People sometimes ask me where I went to high school. The answer is, I didn’t. In fact, the highest grade I completed in the K-12 school system was 6th. I attended the same elementary school from 1st-6th grade. We moved into the shed on my mother’s property right before 7th grade, so I started that school year in a whole new district. I started Marysville Middle School that year, but didn’t know anyone there and as you have probably gathered by now, I was by no means what you would call a social butterfly and I had trouble making friends. To further complicate matters we moved back to my dad’s house in Everett a couple months into the school year. This meant that I had to start taking the public bus home after school.
Taking the public bus was a learning curve for me at 12. My route involved a transfer and a rather long walk to the house after I got off the second bus. The whole process took several hours. The first time I attempted it, I got on the first bus going in the wrong direction. I realized I had made a mistake when the bus was somewhere in Arlington. I told the bus driver where I was trying to go, she rolled her eyes and handed me a transfer. “Meet me on this same bus going SOUTH here in an hour.” I got off. I was near a shopping center with a grocery store and a pay phone. I used the little bit of change I had to call my mom. She was at work. I told her that I had taken the wrong bus and that now I was lost. She tried to talk me through how to get on the right bus going the other direction, but I was so upset by the whole thing that I started crying and said I couldn’t get back on a bus. My mom agreed to come pick me up, but I didn’t actually know where I was.
I had to stop a lady who was headed into the store to ask her where we were exactly. She told me the name of the place where we were and proceeded into the store. While I was trying to determine exactly where to meet my mom and what time she would arrive (she worked in Seattle, so it was going to take a while to get there), the money I had deposited for the call expired and the call was disconnected. I wasn’t sure what to do and I was already pretty distraught. I ended up going into the store and finding the lady who had told me where I was, and asked her if she had any money I could use to call my mom back. I was so embarrassed by having to ask for help, which wasn’t something I did often. I was terminally shy as a child and had trouble speaking to anyone I didn’t know; so much so, in fact, that I sometimes had trouble even purchasing a candy bar at the gas station because it meant speaking to the attendant. So, while I was asking this stranger for money for the pay phone, I burst out crying. The lady, who must have felt terribly sorry for me at this point, decided to help me. She left her cart in the middle of the aisle and took me back out to the pay phone where we called my mom back. When she realized how long it would be before my mother’s arrival, she told her to pick me up at the diner at the other end of the strip mall. She then took me back in the store and bought me several magazines to keep me entertained while I waited. Then she walked me over to the diner, explained to the waitresses what was going on, and paid for a meal for me. She left me there with a few extra dollars in case I needed anything else. My mother arrived a couple of hours later.
After that I always got on the bus going the right direction. However, there was another problem: that time of year, the days were short and I had to transfer buses in downtown Everett. There was no central bus station downtown back then. I got off the first bus on one side of downtown and had to walk all the way to the other side and onto a side street to catch the second. And it was dark. I don’t know if you have ever had the opportunity to walk across downtown Everett in the dark in the ‘90s and stand alone on a side street, but I can assure you, it wasn’t the safest thing for a 12-year-old girl to be doing. And I felt that. I was terrified, to be honest. I would get off the bus and walk past homeless people and drug addicts. Downtown Everett at that time did not have much in the way of office buildings or even shops in those days. It was not a thriving area filled with businesspeople on their way home from work or happy couples out for some shopping and a night on the town. There were no nice ladies on their way into grocery stores to help me out. I would get sneered at and cat called. I would sometimes get followed by some particularly interested suiter who wasn’t deterred by my lack of reciprocated interest in engaging in conversation. I really had no way of defending myself, so I just kept my gaze straight ahead and tried to look brave as I walked quickly past. I don’t imagine I looked very tough with my slight build being all of 80 lbs at that age. I did, however, manage to make it safely onto the second bus every time. After a long ride through residential neighborhoods and a walk along a somewhat busy arterial street with no sidewalk and a ditch immediately on the other side of the white line, I would arrive to a dark, empty house and wait for my mother to arrive home.
The combination of the social rejection and the bus adventure home quickly got to me. I told my mother that I didn’t want to go to school anymore, and she agreed that I didn’t have to. I wasn’t technically a dropout at that time, as my mother registered me for homeschool, but I never did any schooling at home. I’m not sure how many years she continued the formality of registering me as a homeschool student, but I imagine she stopped the practice after a couple of years. Instead of attending school, I spent my days at the barn riding, cleaning stalls, sitting on hay bales and talking to the horses. I liked being at the barn and I never felt like I was missing much not going to school.
I would later go on to earn a Bachelor of Science in Applied and Computational Mathematics from the University of Washington, but that is another story.
Patchwork Girl 