Even the application was magical. They asked us to write an essay on Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave.” Plato! Here was something extraordinary. I sent off my paperwork and waited for Simon’s Rock to set me free and let my real life begin.
It wasn’t long before I got a letter inviting me to an interview and introductory day at the school. Mom agreed to drive me down. I was ecstatic, and she was excited on my behalf. Finally, here was a perfect solution. Not only would it free me from the confines of Lincoln, it would challenge me intellectually, which Mom was determined to see happen if she could.
On the appointed day, we drove down to the campus in Western Massachusetts, almost into New York state. We turned down Alford Road, drove a few miles, crested a hill, and descended into a slight valley. On the left was a big red barn, which was the school’s art center. On the right a little gravel road with a small, tasteful sign that read SIMON’S ROCK COLLEGE OF BARD. As we drove onto campus, we passed a guard shack on the left and came upon a cluster of low buildings with clean modern lines and breezeways. I was nervous, worried about making the right impression, not just with the administrators, whom I wanted to think I was intelligent, but also with the other students, whom I wanted to think I was cool.
As I stepped out of the car, I saw a thin, pale boy with bright green dreadlocks. Both of us were too shy to smile, but we exchanged the kind of small nod that acknowledged our kinship. There wasn’t a redneck or a jock or a bully in sight. I loved it all. At the end of the day, Mom and I were both high on the place, its pretty peacefulness, its broad-minded community and high-minded academic ideals. But first I had to get in.
If I had checked the mail with reverence before, now it was the only moment in my day that actually mattered. As soon as I walked in the door from school, I threw down my book bag and raced to the dining room table.
“How was your day?” Mom said from the kitchen.
“Fine,” I said, sorting through the mail. Nothing.
If no one was home, I ran the grassy path to the mailbox, picturing the letter with the school’s seal waiting for me in the wooden mailbox. Nothing.
One day when I walked in, Mom watched me carefully from behind the counter.
“What?” I said.
“You got a letter from Simon’s Rock,” she said.
“Really?” I said. “What did it say?”
“I didn’t open it,” she said. “It’s addressed to you.”
I held the envelope in my hand, my finger under the flap, and paused. She cradled the tomato she was slicing and smiled at me. I opened the envelope, took out the paper, and read:
“Dear Sarah, we are pleased to offer you . . .”
I looked at Mom, stunned, overjoyed, terrified, everything all at once.
“I got in,” I said.
“You did?” she said. “That’s great, Sarah. Congratulations.”
I could hear everything in her voice that I, too, felt—the relief at having survived these two awful years, the joy at this wonderful place we had found that seemed just perfect for me, and the uncertainty at exactly what that would mean.
My dad had continued to be silent that spring, but he sent me a letter in early June that opened: “I had a dream about you last nite + when I woke up it was as if I had been with you. It was nice. It made me wonder how you were doing? Did you receive my books? What if anything you think of them? Enclosed is a card to let me know. I always wanted to get a James Dean card in the mail.” For the first time in a year, he talked about coming to visit, in his usual specific but elusive way: “I have a round trip to Brunswick ticket good until June 19th, I’ve been waiting til I accumulate some money but that might not happen, I’m going to see if they’ll extend the time on it . . . Whot da ya think?” He also mentioned that Morrissey was playing at Great Woods that summer. “Does that still hold any interest for you? Let me know. Love, John. Hello to everybody.”
I dutifully sent off the James Dean postcard the next week, my text written in the neurotically neat all caps I had adopted after briefly mimicking my dad’s script, written in a spiral, to be arty. I didn’t mention Simon’s Rock, but told him school was out June 13 and, yes, I was going to see Morrissey. “I’ll call if I’m around in Boston. Maybe we could see each other.”
That June, Oliver’s letters yo-yoed between affectionate declarations of how much he liked me and increasing blackness—but always accompanied by intelligence and humor. His letters were missives from somewhere important. And he continued to talk to me in an adult way I craved about love and sex, mentioning his own experiences, and wondering if I had experienced either, and if I could understand how much they changed things. I hadn’t and couldn’t, but I wanted to know.
I never questioned why a twenty-two-year-old man would want to take time out of the fabulous, busy experience I so aspired to in order to talk to a fifteen-year-old girl. But the scenario was perfect for my dramatic, dreamy sensibilities. Since we were separated by age and distance, I didn’t have to worry about the details of fooling around or losing my virginity. It was much easier to be thrilled when he confessed secrets about his troubled romantic life, which he’d never told anyone else, or joked about us moving to the woods and living there, and how I’d hire him as my maid—or marry him—when I was rich.
I received a letter in which he declared his love with all of his usual silliness and charm. I was ecstatic, swept up in what felt like my first love. Almost every day that week he sent me a letter, some hinting that he might have violent tendencies—or at least fantasies—because of inadequacies he felt, but mostly lovely insinuations of the feelings we didn’t dare speak. We talked on the phone for hours, me going on excitedly about my plans for school that fall. He was no longer taking classes and had yet to earn his degree, but I still thought of him as a college student and was excited to join his world. Even though I was only fifteen, I had leapt ahead and was going to meet him where he was.
I was happier than I’d been in years, maybe ever. And then, I began to hear less from Oliver that July. It was a familiar feeling, as if the tide of his attention and affection was suddenly going out without any warning or explanation. I could only assume what I always did with my dad: if there was no specific reason, the fault must be mine.
At least I had Simon’s Rock. I’d gotten a summer job at the one restaurant in our village, Anchor Inn, which opened for the season on Memorial Day and was packed with tourists through Columbus Day. I was obsessed with earning enough money to ensure nothing would prevent me from going to Simon’s Rock and worked as many shifts as I could. As my mom had explained to me from the start, while boarding school was not financially viable for high school, they were committed to helping me attend college. As long as I took on the maximum loans, and a work-study job, and Mom took on a loan, too, it was going to be possible. Even as entitled and emotionally farsighted as I could be at fifteen, I knew enough to be extremely grateful.
As I counted down my final shifts at the Anchor Inn in late August and began packing up my belongings in preparation for my attendance at Simon’s Rock’s “Writing and Thinking Workshop” for all incoming freshmen, I received a two-line letter from Oliver: He was a lost cause. I should forget about him.
I shook. I cried. I sent him impassioned pleas, telling him that he was no loser, that he was special, that I loved him, and so there was hope; there was hope as long as we had each other. He didn’t write back. That was it. He was gone. I was devastated. The problem must be me, just like I’d always known it to be.
Suddenly, after I had waited and waited for what felt like forever, the summer was over, and it was time for me to leave home. I dyed my hair purple, determined to make an impression from the first moment I arrived. I woke up at six in the morning on the day of my departure, covered my freckles as best as I could, carefully painted on my black eye makeup, and loaded the last of my possessions into Mom and Craig’s Toyota Tercel hatchback. Mom had to work that day, and while Andrew was a cheerful, obedient
kid who never caused trouble, he was only six and couldn’t be left home alone, which meant Craig was driving me the six and a half hours down to school.
I stood in the living room as Craig took the last of my bags out to the car, giving Mom and me a final moment of farewell. I looked at Mom. My eyes filled up.
“Let me get a picture,” she said.
She’d always taken a picture of me on the first day of school, and here it was, the last time she would ever do so. My eyes brimmed over. I managed a cloudy smile, my arms crossed over my chest. I hugged Mom good-bye, feeling the grief of rootlessness, as if I no longer had a home, wanting to run back up to my childhood room and never leave. But I knew I had to go, and that I was incredibly lucky Mom was letting me do so under such extraordinary circumstances at such a young age. It was as if she’d seen how stuck I was and, instead of forcing me to stay small out of fear, or showing the kind of love that diminishes a person just to keep her close, she’d handed me the reins to my life along with a challenge: if I thought I was so smart, which she fully believed I was, then I should prove it, read some books, wrestle over their meaning with people who were smarter than I was, put something of real value on the line in my life.
“I love you,” she said.
“I love you, too,” I choked out through my tears.
We had been in something profound together, from the moment I had been conceived, all of those brave choices she had made in order to get herself free and get us to the land. Even though I had felt betrayed when she had her second family, and part of that urged me out on my own, I also felt that we were still in it together and always would be. As her oldest child, her only girl, who had the exact replicas of her hands and feet, the same pale freckled skin, the cleft of the Tomlinson chin, and the name Tomlinson, too, I was about to take all of that and go out into the world to make my fortune, but we would always be joined together.
Simon’s Rock was as good as I had expected it to be, even better. I had gotten everything I’d wanted. I was still sometimes sad for no reason and deeply insecure, but I thrilled at my new life, and for once, I had the good sense to value it in the moment.
I’d landed on the smoking hall, even though I had checked the box that I didn’t smoke on the housing form, for fear Mom would see. I lit a cigarette on day one and didn’t put it out—simply hiding it during holidays at home—for the next fifteen years.
I fell for the most glamorous boy I’d ever seen. Nok was half-Thai, a product of the melting pot of New York City. He was handsome and worldly, even though he was only one month older than I was, which put us at the far end of the spectrum of the youngest kids in our class. I was far too shy to approach him directly, but I made plenty of eyes at him from across the dining hall. And the next day, I was happy to discover we were in the same writing and thinking workshop, a weeklong intensive program designed to get us accustomed to the school’s educational principles. It was based on a great books curriculum, so we read everything, starting with Sophocles and Plato. We were expected to discuss the ideas behind the work and make connections to other writers and thinkers and our own ideas and lives, both in the classroom and in response journals, where we wrestled with the material in a more personal way, as well as papers, where we formed our theories into more developed arguments.
It was all so good. Getting up, rushing down the hallway to get ready in a long line of sinks, smiling to the new friends I was already making—my boisterous, hilarious, always-in-motion RA, Lucy, with her badass mama-bear vibe, and a petite dark-eyed hippie, Beth, who I forgave for liking the Grateful Dead because she’d actually gone on tour with them over the summer, living on saltines and Captain Morgan with orange Crush, earning my admiration for her independent spirit.
Hurrying up the path to the dining hall for coffee and Cracklin’ Oat Bran, then down the path to the classroom buildings, new notebooks and pens stuffed into the black velvet backpack Mom had sewn me, I found everything unexpected and wonderful.
At my classroom building, I nervously slipped into a nondescript room dominated by a big round table. I ducked my head, excited and happy and scared to be there. I had gotten my wish, and I had no idea what it would be like, or if I would be able to pull it off. I glanced nervously at Nok. He smiled at me. A great, wise smile I would find out was the perfect expression of his dark, dry wit. I smiled back, dropped my eyes.
At the end of the first day of class, we all made our way to the dining hall, where after we ate, we could sit on a balcony overlooking campus and smoke cigarettes and gossip. We had homework, but most of us had been waiting forever for a moment like this, and we weren’t about to go back to our dorms and crack books just yet.
We hardly slept that first week, staying up late talking and flirting, dragging ourselves out of bed for class in the morning, cramming as much experience as we could into every moment. Classes were helmed by brilliant, turned-on professors and peopled by equally brilliant, turned-on students. It was as if I’d had my brain cracked open and fried in a pan like that antidrug commercial, except for one crucial difference: I’d always wanted to fry my brains with opinions and feelings, just like this. Such intense thoughts and experiences were where the good stuff happened.
By the end of the first week, it felt like Simon’s Rock was ours. We loved it, and it loved us back. We knew our way around campus, through the airy atrium with its central pond filled with rocks and greens and frogs, into the library, where we picked up our reserved reading for class and flirted among the stacks of books; across the flat courtyard that led up to the student center, where we smoked cigarettes and caught up, before going to the wall of cubbies, where we might find a note from a teacher or a friend, or a slip letting us know we had a care package; and then, down into the bookstore, where we could buy Pepperidge Farm cookies and the books we needed for class, which I loved feeling all stacked up in my arms; and the wilderness we escaped to just beyond the edges of campus, across Alford Road, past the big red barn, to Green River and the Labyrinth, through cornfields and out into the woods; or up the gravel road behind the dining hall, where Nok and I walked on the first Friday night.
We had dropped acid, and everything was heightened, not so much from the drug itself as from the intensity of paying attention to see whether the drug had affected anything yet, and also from looking for signs as to what was happening between us.
I almost couldn’t believe it could be this easy. I had stepped into a perfect version of my life—the cutest boy in our class, whom I’d liked from the moment I saw him, was walking into the night with me, just me, and we were laughing and talking about the books we’d read that week and about writing, which we both liked. The air smelled so cool it was almost damp from the dense groves of pines and hardwoods that surrounded the road on each side. We crested the top of the hill, and the world opened up to reveal a fat, silvery moon hanging just above a perfect little chapel in a vast green lawn.
Next to the chapel was a building with a low porch roof. We climbed up, as if ascending into the sky to touch the moon, the acid coming on in a way that felt warm and dreamy, as if I were one with the world. He leaned me up against the building, and we were kissing under the effect of the drug and the moon and the happiness of this first perfect week of heaven. We wandered back toward our dorms around curfew, although I already knew that the door to my dorm was always propped open, or if it wasn’t, I could climb in through the window of the student lounge. There was no need to worry.
Until the next day. I was nervous about seeing Nok. I thought he was everything I wanted, and he had to be my boyfriend. My happiness depended on my ability to make him like me, but I doubted myself, deeply. I didn’t know what to say, how to be cool around him, or anything. Nok told me that he didn’t want to be tied down. We’d never gotten to the point of being anything, really. But I was distraught, and I hung on.
The following week, we slipped into his dorm room one afternoon when his roommate was at class and fooled around in the dim la
te-afternoon light that wafted in from beneath the blinds, full of the heightened excitement of hearing people moving to and fro in the corridor outside. We didn’t have sex, but it was more than I’d ever done before. I knew he wasn’t a virgin, and I was sure everything was happening as it should with a beautiful boy who was gentle with me and knew how to smooth over an awkward moment with a dry, self-deprecating joke. Even when he again told me that he really thought we should just be friends, I held out hope for our future.
When Nok quickly began seeing a beautiful older student, I did not handle it well. As always, it was proof that I was nothing and no one cared. I had been a fool to expect my new life to be any different than my old. What I wanted was perpetually beyond my reach.
I was enamored of the upperclassmen, because they seemed so much cooler and more in the know, and I made friends with as many of them as I could—like Natalia, a pretty redhead who smelled of cigarettes and Obsession and always had a complex romantic life unfolding around her, and her roommate, Stephanie, who had grown up in Boston. Stephanie’s friend’s band was opening for one of my favorite punk acts, 7 Seconds, at the Channel in Boston during one of our first weekends at school. I rode to the show with them, overjoyed at how far I’d come. I was only fifteen, but I could now legitimately say I was a college student hanging out in the city. My real life had begun.
Cocky with my newfound independence and a sense of my own maturity and worldliness, I reached out to my dad to let him know I’d be in Boston with some friends for a concert. I had only seen him once since the Cure concert two years earlier, but I still felt close to him because of our letters.
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