by Cat Marnell
By the time I started sophomore year in September, I’d been working on Alterna-Teen Retard for almost seven months. The master copy was up to eighty pages, which I hid in a special Doc Martens box under my desk. While I worked, I daydreamed about X-Day: Xerox Day! I was going to make a hundred copies. Production costs would be financed by Mimi, who always gave me a hundred dollars for my birthday. I could . . . not . . . wait.
* * *
Later that month, I went to Mimi’s for a belated fifteenth birthday celebration weekend. I came home on Sunday night with two hundred dollars in my pocket. I went right up to my room to stash the cash in the Doc Martens box with my master copy. But when I opened the box, my zine was gone.
No.
“Mom!” I raced into her room. “Where is it?”
“Hmm?” She was watching Ally McBeal on her chenille armchair.
“MY ZINE!”
“Your what?” my mom said without looking away from the television.
“The magazine I was making,” I said shakily.
Her show went to commercial.
“Oh.” She turned to me. “That.”
“Please give it back!”
“There was sexual stuff in there.” She shuddered.
“I’ll take out whatever you want!” I snapped. “Just give it back!”
My mom shook her head. I could feel hysteria stirring in me.
“There was really horrible stuff about your dad—”
“I’LL TAKE OUT WHATEVER YOU WANT!” My mom looked taken aback. I was supposed to be the passive daughter. “JUST GIVE IT BACK!”
“Calm—”
“GIVE IT TO ME!” I wailed. “IT’S MY ONLY COPY!” I lunged at my mother. I wanted to beat her! But I fell on the carpet on my knees instead. “PLEASE!” Screaming. “THIS IS THE ONLY THING I CARE ABOUT! WHERE IS IT? GIVE IT BACK!”
“Caitlin . . .” my mom said.
“I’ll do anything,” I sobbed. I was still on my knees, pounding on the floor, trying desperately to get through to her. “Please, Mom. If you love me, you’ll give it back. You don’t understand. Please. Please!”
This went on and on. Nothing worked. I’d coaxed “obscene” CDs and things back from her before. But tonight was different. My mom had a funny expression as she watched me implode. That’s how I knew it was bad.
Eventually my mom admitted that she couldn’t give my zine back. She’d shown it to my dad, who’d destroyed it.
“I didn’t know it meant that much to you,” she said.
I ran out of her room, down two flights of stairs, and into the rec room in the basement of our new house.
“AUUUUUUUGH,” I screamed into a sofa pillow.
That was it. My zine was gone. I still feel very teen-angsty about the whole thing, if you can’t tell from this emo chapter. And so angry at my parents. Back then, it was a real watershed moment for me: I was officially done with my family. With Bethesda. With my house. With the dinner table. With it all. I was so fucking done. Game over. I’d lost my sister; I’d lost my “friend privileges”; I’d lost my zine. And I’d definitely lost any respect or affection I had for my parents. It was time for me to get lost, too.
Chapter Three
WHERE DID THE PARENTS OF the ADHD teen send her when she was failing school? A concentration camp! Sorry, sorry; that is a very offensive joke. I have taken it in and out of this manuscript fifteen times. Let its presence here in the final edition be a harbinger of bad judgment to come.
Where my parents really sent me was . . . boarding school! Can you believe it? A real boarding school, too—not a “boarding school” like Cross Creek Manor. A prep school, like in A Separate Peace. A few weeks after the zine “incident”—the soul murder, let’s call it—I went into my mom’s bedroom with a fucking agenda.
“I need to talk to you about something important,” I said.
My mom muted the television and turned to face me. She was in her chenille chair again.
“Okay . . .” she said.
I took a deep breath. My mom looked nervous.
“I was wondering,” I said. “If it would be possible for me to go away to boarding school.” Relief washed over my mom’s face. “I think it would benefit me, my grades, and the fam—”
“I think it’s a great idea,” my mom said. “I’ll talk to your dad.” That was easy! I thought I was going to have to beg and plead. But my mom seemed all about it.
A few nights later, she called me into the dining room, where my parents were still sitting at the table with the bloody plates and steak knives from dinner.
“We’ve decided that you can go to boarding school,” my mom said. Very serious.
“Really?!” I squealed.
“We feel that you deserve it,” my dad said. “After everything you’ve been through with your sister.” Right.
That very week, my mom and I went to a special consultant and found my new school. I flew up to Massachusetts to interview. I told the admissions woman that I wanted to turn my academic career around. I was accepted to the school.
The night before I left, my father and I took a walk under the stars just like old times. Benny the Bear limped behind us. He had a baseball-size tumor in his snout. It was the Sunday after Thanksgiving, so it was so cold outside.
“Cait,” my dad said, “it’s time to cut the crap.”
“I know,” I answered. I was looking up at the moon. It was really shiny!
“It’s time to make some serious changes, Cait,” my dad said. “This is it.”
“I understand,” I replied.
“It’s time to cut the crap, Cait,” my dad kept repeating.
“I know, Dad.”
At the end of our walk, he gave me a hug. Ack.
“You are loved,” he said.
“I knooo-oowwww,” I said, and deep inside I did. But by then I was in my head directing the amazing glamorous movie of my new life, and I didn’t want him—or anyone else in my family, but mainly him—to have a role in it anymore.
* * *
My new home, Lawrence Academy—“LA,” as students called it—was about thirty minutes outside of Boston, in a very old town call Groton, Massachusetts. It was a private school for grades nine through twelve, and there were exactly four hundred students—half boarders, half day. Everyone was really cute. I like New England guys, don’t you? I mean, the sexy ones are sexy. The boys were named things like Austin Colby, and had red-rimmed blue eyes and holes in their sweaters. They were always cranking Phish and smoking “butts”—Groton slang for cigs—in their moms’ station wagons en route to snowboarding team practice. The girls were fab, too: preppy and athletic, with long, healthy hair. (I stopped wearing my wild clothes pretty quick, let me tell you.)
Five minutes down the road was the famous Groton School, where about a zillion Roosevelts went. Lawrence was a good school, too, and very old and very beautiful. The schoolhouse, the dining hall, and the library were austere redbrick buildings with white pillars. The quad and the grounds were supergreen with old trees that turned electric red and orange and yellow in the fall. And there was piercing-blue sky everywhere you looked.
When I arrived in early December—the first day of the second trimester—the leaves were already off the trees. I rolled my suitcase over black ice to my new dorm, Pillsbury House. It was a white two-story house with black shutters. Classic New England steez. Pillsbury had seven bedrooms, two bathrooms, and one pay phone that got taken off the hook during study hall. I lived on the first floor. The window by my bed overlooked the football field and Gibbet Hill, which people said was haunted because there were public executions up there in the 1600s. Now the hill was covered in cute cows! And at the top, there was half a stone castle—it had partially burned down—with stone walls and a turret. (It was—I would discover soon enough—a very magical place to smoke weed.
)
I was immediately happier, and I would stay that way for the next few years. Boarding school was a dreamy, no-parents-allowed teen paradise, just like I’d imagined when I read A Separate Peace. I ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner with teens, then went home to my house-dorm full of more teens. No parents! No yelling.
I was never homesick once that first winter. I was absolutely all good. I didn’t have close friends yet, but that was okay. I loved going to Boston on Saturdays and riding the T and seeing the sunset behind the skyline. It felt so good being in a city—I was grown up! One weekend I even took my “emergencies only” Discover card into a salon on Newbury Street and bleached my hair platinum, which I so, so was not allowed to do. I’ve been blond ever since.
I stayed on campus on Sundays. My roommate, Manjari, had family nearby in Ayer, so I’d have our huge room to myself. I’d collage my walls a bit—I’d brought Marilyn Monroe and Sid Vicious photos from home—then I’d curl up in bed with candy and Doritos and Coke from the student center snack bar and reread The Liars’ Club or Jean Stein’s Edie. I’d eat a Hershey bar very slowly, savoring every square, and I’d pick the new peroxide scabs off my head and stare out the window at the cows. They’d be mooing on the hill, keeping me company—comforting me.
Those same cows were my friends for the next three years in Groton—or so I thought. As I was writing this chapter, I learned that my bovine friends weren’t dairy cows at all! They were actually Gibbet Hill Grill’s award-winning Black Angus cattle, and every August the full herd was taken to a place called Blood Farm to be “processed.” I was looking at different cows every September. God, that’s dark. I’m glad I didn’t know better back then!
* * *
That first winter went by fast. I was never homesick once. Everything was better at boarding school. Well, except for . . . can you guess? That’s right: my grades. Ugh. Grades. Oh God. Grades. Grades!
That first winter trimester at Lawrence I got very bad grades. Despite the small classes and roundtable seminar-style teaching (which I did really like), there were things that I just couldn’t nail, especially geometry, and at the midterm of winter trimester I was placed on academic probation. I got my average up to a C-plus before finals, but it was a huge effort—with more expensive tutors. My parents were paying extra for them.
Sigh. I spent most of study hall—seven thirty to nine thirty at night—looking at my new blond hair in a mirror on my desk, anyway. Then there was half an hour of free time before dorm curfew; I’d get a Peppermint Pattie at the student center or something. After ten, it was girl time. Face masks—everyone used that Freeman Cucumber Peel-Off one—and talking about boys and all that wonderful dorm stuff. I was always bouncing in and out of people’s rooms. It was like having ten sisters!
Every underclassman dorm had a token senior selected for her “role model”-ness and leadership abilities. Ellie, our proctor, had the only single in Pillsbury House. One night in spring semester, I was in there after study hall and saw Ellie swallow a pill at her desk.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Ritalin,” she said. “For my ADD.”
I’d heard of that: kids liked to snort it.
“It helps you study?”
“Yeah.” Then: “Wanna try?” Ellie extended her open prescription bottle like a tin of Altoids.
Was Mark Wahlberg Catholic? The pill I fished out was white and round, like a little moon.
“Do I take it now?”
“If you still have homework,” Ellie shrugged. I popped it.
Half an hour later, I was downstairs at my own desk when I felt my first ever stimulant kick. My heart beat a little faster. Then my brain was, like . . . aroused. Turned on. Stimulated—like Tyga in that gross song he wrote about having sex with Kylie Jenner when she turned eighteen. Just horny for homework. I stayed up reading Walden like it was a juicy Jackie Collins novel. And wasn’t it fun, suddenly, to use these highlighters—to take neat little notes in the margins? Then I looked up and it was two in the morning. Geez!
I needed my own prescription, stat. And I knew just who to call.
* * *
Now—eighteen years later—my overcooked brain remembers that I ordered Ritalin from my dad and he delivered it right to my door—like a pizza! As in: I’d called my dad and told him all about Ellie and her attention deficit disorder (“I think that’s what I have!” I’d said) and her medicine, how she said it had changed her life. Maybe it would help me, too! I remember babbling all this, as I am wont to do. And I remember that my dad didn’t say much; he just listened. Then my parents arrived the following Friday for a previously scheduled visit; they stayed at the Groton Inn. On Sunday afternoon, my dad came to my dorm room to say good-bye. That’s when he gave me a bottle of methylphenidate (generic for Ritalin). There were 120 ten-milligram pills, to be taken four times daily!
My parents, however, say this is completely insane. They insist that I came down to visit them; that I went to the National Institute of Health to be tested for ADHD (I do vaguely remember this); that I scored higher than I’d ever on any test in my entire life; that I then saw a DC psychiatrist, who wrote me a Ritalin prescription that we did not take to the pharmacy to fill. I returned to Lawrence with nada. Only weeks later, when they visited, did they bring the filled script. (“Your dad wanted time for a serious talk,” my mom says.)
I vaguely remember this talk. It was right there in my freezing-cold-all-the-time dorm room in Pillsbury.
“Blahblahblahblahblah,” my father instructed me. “Blahblahblah.”
“Got it.” I tried not to eye the narcotics on my desk. I couldn’t wait for him to get out of there. “Uh-huh.”
One thing’s for certain. As soon as my parents drove away in their rental car, I crushed up a pill with my Discover card, rolled a slip of paper, and snorted a chunky line off my geometry textbook. It was my first time taking anything up the bracket, as the Libertines would say. Yowza.
After that, it was off to the races. The good news is that you will never have to read about my stupid bad grades again. The bad news is that you will now have to read the phrase “I popped a ___” approximately eighty thousand times.
If you would like some theme music, cue Britney’s “Work B**ch!” on YouTube, because after I got my first bottle of Ritalin pills, that was all I wanted to do. The last trimester of tenth grade—that first “medicated” spring—my grades went from Ds and Cs to Bs and As: honor roll. I assure you that I did absolutely nothing different to drastically improve my GPA other than start doing huge amounts of Ritalin—up my nose and orally. Usually I just swallowed it. After two months, I didn’t need water: I just tossed ’em back.
What can I say? Big pharma isn’t lying to you (fine, they probably are): performance-enhancing drugs deliver, babes. In the short term, at least. I felt so ambitious! I was bright-eyed and chatty at roundtable discussions about the American Revolution; I participated eagerly in language lab. I could sit with anything for hours without getting restless. And doing homework was a blast. I even put myself in supervised study with all of the kids on academic probation, which I’d marginally avoided the semester before. Who does that? (Answer: speed freaks.)
And I am not making this up: I understood things that I didn’t get before, like math equations. It was wild—like all of the letters and numbers in the alphabet-soup swamp in my head aligned themselves to spell out answers for me. Do you remember geometry proofs? I went fucking Good Will Hunting on that shit! I’ll never forget sitting in class one day and just . . . understanding how the “steps” of the proof on the blackboard stacked upon one another like paragraphs in an essay—to prove a solution at the end. I began getting As on math tests. And on essays.
I never felt sleepy sitting at a desk ever again. I was always wired—hopped up. It was great. I never had an appetite. I’d already been skinny, but I got really skinny. My jeans were al
l a bit baggy, so I ordered a pair of Sergio Valente twenty-three-inch-waist jeans from the Alloy catalog (boarding school girls live for mail order, you know). Twenty-three inches! On my life. They had white cow skulls stitched on the back pockets.
What else? I felt cooler, because I was “on drugs.” I never told the school I had meds or handed them to the nurse. I took my prescription with me everywhere, so I guess no one cared. Or they thought it was antibiotics or something.
“You shouldn’t do that,” Alistair told me when I sat down at dinner with the little orange bottle on my tray. He was a grade above me and had transferred from Cascade School in Northern California; we’d been the new kids on the same day. He was rich, druggy, and from New York City. I wanted to be just like him. “Carry your pills around for everyone to see.”
But I knew what I was doing. I wanted friends—party friends. My Ritalin prescription was like a honey trap for the fast crowd: I had something everyone wanted. Soon enough, cool, druggy upperclassmen (Alistair included) started knocking on my window at Pillsbury House.
“Wanna smoke?” they’d ask.
“Sure!” I’d say. We’d walk across Powderhouse Road and puff Marlboro reds (ugh) behind the pizza parlor Dumpster. Then the seniors would hit me up for pills on the walk back to campus. I always gave up the goods. Back at the dorm, I’d feel pretty dope as I spritzed myself—heavily, to cover the smoking smell—in Elizabeth Arden’s Sunflowers, a light floral.
* * *
By the end of sophomore year, I was murdering the game. Not only did I have bomb grades, I was tight with the hottest party girls in the senior class. I sat with them at dinner every night.
“You’re our little sister,” they told me all the time—you know, after we took our walks to behind the Dumpster.
So in May, when the campus was “closed” for a long weekend (meaning I couldn’t have stayed on campus if I wanted to) and I hadn’t made arrangements to go anywhere, I didn’t worry too much. I’d heard my “big sisters” plan their hotel-party weekend, and I figured I could tag along with them. After all, they were taking my Ritalin as much as I was. They always wanted me around.