Private (Private 1)

see themselves walking red carpets with movie-star boyfriends

Manufactured in the United States of America

while flashbulbs pop. Others, I’m sure, go the princess route, con-First Simon Pulse edition July 2006

juring up diamonds and tiaras and knights on white horses. All I 2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

imagined my entire ninth grade year was this:

Easton Academy.

Library of Congress Control Number 2006922004

How I found myself there, in the place of my daydreams, while

ISBN-13: 978-1-4169-1873-8

the rest of my classmates were entering the dank dreariness of

ISBN-10: 1-4169-1873-6

Croton High, I still am not totally sure. Something to do with my

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soccer and lacrosse skills, my grades, the stellar recommendation low branch of a birch tree, as if to convey that if you belong here, of outgoing Easton senior Felicia Reynolds (my brother Scott’s

you know where you are going, and if you do not, they aren’t going older, cooler ex), and I think a little bit of begging on my father’s to great lengths to help you find your way.

part. But at this point, I didn’t care. I was there, and this place was My father turned the car under the iron and brick archway and I everything I had dreamed it would be.

was sucked in. Hard. Here were buildings of brick and stone,

As my dad drove our dented Subaru through the sunny streets of

topped by shingled roofs and spires, tradition and pride oozing Easton, Connecticut, it was all I could do to keep from pressing my from every dated cornerstone. Here were ancient, weathered,

nose to the dog-slobbered window. The shops here had colorful

arched doorways, thick wooden doors on iron hinges, cobblestone cloth awnings and windows that gleamed. The streetlamps were the walks lined by neat beds of flowers. Here were pristine playing old-fashioned kind that were electric now, but had once been lit by fields of bright green grass and gleaming white lines. Everything I a guy on a horse toting a pole and a flame. Potted plants hung from saw was perfect. Nothing reminded me of home.

these lamps, bursting with bright red flowers, still dripping from a

“Reed, you’re the navigator. Where do I go?” my father asked.

recent dousing with a garden hose.

Easton’s orientation map had become a sweaty, crumpled ball in

Even the sidewalks were pretty: neat and lined with brick,

my hand. I flattened it over my thigh as if I hadn’t memorized it ten topped by towering oak trees. Beneath the shade of these trees, a times over. “Make a right by the fountain,” I told him, trying to pair of girls my age chatted their way out of a boutique called Sweet sound much calmer than I felt. “The sophomore girls’ dorm is the Nothings, swinging clear bags stacked with neatly folded sweaters last one on the circle.”