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school for rich kids who didn’t feel like fitting in, but we both knew we could never afford that kind of tuition. There was the state-funded school, but it looked more like a prison than a school, and the description scared us both. We finally settled on a school in upstate New York that seemed like the perfect compromise; some court-ordered kids were there, but others at the school just didn’t fit in for one reason or another. It was affordable, but not scary, or so we thought. Best of all, I would escape my life thus far and get out into the world, where I could become my own person. I would leave home, and I would never move back. I was fourteen years old.
    I thought I was ready. All the friends I hung out with were going away to boarding school, too. In our minds, we all thought we were going away on a great adventure, and I couldn’t wait to get away from both my parents. I was tired of people trying to fix me. I wanted to be out on my own. I wanted to try fixing myself.
    Boarding school was much more terrifying than I ever could have imagined. It felt like more of a prison than a school, and some of the things that happened there were extreme, even looking back from an adult perspective. The dorms were always locked during the day, so we couldn’t get in, and locked during the night, so we couldn’t get out. There were cameras in our rooms, so we had no privacy. Worse, we were punished with hard physical labor, like in that movie Holes, where the boys have to dig all day, in fear for their lives. None of the adults running the school trusted us. It didn’t matter whether we told the truth or lied. They always assumed we were lying.
    The headmistress was an intimidating woman who made us call her “Mom C.” Every morning, we had to write in a journal, in the format of a letter to her: “Dear Mom, this is what I could improve in myself.” We also had to participate in what they called “thank-yous.” We all sat in a circle and we each had to thank somebody for something. If you didn’t have someone to thank, you would pay for it later.
    The kids never felt safe, and hard labor was the punishment for any misstep. Once, when I was caught smoking a cigarette, my punishment was to clean out a barn that hadn’t been used in thirty years. The stalls were filled with four-foot-tall piles of rock-hard manure. I remember standing in that barn, feeling desperate and alone, not having any idea how to do the work required of me. It took me weeks of physical labor to dig it out. This was my “lesson.” I convinced some of the boys to help me at night, because I knew I could never finish it alone, but if they had been caught, we would have all been punished even more severely.
    I’ll never forget the time one of the kids ran away. The teachers woke up all the kids in the middle of the night. They told us someone had run away, and they made us all get into vans to go find him. We finally found him pinned up against the fence, poor kid. He was two hundred pounds, he wore glasses, and I remember that he looked like a bumblebee in a jar, cowering in his black-and-yellow-striped jersey, caught in the intersection of flashlight beams and headlights from the vans filled with all of us, staring at him. They brought him back and we all had to go into the living room of the great house. At three in the morning, they put him in the center of the room and while we all watched, they asked him:
    â€œWhere were you going?”
    â€œI was running away,” he said, his eyes downcast, fierce and disgraced.
    â€œDid you think you would go home?” the headmistress asked him. “If your parents wanted you, you wouldn’t be here.”
    They told us that a lot—that our parents didn’t want us, that our parents didn’t love us, and that they had sent us there to get rid of us.
    Once, I was told to clean dishes for the entire school, and while I stood at