Empoword

Part One: Description, Narration, and Reflection 138 All Quie t 53 “We can have you kicked out, you know.” Miss Nick (as everyone addressed her) began digging her fists into her hips. She towered over me at six-foot-something, gravity pulling her wire-framed glasses to the end of her nose. I recounted the empty threats my mom would make. “ Ay nako nanlan! Putang ina! I’ll pull you out of that school! You want to go to Taft? Reseda?” Local public schools. “Do it, you’ll save a ton of money,” I’d say. “The only thing Catholic school is good for is producing my favorite unstable artists and writers,” I’d joke with my friends. They had been in the Catholic school system far longer than I had—fourteen years. I was jaded, though it was only my fourth year. All-girls’ school was supposed to turn me around. But did my mother really expect the Northeastern elitism she hammered into me to fare well in Los Angeles? Especially surrounded by the daughters of television, radio and film legacies who lived in their hilly pseudo-ranches populated with their troupes of horses dancing around in golden Agouran fields? Homogenized whole milk. Lodged right against the Santa Monica mountains was Louisville High School. The school was founded by the French sisters of Saint Louis, a French order founded by Abbé Louis Eugene Marie Bautain—whoever the hell that was. At the top of the rolling hills that were about as blonde as those who lived in them, was a small room that erupted with incense and the chatter of young women. These quarters belonged to this supposed gentle giant who chanted Mary Oliver poems ad nauseam . By her side was a new hire: an aspiring Christian songstress, also the daughter of an actor who had been typecast as a hundred high school bullies in the eighties. They, collectively, made up the “campus ministry.” “Why didn’t you come to us first?” Miss Nick continued. “Why did you have to go straight online?” She had me there. I suppose it just ate at me. Maybe some sense of urgency. Maybe I was just playing their own game.