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Personal Narrative: Back To School

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One early, April morning, people came for me in the dead of night to take me to school. The tinkling sounds of their key inside the lock to the door of my bedroom woke me from a sound sleep. They fumbled with it, betraying their unfamiliarity with the lock, while I rolled over in my bed and half dreamt of reminding my mom that the handle had to be held slightly upwards. When the door opened full there was a pause as light and cool air entered my room, and I propped myself up on my elbows to see why I was hearing such heavy breathing. A tall, middle-aged man approached the foot of my bed, while a short and unfamiliar woman lingered below the doorframe. “All right, you can do this the easy way, or the hard way,” the man’s voice boomed with …show more content…

Six levels were needed to graduate, and for each level, a certain amount of points were required, as well as a two or three-day long seminar that you had to attend and graduate from, before you could be unanimously up-voted to the next level by your group and therapist. Try to imagine for a second the kind of theatrics that would ensue in giving a group of desperate young girls, eager to prove something, the power of a vote that could determine the outcome of someone else’s program, because that was the untold lesson at Cross Creek, that by hindering someone else’s advancement you could ensure your own.
Each level came with certain privileges. On level two, you could talk to your family with your therapist on the phone; on level three, you could shave your legs with an electric razor; on level five, you could go on passes off campus with your parents, or even home for a few days. The accumulation of points was not so easy, though. You couldn’t just “do time.” What a luxury that would be. You had to prove something during your stay at Cross Creek, and that something was elusive to me for a long …show more content…

The staff expected us to fill out a form, a write up, for our own rule breaking, and to call the other girls on a rule when an infraction had been witnessed. If the staff got to it first, it would cost more demerits than it would have been worth had the student been accountable enough to have written themselves up to begin with. Dishonesty was a cat three, and it blanketed a host of actions and circumstances, including what you chose to talk about in therapy. This network of consequences and guilt mongering made the students paranoid. There were too many rules, too many chances to dirty yourself up. “I don’t think you’re clean in your program,” the therapists and upper-level girls would say, implicating dishonesty. With those words a girl’s cover would be blown, or she would have to take on the agonizing task of second-guessing everything she ever did. It takes a pretty vigilant self-awareness to be able to recognize dishonesty in yourself, and a certain level of stupidity in order to then punish yourself with something like a cat three for it, but that was how it worked. Many students who came in with an instinct towards self-preservation would oftentimes buckle under the pressure to be honest later on in their programs, and do something called a come clean. Forfeiting all of their points,

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