The Year I Got Kicked Out of Boarding School
At thirteen, I’d found both Jesus and Culver Academies.
Culver arrived by way of my Aunt Pat, who found herself seated beside a dean at Culver Academies on a flight home from a business trip. After several glasses of wine and a plane ride spent swapping stories, Pat came home convinced she had discovered my future.
“Jamie Girl, you have to apply to Culver Academies.”
So there I lay, belly nestled into the brown shag carpet of our two-bedroom apartment, transfixed by the admissions video that had arrived in the mail.
On the television was another world.
Girls in crisp uniforms moved between stately brick buildings. Lawns swept toward the water. Old trees shaded arched doorways; boats glided across a shimmering lake. It was otherworldly—old money and academia, sophistication, class, and good breeding.
A cockroach scuttled across the carpet beside me.
I barely noticed.
I wanted it so badly I could have cried.
So I applied.
Then came months of waiting, dreaming, praying that somehow this place might change my life.
And it did.
I know what it is to want. To dream. To covet what feels just beyond your reach.
I had been doing it since I was old enough to understand that my skin could make me an interloper, an outsider looking in, an anxious initiate standing at the threshold.
But I was still young enough to believe there was a way across.
If I were smart enough, kind enough, pretty enough. Good—truly and deeply good—perhaps the right doors would open.
I don’t remember much about the acceptance letter, only the certainty that followed.
I was going to Culver.
What I didn’t know was that I hadn’t received the full scholarship my family needed. While I dreamed about what awaited me, my parents quietly figured out how to get me there. In the final hour, they secured a loan to cover the tuition.
At thirteen, I understood almost none of this.
A young girl has no earthly idea of the time, sacrifice, and soul her parents pour into her. I certainly didn’t.
If I could thank mine a thousand times now, it would not be enough.
And so I went to boarding school.
I remember the drive into Culver.
We wound through a tiny lakefront town lined with clapboard houses, front porches, and bicycles scattered across lawns. Along Main Street stood a movie theater, a hardware store, and a twenty-four-hour diner we would eventually take over, lingering in booths, taking luxurious drags from Virginia Slims while we ate and laughed and gossiped.
It felt like a bygone version of America, where newspapers landed on doorsteps at dawn and neighbors traded gossip over a beer at sunset.
Then came the marina, Lake Maxinkuckee glistening beyond it.
We passed through the large iron gates separating Culver’s campus from the town and followed the winding road toward Chateau-Thierry, one of five girls’ dormitories.
When the van stopped, we climbed out, eyes wide, mouths agape, then quickly composed ourselves, acting as though we belonged.
Tower Dorm occupied the third and fourth floors of Chateau-Thierry. I was assigned a fourth-floor quad with Wendy, Missy, and another girl who wouldn’t stay long.
Our room was really two rooms—a smaller space in front and a larger one in back, with windows overlooking the greens and Lake Maxinkuckee.
My parents helped me settle in, but eventually, they had to leave.
I was hungry.
I knew I needed to go to the dining hall, but the thought of walking in alone, finding somewhere to sit, figuring out where I belonged felt like more than I could manage.
So I stayed in my room.
Then came a knock at the door.
I opened it to find three Black girls.
Christina. Michelle. Unecia.
They introduced themselves and asked if I wanted to join them for dinner.
They couldn’t have known what they were offering me.
Until then, I had shared hallways with Black girls at school, but the honors program kept me cloistered in a single hallway with mostly white students. My good friend Courtney and I had promised each other that when we got to high school, we would finally find some Black friends.
I had nearly given up on the idea.
Then, on my first night at Culver, three beautiful Black girls knocked on my door.
I went to dinner.
After that, my life seemed to expand. Friendships came easily, and my days found their rhythm: classes and schoolwork, afternoons stretched across the grass, boats on the lake, walks into town for a movie or a burger.
There were, of course, some missteps.
I was terrible at keeping my room clean enough for inspection and collected minor infractions for things as mundane as an unmade bed.
Then, one weekend, Unecia returned to campus with alcohol. We gathered in her dorm room and drank, giggling because we knew we weren’t supposed to.
So much for finding Jesus.
Word traveled quickly.
The next day, I was summoned for a urine test. I might actually have passed it, but I was young and terrified and confessed before anyone had the chance to find out.
It was the first time I’d ever had a drink.
My honesty landed me on the random drug-testing list.
And then there were the boys.
Some liked me far more than I liked them. Others I pined for.
There was Marcus, a white boy who liked me, kissed me, wanted me—but only in private. Whatever existed between us disappeared when other people were around.
I didn’t have the language for it then, but I would come to know the particular humiliation of being beautiful enough to want, exotic enough to experience, and yet still a Black girl, still someone a boy was unwilling to claim.
At fourteen, I knew only that Marcus wanted me when no one was looking.
Eric noticed too.
I was beginning my sophomore year when Eric came along. He was a fifth-year senior—nineteen years old and, to my fourteen-year-old eyes, a man.
He was wealthy and from Texas. Our worlds could hardly have been more different.
Eric told me he’d watched the way Marcus treated me. He promised that one day I would be his girlfriend, and that he would treat me the way a lady deserved to be treated.
He kept his promise.
He was my first love.
But Eric was older, and he pushed me toward sex much sooner than I was ready. I remember feeling that I had to do this small thing—an act I had not yet learned to enjoy—in exchange for being with the person I loved.
I thought, naively, that I would marry him.
Instead, one afternoon, Eric and I found ourselves in a field near the athletic buildings, fooling around and believing we were alone.
We weren’t.
A maintenance man had seen us. He watched for a while, then reported what he’d seen.
Within days, my life at Culver changed.
I was summoned before an admissions review board. There were meetings, questions, phone calls home. Expulsion became a possibility.
Then it became a reality.
I was expelled from Culver.
Eric was not.
He was nineteen, a fifth-year senior, white, and the son of wealthy donors to the school. He was allowed to remain and graduate.
My parents saw racism and classism in the difference between our punishments. At fourteen, I didn’t know what to call it.
I knew only that I had to pack my things and leave.
And that somehow, I had done this to myself.
I had been given an extraordinary opportunity—a chance at the life I had wanted so badly—and I had ruined it.
That was the story I carried home.
Eric went home too, back to Texas, and then on to Texas A&M. At first, I waited for his calls. Then they became less frequent.
Within a month, they stopped.
Eventually, I got him on the phone long enough to hear the words I had been dreading.
“I don’t love you anymore.”
And just like that, the boy I thought I would marry was gone too.
For years, I kept the story of Culver tight, reserved for the people I trusted to hold it.
Time has given me a wider view.
I see a fourteen-year-old girl who broke rules and made choices she wasn’t ready to make. I see parents who sacrificed enormously to give their daughter an opportunity, then endured the pain of watching her lose it. I see an institution that punished two young people involved in the same act very differently.
I see race. Classism. Adolescence. A girl who wanted very much to be loved.
All of those things can be true.
What I no longer see is proof that I was unworthy of the life I wanted.
So I tell the story now—not to rewrite what happened, but to release the story I made from it.
I tell it for my children, too, and for anyone who has stumbled badly enough to believe the fall was final. I want them to know what I couldn’t have known as I packed my things and left Culver:
A door can close without a life closing with it.
I was never required to be smart enough, kind enough, pretty enough—good, truly and deeply good—to deserve a beautiful life.
I was a girl.
I made mistakes.
And my life was still waiting for me.