First, I took out the scissors and cut away giant fist-fulls of hair until it barely skimmed my shoulders. I used the acceptance letter from the College Preparatory School to scoop up the dead weight of human hair that was now scattered on the bathroom floor and threw the pile into the trash. Then I shook up the mixture of dark red hair-dye and proceeded to squeeze the thick color onto my scalp. For the first time in my life, my eyes were slathered in black eyeliner and mascara, a look I had always wanted the balls to pull off. I didn’t really care what anyone thought about me anymore- I was going to be who I wanted, or rather, who I was.

The bottom line was, if they were really going to force me to go to the last school on Earth I’d ever want to attend, I figured I may as well go in style. My parents had assured me that I only had to "try it out" for a year, and they made a crucial promise that if I didn’t like it there, I could leave at the end of the year. I had tried to reason that I hated the school even before I wrote my application at knife-point, but my arguments had fallen on deaf ears. One year looked like a monster, so I figured that I should try to make it the most of it. Threatening to run away had gotten me nowhere. Bribes had no effect, either. I was going to CPS and there was very little I could do about it. So, to make the experience less daunting and more adventurous, I had decided to re-invent myself.

Sadly, my feeling of adventure died within the first few minutes of the first day of school. It didn’t matter who I was or who I wanted to be, because I could tell that there was no one there who would ever find out either. I surveyed my new classmates with growing skepticism as they mingled together under the large trees, compressed between the pride-inflated redwood shingled buildings.

A large group of girls were clustered together, looking like cheap plastic toys manufactured in Taiwan. You could tell that they tried to look like authentic and antique products, but they oozed cheapness and little substance. Behind me, a factory line of calculator-kids ran around, playing tag. Although their brain power could have electrocuted me into a dull stupor, their social habits were about as advanced as that of a third grader. One of them was carrying a stack of magic cards. Then there was the mass of testosterone-fueled males with skinny legs and small heads who had finally been able to feel like a jock after years of being picked last for kick-ball. They watched the calculator-kids with satisfaction, feeling that they had finally hit the jack pot and might, for once, be the suave, popular boy they had always wanted to be. There were the ‘artists’ that really ‘got’ the world and, even though their parents had enough cash to cough up twenty-five grand a year to send them to an exclusive preparatory school, believed themselves to be tough and hardened by the sorrows of life. And then, of course, there were the ‘weird’ kids. The girl with long, blonde hair and a tangerine guitar, who was too indie for the school’s atmosphere. The organic girl with the hemp skirt who didn’t believe in the powers of deodorant. The boy with the orange afro and square glasses, singing a song about Legos and Star Wars. They were flocked by the students who just didn’t talk or make eye-contact and used their hair as a force-field to intercept any means of conversation.

I was almost correct in assuming that I would never make friends with any of them. However, when Elise and Pan emerged out of the mess of meaningless faces, the year ahead felt less daunting. I don’t remember exactly how we stuck to each other– Elise was in most of my classes and shared a familiar background of friends, and I was drawn to Pan due to his good looks and flippant attitude towards the school– but when we were stuck, we were super-glued. Elise came from a wealthy family and led a strict and sheltered life, but after a few weeks of sitting next to me in science class, I had opened her eyes to the idiocy of the school. Her parents resented me for a considerably long time, blaming me for her ‘corruption’, which consisted of her sudden need to wear as much eyeliner as I did and her intense desire to leave the school she had so previously favored. Pan had already arrived with my frame of mind, also unable to escape his parents’ idea that a private school equaled a better school. He had a biting wit and his negativity was never depressing, only hilarious. The three of us quickly became the threesome that didn’t quite fit anywhere else and we spent our lunches together, locked in the band room, writing songs about living in the jail cells of our school.

Though their friendship was ultimately the only thing that helped me survive the year, I was still feeling trapped with the rest of the experience. So, I tried to occupy myself with my classes. This, however, was quickly deemed impossible. Each class made time fall asleep, the second hand of the ominous clock quivering, stuck in some restless dimension. The slowest tempo of ticking came from inside my art class.

The first time I met Tina, the art teacher, I had a small hope that she would be a good teacher. I had transferred out of "Advanced Drama" after we’d been subjected to a ‘final exam’ in the form of an improvisational puppet show. Because, of course, advanced students of the theater need to be tested in the realms of grossly disproportionate puppets performing skits.

Tina wore crisp clothes and looked classy. She seemed less rigid, less impacted by the excruciatingly stagnant and mathematical atmosphere that filled every crack of the school. However, when I heard her voice, it was tinged with all the restraint and stifled creativity in the world.

"So, everyone is working on independent art projects right now," she explained, motioning for me to sit down in an empty seat. Students around me worked in varying mediums, their brains whirring. Pan was in the class and smirked at me, painting something profane in his endless quest to upset the school’s order.

I smiled. An independent art project was what I needed more than anything to wake me up from the automaton schedule I had been enduring for a half a year. "Great!" I said. "I’m excited now."

Her eyes clicked mechanically into a narrowed look of concern. "Well, I’m afraid that you can’t do an independent project. Maybe later. But for now, you have to catch up with the rest of the class."

"What do you mean?" I asked. I knew I had transferred, but wondered why I would have to make up work from the beginning of the year. Pan rolled his eyes at me from behind her back.

She smiled at me as though I was a kid who had asked her where babies came from- awkward and pitying. "Well, because you don’t have the benefit of my teachings from the first semester, I need to catch you up on the basics. I’m going to have you work on line-drawings for a while, then go on to line-drawings with shading."

I laughed, challenging the curve in her lips. "Oh, that’s alright. I’ve been taking art classes at school and at an art and science center since I was five years old. I think I can skip the line drawings."

Her face turned sour. She looked around in the air for a proper reply. "That might be true, but you didn’t get my professional direction and I feel like the lack of my lessons might hinder your creative process later on. Just be glad I’m giving you an opportunity and learn the basics under my direction at all."

My face fell a few inches. Was she serious?

"I know how to do a line drawing," I assured her. "I would really love to do an independent project." My teeth were starting to clench.

"She’s a good artist!" Pan interrupted. Tina pivoted to electrocute him with a sharp glare and then promptly turned back to me.

"I’m afraid that’s not going to be possible. Remember, you missed out on everything I taught earlier this year. You need my direction," she stated clearly.

I studied her, staring into her robot eyes, waiting to see if any sparks would flicker beneath the clear membrane of her pupil.

"Alright," I replied slowly, my intestines wrangling down the urge to punch her in the face.

For the next month, I sat on a stool and drew line drawings of the random objects she placed in front of me. I drew a hair-dryer like a photo, each tangle of wire an exact replica of what I saw before me. She chastised me for finishing too early. I drew a chair and she got frustrated and said that I hadn’t put enough good attitude into it. I drew countless useless objects- a cup with a ball on it, or a bench with a leaf on it- until I was ready to ‘graduate’ to shading. I watched in envy as my classmates worked freely with their charcoal or clay or milky pastel masterpieces, letting their minds flourish, while I sat, strangled with the knowledge that all I had was a note-book full of line-drawings. It definitely didn’t help that Pan was there to mimic her metallic voice and tell me to re-draw the lamp I had already drawn from four different angles.

My other classes weren’t much better. I spent my days in a wedge of isolation, the pariah in a sea of nameless faces. I began my day in English, one of the only classes that did me any good. The teacher loved me, although the students did not. Elise and I felt compelled to shut our mouths around them and listened in horror as some of the girls, whose only admittance to the school was based on grand monetary donations from their parents, would stumble along, trying to find metaphors in obscure objects from texts we were reading. Most analysis sessions would end with: "Well, the chair was blue... because blue signifies depression, and the main character’s mother was depressed, and since it’s her mother, that means that when she born, she was probably depressed, too-- so that’s why she killed her sister on the blue chair." One girl in particular would continue to talk, spitting out as much intellectual-sounding drivel as she could, until the teacher grimaced and cut her off, thanking her for her valuable input.

Even in the most rigid subjects, the professionalism was lacking and I felt that the money spent on the school was going down the drain. For instance, one memorable day in math class, Mr. Doug, a balding man with paint-peeling breath and the tendency to make his students feel uncomfortable by reminiscing constantly about his wife’s death and her impending replacement, waddled up to me to check on my work-sheet.

As he bent over, a perfect missile of snot navigated its way from his nostril and onto my paper, announcing its presence with a resounding ‘splat’. I gagged and attempted to hide the surge of disgust pulsing through my body, politely pointing it out to him. Elise, who was at an adjacent table, just started at me incredulously.

Instead of giving me a new paper, he laughed, handing me a tissue to wipe it off myself and continue working, muttering a barely audible, "Whoops." Something of this revolting nature was not uncommon, though– for instance, he had the charming tendency to pass gas next to a student, chuckle to himself in stereotypical elderly fashion, and slowly distance himself into a different corner of the room before committing the offense all over again. Elise and I learned how to disguise our winces while his breath wafted into our nostrils– he had the habit of speaking quite close to ones face– far better than we ever learned how to do Geometry.

These were how my days went. I was ushered from one jail cell into another, hoping that by some act of God, there would be a substitute to greet me, or that the school would magically catch on fire. Even classes that I could have adored, like French, were dampened by the seemingly endless piles of homework I received. Elise and I shared an intense passion for the language, but ended up dreading the class more than anything. The work the school ladled out was almost always ninety percent busy work, too, in order to convince the parents that every dollar they were being robbed of was going to a good cause. Even on my first day of school, I spent four tear-soaked hours filling in ‘sample quizzes’ to assess my knowledge and ‘preparation worksheets’ to remind me of all that I didn’t know and would have to catch up with. Caffeine became my best friend. It came to the point where if you mentioned ‘sleep’ in a sentence, I would have had to look it up in a dictionary. Bags grew under my eyes within the first two weeks and festered there until well into the summer after I finished my year. My fingers became sore and twitched every so often from the tight gripping of pencils and late-night typing sessions. The dense air of the habitat was stifling Pan and Elise, as well– Pan became even more insane, doing anything to provoke the authority, even painting in his own blood during art class. Elise got to the point where she hated the facility even more than I did.

But even in my insomniac, work-a-holic state, the absolute worst part of my entire situation was the time between the end of school to the moment when I could finally shut my eyes and disappear into a dream. Pan and Elise would be shuttled straight home to attack their own restless work-piles, and the world I had built outside of school would become a distant planet that I almost never had enough fuel to launch my rocket ship and visit. I would leave the deep ditch that hid CPS and walk a solitary mile to the richer part of Oakland. I liked to sit at the bus-stop and listen to the BART train roar overhead. I’d take the bus to the Berkeley High park and sit there, even though most of the students had already left by the time I arrived. Sometimes I just stared at the towering, white wall of the theater, its carvings of Gods reaching down to me, until I felt as though I wanted to climb to the top and jump off. I wondered where the people I used to know were. I imagined what their classes were like and whether they had robots, senile pessimists, or distant ‘professionals’ as teachers, too. I wondered if students in their classes cried when they didn’t get a Mercedes for their fifteenths birthday or if anyone at the school carried around hundred dollars bills in their wallets.

These were the hours that lasted the longest. These were the hours where I took a step away from myself and watched my figure in pity as she sat on a ledge, gazing at the school across the street. I wanted to go up and punch her in the face for being so dramatic. I wanted to shake her and tell her to get over herself and fit in and be smart enough to keep up with the course work. But another part of me wanted to go up and give her and hug. I wanted to apologize that she was having a hard time doing musical theater outside of school. That she was getting light-years behind in her classical cello training. That she hadn’t done a decent art project in months. That all of the creativity was being sucked out of her soul and all that was replacing it were geometric shapes and historical dates.

I eventually realized, at some point, that I was stuck at the school and there was nothing I could do about it. There was no use wishing for the ordeal to just disappear because I was starting to distance myself from my real life. I was exhausted from pretending that I was anywhere else but where I was, so I stopped feeling sorry for myself. Although the second hand of the clock was moving like a slug, it was still moving. I didn’t want to let the school defeat me, and I knew that I would be free at the end of the year. Even Elise had managed, after months of screaming and threatening to jump off of window sills, to convince her parents to let her leave. Picking up the slack and working in over-drive, I fought the beastly mound of homework on my desk with a sharp pencil. My brain hurt, my heart hurt, and my hands hurt, but I had acquired a strange determination to leave the school in one solid piece.

I began to roam the school’s claustrophobic campus more lightly as the last months approached. My loneliness had strengthened my social immune system and I found myself growing into my own person and not dwelling on the fact that I didn’t fit in with the other students. Pan and Elise were so close to me, but I would have to leave them, too, eventually. The bulk of the months were behind me and the reality of summer intensified along with the sunlight of spring. I was going to be free and I was going to leave without making a mess. Not only that, though– I had spent a whole year not trying to change who I was to fit into a particular group, and in this phenomenon, I had become the kind of person who I always wanted to be. I wore what I wanted to wear and said what I wanted to say and learned how to stop letting others influence my behavior or personality in order to feel accepted by them.

On the last day of school, there was a gathering in the auditorium. I sat in the back with my only two friends, waiting for the announcements to reveal the names of students that wouldn’t be returning the next year.

Three freshmen names were read off before I heard my own. No one looked back at me because no one knew who I was anyway. I just smiled politely and shrugged when my teachers sent me a worried and scandalized look. Then Elise’s name was read and we exchanged looks of relief that sunk deep into the tunnels of our eyes.

After the end of the speeches, a large barbecue was held in the deep ditch that was supposed to represent a playing field. I could smell the hamburgers frying and the laughter of the plastic girls and ecstatic seniors. My stomach reached out its arms to the heavenly scent of grilled satisfaction, but I resisted and observed for one lingering moment, contemplating saying goodbye. Elise stood next to me, squeezing my arm in excitement. Pan had opted to attend the barbecue, still furious that we were actually going to leave him there. Why he didn’t put up a real fight like Elise had, I still can’t figure out.

We walked up the long, slanted driveway that was the entrance to the mouth of the school, high above the field of people who were pieces that fit in their puzzle. Neither of us had fit and there was no use bothering anymore. There were plenty of other puzzles to try out.

I decided to run, my feet pounding the pavement, past the "Welcome to the College Preparatory School." Elise sprinted behind me, laughing so hard that she almost fell over. I close my eyes and smiled so hard that my face hurt. I ran until the year of isolation, frustration, sleepless nights, and struggle were too far behind me to consider turning around. I ran until I was free again.