Good Girl : A Memoir (9781476748986) by Sarah Tomlinson

brochure for an early college in the Berkshires called Simon’s Rock. I read it. If I got accepted, I would be allowed to drop out of high school after my sophomore year and begin taking college courses the next fall. Mom told me that she’d always planned to help me attend college, and while we couldn’t afford private high school with its more limited financial aid, if I got accepted to Simon’s Rock with a scholarship, she would find a way for me to go. I had never wanted anything so much in my entire life, and I don’t think I will ever want anything that much again.
    Even the application was magical. They asked us to write an essay on Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave.” Plato! Here was something extraordinary. I sent off my paperwork and waited for Simon’s Rock to set me free and let my real life begin.
    It wasn’t long before I got a letter inviting me to an interview and introductory day at the school. Mom agreed to drive me down. I was ecstatic, and she was excited on my behalf. Finally, here was a perfect solution. Not only would it free me from the confines of Lincoln, it would challenge me intellectually, which Mom was determined to see happen if she could.
    On the appointed day, we drove down to the campus in Western Massachusetts, almost into New York state. We turned down Alford Road, drove a few miles, crested a hill, and descended into a slight valley. On the left was a big red barn, which was the school’s art center. On the right a little gravel road with a small, tasteful sign that read SIMON’S ROCK COLLEGE OF BARD . As we drove onto campus, we passed a guard shack on the left and came upon a cluster of low buildings with clean modern lines and breezeways. I was nervous, worried about making the right impression, not just with the administrators, whom I wanted to think I was intelligent, but also with the other students, whom I wanted to think I was cool.
    As I stepped out of the car, I saw a thin, pale boy with bright green dreadlocks. Both of us were too shy to smile, but we exchanged the kind of small nod that acknowledged our kinship. There wasn’t a redneck or a jock or a bully in sight. I loved it all. At the end of the day, Mom and I were both high on the place, its pretty peacefulness, its broad-minded community and high-minded academic ideals. But first I had to get in.
    If I had checked the mail with reverence before, now it was the only moment in my day that actually mattered. As soon as I walked in the door from school, I threw down my book bag and raced to the dining room table.
    â€œHow was your day?” Mom said from the kitchen.
    â€œFine,” Isaid, sorting through the mail. Nothing.
    If no one was home, I ran the grassy path to the mailbox, picturing the letter with the school’s seal waiting for me in the wooden mailbox. Nothing.
    One day when I walked in, Mom watched me carefully from behind the counter.
    â€œWhat?” I said.
    â€œYou got a letter from Simon’s Rock,” she said.
    â€œReally?” I said. “What did it say?”
    â€œI didn’t open it,” she said. “It’s addressed to you.”
    I held the envelope in my hand, my finger under the flap, and paused. She cradled the tomato she was slicing and smiled at me. I opened the envelope, took out the paper, and read:
    â€œDear Sarah, we are pleased to offer you . . .”
    I looked at Mom, stunned, overjoyed, terrified, everything all at once.
    â€œI got in,” I said.
    â€œYou did?” she said. “That’s great, Sarah. Congratulations.”
    I could hear everything in her voice that I, too, felt—the relief at having survived these two awful years, the joy at this wonderful place we had found that seemed just perfect for me, and the uncertainty at exactly what that would mean.
    M y dad had continued to be silent that spring, but he sent me a letter in early June that opened: “I had a dream