Eastwood Academy

Chapter 1: The Before Times

My first year of high school sucked some serious ass. And the second was even worse. My mother got breast cancer when I was fourteen and died in the middle of winter when I was fifteen. Before she passed, I tried to be strong. I went to school, got good grades, and tried out for the girl's softball team. I tried to socialize with my peers even though I felt like I was living on a different planet than them (after all, what do you say to the girl whose mother is dying?). After she took her final breath, I collapsed onto my bed and didn't get up for a week. I felt like I wanted to die, too.

We had a rare kind of good relationship. Looking back, a lot of that came from the fact that I was self motivated. I was one of only three freshman girls to make the softball JV team. Instead of pushing and nagging me to take my life seriously, my mother was my cheerleader in my endeavors.

My mother was the one who suggested I try out for T-ball in elementary school. I was too shy to make friends on my own, and it was her way of getting me out of my head and into the world. And it worked. We didn't have the usual rebellious teenager fights. Maybe we would have if she had never gotten sick. But fourteen was too young for me to rebel properly, and after she got sick, all I wanted to do was treasure the time we had left together.

At first, the doctors were hopeful, but I never was. From the moment she was diagnosed, I got this sick feeling that started in my stomach and spread throughout my whole body. My mother was going to die. I was sure of it. Of course, I tried to convince myself otherwise. I tried to stay optimistic, but as the months passed, my pessimism turned out to be well founded.

Our house, which had once been a lively, happy place, became filled with an impending sense of doom. We lived in Oregon in a small suburban neighborhood outside of Medford. The summers were beautiful, but the winters felt like they could drag on forever.

While the rest of my peers in my freshman year were out skiing and making snowmen, I was at home burying myself in novels and treasuring every moment with both my parents. Whenever I saw them together doing something mundane, cooking or watching TV, all I could think was that it would all end soon. For a year and a half, I felt like I had a constant electric current of low-grade anxiety running through my body. Every time my dad came to take me out of school to see my mother, I would hold my breath as we left the classroom, wondering if he was about to tell me my mother was gone. She hung on longer than anyone thought she would.

Then, in January, the first week back from Christmas break, my dad came to pick me up from school, and something was different. He looked so devastated I knew before he said anything. I wasn't surprised, but that didn't make it any easier. The next morning, I couldn't get out of bed. I just lay there curled up in shock, not crying. Just staring at the wall, willing it to be a nightmare. After two weeks of this, my dad suggested I go back to school. Somehow, he had enough willpower to parent me. But barely.

When I refused, he didn't make me. After three weeks, my teachers started sending me my work online. Even though I was dangerously close to failing all my classes, I ignored it. My mother was dead. Everything else paled in comparison.

After four weeks went by, and I still showed no signs of coming out of my depression, my dad really got scared. He asked if there was anything he could do to persuade me to go back to school. I told him it was too painful. Everything reminded me of my mother. It was simply too hard to wake up in the house she raised me in and play the sport she loved so much.

Something about that resonated because my dad decided it was time for an intervention. A radical one. He thought a change of location would be good. I could go somewhere that didn't remind me of her every day. He also didn't know what to do with me because he was struggling so badly himself. A former co-worker, Amanda, told him about a boarding school in Colorado that changed her life.