Letter to My Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page A

dollars and they left.
    “Welcome to the nunnery,” Melissa said when they had all gone. She was tall and thin, with sharp features and an abrupt manner of speaking. “Laura Jenkins,” she said, looking me up and down. “Did you just come from the farm, or what?”
    “Zachary,” I said.
    “Oh. Wow. Sorry,” Melissa said.
    What has been the most lonesome night in your life so far? Could you pick out one, say, “That was the worst of them all”? For me it would have to be that first night at Sacred Heart. Separated from my boyfriend, abandoned by my parents, I felt like the most unloved fifteen-year-old girl in the universe. As the stark reality of my situation sank in, I was filled with a loneliness that ached in every bone and tissue of my body. My mother and father weren’t going to be overcome with remorse and return the next day to bring me home. Tim wasn’t going to appear on the lawn below the window to carry me off in his arms. Nothing was going to get better. Pale winter moonlight shone through the barred window at the head of the room, casting a gray grid on the floor. Buried down under a too-thin blanket, I tried to stifle my sobs so as not to disturb my new roommate. Sometime around midnight, Melissa called from across the room:
    “Do you mind? I’m trying to sleep over here.”
    •   •   •
    To be a high school transfer student is hard, but to be a midyear high school transfer student is even harder. Most of the girls at Sacred Heart came from old-time Baton Rouge families, daughters of daughters of alumnae, and so a new out-of-towner like me was a great curiosity. I might have been a chimpanzee just delivered from the zoo for all the stares I got that first morning. I kept tugging at my new uniform; it didn’t seem to fit right—it was too tight in all the wrong places and too loose in the others. I was wearing ugly thick-soled lace-ups instead of the smart penny loafers the other girls wore, and I couldn’t get my navy blue knee socks to stay up the way they were supposed to. In almost every class I had to stand, say my name, where I was from, and what I liked to do. “Tell the class something about yourself, Laura,” the nuns asked. That last question stumped me until I hit on “I like to read”—which at least pleased the Freshman Rhetoric teacher, Sister Mary Margaret.
    At lunch I ended up sitting at a table in the cafeteria with a bunch of other misfits. A more forlorn group of girls you couldn’t find. There were the girls on hardship scholarships, like me; there was one pathologically shy Asian girl, Soo Chee Chong, who never spoke a word and was ashamed of her name; there was Christy Lee, one of five black students at the school, who crept around so silently that she looked like she wished she were invisible; and there was Anne Harding, locked in a monstrous steel neck brace that didn’t allow her to turn her head independent of her body. We were, I later learned, what the other girls called the charity cases.
    Have you ever wondered why so many unfortunate people seem so spiteful? Why they so often refuse—despise, even—efforts made to help them? I know why. Because I sat at their table, I know why. Within a week at Sacred Heart Academy, I had learned what every charity case knows: that any act of kindness can also be cruel. If some girl happened to be nice to us, we knew she was only being nice out of a sense of Christian duty, because she felt she had to be nice to us. And if some other girl wasn’t nice, well, that only proved how rotten all people really were at the core. So we, the charity cases, were doomed to be doubly bitter: bitter when rejected, and bitter when not.
    Lucky for you, Liz, you don’t seem to have this problem. You’ve always had plenty of friends, and none of them charity cases as far as I can tell. Still, I suspect that all of us, no matter how fortunate, feel like charity cases at some time or another in our