The Hitmen – Bates Motel

After surviving the ignominy of junior high and coming to the realization that I was not an average middle-of-the-road mainstream teen – or, rather, once I realized that that was a liability and my former ease with making friends and moving comfortably between different social groups was gone – I enrolled in the Interlochen Arts Academy, where I hoped to find solace and companionship. It was always a given that I’d attend the Academy, since my mother was the head of the dance department, but the horrors of junior high and a timely performance of A Chorus Line convinced me that I had to act sooner rather than later and I entered as a freshman, instead of waiting until the junior high ended and enrolling as a sophomore.

There are, for good reasons, few people who attend theAcademy as freshman. The biggest is that it is a boarding school, and few thirteen-year-olds have the maturity to live by themselves at that (not so) tender age. I had what I thought at the time as the best of both worlds, because I could attend the Academy during the day, but then I could walk across the street after the last class of the day and still get a home-cooked meal and hang out with my local friends and sleep in my own familiar bed. However, that comfort soon revealed itself as a liability. In a regular school, friendships are made during the day, at lunch or in classes. But at a boarding school, all the action happens after class, in the dorm or in one of the few social areas on campus. Since I wasn’t there for any of that, I didn’t have the opportunity to make many friends. There was a dorm room set aside for the few day-students that attended the Academy (all “faculty brats”), but that quickly became the Dungeons and Dragons lair and I had learned my lesson about only spending time with geeks in junior high (i.e., you are who you hang with), so I was loath to be part of that crowd. And now that I wasn’t going to the junior high with my other local friends, those relationships started unraveling, and I found myself, more often than not, sitting home alone during the evenings, staring wistfully out the window and wondering if my life was ever going to begin (some things never change). I longed to be part of the social scene, to have cool friends, but I just didn’t know how to go about it. I was painfully shy and the worst part of each day, the moment I dreaded the most, was lunch, when I’d be thrust, tray in shaky hands, into the full flock of the student body. I’d pray for an empty table so I wouldn’t have to try to insinuate myself into an established clique, but then I’d sit by myself, miserable, watching people joke and laugh with each other with a comfort and ease that was entirely beyond me.

Because my mom taught ballet, I had a bit of an in with the dance crowd. I was taking dance classes (against her wishes), but I was still a couple of years away from being proficient enough to join the higher levels and start performing. But I did tech work for them, running the lightboard during performances and going on tour with them and setting up the sound system or the portable floor or whatever needed to be done. It was grunt work, but I was happy to do it because it brought me – however tangentially – into the orbits of what I (and many others) considered the coolest clique on campus. Dancers were the jocks of Interlochen, only without the attitude that usually accompanies that social class, and they also counted the most beautiful girls among their ranks (there were always a handful of exceptionally pretty actresses as well, but it didn’t take me long to figure out that most actresses were completely crazy – not that dancers aren’t crazy too, they’re just more eat-five-pounds-of-ice-cream-go-puke-it-right-up crazy and less stand-on-the-roof-screaming-Shakespeare crazy). And the dancers were almost all girls of the female gender (with a few girls of the male gender thrown in). I had always gotten along better with girls than with boys, and the boys that tended to be dance majors, even if they weren’t gay, were generally gentler and more sensitive than the average hormone-addled teenage guy. Lots of beautiful women and a few guys that didn’t think blowing shit up was the most fun you could have. My kind of crowd. I desperately wanted to be counted among their ranks. They were generally nice to me, but I usually got the feeling that it was more out of a sense of duty to my mom than because of any of my inherent charms. I felt like a slightly patronized younger brother. Someday soon, this world would be mine, but for now I’d have to sit on the sidelines and watch. I idolized them and, when I was a freshman, the one I idolized most was Rory.