Adriana Trigiani - Viola in Reel Life

YOU WOULD NOT WANT TO BE ME.

OKAY, LIKE, SEVEN TRIES LATER, TRISH FINALLY GETS a decent

WHEN IM HOME IN BROOKLYN AND HAVING A CRISIS, I

Mrs. Carleton is one of those teachers who, when youre sitting

FOUNDERS DAY IS A MUCH BIGGER DEAL THAN I EVER

MRS. ZIDARS OFFICE IS LOCATED OFF THE ATRIUM NEXT to the

NOTHING, AND I MEAN NOTHING, MAKES A GIRL MORE popular

ROMY, SUZANNE, AND MARISOL ARE EATING CUPCAKES at the museum

WHEN IT SNOWS IN INDIANA, IT DOESNT FALL TO THE

FINAL EXAMS FOR THE FIRST SEMESTER ARE ALMOST over. Grabeel

NOW, GIRLS. EVEN THOUGH WERE HERE IN Grand has to

GEORGE AND GRAND SIT AT THE LOUNGE TABLE IN Curley

MRS. ZIDAR PARKS THE VAN IN THE GUEST LOT AT THE

THE CONSORTIUM OF SCHOOLS WANTS US TO POSE FOR pictures

YOU WOULD NOT WANT TO BE ME.

No.

Im marooned. Abandoned. Left to rot in boarding school in the dust bowl of Indiana like the potato we found in the cupboard in our kitchen in Brooklyn after months of searching for it. It was only when the entire kitchen began to smell like a root cellar from Pilgrim days that we figured out why and when we finally found the potato it was soft, rotten, and breeding itself with white barnacles with totally disgusting green tips.

Consider me missing. Like the potato.

I only hope it doesnt take an entire year for people to miss me as much as I can already tell that Im going to miss them. And if Im not good at explaining it in words, well, theres always my movie camera. I do better with film anyhow. Images. Moving pictures.

I flip the latch off the lens, look into the view finder, and press Record.

Im in South Bend, Indiana, on September third, 2009.

With my hand securing the camera and my eye behind the lens, I turn.

Through my lens, I slowly drink in three old brick buildings: Curley Kerner Hall is the dormitory where Ill be living, Phyllis Hobson Jones Hall (called Hojo for short, according to my resident advisor) is the theater with art studios on the basement floor, and Geier-Kirshenbaum is the classroom building. The Chandler Gym, a modern building that looks like a Moonwalk carnival ride covered with a hard shell of white plastic, is obscured by tall trees on a flat field.

What did I expect? Purple mountain majesties? Im in the pre-great plains of the Midwest. The gateway to the west. This is Indianatranslated its a Native American word for flat . Okay, I made that up.

I film the freshly painted black sign with gold lettering set in a stone wall.

THE PREFECT ACADEMY FOR YOUNG WOMEN SINCE 1890

It gives me little consolation to know that parents have been dumping their girls here for a solid education since bustle skirts, high-top shoes, and the invention of the cotton gin.

This is my new school, I say aloud. Or my own personal prisonyour choice.

The stately brick buildings are connected by corridors of glass. From here, the glass hallways look like terrariums. Thats right. The boarding school has glass atriums that look exactly like the scenes I made in summer camp out of old jelly jars filled with sand, cocktail umbrellas, and plastic bugs.

I pivot slowly to film the fields around the school. The land is the color of baked pizza crust without the tomato sauce. There are no lush rolling hills similar to the ones that appear on the school website. The babbling brook on the home page gushes crystal water, but when I went to film it, it was a bone-dry creek bed, with gross stones and tangled vines. Besides being marooned, Ive been hadduped by my own parents, who, up until now, have made fairly intelligent decisions when it comes to me.

I lift the camera and film a slow pan. The endless blue sky has gnarls of white clouds on the horizon. It looks a lot like the braided rag rug my mother keeps in front of the washing machine in the basement of our Brooklyn brownstone. Everything I see makes me long for home. I wonder what color the sky is now in New York. Its never this shade of blue. This is cheap eye shadow blue, whereas New York skies have a lot of indigo in them. When the moon rises over Indiana, I bet it will be a cheesy silver color, but at home, its golden: 24K and so big, it throws ribbons of glitter over Cobble Hill. I can already tell there will be no glitter in Indiana.

The first thing my parents taught me when I held a camera was to spend the least amount of film time on beauty shots, and the most amount of time on people. If you film people, my mom says, youll find your story. I slip the camera back into its case and head back to the dormitory. Im going to remember to tell my mom that sometimes you need beautyand beauty shots. Beauty makes me feel less alone.

The gothic entrance hall smells like lemon furniture polish and beeswax. The dorm has the feeling of an old church even though its not one. Heavy dark wood stairs and banister lead to a ceiling covered in wide squares of carved mahogany. A burgundy carpet runner over the wide staircase is frayed at the edges but clean.

The hallway that leads to my room on the second floor is filled with small groups of girls, my fellow (!) incoming freshmen, who laugh and chat as though moving into a boarding school is the most natural thing in the world. Ill try not to resent the smiling, happy girls.

Inside the rooms are more girls, hanging posters and unpacking, talking as if theyve known each other forever. But then there are the other girls, girls who are quiet and clump together, looking around with big eyes full of dread and fear waiting for something horrible to happen.

I guess Im somewhere in the middle of these two camps.

I dont want to be too quick to make friends because I dont want to get stuck with an instant BFF who seems totally nice on the first day, and then a week later is revealed to be the most annoying person on the planet. I dont want to be that freshmanthe chirpy kind, who needs friends fast in order not to feel alone. So I am deliberately aloof. At LaGuardia Arts, my old school, this method worked very well for me.

I did make close friends when I was a photographer for the yearbook. I even made my best friend since childhood join the yearbook staff. Andrew Bozelli (BFFAAthe double A is for: And Always) and I have a lot in common. Never mind that everybody, I mean everybody , thinks were boyfriend and girlfriendwe are not by the way, we just happen to spend a lot of time together. And we were both lucky enough to get variances to go to LaGuardia High School. I fish my phone out of my pocket as it beeps. Its Andrew.

AB: Unpacked?

Me: Yep .

AB: What have you filmed?

Me: Exteriors. I will download and send .

AB: You hate it already .

Me: Yeah.

AB: Hang in there.

Me: Trying.

Andrew and I sort of read each others minds. Weve known each other since Pre-K. His mom and my mom are friends, and they used to set a lot of playdates with the two of us because Im an only child and my mother didnt want me to be antisocial. And she especially wanted me to play with boys so that when I turned fourteen I wouldnt find them weird, like they were from another planet or something. Mrs. Bozelli liked Andrew to play with me because she thought if he hung out with me, he would develop some finesse.

See, Andrew is in trouble a lot at home because hes the middle son of three boys and gets blamed for everything. The bookends of the happy family squeeze out the middle like too much jelly between slices of Wonder bread. Andrew never complains, he says he doesnt mind. (I would, but what do I know? I dont have annoying brothersor fun ones for that matter.) He just says, Thats the way it is, and he winds up spending a lot of time at my house, which is fine with me.