Diamond in the Rough Read Online Free Page B

faith, none, in myself, in my family, in whomever I might meet, in the teachers I would have. The really odd thing is that I was right.
    I was to take a bus, another first, to Lincoln Junior High School, a massive brick structure just east of downtown Carbondale that housed the town’s entire seventh and eighth grades. There I had the misfortune of being assigned to the meanest teacher who ever drew breath. He was given to throwing erasers and chalk, barking lessons to us in his pinched voice like the army sergeant he once was, crew cut and all, and reading his paycheck aloud to us every Friday. Mercenary? Pshaw.
    There was also corporal punishment at Lincoln, and we had one specific hall monitor, a gigantic hulk of a man who would slowly stroll down the halls, chuckling as he whacked a ruler against his palm. I swear the place felt like a lockdown facility. I was twelve years old, a time when bodies and minds and hearts go through so much, and I was simply not equipped for this passage. The passage had to do with the big, bad world, and I wasn’t ready to be in it—the mean teachers; the ominous, punitive hall monitor; the jaded, cruel kids; the sheer size and breadth of the humanity. I’d attended two small schools in my life, and I had thin skin.
    My mother was standing in the garage when I came home that first day. I’d held it in until then, but when I saw her, my mouth opened and no sound came out. I was sobbing so hard I simply put my head on her shoulder and drooled down her back. She was devastated to see me in such misery, yet surely it was something I would get used to and get over. But it wasn’t. I was literally Lincoln Junior High School–phobic. It felt like a cold, vast, prison, and I was a new inmate. I just couldn’t figure out what my crime was. The panic attacks started every morning in homeroom. All I wanted was to go home, back to my music world, back to my mother. I couldn’t take it. I began to feel dizzy and anxious, and I started calling Mom within the first weeks of school to come and get me because I felt sick. We had, I think, a white station wagon, and my little brother, Clay, must have been in the car, since he couldn’t have been more than three then and Mom stayed home with him. How often did I ask her to come get me? Once a week? It seemed like every day. For a while she would do it, and I don’t remember her being mad about it. When I was home, I became addicted to soap operas like Love Is a Many Splendored Thing . I read books and played the guitar. I was learning Simon & Garfunkel, specifically “April Come She Will” and “Flowers Never Bend with the Rainfall” and “The Dangling Conversation.”
    I was taken to the doctor to figure out what was wrong, but they couldn’t find anything. So eventually my mom felt she had no choice but to refuse to pick me up anymore. It was my job to go to school—something I tell my own daughter—and it was their job to make me go. But once it became a battle, we were all screwed. Maybe I could have been homeschooled for a time. Or maybe a deal could have been struck whereby I would go to Lincoln for part of the day but not all. But there was simply no insight into my heart except to regard me as rebellious. Later my mother told me, “We didn’t know what to do. We couldn’t take anything away from you except television, because you had no friends and never went anywhere,” the implication being that punitive measures were the natural course of action, and at that time I suppose they were. I was in over my head, and so were my parents.
    I got creative, holding a thermometer against a lightbulb to feign fever. That wore itself out, too, and I knew that if I were to keep avoiding school, I’d have to up the ante. I would ask a teacher if I could use the bathroom, excuse myself, and just leave the building. I didn’t play hooky to do something fun. I would have preferred to be home with my mother. I’d wander the streets of Carbondale