The statue in the entry hall served as a better reminder of the shadow over our shoulders than any nun brandishing a ruler could have. It was a rendition of an angel— my memory blurs it slightly, but an angel sounds right. It served as a representation of who we were meant to become—winged advocates for ourselves, mostly for others, about things we may not even agree with. Our eyes would glaze over it each morning; all the coffee in the world couldn’t keep us girls awake enough to care at 7:30 a.m.
The morning Texan heat burned in the summer and fall months, though it was not yet fully fledged; the chill would bite hard in the winter since it was debated whether we could wear leggings underneath our skirts (don’t even start about the problem of their length. It was the administration’s never-ending battle).
Eventually, it became a senior privilege. The younger ones would stay cold.
Such administrative choices were among certain topics we silently understood needed to be kept to a whisper, secrets, gossip, who was going out with who, breakups, lies, and betrayals. The hottest topics were always taboo. Politics, however, did not fall into that hidden category.
We discussed speeches and primaries with our English and history teachers, women explaining to us younger women how the fight for our bodies raged on through the decades. We would mention our political anxieties to our favorite biology teacher when he wandered into our English teacher’s classroom during the free period, a tender 45 minutes meant for homework but used for chatting and snacking on the floor when chairs became too stifling. There were mainly female teachers at the school. Still, this man became the favorite because he, like us, watched anime, was a musical theater fan, and publicly posted how much he hated conservatives on his Instagram. He taught every student at least once and remembered all of us by name.
The world burned around us, power players made a mess of our government. But all the while we went in each morning and took our pre-calculus exams, read “Crime and Punishment” and discussed the fall into madness, defied the laws of physics with a homemade potato launcher.
The people at the heads of the institution that ran our school claimed half of my friends were some kind of anomaly, they required prayer to ‘fix’, that they weren’t sinning, but they couldn’t fully participate in religious life. Our teachers allied with them, but even they were beholden to a system where they might get fired for speaking out too loudly.
Their lives went on, and I supported them, wondering how in the world anyone could look these girls in the face and tell them anything was wrong with them.
This is Houston, Texas after all, any differences could be put aside for the universal cause of baseball; the Astros winning the series meant we got a day off school.
Sure, we resisted. We snuck our phones into the church. We hid them behind our iPad screens and sent Snapchats in class. Attempted and failed to not draw attention to pink or purple highlights in our hair.
It was in the middle of my junior year AP English class. Our teacher was a brilliant woman. Funny, kind, sympathetic, and understand- ing to everything we had to say, no matter what.
That day’s topic was the bathroom rule: only one person could go to the bathroom at a time in a class. This was meant to stop vaping and phone use in the restrooms. For us and the teachers, it just became a huge inconvenience and did none of the things it was meant to.
“It’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” I recall remarking among similar complaints my classmates made.
The chatter grew louder, almost drowning out the sound of a knock and the door to the classroom opening. No one took much notice; it was normal for teachers to come into each other’s classrooms if they needed something, or if they had a free period and wanted to socialize.
“Hello, principal,” the teacher blurted, throwing us all a furtive glance as the room went silent.
She greeted us and sat in the back of the class. Our teacher went back to her lesson topic; the principal left before long, hopefully not making any note of how every student was silent the entire time she was in the room.
Twenty pairs of eyes followed the principal as she left. We listened to the door shut behind her and her steps fade down the linoleum hallway.
“Ohh gosh,” the teacher started to say as she leaned on her podium, her mouth quirking up into a wide smile. Then we burst into laughter, the teacher among us, my eyes tearing up as the anxiety left us in a collective rush.
This was sisterhood. This was womanhood. A moment of secrecy we could share and bond over like the young and unsure and gleeful people were. We were only girls after all.
We were girls in an institution built to raise us—to make us into women of their word and truths.
They were the men who ran the school that was meant to educate women. We were girls who fought the structure through our clothes, our words, and our sexualities, but we still went to mass once a month, resigned and hoping we could drift to sleep during the sermon without anyone noticing. The 250 of us that made up the entire student body were the future, the group that would continue to uphold the traditions: the pillars with which we were boxed. But they made sure that we grew straight up toward the sky, those values of truth, beauty, and goodness around us like wooden dowels set up to ensure a plant does not droop as it becomes too tall to support itself.
Too tall? Or too autonomous? Might we ever grow past them? Grow over and around these pillars like ivy, still containing them, but now beyond them?
I try to this day to go beyond. I left. I traded the sun for the snow and conservatism for liberalism. But still, the memories of those skirts and that angel linger, but not always in a bad way.
