how to leave for prep school.

Well, you probably already got the letter. Crisp and ominous in a crème colored envelope with the texture of prestige and printed on stiff paper, tri-folded and searingly congratulatory with the stamp of Shattuck Saint-Mary’s Preparatory Academy across the top. Your first thought upon pulling it from the mail box might have been to file it away in your closet, in the checkered Vans shoebox alongside the interim report cards (that your parents still don’t know you receive) and anything else kept secret, the box itself brimming with secrets that are no good for anyone.
And yeah, your stomach probably dropped as everything you had been readying for all summer began to come to a head. The trip that you took to Meriden, New Hampshire with your father to visit Kimball Union Academy, where you crossed the campus back and forth listening to a ‘haircut every week’ gentleman in black track pants and an orange polo shirt say things to you and your father, words like “foster” and “nurture” and “environment” and “responsibility” and “boys” and “men” while you tried to roll your blue oxford dress shirt up at the bottom to make it appear tucked in the heat made the evenly manicured grass swirl around your feet. Those words that were repeated to you in every interview that you did, across all the schools you visit in New England. Taft, Phillips Exeter, Vermont Academy
You left and drove down the long main street counting how many things there weren’t in the small town, seeing the forest through the trees all to well at this point. You looked at your father the whole drive there, trying through some kind of father son telepathy to let him know that you didn’t want this.
You won’t learn until some years later that he didn’t want it either.
And as for the locale, or lack thereof, push those thoughts from your head; they do not put prep schools within a long school bus ride of anything fun for a reason.
You don’t hide the letter though, this isn’t the wisdom teeth appointment thing after all, even with how much you dread the idea of high school in Minnesota, you recognize the opportunity, you understand that a nurturing environment might be the best thing for you, the responsibility, the blossoming of a boy into a man.
Ah yes, this is an important part to mention, through all of this you have wasted away your last summer as an Ann Arbor, Michigan high school student. Too worried with hockey tournaments and prep school interviews and essays and questionnaires and sharpening skates and caloric intake and chicken breasts and starched blue oxfords.
So you have two weeks left.
Go skinny-dipping at the house that Paula is housesitting in. Noa will be there too, and she’ll want to go swimming and her breasts are going to be bigger than you thought and as her pale body floats along the top of the water, you will wonder why you never… no! No time for reflection, you must move forward, you don’t have time to put in any work that you haven’t already. Pretend you know how to make White Russians and then calmly set it down as naked Paula and naked Noa lead you by the hand into a shower that is large enough for you all to do jumping jacks in.
Don’t actually do jumping jacks.
By the time you are done, Paula and Noa will have the cleanest breasts and butt cheeks in all of Washtenaw County and sometime in the future a man is going to come back to his home and wonder aloud where the other half of his bar of soap went.
Smoke a ton of dope with Paul B., every chance you get. For shits and giggles, see how much you can put into a blunt. I bet it’s a half-ounce.
Drink an entire bottle of Rum in about an hour. Puke out of the side of Kyle H.’s van right up until your driveway and then fall asleep in your own backyard. When your mom wakes you up, yelling at you from the porch, yell back to her that you are “just getting it out of your system.”
You are probably thinking, “Well, while I am out scrubbing boobs and puking on vans, shouldn’t I be concerned with packing? I mean two weeks isn’t a very long time.”
If you are worried about packing, don’t be. You will pack the last night, all night, before you leave in the morning, after you say goodbye to Abby. Packing this way is tactical; it leaves you less time to worry about the plethora of things you have to bring. If you thought about it for two whole weeks you would end up stuffing Hustlers into your penny loafers and figuring out how to pack your Wayne Gretzky Chunky Soup can collection without denting the cans or tearing the labels.
I tried to skate by without mentioning Abby; her ingredient status to this whole equation is that of anchor. She is the closest thing you know to a girlfriend, but she will really not care all that much when you leave. Not as much as you, unavoidably, will miss her. On the night before you leave you will take 13 Polaroid pictures together, she will give you a ring of hers and you will put these things into a little blue box with a snap close lid. Within two weeks of getting to school, she will break up with you while you sit on the floor in the hallway of your dorm, under the pay phone and facing a corner so no one sees you crying. You’ll enter all sixteen digits of your phone card number again to try and talk to your mom, but no one will be home including, and especially not, you.
But I am getting distracted and the look on your face is awful, time to turn it around, right the ship and go back to a time of preparation for the unknown.
Go through your room with the most meticulous of combs. Throw away said box of bad report card, the half bottle of crème de menthe that you drank at your homecoming dance? Pour it out. You learned that lesson. The empty bottles of Absolut? Put them in the bottom of the trashcan on a Thursday night. Anything you ever jerked off in or onto (socks, paper towel, gauze, a pair of Abby’s underwear) burn. In the back yard though, not in the driveway. The last thing your subdivision needs is a half pair of blackened and burned cotton panties lightly blowing down the street. Take a second to make sure everything goes up nicely, you got yourself into this mess, or maybe you got your mess into this more appropriately, save yourself the further embarrassment.
Your big box of porno? Yeah, the one in the blue Rubbermaid tub that says winter clothes on it. Get rid of it. This catalogue or your carnal taste ranging from unlabeled VHS tapes of every time you recorded something off of HBO, to all the Playboys, Hustlers, Penthouse, Club Confidential, Tail, Barely Legal, Cherry Toppers, Whack It!, MMF’s, Booty Stomp… Jesus, Booty Stomp? How did you get all this filthy erotica?
Trading? Right, anyway… You can’t even watch those tapes that you got in Sweden in The States, you’d need a Swedish VCR, you dirty packrat.
Get rid of it all. Somehow, burn it, sink it, do anything.
Because, in two months when your parents come to visit you on parents weekend, and your mom walks out to the car to get her Diet Coke, your dad is going to tell you a horror story about how they were cleaning out your room after you left so that Nana and Grandpa would have somewhere to sleep.
Your face is going to get really hot right here and you are going to feel your stomach flip itself over. This, I think, is guilt. You get this feeling when you lie, get caught lying, or know you are going to get in trouble.
He is going to tell you this awful little story about throwing everything in the room down the stairs to your mother, who waits at the bottom with her arms wide open, prepared to sort through all of her little angels knick knacks and brick-a-brack. Your Ninja Turtles and Ghostbusters, hockey cards, bug collection, baby teeth, seashells, and maybe, and she is ready for this one, that signed Hooters calendar that you got in Toronto.
He will tell you with all of his mannerisms and gestures about wrapping his hands around the box and feeling the weight inside. I mean winter clothes right? Jackets are heavy, so are sweaters. He even says that he almost didn’t throw it down the stairs towards your mother.
Curses, Father. Curses.
While it was in the hair, momentum shifting the contents and opening the lid, slingshotting everything out onto the stairs and towards mom, horrified at the deluge or pornography heading her way, a porno-lanche. She will throw up her hands and walk out the front door, done for the day.
They will find the report cards too, but since you are already at a prep school hundreds of miles away, a punishment seems a bit redundant at this point.
So, we have all of that taken care of. I suppose packing is next.
Don’t bring anything of value, sentimental or financial.
Don’t bring a bathing suit.
Bring towels, lots of them.
Bring an edge, a chip on your shoulder. Bring a sneer and an attitude. Don’t bring trust, you might be able to get that there. Bring secrets, so you have something to keep to yourself. Bring soap and a toothbrush, for sure. Get a hot pot, something to boil water. Shitty blankets and sheets to match, not your favorite pillow or any expectations. Black, Maroon, and White polo shirts, two pairs of Docker’s Khakis, and a pair of Sperry Topsiders.
Hey, relax. I know it sounds bad. That’s why you don’t bring expectation. When you come out of it, you’ll come out stronger.
And you only go to prep school for two days. The day you drive through the prestigious stone arch and the day you drive out with your diploma.
Hey, and talk to that girl behind you in the health services line on the first day, she will make fun of your name and you will make fun of hers.
She might save your life one day.
Ok kid, keep your head up, your shoulders squared and your knuckles forward and you’ll be alright.
I promise.