I'm sure it's a term you're all familiar with.
Boarding School.
Maybe it's been tossed around as an option by your parents, maybe you've only gotten an idea of the horrors that lurk within it from reading Catcher in the Rye,or maybe you actually attended one, in which case, God help you.
Boarding School.
It's kind of a terrible idea, isn't it? Shlepping off your unruly children to a convent for the Rich and White for forty grand a year, hoping the environment somehow shapes them into reasonable adults despite the fact that boarding school encourages all the elements of modern society that most sane people find detestable.
Maybe I'm generalizing. Maybe you're one of the few who made it through all right. Maybe you're the soldier who galloped through the minefield with nary a scratch and have gone on to a respectable career with a loving family.
Maybe I'm just bitter because it was my decision to go.
Woodberry Fucking Forest Fucking School for Fucking Boys Fuck. I'll let you guess which parts of the name I made up. It's a higher learning institution based snugly in central Virginia, around forty minutes from Charlottesville, the nearest landmark on your map. It's not the middle of nowhere, no. There's stuff, just not a whole lot of it.
The small town of Orange is around ten minutes from Woodberry, the town proudly boasts four stoplights, and the youth of the snug little hamlet flock to El Vaquero, the local Mexican place for after-school gatherings. Despite the size of Orange, the town is fairly homey, with a good public library and citizens that are, for the most part, well-behaved and friendly. There's the occasional ill-tempered and unruly redneck, sure, but that's true of any town. Orange is where I spent my first year of high school.
My father works at Woodberry Forest as an English and speech teacher, and while I was given the option to attend it my freshman year, I opted instead for Blue Ridge Virtual Governors School at Orange County High. BRVGS was a class of fifteen so-called "gifted and talented" students from the middle schools around the county that filtered into Orange High. To be accepted was a pretty big deal, and the fifteen of us lucky enough to be accepted were pretty damn psyched.
So I did it for a year. It was fun. But it was easy.
Excepting the actual BRVGS class, the courses were ridiculously easy. I apologize if this sounds like bragging, I don't mean to come off all "I am so much smarter than these peasants, when will an institution of higher learning accept me mnyah mnyah mnyah". Everyone I spoke to seemed to agree that yeah, this was a little too easy.
So my friends and I sailed through the first year of Orange High, and I decided that, while I enjoyed BRVGS, the rest of the classes provided no real challenge. So, I reasoned, there's no real reason to stick around OCHS, why not go to Woodberry for the rest of my high school career? They accept incoming sophomores, why not give it a shot?
Yeah, I really fucked the dog on that decision.
So I applied. I got in. I was happy. I spent the summer leading up to the first day at Woodberry in gleeful anticipation of my future boarding school career.
And thusly, we enter the book.
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