Memories of Mount A

The sky here is absolutely amazing, great cloud pictures happening. One night last week there was a vanilla sky and I stopped for 10 minutes to study it before it mutated into something else. A memory came to me last night of when we came here for the drama festival when I was a kid. Not sure what year that would have been. '85? '86? Maybe. I know it wasn't the first festival I went to and it wasn't the last, but it was the only one not hosted by UNB/St. Thomas in Fredericton.

At some point the teacher chaperones had taken us for a walk about town and we noticed a pool hall/arcade (bar maybe?) It's fuzzy whether we slipped away right then and met local boys or whether it happened later, but no matter, we did meet some local boys and promised to meet up with them later in the evening. Our dorm room was on the first or second floor. Not too high for jumping out . . . but as it turned out too high for climbing back in. There were a bunch of us who planned to go. Stacy and I went first and I thought the rest were right behind us . . . but when we ran down to the boys waiting in the car it turned out it was just me and Stace.

Not sure what we did really. I know there was driving around. I know I was in the middle of the back seat between two boys. I know there was drinking . . . maybe some hash (it's fuzzy). I know we drove around some, but not sure if we went in anyplace. I remember the police lights behind us and pulling over and being a little bit concerned that we would have to walk back to campus from the highway, a moment where I was figuring out the lay of the land in my head and gauging the walk, wondering how out of it Stacy was, whether she had any better understanding of where we were or whether it would be all on me to get us out of here.

It seems like the driver had to blow the breathalyzer. It's fuzzy whether he was actually charged with impaired. I'm pretty sure all our open liquor was confiscated. But I'm not certain of anything anymore. Maybe we got away. I remember thinking that these boys weren't the sort of boys that we usually hung out with, they were nervous about the police, jittery, really freaked out. I remember thinking they probably had never done anything like this before, maybe they were geeky boys trying to impress us with their bad boy attitudes. I thought that was kind of sweet.

Regardless of what happened with the police, we didn't have to leave the car . . . I don't think, unless I've completely blocked out a ride in the cop cruiser. I do know we didn't walk back to campus, we got dropped off. Staggered up to the dorm, realised we couldn't climb back into the window, sucked it up, prepared to take our punishment, and walked through the front door into the lobby. There were teachers there. Mr. Hendry was one. It was long after curfew, quite late in drama festival terms, I'd say going on midnight anyway. We walked through the lobby, past the teachers, and up to our rooms without anyone so much as saying boo to us. It was amazing! We couldn't believe it. In our drunken/high state we wondered if we hadn't been invisible for a few minutes or something.

Back in the rooms, the other girls explained how they'd been caught trying to leave campus and reamed out by the teachers, lectured about safety and all that. Threatened about priveleges being taken away, school suspension, and so on. They couldn't believe we had gotten away and even more incredibly that we'd come back through the front door in plain sight of all the teachers. The rest of the girls hated us!

But sometimes I wonder about it. I know Mr. Hendry saw us. He gave us that thin lipped hands on his hips nod of disapproval. But we didn't get any lecture. We weren't punished. He might have asked us the next day not to wander so far away or something, but no trying to put the fear of Jesus into us. And I've always wondered why that was. Why could Stacy and I get away with things that other kids couldn't? Why were we allowed to write tests over and over until we passed them when other kids would just fail? Why was I allowed to make up English assignments in my head on the spot and present them orally rather than in written format like everyone else? I used to think it was because we were smart. I mean we had been labelled smart from elementary school, pulled out of the class to do more difficult work than our peers. Part of a group of 10 kids who were supposed to be smarter than anyone else. I still meet people I went to school with and the first thing out of their mouths is about how smart I always was in school. And I'm like no, no I wasn't, I never did any work in high school. And they don't believe me.

I used to think it was because we were smart, but sometimes I wonder if it wasn't because we were pretty and sexually adventurous and always hanging out with people a lot older than we were. When you think about it, a lot of our friends weren't that much younger than what the teachers would have been at the time. These were young teachers, just starting out. And we were flirtatious, with teachers, with cops, with the minister, with everyone. It was a time of testing boundaries and seeing just how far you could go. My motto as a teen was to try everything at least once. If it was there for the doing, I wanted to do it. I was fearless and reckless and dangerous and a terrible worry to my parents. May my sisters not have any of their children inherit that destructive gene from me!

Anyway, that's my almost-memory of Mount A. I've been on campus and can't recall at all where our dorm was or anything. I've been around town and can't recall where that arcade/pool hall might have been. It's all a little fuzzy. But I do remember Mr. Hendry standing in the lobby when we got back, very clearly. I remember getting away with stuff that other girls couldn't.

Mood: Boppy
Drinking: Tea, King Cole with a dash of cream (i'm all outta milk . . . i'm all outta lot of things)
Listening To: The Dandy Warhols, Easy
Hair: can't find the dieppe salon in the phone book . . . perhaps I've forgotten the name, got mixed up somehow . . . it happens, when you drink multiple glasses of wine