Ninth Grade

I got on the wrong side of--well, she wasn't a season, but she was as old as they are. Mrs. Cranberry--no, really. Mrs. Cranberry. Yeah, that was my reaction, too. She was my ninth grade English teacher. You know how terror has a side effect of blindness? I never did learn how to diagram a sentence--I could never make out what was on the board. Mrs. Cranberry must've been--well, she might have been 40, but at the time I was convinced she was at least 90. She used to prowl up and down the rows of desks with her ruler in hand--no, she never hit us, it wasn't Catholic school. But she always reminded me of that--what was that captain's name from Mutiny on the Bounty? That guy. That was like a Disney version of Mrs. Cranberry.

Ninth grade was an unsettled year for me. I spent half of it in school with Em and the rest of my friends, and the other half visiting Nina. Mom and Dad talked about taking me out of school entirely and just homeschooling me or something, but they were trying to keep my life as normal as possible--which I appreciate now, but I think at the time I felt like they were being terribly inconsistent:"Why can't you keep your grades up, are you stupid?" "No, you can't go to school today, you have to go stay with Nina!" Okay, so they never actually called me stupid, but that's what it felt like--hey, I was 14; I was going through puberty; I was allowed to be irrational!