MY JOURNEY TO BECOMING WHOLE

BOARDING SCHOOL SECRET

Trigger Warning: This chapter contains references to child abuse, death of a parent, and abuse in a school setting. Reader discretion advised.

Boarding school was supposed to save me.

"St. Mary’s Academy will make you somebody," my mom said when she dropped me at the gate. I was twelve, carrying a metal trunk and a heart full of broken glass. Dad had been gone two years.

I thought if I left home, I could leave him behind too. Uncle Kevin. The man with the big smile.

I was wrong.

Dad died when I was ten. Three months after Uncle Kevin’s last visit. The village said it was his heart. I wondered if it was shame. He never looked at me the same after that night. He never asked why I stopped speaking. Then he was just... gone.

So when Mom sent me to boarding school, I was already an orphan in the ways that mattered. No one left to notice I stopped writing letters home. No one left to see I flinched when people hugged me. No one left to ask why the girl who loved school now begged to stay home during holidays.

Senior Rebecca had the same smile as Uncle Kevin. Big. Warm. The kind teachers trusted. She was House Prefect. She helped new girls find their classes. She braided my hair on Sunday evenings and told me I was "special."

Special meant nights in the senior dormitory when everyone else slept. Special meant being told to "be a good girl" and "don’t tell, or they’ll send you home in shame."

I already knew how to be a good girl. I had been practicing since I was ten. Since Dad died and took every safe place with him.

So I split myself again.

By day, I was the best in Literature. I won debate competitions. I played the lead in every school play. Mrs. Anderson said I had "a gift for becoming other people." She didn’t know that was the only way I knew how to survive — by not being myself.

By night, I was quiet. I was obedient. I was disappearing piece by piece.

Then one day in Year 10, a new girl arrived. Her name was Grace. She was ten, with bright eyes and two neat braids. The same age I was when Dad died. On her first night, I saw Senior Rebecca look at her the same way she once looked at me.

And for the first time since Dad’s funeral, I felt something stronger than grief.

I felt rage. Because Grace still had a dad to go home to. And I would make sure she kept him.