text: For second grade, I transferred to a conservative Lutheran elementary school. We weren't religious, but Mom had gone to public school as a child, and the only stories she told us about her education were about kids not wearing shoes to class and the time where she had to shave her head because of lice. Oh, and something about "knocking up" people too early, which I didn't understand, but she was very specific: it ruined women's lives.
  
  Saints Academy was the best school in the cosmopolitan town of Huntsville, Alabama (Home of Space Camp, repreSENT!), and I loved it, except that we had to attend chapel every day. I considered this hour a threat to my intellect, because Mom always said, "I don't want you or your brother becoming a Deep South Bible Thumper." I took her warning literally. A woman named Ms. Rosemary led religion class, and whenever she'd touch the Bible with the SLIGHTEST velocity, I would fold my arms and scowl. "No way, lady! You're not turning me into a 'Thumper!'"
  
  The only thing that got me through the daily service was a big Jesus statue hung behind the church pulpit. I thought his face, although a little depressed about being up on the cross like that, was kinda hunky. So I sat there every day, tuning Ms. Rosemary out like the trombones from the Peanuts cartoons, imagining me and J.C. cuddling in front of the television while we watched Family Ties or Scooby-Doo together. Sometimes we'd even go to Disneyland on our imaginary honeymoon. J.C. hated Goofy and loved the teacup ride the best, just like I did. We were the perfect pair in my dreams!
  
  But after a few months, my crush on Mr. Christ transferred to a Mr. Hasselhoff from Knight Rider, and after that I prayed to my ex-boyfriend's dad for anything to get me out of the daily religious misery. Ms. Rosemary was not a good communicator, and whoever these "John," "Matthew," and "Judas" people were, they were NOT HAVING A GOOD TIME. How could I escape?!
  
  And one day, it happened. Ms. Rosemary and a guy named "Timothy One" gave me the key. After school, I ran into the kitchen. I couldn't wait to throw my match into the parental tinderbox.
  
  "Mom! Mom! Guess what? They burned money in church today!"
  
  My mother stopped making her hemp yogurt or whatever other disgusting health food she used to force-feed us. "What?!"
  
  "Yeah, they set fire to money. Ms. Rosemary said it's the devil's paper!"
  
  "Are you kidding? How much?"
  
  "Hundreds of dollars! More than any money I've seen in my life!" It was actually a handful of fives, but the dramatic inflation seemed appropriate. And they did burn American currency in front of a bunch of seven-year-olds. That part was true. The flames reflected in Ms. Rosemary's eyes. Even my ex-boyfriend Christ looked creeped out, and he was a statue.
  
  My mom went through the roof, just like I knew she would. She's a lovely woman, but cross her about something she cares about, like politics or discontinuing a face cream she loves, and her attitude is, "I will fight you. Right in this department store, throw it down NOW, Clinique associate bitch!"
  
  Her temper could be intimidating, but in this instance, channeling it was in my best interest. And therefore, the BEST!
  
  "Do I have to go to chapel again, Mom?"
  
  "Absolutely not! Don't worry, baby. I'll take care of it." Ooh! The Thumpers were gonna get in TROUBLE!
  
  The next morning, my mom went in to talk with the principal. She put on her special dress, the Liz Claiborne with the sleeves puffed up like the Hindenburg, so I knew she was serious about saving me. While I waited for her to come home, I fantasized about how I'd use my free hour at school. Organize my sticker album or tend to my vast My Little Pony herd. You know, things that would contribute to my future.
  
  But when she returned home a few hours later, her big puffy sleeves were deflated. The school wouldn't apologize for the money burning, and for some crazy reason, they wouldn't make an exception to their curriculum for an outraged partial-hippie family. I couldn't believe it didn't work! I mean, when Mom was upset about things, like my refusing to eat chicken liver, it was scary. What was wrong with these people?!
  
  "So I have to go back to chapel again?"
  
  "No. You're not going back to that school at all."
  
  "Cool! Wait, huh?!"
  
  Yup. The Money Burning Incident of 1985 got me yanked out of school completely. Oops.
  
  I briefly got put into another school that was into "unschooling." I can't remember much about that place except it closed abruptly and stole all our money. Adult problems. At the same time, my dad got orders to move from Huntsville, Alabama, to the Deeper South—Biloxi, Mississippi—to finish his medical training for the military. And that's when the shit hit my educational fan.
  
  To most of you outside the Deep South, Alabama or Mississippi? It's the same. I mean, they're ass-to-ass anyway. Might as well combine them and make a super hick state, right? But to my Southern extended family, it was bad. They thought we were moving to an antebellum wasteland. My dad was a Yankee himself, so he was even more concerned. (Everyone north of Kentucky was referred to as a Yankee in my mom's family. It took me years to realize that wasn't official.)
  
  There wasn't a tradition in our family to homeschool, but there was a tradition to get super-mega educated, especially on my mom's side. My grandfather had a PhD in nuclear physics and a thick Southern drawl like molasses. He would invent a desalination machine one week and chew out anyone who distracted him from his favorite Nashville sketch show, Hee Haw, the next. "Get outta there, Pooch! You're blockin' Skeeter Davis!"
  
  My grandmother is a scientist, too, and a nurse and an artist and... I'll be honest, kinda scary. She once found a dead owl on the side of the road and put it in the back of her pickup in order to analyze the skeleton after it decomposed. I mean, that's kind of Beth Henley interesting behavior, but seeing a dead owl in the back of a pickup is super creepy when you're seven years old, guys. Because you start to suspect that if it were legal, Grandma would do the same thing with your corpse, too.
  
  In order to keep the brain legacy up, my mom scrambled to find schooling options for me and my brother before we moved, but the Gulf Coast of Mississippi didn't have much to choose from. In fact, it had one of the worst education systems in the country, and the only secular private school in the area was a place that made kids wear uniforms, which Mom considered fascist. So we were in a quandary. And because my dad was working twenty-eight hours a day to become a surgeon (scrubs were the only thing I saw him in from the age of eight on), it was up to my mom to figure out an alternative.
  
  So, in a natural leap, she decided to Bob-Vila-DIY our educations herself.
  
  [ Home Is Where... It All Is! ]
  
  In retrospect—and not to be mean to anyone who parented me—it doesn't seem like there was a clear plan going into the whole homeschooling thing. At first, the idea was to follow a comprehensive third-grade curriculum that my mom sent off for in the mail, 1-800 style. It was a system missionary families used when they took their children abroad, and I was a fan of that idea, because it seemed super romantic. I'd always dreamed about traveling overseas on a ship like the Titanic, and missionaries seemed tragic and special (not like dumb Ms. Rosemary).
  
  Also, homeschooling seemed like something an orphan would do, and I really wanted to be an orphan. Because let's be real: they have it so good in kids' literature! They're sad but special, people love them against all odds, and they're always guaranteed a destiny of greatness. The Secret Garden, The Wizard of Oz, Harry Potter? Orphanhood was a bucket list item for me! Along with being able to communicate telepathically with my dog. Based on the loose association of "no school" and "no parents," I was pro-homeschooling. Without understanding what the hell it really was.
  
  On the first day of my new educational life, several boxes of books arrived at our house. Weirdly, all the texts were designed the same, with the words "Science" and "Math" on the covers, like boxes on a generic food aisle.
  
  Despite the weirdo curriculum, I was psyched. And so was my mom.
  
  "You guys ready to learn outside the box?" She lifted up the thick "teaching manual" that she was supposed to use daily. (I don't think it ever got its spine cracked.)
  
  "Yeah!" My brother, Ryon, and I jumped up and down, way too excited, like we were in the audience for a Nickelodeon show. We were ready! Screw the establishment! We were learning on our own!
  
  The next morning I put on pants (even though I didn't technically have to because I was in my own home), sat down with my new books at my "desk" (the kitchen table we fed the cats on), and got ready to rock my brain!
  
  Just to be clear, my mom did make an actual effort to start our day at 9:00 a.m. sharp and do schoolwork until about 1:00 p.m., before "do whatever you want, kids" time. This lasted for maybe a week. With no one to supervise any of us, slowly but surely, the family wake-up time slid to a nebulous "midmorning." After a few months, we'd miss all studying before lunchtime because we ate out every day (eating at home was for oppressing housewives), and the restaurants filled up around one, so it was better to leave the house at noon to beat the work crowd. And if we got up around 10:30, that meant... I mean, showering is a thing that takes time, guys.
  
  Any structure in our lives disintegrated. "Can the doodles in the margins of my geology chapter count as art class? Really? Thanks, Mom!" Schooling became "We'll get to it later!" around other, more important things, like grocery shopping and going to see the midnight Rocky Horror Picture Show screenings. Eventually, my brother and I were on our own. No rules, no tests, and no pesky governmental supervision for children who had recently relocated and weren't on official census lists.
  
  I don't mean to imply that Mom was completely hands-off with our educations. She did stuff. When she got interested in something, she'd say, "Let's go learn about history!" and we'd jump in the car and drive around the state for a few days visiting all the Civil War memorial sites. (It's super fun to roll down a grassy hill where thousands of Confederate bodies are buried.) She'd also yell "Study!" a lot from her bedroom while watching The Sally Jessy Raphael Show, and during the first Iraq war she made us start learning Arabic because, "You never know what will happen."
  
  There was, however, one big rule that was enforced during our free-for-all education: We were expected to read. Constantly. All day, every day. Whatever we wanted at the library, the used bookshop, adult or kid section, anything that didn't have nudity or Stephen King on the cover, we could read.
  
  Naturally, I became obsessed with detective pulp fiction. Perry Mason was my favorite. Not the actor who played him in the TV show, Raymond Burr. I hated him; he was bulky, and his skull looked creepy underneath his skin. No, my Perry Mason was taller and debonair, like Cary Grant, or my second love, David Hasselhoff. I collected all but one of the Perry Mason books (The Case of the Singing Skirt eluded me; it was my collection's white whale), and I arranged all eighty-one of them by publishing chronology on a makeshift bookshelf in the back of my closet. Because of their influence, my life's dream became clear: to enter the glamorous profession of "secretary," like Perry's loyal companion, Della Street. Either that or "moll"—whatever that job entailed.
  
  I was also expected to work hard on math, for my grandpa. Since he was a physicist, he would quiz me on equations when we'd go back to Alabama for our monthly visits. My mom liked to impress him. And I did, too, because he always gave me hard candy when I got something right.
  
  "Tell me the Pythagorean theorem."
  
  "A squared plus B squared equals C squared?"
  
  "That's my girl! Now have a Werther's and scoot to the kitchen. Hee Haw's on."
  
  According to my mom, there was a pressing urgency for me to learn as much math as I could. An uncredited study she read once said, quote, "Girls become really stupid in science after they get their period, so you'd better learn as much as possible before that happens." I had such anxiety about this "clearly proven" biological fact that I was studying calculus by the age of twelve. When I finally got my period, I cried, not because I was growing up, but because I had just learned derivatives and really enjoyed doing them. I was scared that estrogen would wipe the ability to do them from my brain.
  
  I guess at a certain point, my dad expressed concern or something about our education. My brother and I didn't see what the fuss was. I mean, we were FINE with doing whatever we wanted and not being forced to "study" like the rest of the world's plebes. But to add structure to our lives, my mom shifted her focus, like any smart businessperson, to outsourcing. Our lives became nothing but lessons.
  
  Ballet, tap, jazz dance, youth orchestra, martial arts, watercolor at the local community college (me and a bunch of eighty-year-olds rockin' the stand of maple trees!), cross-stitch, poise class (held in the back of a department store, for REAL!), my mom basically trained me to become a geisha. With dance lessons alone, I went to class at least three hours a day. Big calves, you are mine for life. So even though it was weird and thoroughly uncomprehensive, my brother and I got an education. Of a sort.
  
  Here's an average daily schedule to give you some perspective about a weekday in my eight-to sixteen-year-old life:
  
  00 a.m.: Wake up before everyone and SHUT YOUR CLOCK UP OR ELSE.
  
  30 a.m.: Lost in Space reruns while eating Rice Krispies.
  
  30 a.m.: Math for an hour. Maybe a chapter in one of those logic puzzle books with the grids. I loved puzzles, and Mom said they counted.
  
  00 a.m.: AMC movie, hopefully a historical one for studying history, hopefully Technicolor, hopefully Oklahoma! If not Oklahoma!, 50 percent chance of watching VHS tape of Oklahoma!. Or a Cary Grant movie. Half-ass read chapter in history book while watching said movie. CHECK!
  
  00 p.m.: Family time! Lunch out at restaurant, one of four that saw us so frequently, they kept a table reserved for us. No one ever questioned why we weren't in school. Thanks, society!
  
  00 p.m.: Study Latin because Mom thinks it sounds good to tell people we are learning Latin. Most of the time, read Perry Mason book instead, for "literature."
  
  30 to 8:00 p.m.: Geisha lessons.
  
  00 to 10:00 p.m.: More movies or TV (especially kung-fu movies for PE) while eating either tuna casserole or manicotti (the only two items my mother cooked) or a microwave TV dinner (the one with the postmodern square desserts).
  
  00 to 11:00 p.m.: More reading, video games, or maybe some Legos. For my brain-shape skills.
  
  After 11:00 p.m.: Eh. Go to bed whenever.
  
  [ Socialization, Maybe? No? Okay! ]
  
  Since everyone we met always brought up "What about their socialization skills?" like naggy in-laws, my mom tried to find us like-minded people to hang out with. Problem was, our family's minds weren't like any others. Especially in southern Mississippi.
  
  My brother and I tried to hang out with other homeschooled kids a few times, but in the ass crack of the Bible Belt, parents who kept their kids home were not going to intersect with our liberal points of view. Ever.
  
  At one awkward meet-up, I was hanging out with a girl around my age on the playground. She was wearing a white long-sleeved shirt and an overdress down to her ankles. I kid you not; she looked like a Pilgrim, and her name was Eunice.
  
  I made the first move. Because socialization beggars can't be choosers. "What books do you read?"
  
  "The Bible."
  
  "Have you read A Wrinkle in Time? Or Perry Mason, The Case of the Fan Dancer's Horse?"
  
  "No. We only read the Bible."
  
  "Oh. You're a Thumper."
  
  "What?"
  
  "Nothing. Wanna swing?"
  
  "I can't. I might show my ankles."
  
  I laughed because I thought she was joking. She wasn't.
  
  After that, my brother and I were in agreement: being alone was better than hanging around those homeschooled weirdos.
  
  So I didn't spend much time with other children as a kid. SURPRISE! I actually can't name one best friend I had during those years outside of a group lesson situation. But it's human instinct to connect, and eventually I found someone who would listen to me no matter how weird I was: my little pink diary.
  
  I called myself Leesie as a kid because I guess my family couldn't think of a more unattractive nickname. Oh wait. My grandpa called me Pooch. That one I won't embrace in print.
  
  But the way I wrote to this diary, you'd think I was writing on the mirror to another little girl who existed on the other side of the page.
  
  "Dear Diary, it's been a month since I wrote. I know, I'm a bad friend."
  
  "...I finished the Emily of New Moon books this week, but I mustn't bore you."
  
  "Today's our first anniversary. Happy Birthday to us!"
  
  I confided everything a weird sixth-grader would share with other children and definitely be rejected for in a typical school situation. Big dreams like, "Wouldn't it be neat to go back to 1880 and there wasn't any kidnappers and progress, and the streams and fields and everything were beautiful?"
  
  I made super-serious vows in the margins, like, "Vow: I will never kill an animal if I can help it." "Vow: I will never marry a man for money." "Vow: I will never let my children live in a slum." Real personality-congealing self-work.
  
  My mom was a big political activist, and that rubbed off on me in a big way, too. The diary is awash in bold political statements and social consciousness.
  
  "We have a new president. George Bush and Dennis the Menace for vice president."
  
  Most of all, the diary was a safe zone. A place where I could share my innermost thoughts, work out a semblance of an identity, analyze my likes and dislikes, and work through my relationships, like that with my brother, Ryon, in a thoughtful, mature way.
  
  That little pink diary is a tome for the ages.
  
  My mother wasn't totally blind to the fact that we needed exposure to other kids. She made efforts. But none of them seemed to stick. Probably because my attitude toward other children was like a seventy-year-old spinster's.
  
  "This girl Kate from violin lesson came over and I told her about my books. She doesn't read. Stupid. I won't explaen [sic] them to her. She has no imagination."
  
  "We went to eat with Miss Molly's two kids today and they were putting forks on the floor and stepping on them like hoolegans [sic]. We also took Samantha (10) who is fat and obnoxious, but nice when she isn't giggling insatatiabley [sic]."
  
  "I went to an opera-ballet by myself. Behend [sic] me were two 7-year-old giggling brats. Well, gotta go!"
  
  The only kid in real, close proximity to me was Erin, a thirteen-year-old who lived next door. She taught me that owning a trampoline was the most glamorous thing a girl could have, and that jelly shoes were haute couture. I learned all this through spying on her through my bedroom window, because she didn't like me and wouldn't spend any time with me, physically.
  
  Despite our strained relationship (or because of it), I did have strong thoughts about her lifestyle choices.
  
  Then I went on to apologize about criticizing her behavior, because I think my diary started chiding me about my judgmental attitude. Somehow.
  
  Upshot to my bizarre upbringing: I got super-hyper-educated in many odd areas but was pretty lonely for many years. Sometimes achingly so. They say that the root of everything you are lies in your childhood. Every emotional problem, every screwed-up relationship, every misplaced passion and career problem you can blame on the way you were raised. So I can be kinda smug when I say, "Boy, do I have some excuses!"
  
  Sure, I could have avoided a lot of problems as an adult by being raised like everyone else. I might not have had as much performance anxiety, I might be better at maintaining relationships outside of hitting "Like" on a person's Facebook post when they have a baby. But here's the part I unapologetically embrace: My weirdness turned into my greatest strength in life. It's why I'm who I am today and have the career I have. It's why I'm able to con someone into allowing me to write this book. (Hi, Mr. Simon and Mr. Schuster!)
  
  Growing up without being judged by other kids allowed me to be okay with liking things no one else liked. How else could a twelve-year-old girl be so well versed in dragon lore and film noir? Or think it was the height of coolness to be able to graph a cosine equation? Or long to play Dungeons & Dragons but never get the chance until adulthood because her mom saw that one article on how it made you a Satanic basement murderer?
  
  Most school situations would have shamed all those oddball enthusiasms out of me REALLY quick. Those bow-girls would have snubbed me for them, for sure. But during my childhood my fringe interests remained uncriticized, so they bloomed inside of me without self-consciousness until I was out in the world, partially formed, like a blind-baked pie shell. By then it was WAY too late. I was irrevocably weird.
  
  I'm glad I didn't know better than to like math and science and fantasy and video games because my life would be WAY different without all that stuff. Probably "desk job and babies" different. Not that there's anything wrong with babies. Or desks. I mean, I'm sitting at one now, so my analogy really doesn't... I didn't mean to insult anyone with those things, I just... oh gosh, panic sweats.
  
  Anyway, thanks for all the weirdness, Mom and Dad!
  
  P.S. I don't have a GED. I have two college degrees, but I don't actually have a high school one.
  
  It took writing this chapter to figure that out. Fuck.