CHAPTER VIII
The school was three great buildings a little way from Mrs. Carney's house. I had never dreamed of anything so grand as those rooms seemed to me. What I couldn't get over was the padded carpets that you didn't make a sound when you walked on. The furniture was big pieces, all carved and hard to dust; and lights that didn't show was burning in the inside rooms. There was great vases, as tall as I, and pictures as big as the ceiling of Mrs. Bingy's and my whole room.
The first days at that school are the kind of nightmare that it hurts to remember even in the daytime. I begun by feeling so grand. By the second meal I was wretched. By the time the first evening was half over and the dancing in the gymnasium, I was sick. School wasn't the way I thought it was.
If only they'd taken me out and ducked me, or buried me, or left me on the roof all night every night. But the ways they had were like pouring vinegar in a skinned place in my heart. I ain't going to talk about it!
And yet I never minded their laughing, if only they looked at me when they laughed. But when they looked at each other and laughed, that killed me.
I'd been at the school about six months when one afternoon I was coming across the field that everybody called the "campus." I'd never called it that yet—it sounded like putting on. I met a lot of them coming down from their classes. I used to begin looking at them when they were way ahead, hoping there was somebody I knew and could speak to. I liked to speak to them. I'd had an introduction to most of them; but they didn't always remember me. When they did remember, they didn't always speak. Some of them done it on purpose. But always I knew which was such. That afternoon so many of them didn't speak to me that all of a sudden I felt crazy to get away from them all, off somewhere by myself. I run down the hill back of the main building. A stone wall went along by the road. The wall was pretty high, but I put my hands on it the way I used to at home, and I jumped up on it with my head in some branches. And I says out loud:
"I know how Keddie Bingy used to feel when he got drunk."
"My word!" said somebody. "And how did he feel?"
I looked down, and there was an automobile drawn up by the wall and a man in it, rolling a cigarette.