Eastwood Academy

Chapter 2: New Beginnings

 I sit in the back of an Uber on my way to Eastwood Academy, fidgeting nervously and resisting the urge to check my phone every thirty seconds. My late mother's words ring through my head: "Brooklyn, you'll never learn to make new friends if you keep using that thing as a crutch for your shyness." She said that to me the day before my first day of high school back home, and she was right.

And yet, in the year and a half she's been gone, that's exactly what I've done. Well, not shyness so much as grief. I fell further and further into a depression. The days turned into weeks, and the weeks turned into months; then, one day in March of my junior year, I found myself sitting down to take the SATs with no preparation or thought of the event whatsoever. College was the last thing on my mind. I was passing my classes with C's and B-'s, mainly because a handful of teachers were going easy on me. I was also lying to my father about this. Given my lack of preparation, my first set of SAT scores were shockingly good. I remember the day the scores came in the mail. My dad looked more hopeful than I had seen him since he briefly decided to convince me to try to go to boarding school in Colorado.

The next day at school, the guidance counselor called me into her office and told me point blank that a good SAT score was my last chance to turn my high school experience around and possibly get into a good college. She told me to retake the test, jotted down a list of prep books and tutoring centers, and gave me a handful of glossy college brochures for "inspiration." That day, it felt like something that had been asleep inside me for years had finally woken up.

In the last two years I had drifted away from all my friends and avoided anything to do with sports altogether. I would park across campus and walk an extra ten minutes to get to my classes so I could avoid seeing the baseball pitch. At lunch, I found myself walking down to the pitch for the first time since I was a freshman, spending my lunch period pouring over the materials my counselor had given me. For a blissful 30 minutes, I flipped through the pamphlets, imagining myself walking to class on a gorgeous college campus. Then, my heart sank when I remembered how bad my grades were. Something had to change.

I raced home after school and told my dad what had happened when he got home from work. He was angry at me for lying about how bad my grades had been for so long and immensely relieved to finally hear me express some interest in my future. I paced back and forth in our kitchen, head in my hands, rambling on and on about how bad my grades were.

"I know it's a mess, and I should have probably tried harder, and I know that now- do you think if I pull it together for senior year, I'll have a chance to get in anywhere?" I asked him frantically. A pregnant pause ensued, during which my anxiety skyrocketed. I had been expecting him to say something like, "Don't worry, you can do anything you put your mind to," but my father, while always kind and steady, was also not the type of person to sugarcoat things.

"I don't know Brooklyn. Your transcript is pretty bad right now," he told me honestly. It's not an unsalvageable situation. Let's get some advice from someone who knows what they're talking about."

"Like who? Someone who works in college admissions?" I asked.

"Remember that college prep school I took you to right after- last year?" My father asked, wincing a little at the reminder of those awful weeks right after my mother passed.

"Yeah," I replied. A vivid image of the boy with green eyes and a haunted expression filled my mind, but I pushed it aside.

"My best friend from high school, Doug Stanton is the head of the board, and the school has its own private college counselor program created and run by his wife. She has a strong track record of getting her kids into great schools," he said.

"Probably rich kids who've been working on their applications since kindergarten," I grumbled.

"Some," my father admitted, "but let's not count you out yet. You got a great SAT score without even trying. Let's see what you can do if you put some effort into this. I'll call Amanda and Doug tomorrow. You work on studying to retake the SATs and get your grades up."