The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life Read Online Free Page A

thrashed and flailed and begged them to let me go. I called out to the chaperones, the mothers of classmates, and begged them to help me.
    They stepped over me, lying pinned to the floor, and left the room.
    The gang let me go without stripping me naked—they probably only intended to give me a good scare—and I fled down the hall, into my room. I wanted to catch the next flight out, but had to endure the next few days, hoping that it wouldn’t happen again. Ruthie, who had been off at the beach with one of her friends, never knew what had happened, and wouldn’t have understood what it meant to meif I had told her. I made it home without further incident, but the world looked very different to me after that. To this day my mother remembers a sea change: “I knew something had happened on that trip. I didn’t know what, because you wouldn’t tell me. It was in your eyes.”
    When school started that fall, word had spread that I was now untouchable. Boys who had been my friends since elementary school now wouldn’t talk to me in the hallway. Older boys shoved me on occasion. The preppy queen bees made a point of insulting me every day. By no means was I the only one they treated like this. There was nothing that anybody could do about it, or so it seemed. The thing that killed me, though, was how my best friends literally dropped me overnight. Cutting a boy who had been their close pal most of their lives was the price required to join the cool kids’ club, and gain access to their booze, cigarettes, and social status. It felt like the end of the world to me. I doubt it troubled them one bit.
    School became little more than a daily opportunity to confront what a piece of stinking garbage I was, and how powerless I was to make any of it stop. The misery continued throughout my tenth-grade year. None of this made sense.
    During this time I fought often with my father. I honestly can’t remember what we argued over, but I remember him being frustrated with my outcast status. Both he and my mother worried about me, but they didn’t know what to do, and panicked. It was especially hard for my strong-willed father, who could not empathize with a son whose way of seeing the world was increasingly alien to his own. In one of our yelling matches Paw accused me of bringing all this on myself for being so obstinately strange. And that’s when I knew how alone I was.
    I turned at the time to the woman who had been my ninth-grade English teacher, Nora Marsh. With her tightly braided curly red hair, her Yankee accent, and fondness for rock and roll, Nora stood out among the teachers. Descended from an old West Feliciana family, she had grown up in Chicago but moved to the parish to live in and care forWeyanoke, her family’s antebellum plantation house, and spend weekends at her place in New Orleans. She was fun, smart, and—catnip to a teenager like me—had a “Question Authority” bumper sticker on her Chevy Citation. She became a mentor to several of us bookish outcasts. Nora knew how hard we had it in school, and served as a cheerleader for us, and a messenger of hope. What she told us, mostly by her example, was that we were okay, that we were normal, that loving books and ideas was nothing to be ashamed of, and that, honest to God, things weren’t always going to be like this.
    One Friday in the autumn of 1982 several of us were hovering around Nora, waiting to go to a pep rally when we heard an announcement on the school intercom. Representatives from a new residential high school for juniors and seniors were going to be in a particular classroom if anybody wanted to meet them. What was this? We had to check it out.
    The idea behind the new Louisiana School for Math, Science, and the Arts was to bring academically gifted juniors to a refurbished high school in Natchitoches, a town in north-central Louisiana, put us up in unused college dorms, and teach us college-level courses. It was to be a state-funded public