I Don't Have a Happy Place by Kim Korson Read Free Book Online Page B

small pack of campers, being led to sporty activities I already found challenging. I wasn’t homesick, because I didn’t feel any more at ease back there. Being part of a pack, encouraged to participate, all that fun—I think I just felt lost.
    â€œThis is great,” my father said, eating fried chicken out of a cardboard box on visiting day, his golden Capricorn necklace pendant catching the sun and memories of his own days at camp. “Man, you guys are lucky.”
    Maybe I was just too young to appreciate it, so my parents continued sending me off, just to make sure.
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    I started kindergarten the fall just after my first trip to sleepaway camp. It was a French school, housed in a large brick building that loomed over a busy residential street in Montreal. The brochure was on top of a mail stack in the kitchen and its cover featured what I believed to be a mental institution for smilinggirls dressed in dark navy uniforms. Those tunics are what sold my mother. She believed in the idea of uniforms, convinced our future relationship would never be in jeopardy if we took fighting about what to wear out of the equation.
    My mother brought me to school the first day, holding my hand as we crossed the threshold. The teacher stood en garde by the door, her brown wool pencil skirt static-clinging to nude panty hose. Twenty-eight kids seized the classroom dressed in kind: gray pants and white shirts for the boys, navy pleated tunics with white shirts underneath for us. I could hear kids speaking French and learned at once that no English was spoken in the classroom, which made my stomach hurt because no French was spoken in my home.
    The classroom was set up with a series of tables along one side, facing a line of windows. Under the patches of light the windows let in was a domestic-style setup: a play kitchen with a fridge and oven and fake food and a small wooden washer and dryer and play ironing board with a pile of teeny rumpled clothes. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. My mother’s eyes were concealed behind the prescription sunglasses she’d neglected to replace with appropriate indoor eyewear. Sometimes I’d feel proud of her wearing dark glasses inside, like she was a rock star, but on the first day of French school, the kids were staring at her and I wanted her to be like everyone else. Although I couldn’t see her eyes, her craned neck suggested she was checking out the small tub of hard candies sequestered on a high shelf near the door, and I’d soon figure out that on good-behavior days, Madame Larousse would give us each a sour ball to eat on the way home. If you sucked them dutifully, small shards would form and cut your tongue. I liked that part best.
    We all took seats at the table. Most of the parents had left by that point, but my mother stood behind me, dark glassesin position, looking like my bodyguard. Some kids are naturally attractive, have an ease about them that others gravitate toward. I sat in my chair looking straight ahead, wooden, just like my mother. We were the dream team of people repellent. The teacher nodded at my mother, which was code for It’s time to leave your kid here with me in this French mental institution . Understanding it was time to go, my mother scanned the room for someone to pair me up with so she could leave without my having some sort of emotional breakdown, or worse, having one of her own.
    Already sitting next to me was a little redheaded girl, all freckles and good posture. My mother crouched down in between us. “Hello,” she said, in her signature baby voice. “What’s your name?”
    The small girl looked at my mother, possibly through my mother, and ignored her. I immediately knew her angelic little Peppermint Patty face was a big ruse.
    â€œName?” My mother tried again in a tougher tone this time, staring at the kid until she finally, in a standoffish voice,