Before
Grandma referred to Farm Home as “that place” and wasn’t much of a talker. She fed Kestrel, gave her a safe place to sleep, but otherwise didn’t help facilitate a transition from member of an “intentional peace community” in rural Oregon to public high school in suburban Idaho.
From the first day, Kestrel realized that her hope of easily assimilating would be impossible.
Besides never having received a basic education, she’d lost four years of pop culture references.
What it meant to “fit in” was a constantly rotating, twisting, undulating question with no definite answer, but it was clear her experiences at Farm Home weren’t going to be relatable to her peers.
By her junior year in high school, Kestrel’s desire for a friend was so profound, she felt it like a physical ache, a spear stuck in her chest. Her fear of revealing her past forced her to keep potential friends at arm’s distance, and she didn’t know how to move past that until it occurred to her to ask, What would Elizabeth Bennet do?
By channeling the heroine of Pride and Prejudice, she eventually found a smart, self-deprecating voice inside her that enabled her to start sharing her truth with potential friends.
“Sorry, I haven’t heard of [that movie/show/singer], but I spent four years in this super rural farm community. Yes, it was just as exhilarating as it sounds.”
“We were forced to wake up at dawn and attend a lecture so boring I barely survived. We could play after we did our chores, so I became the fastest weeder in the west. By the time I was fourteen, I was delivering baby goats. So much goop!”
“I lived with basically a litter of kids in our own cottage. My bed was whichever one was free at the time. A well-timed fart could always win you a little extra space.”
“No school except reading old books on our own, or when adults lectured some very sketchy science and history at us while were stuck peeling potatoes or darning socks.”
“We had running water but no electricity. Completely off-grid.”
The Confession Room had electricity, but those memories were too covered with a sticky shame to share.
Otherwise, Kestrel began to relish exposing the weirdest stuff, because it earned her the biggest reactions.
Shock meant rapt attention. Attention sort of felt like love. The feeling was novel—and irresistible.
“Until I was fourteen, I didn’t even know what country I was living in. I had memories of the before, but I guess I thought the whole world had decided to live like us now.”
“We didn’t celebrate Christmas, because it represented the Two Great Failures: religion and capitalism. One winter solstice we actually had an anti-Christmas where we made a bonfire and burned a material object that we loved.”
She laughed as she related fooling Teacher and everyone by burning a pressed-flower book Jenna had made her, though she hadn’t cared a rat’s patootie about it or about Jenna, that tattle-telling, perfectly obedient nightmare.
And then, at a sleepover with girls smarter and more popular than her, Kestrel felt desperate enough for their attention to claw through the shame and disclose the worst.
“One time Teacher locked me in a coffin-sized box all day and night. After a few hours I had to pee my pants! You haven’t lived till you’ve been trapped for hours with the smell of your own urine.”
She laughed, and the girls felt free to laugh with her. They started to call her “commune girl,” and it sounded almost respectful. She had been through something hard—weird and hard even—and survived. That was strength.
Internally, she felt massively ignorant.
Too often she had no idea what her peers or teachers were talking about, so being commune girl could usefully deflect attention from her other failings.
Still she couldn’t quite relax or trust that anyone would be comfortable with all her pointy, ugly, sharp bits.
And she’d certainly never make herself vulnerable enough to admit how haunted she still felt, and how frequently the nightmares returned.