Don't Call Me Princess

by Peggy Orenstein

  Throughout September and October, April held out hope that she could earn the marks that would advance her to eighth grade. By November, however, her grade point average hovered at D-minus, and by the end of the first semester, her teachers had given up on her.

  “She’s failing,” Mrs. Sandoval tells me flatly when I run into her in the school office. “She doesn’t come to class anymore. Maybe she comes three times a week, but math is built on structure, on one thing then the next, so unless you’re really bright at it . . . sometimes she tries really hard and seems to get it, but she’s just falling behind. I offered her after-school help. But if she doesn’t come, I can’t make her do it.”

  I ask her how she thinks she could help April.

  She answers quickly and her tone becomes curt. “Hey, I got kids of my own,” she says. Then her shoulders droop and she sighs. “Look, I know she’s on the ‘at-risk’ list, that they know about her. But there are so many kids in the class with so many needs . . . someone like April, when she’s not there much, it gets to be out of sight, out of mind.”

  Later that day, when I ask April’s science teacher if I can speak to April in the hall for a few minutes, he seems equally frustrated. “Go ahead,” he says. “Keep her the whole period if you want to. At this point, she’s just a distraction.”

  April is a distraction, as would be any student who cannot catch up but will not drop out. Toward the beginning of the second semester, when April jokes too loudly and too often in her art class, the teacher sends her to the counselor’s office with a discipline referral slip. On it, he writes in capital letters, underlined several times, “It is my opinion that April should have been staffed out last year”; that is, labeled unmanageable and shipped to another school, where she will become someone else’s problem—or someone else’s to ignore.

  “I know I’m not doing good,” April says when I find her wandering in the hall one afternoon. “But I’m not tripping or anything, ’cause I’m still gonna graduate after next year and go to high school.”

  No one at Audubon can explain how a child reaches seventh grade without being able to add or subtract, particularly a vocal child like April who makes her difficulties quite clear. When, toward the end of March, I question April’s counselor, Ms. Peck, about this, she lets out a long, slow breath. Ms. Peck is responsible for “counseling” over three hundred students a year. She is a peevish woman with gray skin and sharp features. The first week of school, in an assembly for the entire eighth grade, she announced that the students’ fate was already sealed since their high school applications are based on their seventh-grade GPA.

  “It’s already done and you can’t change it,” she told them, effectively extinguishing any motivation for improvement. Today, sitting in her cramped box of an office, Ms. Peck leans across her cluttered desk to pull April’s file up on her computer screen. She informs me that April has already racked up between twenty-five and thirty unexcused absences in every class.

  Ms. Peck leans back in her chair. “She’s missing an average of two days a week of school,” she says. “There’s very little we can do if a child is not here. We contact home, but if she doesn’t do the work required and she’s not here . . . well, there’s very little we can do.”

  Audubon students who are the most vulnerable to leaving school are placed on a special counseling list. Once a month, the counselors, the social worker, and other appropriate support staff members convene an “at-risk roundtable” to discuss what can be done for these children. They request daily progress reports from the teachers (they are rarely provided), meet with parents when possible, and evaluate whether students require testing for learning disabilities. April was placed on this list in December, and according to Ms. Peck, her case was discussed shortly thereafter.

  “I know we talked about her,” Ms. Peck says, “but I don’t remember what we said and I don’t remember what we were going to do.”

  I ask Ms. Peck how the school will insure that April receives an adequate education. “I don’t know if there’s anything that we can do to make a difference for April,” she says. “I always say that success in school is a three-legged stool: the parent, the school, the child. If you’re missing the parent or the child in that stool, you won’t have much chance at success. From what I understand, April goes back and forth between her mother and her aunt; I don’t have any idea of what goes on there, but she doesn’t seem to have any parent backing.”

  Although there are no comprehensive programs at Audubon designed for girls like April, Ms. Peck insinuates that April’s home life is solely responsible for her failure. Yet when one of April’s aunts calls Ms. Peck and asks to be kept abreast of her niece’s progress, the counselor does not offer to meet with her, nor does she invite her to participate in the at-risk roundtable. Instead, she writes the aunt’s phone number on a Post-it that quickly disappears on her desk. She cannot, Ms. Peck explains, be expected to keep track of every relative who calls when her caseload is so overwhelming.

  “I don’t have the time,” she says. “I don’t have the time to do much more than discipline.”

  A few minutes later, as I am about to leave her office, Ms. Peck makes a final remark, which sounds very much like April herself. “It doesn’t matter how well or poorly she does, though,” she says grimly. “She’ll go on to ninth grade in another year anyway.”

  If, among some of her teachers, there is a tacit understanding that April is doomed by her family’s circumstances, it is not an understanding that April shares. Ever since she was a toddler living with her grandmother (who died when April was seven), April has been battling fiercely—and largely unassisted—to keep her mother’s addiction from defining her. Sitting in the school’s litter-strewn back stairwell on a bleak winter day, she discusses that struggle. As she talks, April squirms, fiddling with the ornately braided ponytail she has woven into her hair. Throughout her story, however, her voice remains steady and she speaks with a level of insight that goes untapped in the classroom.

  April explains that after her grandmother died, she became a vagabond, moving back and forth between her mother, who lives in a public housing project with April’s ten-year-old brother, and one of her nearby aunts, who seemed more interested in the monthly foster-care check she received from the state than in caring for her niece. Month to month—sometimes night to night—April was unsure of where she’d lay her head. But it wasn’t until the summer after her first sixth-grade year, when her aunt moved in with a boyfriend and her mother succumbed to drug addiction, that April decided she had to find a better life.

  “I was living with my mom back then,” April says. “She was into the fast life, into drugs and all that. She wasn’t at first, but then she took up with her boyfriend and he was, so she started doing it, too. She lost her job and she was just doing crack with her boyfriend all day long. I used to call him ‘Dope Fiend.’”

  She breaks into a small, wry smile. “We didn’t get along too good,” she continues. “He’d yell at me and hit me sometimes. Once I got so mad at him, I took his drugs and crushed ’em up. He tried to slap me and I kicked him and he said he was going to throw me out of the house. That’s when I told my mom, ‘You gotta choose between us,’ but then, I didn’t make her choose. I just left. I called the Child Protection [sic] Services and they took me, and they took my brother, and they put us in a group home for about four weeks.

  “I didn’t want to go back with my mom after that, but my brother did. I wouldn’t go back to that drug-infested hellhole. I told her that, too, and she cried. So I lived with one of my aunties for a while, until my mom broke up with her boyfriend after he stole some drugs and almost got her killed. My whole family told her to go into rehab then, but ain’t nothin’ gonna help if you don’t want to help yourself. But then, she did.

  “I moved back with her now and I stick with her like everything. I watch every move she makes. When she first came back from rehab, she had money and she was going to the store; I follo
wed her where she couldn’t see, because I thought she’d buy drugs for sure. But she didn’t. So the next time I trusted her, and she came back with food and no drugs, so I think it might be okay now. I pray to God it is.”

  April has been staring intently at an empty candy wrapper as she talks. Now she abruptly turns to face me.

  “I would never do drugs,” she says passionately. “I saw what it did to my family and I’d never look at it even. But to this day, I tell my mom: ‘I don’t hate you, I love you, but I hate what you took me through.’ I would never, never, take my children through what she took me through. Never. There was people in that house walking around like zombies; there was people with guns threatening to kill people. Once, my mom’s boyfriend owed my cousin a thousand dollars for drugs, and when he didn’t pay, my cousin put a gun to his head. I used to go in my room and lock the door and cry, and I’d think I should just kill myself, it was so bad.”

  She turns away and stares straight ahead, at the gray light that trickles through the stairwell’s frosted windows. “But I learned something, too,” she says. “I think I learned to be a positive person. And I learned I would not put myself through that and I would not put my children through that. Not never. I learned all that, so that’s okay.”

  Under the weight of her family burdens, Becca’s academic confidence has begun to falter. Like many of the girls I follow at Weston, Becca holds herself to unrealistic standards. (Her mother says Becca’s perfectionism sometimes “paralyzes her.”) But whereas anxiety drives some of her equally bright peers toward excellence, Becca uses her “sensitivity” as an excuse to shrink from challenge and avoid risk. In sixth grade, Becca was an A student; at the end of seventh grade, she asked to be removed from the advanced math class, and by the middle of eighth grade, her grades in all of her classes were drifting to low C’s.

  As a quiet girl, Becca has never spoken much in class (“unless I’m really, really sure of an answer and sometimes not even then”), but with her self-esteem flagging, she stops volunteering entirely. She even begins to see her silence as an advantage: as long as she’s perceived as shy, her teachers won’t notice that she has, in truth, disengaged from school.

  At the same time, though, Becca complains that teachers make her feel invisible on the few occasions when she does try to participate. After trying, and failing, to get her English teacher’s attention one day, Becca observed sadly: “You know how some people have charisma? I have, like, negative charisma. I feel like I can be talking and people can be looking right at me and they don’t even see me.”

  In a sense, both Becca and April are invisible. April’s inappropriate attempts at garnering adult attention are seen as an unmanageable product of her home life, and so she is shunted aside. Meanwhile, Becca’s silence allows her to be overlooked as well. She is not seen as someone in need of counseling or special help because, although her grades have dropped, she is never combustible: she never, for instance, yells in class, fights with other children, conspicuously challenges authority. Becca’s is a passive resistance. By opting out rather than acting out, Becca is in many ways the classic female student—quiet, compliant, obedient; as such, she is easily overlooked or seen as “making choices” rather than expressing psychological distress.

  “Becca is so quiet,” her math teacher admits, “she gets lost in the crowd. I don’t like that to happen, but it has happened with her. She doesn’t disrupt. She always looks like she’s paying attention, but maybe she’s not. I don’t know.”

  Says her history teacher: “Maybe she thinks she’ll be more cool as a C student. But she doesn’t even get it together after she gets the bad grade. I’ll say, ‘Becca, you have a D, you may fail,’ then she doesn’t turn in the next homework assignment. But I think of her as someone who’s responsible for her own grade and I let her be responsible for that.”

  Becca has indeed let her grades drop, but not out of laziness. Her disengagement is actually an academic strike, a statement of hopelessness that she willingly acknowledges. “Lately I’ve been thinking I don’t care about anything,” she tells me in February. “I don’t see why I should care about my grades, you know? It’s just a letter. What’s the difference? Why do I need to learn anything in these classes?” She pauses, weighing the gravity of her statement. “It’s not like I really mean that,” she says. “I know it’s important, but I have to get my anger out.”

  Ellen Hollbrook is a tall, lanky, forty-four-year-old with sun-roughened skin and, like her daughter, newly blond hair (although hers is professionally tinted). She meets me at the front door of their home, just as Becca did, but where Becca’s gaze is circumspect, Ellen’s is direct; where Becca draws back, Ellen’s handshake is firm. She wears jeans and a black, embroidered blouse; silver earrings coil into lizards just below her lobes, and her red-painted toenails peek out of sling-backed espadrilles.

  Ellen teaches special education at a middle school in a neighboring town; she has recently returned to the classroom after fifteen years as a reluctant stay-at-home mom, taking care of Becca and Jason, the Holbrooks’ seventeen-year-old, mentally disabled son. She says she took the job in part to try to be a better role model for her daughter.

  “Becca and I are kind of on a parallel course,” she says, when we’ve settled into lawn chairs in the Holbrooks’ back garden. “We’re both learning who we are together. I know the messages I got when I was her age and that’s not what I want for her. I want her to be more of an individual, not be defined by her relationship with boys. I try to tell her that responsibility and commitment are important and you have to work on them, but not lose yourself.”

  Ellen shakes her head and her smile grows rueful. “I said that to her, but I felt like a hypocrite. I mean, I tell you I want her to get the message to be independent, to be strong, but what I tell her is one thing—look at who’s the nurturing one in the family, who left off her career to put the family’s needs first, who takes care of everything, who’s the teacher, who doesn’t earn the money.”

  By making Becca her confidante, Ellen has deepened her daughter’s anxiety. Yet she badly wants Becca to rise above her environment; she wants it so badly that she, too, ignores Becca’s retreat from her potential, saying that because of Becca’s “sensitivity,” she “doesn’t want to pressure her in school.” So several years back, when Becca decided against enrolling in the district’s gifted program, saying she didn’t want to be seen as a “schoolgirl,” Ellen supported that choice.

  Last year, when Becca asked to drop advanced math (although her grade was a B), Ellen agreed again, hoping it would boost her daughter’s confidence in the subject; it did, temporarily, but by the third quarter of eighth grade, her math grade had slid to a D. More recently, Becca has begun to express anxiety about college (where she would have “the pressure of midterms and stuff and it would be really hard”) and Ellen does not question her timidity; instead, she alleviated her daughter’s worry by telling her she could delay the option as long as she wants.

  “Becca wants to blend in, be part of the crowd,” Ellen explains. “She doesn’t want to be smart. She’s a very sensitive person and if it’s easier for her to be average, then that’s okay with me.”

  With the adults in her life overlooking her pain, Becca’s efforts to gain their attention escalate. Several months after our initial meeting, Ellen tells me that Becca, who is twig thin (and is, in fact, sometimes called Twig by her friends), recently asked her what it means to die of starvation.

  “I told her people don’t actually die of starvation,” Ellen says. “Their organs malfunction. I told her that Karen Carpenter died of a heart attack, not actual starvation. And she thought about that and said, ‘Well, maybe I can get my appetite back.’ I didn’t say anything to her. But I’ve noticed that sometimes her mirror is out of her closet. She brings it out to look at herself, and she does it a lot. And some days she comes down and says, ‘I can’t go to school today, I’m too fat.’ Then a few minutes later, she’ll say
, ‘Okay, I found something to wear that hides it, but I’ve got to lose weight.’”

  Echoing Becca’s history teacher, Ellen says that as with academics, developing a body image is Becca’s responsibility, so she won’t “pick up the rope” and interfere. “I don’t say anything,” Ellen says. “I see that she doesn’t eat for a day or so and then suddenly a whole box of Nutri-Grain bars [is] gone. Or all the leftover Halloween candy. Or a bag of doughnuts. I know she doesn’t binge and purge, but she does have this very erratic way of eating.

  “Becca doesn’t have an eating disorder, but she’s messing with the choices, with the possibilities of it. But I’m not going to give her attention on that topic. I don’t want food to be a battleground.”

  Like Becca’s teachers, Ellen plays down her daughter’s behavior, although she herself once spoke to me of the perils of misreading girls’ passivity. “When boys have problems,” she said, “they act out and get in trouble. But with girls, they aren’t supposed to get in trouble and often they just turn it in. So you don’t hear about the problem until they try to commit suicide.”

  By the time I meet Tom Holbrook, he has become a mythic, frightening figure. I expect a fierce man and am startled to find a mild-mannered, balding fellow with a goatee wearing jeans, a T-shirt, and old deck shoes, who slouches much like his daughter.