I was not popular at Wexford. I wasn’t unpopular either. I was just there. I wasn’t the brightest, though I managed to hold my own. But I had to work harder than I’d ever worked. I often didn’t know what people were talking about. I didn’t get the jokes and the references. My voice sometimes sounded loud and odd. I got bruised from the hockey balls and the hockey ball protection I wore.

Some other facts I picked up:

Welsh is an actual, currently used language and our nextdoor neighbors Angela and Gaenor spoke it. It sounds like Wizard.

Baked beans are very popular in England. For breakfast. On toast. On baked potatoes. They can’t get enough.

“American History” is not a subject everywhere.

England and Britain and the United Kingdom are not the same thing. England is the country. Britain is the island containing England, Scotland, and Wales. The United Kingdom is the formal designation of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland as a political entity. If you mess this up, you will be corrected. Repeatedly.

The English will play hockey in any weather. Thunder, lightning, plague of locusts . . . nothing can stop the hockey. Do not fight the hockey, for the hockey will win.

Jack the Ripper struck for the second time very early on September 8, 1888.

That last fact was hammered home in about seventeen thousand ways. I didn’t even watch the news and yet, news just got in. And the news really wanted us to know about the eighth of September. The eighth of September was a Saturday. And I had art history class on Saturday. This fact seemed much more relevant to my life, being unused to the idea of Saturday class. I had always assumed the weekend was a holy tradition, respected by good people everywhere. Not so at Wexford.

But our Saturday classes were our “art and enrichment classes,” which meant that they were supposed to be marginally less painful than the classes during the week, unless you hated arts or enrichment, which I suppose some people do.

Even though Jazza tried to wake me up on her way to the shower, and again on her way to breakfast, she succeeded only when she returned to the room to get her cello for music class. I fell out of bed as she hauled the massive black case out of the room.

I wasn’t alone among the Saturday late starters. I’d already developed the habit of throwing my skirt and blazer over the end of my bed at night, so all I had to do in the morning was grab a clean shirt, pull on the skirt, shoes, and blazer, and scoop my hair up into any formation that looked reasonably like a hairstyle. I showered at night, and like Jazza, I had given up on makeup. My grandmother would have been appalled.