A Freshman/Senior

Spending more time on campus makes me realize that I had a very unique college experience.  As a junior in high school, I discovered some trap door escape route to college.  Sure, I had friends who took dual enrollment courses through local offerings.  No, this was different.  This was moving to a college campus hours away from home, living in a dormitory, secretly/officially still a senior in high school, but living like a freshman in college.  In fact, I was still considered enrolled at the high school.  This was no G.E.D. program.  At the end of the academic year, I still walked with my high school graduating class. It was a parallel life.

It was, like I said, some trap door escape from my little suburban city.  I looked at a couple of schools with this "program;" however, I ended up at a private college in West Palm Beach.  I believe they were sponsored by the baptist church, but certainly tried to seem nondenominational.  So, as my fellow seniors started their exciting last year at the top of the class, I was packing my white Honda Civic hatchback for freshman orientation.

There were spanish stuccoed, high-rise dormitories on campus filled with the upper crust christian kids with loaded parents.  That wasn't me, thank god.  A block or two away was my dorm -- along with a hundred or so other girls--all of us heathens for sure.  It was a renovated old motel on the inter coastal, adjacent to the Norton museum of art.  The location was phenomenal even if it the accommodations were rather cramped.  I roomed with five other girls in a two bedroom apartment.  Four nestled into a larger bedroom while two more bunked in a separate room with an adjacent bath.  We had a common living area and kitchen.  I don't recall using any of the "amenities" of our dorm -- not even the pool.  Since it was a little private christian college and we were freshman, there was of course a resident den mother-type who'd come check on us every night--the evening roll call.  If we were leaving campus for the weekend, we signed out in the lobby and stated where we'd be headed.  I assume they thought we'd tell them truthfully where we were going.

I was seventeen, very soon to be eighteen, when my unofficial college career began.  I could walk to the downtown Palm Beach scene, the local bars and nightlife.  I periodically went on dates with wealthy, highly dysfunctional men who offered me a tour of their houses.  There was one who, on our first and only date, wanted to play doctor with me.  Crazy.  He was crazy. I was crazy, no...I was naive.... more naive than I am now.

I worked in Palm Beach at various interesting places.  I was a nanny for a couple of attorneys.  I worked as a valet for the performing arts center where I parked and fetched the Bentleys, Jaguars, and antique cars of the aristocrats. I saved up over a thousand dollars and bought a ticket to Santa Barbara, CA.  I explained to my parents I was heading west during Spring Break and staying with some friend I'd met on the internet....back when the internet was a safe place. Ha.  Oh, I was young and in that place where I felt I could do anything.  Part of me still feels that way.  I have very few regrets even in the sometimes dangerous, certainly carefree path I've taken. I look at others who live such sheltered, restricted lives and wonder how they do it.  I don't know any other way but to be wild and adventurous.