Memories (Part 2)
“We believe in individual attention here. Once I know what a student likes, a kind of doughnut, or a treat, then I’ll bring it one morning” T. gestured kindly, his face soft as he nodded my direction.
Maybe I remember T. saying this because it never happened to me. And really, I only remember it happening once or twice to anyone – towards the end of my senior year when everything had begun to slip out of control.
My senior year, I had started looking for schools to go to after JPAC. After touring Mississippi College, I told T. that I was disappointed in the English class I had sat in on. It just seemed like I could be doing something better with my life than analyzing tire commercials. He recommended that I try Millsaps, where they had both gone. It was academically rigorous, so much so that it might as well be an Ivy League school, he said.
From then on, getting into Millsaps was my obsession. T. talked about fashioning ourselves into the type of person who would attend the schools we dreamed of attending – so I did. I went to every event the Millsaps recruiting team offered. Into senior year I wrote and rewrote stories and essays for my scholarship applications. I must have had five or six people look over them before I finally submitted them. Once I got in, all I would have to do was make sure that I remained the perfect JPAC student and then I would transubstantiate into the perfect Millsaps student.
Senioritis was a profoundly serious crime at JPAC. My entire graduating class was presented in a schoolwide meeting as being a weak link. We were not examples to the younger students the way we should be. We should have started choir and dance before T. arrived in the mornings (but not the wrong song or the wrong dance – we were old enough to know what needed to be worked on.) We should have been unimpeachable. We couldn’t be trusted to be seniors. At this point in our lives, we should have been leaders long ago.
My last semester of high school, we were preparing for a musical production of The Little Mermaid. My best friend oversaw the set design for the season. JPAC spirit was lacking, and she had little help making T.’s visions come to light during regular school hours. And so, we stayed at night, in the art room adjacent to the sanctuary where the school assembled, and painted sets. My mother was angry that I was staying out late and I was angry that she didn’t understand that it was my duty. I had to set an example, I had to be the exception, or I would never go anywhere in life. For all I knew, my acceptance into Millsaps could be ruined by one mishap.
T. seemed satisfied less and less those days. We never could dance enough or paint enough to avoid the long schoolwide lectures under his bulging brown stare. When he talked, he looked at every person in the room with the same severe blast. I felt like he was talking to me, even if I hadn’t done anything wrong. Innocent people don’t feel guilt, I thought, turning my gaze inward to daily embark on another exercise of self-examination. I would page through every thought, act, and secret motive searching for the flaw that made me less of a JPAC student.
As I blended light blue into ocean blue and melded newspaper onto chicken wire, for the set I felt more and more tense, like I was straining for perfection, but my muscles wouldn’t quite let me obtain it. The thoughts came more and more often, that everything was wrong and maybe the McComb community was right – maybe T. didn’t have our best interest in mind. I prayed more and more. I bound Satan with every breath.
My anxiety was spiking. I worried that I was dying from all sorts of diseases. Undetected internal bleeding. Spontaneous drowning. That’s what it’s like when your every waking thought centers on a man who preaches that God strikes people down for his sake. You could die at a moment’s notice for a sin you didn’t realize you had committed. Against T. Against God. Against the school.
My periods were long and hard. In March of that year, I spent the entire month bleeding, and I vacillated between worrying that I had somehow gotten pregnant without having sex and that I was being punished for some sin I couldn’t even imagine.