Stories From a Plaid Skirt

Elisabeth Kay

   Since the age of four, I’ve thrown a plaid jumper over a white collared shirt five days a week. When I entered fifth grade, I traded the jumper for a skirt—a sign of growing up, entering middle school (though middle school was just the second floor of the elementary school building). I left the knee socks in the back of my sock drawer, trading them for crew socks, and subbed out black ballet flats for Sperry’s. In high school, the bright red pullover sweaters became black fleeces, and the skirts had been rolled up a few more times at the waist. In these uniforms that never seemed to fit me like a glove (even though I tried to style them in every way I could), I learned the ins and outs of trends, puberty, girlhood—you name it.

         In fifth grade, I transferred from St. Sebastian, a one-story elementary school and parish that got most of its funding from their annual festival, to Divine Child, a two-story elementary school on a joined campus with a high school, parish, and newly built three-million-dollar football field. This campus change also brought a change in people and my awareness of what was “cool”—I was quickly begging my mom for Sperry’s instead of my scuffed pair of flats, Lululemon headbands that had absolutely no business being twelve dollars, and anything with a brand’s logo on it. I’d fallen into a friend group that promised nothing pleasant, and that promise was fulfilled—by the end of seventh grade, I had my “best friend” telling me that I needed to find new friends because it was apparent that no one in the current friend group liked me all that much. I couldn’t pretend I didn’t see it coming; I sat at the end of the lunch table, practically hanging on to it for dear life trying to lean in just to hear a smidge of who they were gossiping about that day (the way I leaned probably caused a lot of the back pain I experience today). It was evident they were only friends with me for things they admired about me: when we went to Pink during the summer of our fifth-grade year, giggling about asking for bra fittings, their mouths were agape at my measurements coming back as a C cup at the age of 11. But the size of my boobs didn’t outweigh the fact that I simply didn’t fit in with these girls—my dad wasn’t the president of the local country club, and most of the clothes I’d worn outside of my uniform were hand-me-downs from my cousin.

         During the summer going into eighth grade, I truly became the girl I am now. I lacked friends from my new school, but I had those from my old. My childhood best friend Emma was one of my rocks during this time, with the other being my sister. I let my nerd back out; I became obsessed with everything Broadway-related, ditching soccer practice for singing lessons. I joined the theater department at my school, and despite its quirks, I found the people who I truly found solace in while finishing out middle school. One stuck with me all the way through high school—Ella. Emma transferred to the same high school as Ella and me, and we quickly fell into a comfortable friend group, finding our platonic soulmates in each other.

The three of us attended the biggest co-ed Catholic high school in Michigan, where we found ourselves in situations so uncomfortable they became laughable. A few years before our freshman year, our school lit up national news stories for mandating “Modesty Ponchos” for prom dresses that didn’t fit the dress code—too much shoulder, too much midriff, too much chest, too high of a slit, you name it. That situation was just a precedent for the years to come. It became a joke that every year, the school would be involved in at least one scandal. My freshman year, it was our campus minister doing a guest speech in our theology classes about respecting your body, which turned into a preachy speech about women “asking for it.” My sophomore year, it was our priest’s homily comparing Black Lives Matter protestors to terrorists. My junior year, it was our morality teacher getting fired for being Islamophobic towards a student (in Dearborn, the city with the highest Islam population in the United States, may I add). But I think it was my senior year that really threw me for a loop.

         We were sat in the Church, the wooden pews as uncomfortable as they always were on Tuesday mornings. I, like 90% of the students and faculty there, was prepared to daydream into a dozed state for the next hour. However, plans changed as a young male guest speaker stood at the altar, claiming he was going to talk about abstinence. He spoke for fifty uninterrupted minutes about his past addiction to masturbating, stating, “Spring break photos were the worst time for me.” He claimed he was saved because he would go to confession every time after—however, he warned us that if we indulged in anything of the sort, we wouldn’t be forgiven so easily. As we were dismissed back to classes that day, the Church roared louder than it did during responsorial or celebratory hymns. Every student and faculty member, including our campus minister, agreed—his speech was absurd. But this absurdity brought the students together, as the numerous stupidly offensive scandals Divine Child found themselves in always did. I’d talked to classmates I didn’t remember the names of as I walked back to class from the Church, laughing at jokes being made about the guy who’d just taken up our time talking about his sex life in front of the Tabernacle, where the body and blood of Christ is supposedly held. I searched for Emma in the hallway on the way to our apology assembly put on by our campus minister later that day, jumping in and out of conversations on our way to the auditorium.

It’s things like this that I remember the most from Catholic school—nothing taught in a theology class, nothing about the New or Old Testament, nothing about the Ten Commandments (though I could probably recite them if you asked; the Beatitudes is a different story)­—but about the sense of community that can come from such absurd moments, or about friendships made from ashes of old Lululemon headbands.

Edited by Lauren Myers and Kate Castello