Free Set Me Free by Miranda Beverly-Whittemore Page B

year. So say goodbye to your families. They wish you well. Let us now get to work. Let us embark together on this
     great adventure of the mind.” At that moment, the two hundred some students, ranging in age from four and a half to twenty,
     would stand and bid farewell to their families.
    In the younger classes, rumors spread. There was always one first-grade girl who would cry: “But my brother
promised
there would be a powwow.” The grade school teachers would nod sympathetically, placing their hands on top of sweaty, disappointed
     heads.
    In the middle school, the issue of the powwow was debated; these kids were old enough to remember. But they were also getting
     the hang of tradition, and they loved being in on the secret. On the playground, they’d bait the kindergarteners: “It’s too
     bad they’re not having one this year. Last year’s was
awesome.’
    The high school students would roll their eyes, acting as though they wanted nothing to do with it. “It’s stupid,” they’d
     say. “I hate this school.” That’s high school. Those of us teaching them tried not to take it personally.
    But even for the high-schoolers, there would come a moment in the day when, distracted by the high desert heat and the leftover
     smell of summer, they would relish what they knew was coming.Someone would hear shell dresses tinkling in the background. Over the whisper of syllabi being passed to the back of the classroom,
     the students would hear their mothers laughing, their sisters nursing, their fathers cursing, their grandmothers bossing everyone
     around. As the children held soft chalk to the blackboards and scribbled long division, they would anticipate the slick gym
     floorboards smooth under their bare feet and smell the tantalizing smoke of the salmon bake as it wafted over campus.
    At three o’clock, when learning was over, the children would open their classroom doors to find their regalia folded in their
     cubbies. They’d race to the academy bathrooms and change. Then the whole herd of them, whooping, hopeful, giddy, would surge
     back toward the gym. Just outside, in the hallway, the seniors barricaded the door and instructed the children to line up
     in descending age order. The impatient kindergarteners were forced to hold up the back of the line. Then two distinguished
     seniors, handpicked that very morning by Elliot, would hold high the school’s eagle staff and U.S. flag. These seniors would
     ask the other children if they were ready. A whoop would rise up. And then these eldest children and their classmates would
     thrust open the gym doors. The children would snake into the powwow arena, making their Grand Entry. Families cheered inside
     as the drumming began. There was fancy dancing. Eating. Gossiping. And everyone was ready for another year of school.
    I N S EPTEMBER 1996, Amelia was not at Ponderosa Academy for the first day of school. It was the first time she’d missed all the hoopla.
     She was across the mountain, in a green city, playing her violin, and so on that day she didn’t feel that she’d missed out.
     The academy and Amelia had grown together, her father’s twin ambitions. Amelia was infinitely proud of her father, but she
     couldn’t help feeling that after her mother had died—a mother she could not remember, a mother she had known for only twenty-two
     days—Amelia had not been enough for Elliot. She was all he hadin the world, and he’d started the academy because he needed more.
    But since this realization, Amelia had spent her childhood caught in a logical loop: didn’t she actually
want
her father to be distracted from every intimate detail of her life? Wasn’t that kind of the point? By middle school, she
     had gotten good at ignoring the familiar cloying sensation that clung to her whenever she stepped out of bed. She hadn’t imagined
     it could end. Even though Elliot never had time for her, he never had time without her. He was everywhere.
    As she got