the woods of New Hampshire.

While a student, she imbibes the zeitgeist passed down form her favorite teacher. “Some people” he said, “are meant to travel beyond where they’re from.” It’s the place, the circumstance, that’s holding back their ambitions. And to fly with those ideas, that unction, about who you are and what you’re made for, is virtuous.  But Bodie hadn’t delivered herself on the wings of ambition. She was an attempted rescue from a crappy situation. “But I loved that you assumed I’d fled on my own. For a teenager, being seen a certain way is as good as being that way—and soon your vision became part of my self-image… I believed it.”

Bodie returns to her alma mater from her home in LA twenty years later to adjunct a two-week class session. While there, she confronts her past with the hindsight that only time passing can afford. There was a murder in their senior year, and Bodie has some clues she’s never shared, and an inkling of the guilty party. He isn’t the person whose been in jail for the last two decades.

“The memory,” she considers, “started to roil, to trouble me. We were so quick to spread lurid gossip, but so void of concern. Perhaps because we believed we were adults. If she’d slept with a teacher, that was on her. We were scandalized or even impressed, but not worried.”

This is how fiction saves lives. You put a character in a high-pressure situation, one that is just slightly outside of your reality, and all kinds of truths are revealed. How perfect is this representation of the adolescent self-image? I wish I could enumerate the ways I latched onto identities of my own making. You’ve heard many of them already. Hockey player; shy kid; out-of-place student; boarding school girl. The list goes on and I’m sure there are ways I’m doing this still.

“Later, I was more honest: My ambitions didn’t precede Granby, didn’t get me to Granby. My ambitions were born at Granby. They grew in the mossy woods like mushrooms.”

Because we believed we were adults. This is getting me. In the gut. It was in this state, believing I was an adult, that I chose to go to boarding school and created a source of sadness and strife in my relationship with my sister. And now I see, my parents too. I left them at home. My sister became the sole witness, of four kids, to the end for my parents’ marriage.

These years were lonely, diseased, and fracturing for our family, and maybe especially for Emily. She was twelve when I left, in a school she hated, and home alone a lot. I’ve apologized over the years. But in these past few months what’s glared at me like a red-eyed monster under my bed, is that I’ve always excused my decision with the caveat that I was a kid who didn’t know any better. I made my decision under the delusion that I was grown, and capable of choosing a course for my life. I was a child, and I’m not sure I should have been choosing at all.

Emily and I, at least, made it. We survived through sweat and adrenaline, with tobacco and beers. We let these roots bind our bleeding hearts. We made skype dates we were always reluctant to end. We never forgot who we were to each other. This is our story.