By the time I got to high school, things at home had changed. Now that my stepfather was gone, my mother was lonely, depressed and fearful. She started having flashbacks of the abuse she suffered at the hands of my father, and turned to alcohol to dampen the clamor in her head. We faced another source of tension by unhappy accident: I had hit puberty at the exact same time she had hit menopause. Our hormones were like high-pitched sine waves out of sync: the effect was discordant and painful. Most nights in junior high had involved my mom quietly, sullenly writing at her electric typewriter while I studied and talked on the phone, but by the spring of my eighth grade year, every night was another round in the migraine-inducing, shrieking battle of estrogen versus progesterone. I started staying out later. Then I started staying over friends’ houses. Then I stayed out all night, sitting up reading William Burroughs and The Watchmen at the 24-hour diner in Harvard Square. Once it got warm, I stashed my sleeping bag under a bench in the basement of the psychology building at Harvard and slept there. By end of summer, the sleeping bag had been taken away, so I began sleeping under the fruit trees in Radcliffe Yard. One day during the first week of high school, I had slept so little each night that I nodded off in the girl’s bathroom and slept there through two periods. Yes, I fell asleep on the toilet. To add embarrassment to idiocy, I didn’t wake up until the dean of my program woke me, flanked by the hall monitor and a student who’d innocently come in to pee and heard me snoring.
I was lucky.
Word got out about my “incident” and some new friends of mine from hanging out in Harvard Square expressed their concern. I started living at their houses, taking a week shift at each. The dean knew, but he never told. My mom knew, and knew well enough not to say anything. The last time I had tried to leave, she had grabbed my hair as I approached the door. I didn’t let go, neither did she, and next thing I knew, my scalp was bleeding. I left in shock and we didn’t mention it the next day. But I could feel her shame.
Staying with friends week to week meant getting to know the kids from my new high school. I had been active in a program called the High School Studies Program at MIT, and was still tight with all of my friends from junior high, so I hadn’t expected to want to socialize at school. But now I had no choice. I did the best I could at fitting in, but failed miserably. I was simultaneously way too worldly and way too geeky to make sense to most of my peers. So while I tried to fake normalcy, I also tried to escape into my studies. Given the program I was in (I will name no names), that was impossible. The teachers there were burned out and no one wanted to be there. The only class where I could be me took place in a different program within the school: biology. I took it with friends of mine from elementary school, so I was able to expose the real, goofy, studious ME for one period a day. It was no wonder that when it came to do our projects for the science fair, I put my heart and soul into it.
Later that semester, I was assigned an experiment in psychology class. I was living with a friend whose mom was a daycare provider, so I decided my project would see if Piaget’s experiments on children in France were replicable with children in Cambridge. I performed his experiments on children at my friend’s daycare center, at the one I had attended, and at another local daycare. None of the results came close to his. I began hypothesizing on why, and contacted a student at Lesley College who had studied my class the year before (this was a common occurrence in uncommon Cambridge, Massachusetts). She had been a friend and mentor, and I trusted her to tell me whether my methods had been flawed. She actually came with me on a visit, observed my method and told me I had performed it with scientific rigor. She was so interested in my result, she decided to help me perform my scholarly research, which led us to a 1981 study that showed inner-city children lagged significantly behind those in Piaget’s study. I had independently confirmed the results that challenged the replicability of Piaget’s results. It was pretty cool. Cool enough that my teacher asked me to enter it into the science fair.
[Note: this took me two years to publish, because I really wasn’t sure if I wanted anyone to read it. Thanks to Kevin Zelnio for his constant inspiration to stay honest.]
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