Getting Punted

My memories of my first year of high school are so awkward and embarrassing that I feel myself blushing as I begin to write about it. During my 8^th grade year at St. Patrick School, the mother of one of my classmates asked me if Buckingham Browne & Nichols (BB&N) was a secretarial school. I could tell by her intonation that she was slightly concerned about what my parents were doing with my life. At 8^th grade graduation, Ms. Andres announced scholarships and other notable awards to the family filled church. Unaware that this was part of graduation, I was surprised when she told everyone from the lectern that “Erin Gottwald has received a $6000 scholarship.” Most of my fellow 8^th graders were attending Catholic High Schools with tuition costs that were half as much as my scholarship. I’m sure that the mother who was concerned about my secretarial school education was now certainly more concerned with my over indulgent parents.

During the summer before high school, I begged my mother for a perm. I felt that if all my friends were going to Catholic or public high schools, that would be the least she could for me: let me perm my hair. Sure enough, I got a perm. I loved it all summer. I felt like a Stoneham High School girl. I got to use Dippity-Doo and style it anyway I wanted. I was thrilled that I had my perm in time for the NKOTB (New Kids on the Block) concert that summer at Foxboro Stadium.

The week before high school, we went shopping for everything I would need for Bivouac. On BB&N’s current website, it is described: “A pivotal bonding experience, Bivouac is a twelve-day outdoor education and team-building program at Camp Marienfeld, BB&N's New Hampshire retreat. In an area of about 200 acres of woodland, the students are divided into small squads responsible for building a kitchen area and cooking their own meals.” My mom and I had to travel distances to find stores that had the special, bio-degradable shampoo that I could use in the lake. I had never been to stores like that. Bivouac would be my first taste of BB&N, where I would meet my high school classmates and spend 12 days with them in the middle of the woods.

I should have known that ninth grade was going to be painful by my squad placement. It could have been random, after all administration couldn’t quite tell who were the nerds, but I felt that I had been placed in the loser squad. This feeling was confirmed when we met our squad leader. All of the squad leaders at Bivouac are teachers. There were plenty of young, hip, attractive, fresh-out-of-college teachers at BB&N, there were a handful of older, seasoned, extroverted, grandparent-ish, wise yet humorous teachers at BB&N and there were a few introverted, nerdy, Bivouac-is-the-highlight-of-my-career teachers at BB&N. Guess which one I had as a squad leader. Needless to say Bivouac, although it was mostly fun, established me in a foreign network of nerdy girls who had a nerdy squad leader.

When we returned home from Bivouac, I immediately grew concerned about my perm. There were only a handful of other students who had perms and tight-rolled their pants. I had the impression that they were on scholarship, too.

My first day at BB&N, I remember climbing the crowded stairs to the auditorium with my other squad friends, wearing my pink and yellow checkered, tight-rolled Skidz with black pat n’ leather, MC Hammer-inspired, lace up shoes with half-moon shaped taps on the tips. I had taken time that morning to Dippity-Doo my perm. I noticed other students with their straight hair pulled into a loose pony-tail, strands falling around their ears and brushing against their cheeks. A sea of new things drowned me. There were plaid headbands, unbuttoned flannel shirts, backpacks from a company called L.L. Bean that were all custom embroidered with initials. And the shoes: boat shoes with laces that didn’t tie but wound around themselves in a coil, shoes which I came to learn were called “Birkenstocks” and “Doc Martens” and “All-Stars.” I squirm just thinking about how out-of-place I looked. But then I remember that there were the other scholarship kids who shared my fashion sense.

My ninth grade classmates would be horrified if they knew I had screamed “JOEY!!!” at the top of my lungs at an NKOTB concert just a month before. They listened to music I occasionally heard on the oldies station on the radio: Van Morrison, Steve Miller, The Allmann Brothers and The Grateful Dead. What gave me leverage was that I was a “ballerina.” If my townie perm and MC Hammer clothes turned them off, the fact that I was a professional student at the Boston Ballet intrigued them. I added diversity to their worlds.

Freshman year was a nightmare. In the winter, during “Nutcracker”, I got a painful ovarian cyst which my mom initially thought was just pangs of anxiety. In the early part of Spring semester, I was overwhelmed with the amount of homework and not used to receiving B’s and C’s. I was a straight A student at St. Patrick’s. All year long, I carried a brush and went to the bathroom several times a day just to get the perm out. I cheated on a Russian test in March and found an anonymous note in my box (we all had mailboxes)that read something like this:

“We know that you have been cheating. Do it again and we’ll tell Mr. Deptula.”

After school that day in March, I felt my knees buckle as I read that note and walked directly outside where I waited anxiously for my ballet carpool. Once at ballet class it was difficult for me to focus, I went through the motions but began to problem-solve. I decided that I needed to transfer to Matignon, a Catholic high school where my best friend had gone. In the midst of this revelation during ballet class, I was not concentrating on the exercise at hand and slid out on my pointe shoe, severely spraining my ankle. I went to the emergency room where the doctor told me and my mom that I did not break my ankle, but that I would be on crutches for at least two weeks. I sobbed all night. My dad sat with me on the couch and applied an ice pack and I screamed not because I was in pain, but because I had been caught cheating, I was no longer an A student, I didn’t have Doc Martens, I didn’t have an ATM card or a bank account, I had a hair of frizz, I didn’t have an L.L. Bean Backpack with “EEG’ embroidered on it. But, I never shared the reasons for the crying and my dad placed the icepack on the coffee table, told me that I needed to calm down, and retreated to the TV room.

That night I crutched my way to my parents’ room around 2AM and asked my mom if I could sleep with them. She was accustomed to my anxious tendencies and obliged. I didn’t sleep much that night and my parents did not even entertain the thought that I would stay home from school the next day. Trembling, I went to Russian class the following day on crutches. All the students were kind and sympathetic and boys who I had crushes on offered to carry my books. Spraining my ankle was a turning point.

A few nights later, still shaken I walked into Danny’s and Gretchen’s room where my mom was reading a story to them and I asked if I could talk to her. She asked me what was wrong and I told her that I had cheated on a Russian test. My mom has a way of changing my heart rate. These days, she tends to make it race as I get phone calls from the passenger seat as my dad weaves through traffic, but as a teenager she usually brought my heart rate down. She told me that it was okay, asked me why I cheated, and said not to do it again. It seemed simple enough. I realized during that conversation as five year old Danny and seven year old Gretchen flanked her that part of my increasing anxiety was that she couldn’t help me in an increasing number of areas in life: Ballet, Russian, Chinese History, private school fashion and behavior. This made me feel lonely but I never cheated again, no one ever confronted me, and there were no more letters in my mailbox.

I begged my parents to transfer to the catholic high school. They told me that I needed to finish freshman year and then “we would see.” Usually, this parental phrase was optimistic and could be translated into a “yes.” So, I finished out the year, daydreaming about how I could go to Matignon and be an A student again and listen to pop music. The summer after freshman year, I went to Matignon and filled out paperwork to transfer for sophomore year. I was so relieved and excited about September. My best friend told me all about her friends there, and I even got to meet some of them. This transition would be easy and I deserved it.

You can imagine my dismay when one day in early September, my parents confronted me with developments in my educational future. I remember my dad sitting in the rocking chair and my mom standing up near him. I was standing in front of them as they started to present their plans. It took me several minutes to understand what they were saying, partially because they were each waiting for the other to say it and neither was really stating it clearly.

“Erin, you’re going to go back to BB&N.”

As my four siblings milled about in the background, watching television in one room, playing street hockey in the hallway, I threw a teenage tantrum. I screamed and hollered, I hyperventilated, I physically crumbled to the floor, I stomped my feet, I stared out the window dreaming of better parents. And I remember each of them intently watching me go through this tantrum. I imagine that their empathy had them on the verge of caving in but their morals and commitment kept them steadfast in their mission. I would receive this first class education and nothing less.

I don’t think I ever said, “I hate you.” I never really felt that. But I did feel like the football which my parents punted from one end of life’s field to the other. I had been officially catapulted into an educated class. I felt this at age 14. And after that tantrum and their display of resolve, I knew that this was irreversible.

So, I returned to BB&N for sophomore year. The perm was fading, the tight-rolled pants disappeared, I got some All-Stars and flannel shirts, and joined the Russian Club.