ENGL 399 Writing Assignment #5 REVISED

non-fiction story, draft 2. i struggled ending this draft.

At 13 years old, I walked into school for the first time. I walked back out before the day was over. I was the willing participant in a family experiment; after being home schooled for the first seven grades of my education, it was time to try public school. Eighth grade was the year to do it, both by reason and default: it would be good, we thought, to acclimate to the culture of public school before the GPA years. My sister had also started in eighth grade, but that was more directly affected by the chemo that wiped out our mom's white blood cells for a year, leaving her exhausted at the thought of teaching an eighth grader in addition to four younger children. The cancer was gone by the time my year arrived, though, and calculating the complex formula of my personality, academic needs, and age, we reached a compromise. I would climb onto the yellow bus with my sister at whatever inhuman hour it arrived, go to algebra and chorus and PE, and then vanish from the school before the sixth graders could swallow their first bite of peanut-butter-and-jelly.

The algebra classroom at the middle school was the former shop room, a cement cavern with two dozen desks lined up in neat rows in the corner nearest the whiteboard. Unused machinery sulked in corners, pieces of steel and iron that my sister had used to make gumball machines and bird houses but we never touched with our pencils and calculators. A hand-washing sink seemed out of place in the industrial setting: it stuck out from the wall in a half-moon shape as broad as my wingspan, with curving strands of water shooting out rays into the basin when you pressed the foot pedal. I was used to this kind of juxtaposition. At home, class often took place at the breakfast counter while Mommy alternately helped us with math and mixed up cookie dough in the stainless-steel Kitchen-Aid mixer. Sometimes we'd be wearing our pajamas—that was always a favorite question of kids who had been at public school their whole life: "Do you wear pajamas all day?"—to complete the picture of school plus home.

But its dissonance did not make this room feel homey. Instead, it made the room a playground for the other kids. I watched them with eyes rounded into wide circles. There was a clock on the wall, the cheap kind that you can buy from Walmart. Zack would always try to turn the clock ahead a few minutes, getting us out of class early. Often the clock would disappear entirely. One day we showed up and the clock was taped to the wall. I don't remember if it was Ms. Flemer who, in her oblivious frustration, tried to hold the clock hostage to the wall, or if it was another prank. I think it ended up in the corner of the room the next day, on the floor or maybe in the trash with tape still rimming it.

The first day of class we introduced ourselves. Dan asked Zack about a homework assignment, and Zack asked me, and then Zack told Dan, "Yeah, Becky said it's due Tuesday." "Who's Becky?" Zack pointed back at me. I had never had a nickname given so freely before; my sisters and I would sometimes come up with names that we liked or seemed appropriate and try to remember to call each other them, but we would always forget and our tongues would lapse into the given names that we had always been comfortable with. Jasmine and Tigger and PJ never quite caught on for little girls name Elisabeth and Rebecca and Hannah. But Becky stuck, at least for that class and especially for the boys. I didn't mind, especially when it came from Dan.

I thought he was gorgeous. There were no cute boys at home except for my baby brother, so Dan was a novelty. I always tried to sit near him, to finagle the desk situation so that I was in his row or next to him. But he was dating the prettiest and bustiest plastic in eighth grade. So algebra gave me an education in variables and a chance to pine after the football star who, ironically, had the second-girliest handwriting in school (the first prize went to a kid who dotted his I's with little circles).   

Algebra taught me other things, too. I listened wide-eyed as all the untainted areas of my brain were murked and blackened by words and deeds I didn't know existed. My thin skin was tested with the sarcastic comments of classmates. The one that I remember is a girl who asked if I got A pluses at home too. Another friend, the girl who I doggedly tagged behind all the way until the end of high school, laughed. I held my lips in a tight jagged line. I knew I could do well in school if I worked hard, so I did, and I didn't understand why other students were annoyed. What did it matter to them? No, we didn't get report cards in "home school." Yes, we had homework; duh, it was called home schooling, for goodness' sake. All our work was homework. P.E. consisted of going outside before lunch to play on the swing set. Field trips were spontaneous planetarium or historical site visits at our grandparents' house on Long Island. Our friends at church gave us the opportunity to learn social skills, squashing the feared homeschooling rumor that homeschoolers never quite adjust to the outside world. We had a completely normal upbringing.   

But normal did not mean identical to everyone else. The eighth grade humanities classes were broken up into three teams, and even though I did English and history at home, I was put on the Odyssey team. At the end of the year picnic, my class award was "Phantom of the Odyssey"—my part-time status meant that teachers knew I was at school but they never saw me. I cried at that picnic. My dad was there—parents could stop by—and I sat with him on the grassy hill outside of the pavilion, his arm around me. I cried about friends, about not having friends, about never being able to integrate into a grid of people who had formed bonds in kindergarten and never loosened them to let someone else in.

The family experiment hadn't failed, but my turn was up. I went to high school full-time the next fall. Once I started playing basketball there, more friends found me. My mind was further scalded and molded. I wasn't the strange new girl anymore. But I never completely lost that floater feel, that sensitivity to a world that I was not native to. To this day I waffle between niches, trying to sort out where I belong. Another experiment for another year.