Sometimes I Feel Like a Nut (5 page)

5

I
was the vampire of my high school. Okay, I wasn’t. But in comparison to the legions of blond fleece-wearing preppies who looked like J.Crew explosions, I might as well have been a tongue-pierced goth. I was pale; I wore black; I never saw a field hockey stick.

Oddly enough, I had begged my parents to let me go away to boarding school. In New York I felt like girls went from twelve right to twenty-one, our teen years sucked out by the social chasm between dumbass charity dances from seven to nine p.m. and then bars. You could either kiss a brace-face boy or dance with older gross men at a club. But where were the “guys”? Like in the John Hughes movies? Not that I wanted to cheer on the football team, or even bite my lower lip Molly-style; I just wanted to be a fucking teenager! So, at fourteen years old, I secretly sent applications to six New England boarding schools. When the time came to get my parents to accompany me to interviews, I sat them down.

“Why would you want to go to boarding school?” my mom asked.

“I went to get away from my parents,” my dad added. “Is that what you want?”

I took a deep breath. “You know how last week I said I went to see
Rain Man
and slept at Sara’s?”

They nodded.

“Well . . .” I continued with trepidation. “That was a lie. Sara said she was sleeping here and instead of seeing
Rain Man
we went to Mars, a club on the West Side Highway, and danced all night until the sun came up and then we went to a diner in Chelsea and got breakfast and bought the
New York Times
and read the
Rain Man
review so I could discuss it with you.”

I was promptly FedExed to boarding school in Connecticut.

When I arrived in my multizipper black leather motorcycle jacket, which I tossed on my bed next to my blond, southern roommate’s poster of a fluffy kitten dangling from a branch that said
hang
in
there
!, it was as if I had parked my spaceship on the verdant perfectly mowed quad. It was the first day of school, a crisp gorgeous September day, and old friends were embracing each other as Big Head Todd and the Monsters blared from a “boom box.” Except I felt like I was the monster, a bloodsucker descending on this quaint country club of tended grass and blond hair. Whenever it was a big day at school, like mothers’ day or fathers’ day (separate ’cause of the divorced peeps), graduation, or in this case, the first day of school, they had that square-cut bright green sod patched in what I call toupee grass. Equally sunny-hued were my classmates, unpacking tapestries and bean bag chairs, bedspreads and wardrobes. The clothes were ROYGBIV all the way, ripped from a prism, or a J.Crew catalog, which at the time, 1989, had color choices like Wave, Berry, Lemon, Pumpkin, and Rat Blood. Not really. But they were weird. And then there was Jill’s closet. Black. Brown. Gray. White. Navy was steppin’ waaaay out. Going crazy. Boots on my feet instead of Tevas and later black leather clogs instead of Birkenstocks. It was as if Patagonia threw up on the campus; that little mountain logo may as well have been an active volcano that Pompeii’d everyone’s ass into fleece for all eternity. Not a soul wandered the halls sans zip-up pile. But it was Indian summer, so Panama Jack was squirted on tan-skinned bikini bods. Hacky Sacks were kicked, Frisbees thrown. Some mop-headed Aryan Nation dudes noodled to the Dead, while others threw lacrosse (aka “lax”) balls back ’n’ forth.

And then there was me: the angel of death.

I looked exhumed from a grave starting around age eleven when I had a mole removed that had some malignant cells in it. I went promptly under the knife to remove surrounding tissue, got a bunch of stitches and sizable scar, and never went in the sun again. So by high school I was preaching the valor of pallor and was a hue akin to that of Robert Smith of the Cure.
Beetlejuice
had come out and I dug Winona’s wan look so I went with it. But I stuck out.

Not as much as I would the second night of school, when we had our first “Vespers.” Vespers was a four-times-a-week all-school assembly in the evening, just before dinner, with speakers ranging from political peeps to dance troupes to Bela Fleck and the Flecktones to a gay guy who told all the homophobic male prepsters how hurtful it was when, in his teen years, he was called an anal astronaut.

Everyone was freshly showered after their field hockey practice, a comb run through their baby shampoo–smelling hair, their Laura Ashley–type dresses with cabbage rose infestations tossed on. The guys had to wear jackets and ties, which I loved, and while most of my ensembles were slightly more urban I still liked getting dressed for dinner. But on that night, still a bit shaky from the newness of it all, we had some doctor come lecture us about STDs.

“Everyone, please rise,” he commanded. We stood up from our crimson velvet seats.

“If you own a Patagonia jacket, sit down.”

Rumbles as 90 percent of the school plopped back in their chairs.

There I stood, looking around at the others—a theater techie here, a singer girl there, a girl from Belgium, and Long Duck Dong.

“Now, if you attended the summer camp Windridge, please sit down.”

Uh-oh, there went the singer and even the techie. That left me, some Bangladeshi with Coke-bottle-thick glasses, and Long Duck.

“Okay. Now. Look around you.”

I felt sweat gather as the back of my neck reddened with the toast of embarrassment.

“The remaining students standing . . .”

Oh god. What? Don’t call me up onstage. Please.

“ . . .  are representative . . .”

Yeah . . . ?

“Of the number of you that will
die of
AIDS
.”

Um . . . what?!

Great, I just got here and already I’m dead of AIDS. What a way to become popular!
Finally
he let us sit down as he lectured about the epidemic of HIV and told us that we all had to “bag it up” if we “interdormed.” That was code for screwing each other’s brains out in boarding school speak and I’d like to add that I never
once
interdormed. Notta once. I had boyfriends from summer camp that I stayed together with, if you count never seeing each other again but writing letters as staying together.

But I could already tell I’d nurse plenty of crushes on all the hot reversible-name types. You know, Brooks Garrett—could be Garrett Brooks! Prescott Burke, Wellington Rutherford, Crawford Hodges. Usually with a roman numeral tacked on the end. It doesn’t work with Kopelman Arie, now, does it? Very quickly, however, I learned that said dudes had an annual first-week-of-school tradition where they camped on beach chairs in Main Hall and rated the new girls with cards, grading us. I walked by and the five guys held up cards, old-school Olympics-style, except all the judges may as well’ve been East German in the early eighties. I think I got a 4.0, which might sound like an A but at my school was a big fat B–, since we had a grading scale that went up to 6.0. Great, just great. It was at this moment I walked straight to the dean of students.

“This is absurd. It’s 1989! This is unacceptable!” I ranted. Having come from an all-girls school, I was starting to fear Taft may have been a bad fucking choice. The guys were told to knock it off, but as chairs were being folded and poster board chucked, one guy, whose name was literally Chad, said to me with a chin-jut, “Too bad you’re not as hot as your mom.”

I guess he’d spied us on move-in day, and yes, my mom is gorgeous, but ouch, was that harsh! But it only empowered me more to forge my own path and make the best of my three years there. I just had to figure out the lay of the land first. A cultural road map. I had to figure out the system, stat.

There were all these rituals I had to learn, not by osmosis but by drowning. Those benches are for seniors only. Touch Abe Lincoln’s nose daily for good luck. The freshmen, or “lower-mids,” or “lower-squids,” were relegated to the balcony in the auditorium. Without fail on movie night, some assholic senior would open the door and scream the ending. (Just as my pulse was pounding as I beheld a squirming Harrison Ford in
Presumed Innocent,
one jock yelled, “
The wife did it!
” and ran out. Thanks.) Lastly, under no circumstances can you drop a tray in the caf, as a symphony of embarrassment and shattered plates would earn you roaring applause from the entire school, five hundred strong.

Some traditions, though, were fabulous. About every three weeks or so after a long night of studying and rumbling late-night tummies, the dorm monitors would run up and down the halls and scream, “FEED! FEED! FEEEEEEED!” When you heard the word “feed” it was like cherubim blaring celestial trumpets, the heavenly siren call of high cuisine: Domino’s. Subway. Pillsbury cookie dough logs. Served in the dormitory common room to girls in their pajamas. There were also Headmaster’s Holidays, where they’d stage a fake fire drill or assembly and then have someone make an elaborate entrance à la Howard Stern as Fartman on a zip wire to announce that, for no reason other than to just be cool, there would be no school the next day. Amazing.

What was not amazing was being in what I called the Two-Jew Club in my class of 180. Though in addition there was a halfsie girl whose was “accused” of being a heeb by one of the white-baseball-hat people and she violently responded,
“I AM NOT JEWISH!”
recoiling as if he’d asked her if she liked to snack on snake feces. “My mother is Scandinavian!” Blithely eating my chocolate pudding, I responded casually, “Newsflash: with a last name like yours, you’d be rounded up with the rest of us, honey.”

Despite the homogeneous student body at Taft, I met two of my best friends there, Lisa and Lauren, who remain sisters to this day. We were three brunettes in the sea of
Children of the Corn
towheads, and while the fleecefest boasted bootlegged Phish and Grateful Dead, we’d blare Sub Pop records from my room and talk about who’d lose their virginity when. Mine was like a burden. Like not having your period in
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret
. In both cases, I wanted blood. Call me a vaginal vampire, but I wanted to be old. Der. Older. I wanted to be edgy, provocative, on the dark side, like when a ween entered you, you somehow had your passport stamped (or punched is more like it) and you crossed over into some new land of the deflowered, seeing the world through new eyes. And speaking of foreign travel, due to alleged bloodletting post–hymen plunder, the three of us started referring to losing our V card as “going to Japan.” Picture the flag. Yup: white with a big fucking red dot. We learned in history class that in medieval villages after the wedding night they’d hang up the sheet to show the whole town that the new couple had consummated the marriage. I mean . . .
ew
! Yet in my own way I wanted to verbally wave the sheet by staying up all night and dishing about it with my friends when it happened. As it did after junior year, in a very anticlimactic romp, with “Ouch!” instead of the “Oh god” I’d seen in movies. Oh well. By senior year I wanted to pole-vault the hell out into college and move on with my life—and the sweet smiles and photos with ten girls in a row with their arms around one another in floral dresses save for
moi,
Elvira (my friends and parents would always sing that
Sesame Street
song, “One of these things is not like the others!”), started to feel staged and desperate in their attempts to capture the Best Years of Our Lives. I remember one preppy seersucker-sportin’ alumnus dad patting his daughter on the back, saying, “Kids, enjoy it; these are the best years of your life!” Note to self: buy rope for noose at school store. In the end, it wasn’t the horror show some paint of high school, nor was it the John Hughesian all-American pigskin paradise with slamming lockers and Psychedelic Furs as soundtrack. It was . . . fine. And some moments were downright fun, if not a tad weird. We got so wound up we were drawn to random pranks at all hours. Lore had it the seniors a few years above me broke into the science lab and chucked thirty fetal pigs off the balcony during Movie Night while squealing. They stole statues from rival Hotchkiss (boo, hiss!), somehow drove the headmaster’s car into the lobby, or covered the small pond with floating red lunch trays. Our pranks were far less of a spectacle but my senior year we did streak (my one and only time—some lucky frosh was brushing his teeth and unleashed a soprano “Holy shit!”). My most memorable bizarre stunt was fall of senior year as we were all dying of stress. This girl in the dorm decorated her door for each month, and after Halloween’s bats ’n’ jackos came November’s turkey in a top hat and a horn of plenty that put the “corn” in “cornucopia.” Literally. She had three Indian corncobs tied with a bow made out of corn husk. At about three
a.m
., feeling completely bonkers, Lauren and I ripped it off her door and stuck it in the microwave. We were shocked and delighted to see that it popped. We replaced the popped cobs on the door as if nothing had happened. Hand to god, the next morning she marveled at it, saying, “
Whoa, guys!
It must’ve been really hot in the hallway!” No shit.