Meet Me in St. Louis!

I grew up in a suburb outside of St. Louis, Missouri. Almost everyone you meet who says they grew up in St. Louis really means they grew up in a suburb outside of St. Louis, which covers quite a lot of ground. That’s why when you find someone else from St. Louis, you always ask, “What high school did you go to?”

Partly to understand where they really grew up and partly for judgements sake. In STL, you can make a lot of preconceived judgments on people based on where they went to high school. Knowing what high school they went to just gave you a bit of background on the kind of person they were before even getting to know them. For example, if you went to SLUH or De Smet, disrespectfully, I don’t want to speak with you any further.

One of the biggest storylines in my life growing up in STL until I moved away for college, and even still some then, was private schools versus public schools.

Part of the reason I chose my university was that there wasn’t anyone from my high school going there. However immediately upon orientation my first year, I learned that a large percentage of the school is from STL. None that I knew, but apparently a recruiter goes around to all the private schools in the city recruiting them to my university, but never goes to the public schools.

My senior year I had someone from Florida, and therefore far removed from the STL high school drama, ask me, “Were you born and raised in St. Louis or did you move there later? I don’t know, you just don’t seem like the other people I’ve met here.”

I didn’t know how to respond to that, given I didn’t know what people from STL were like, and I had lived there my entire life until I turned 18. The girls’ friend, who was from STL, chimed in and responded, “That’s because she went to public school and the rest of us went to private school.”

In writing it seems like a rude thing to say, but she put it very matter-of-factly in a way that made it seem like I was better than the private school kids, which is honestly the validation that every public school kid wants to hear when they were surrounded by private school kids their entire life.

That is how I met one of my good friends right at the end of my senior year, Londyn, who minored in economics and is also spending the summer in STL. We spent a lot of time together the last week on campus as I took her senior pictures, she was with me when I got to my wits end with one of my other friends, and took me out downtown to forget about it, and we sat next to each other at graduation, making fun of our university’s president the entire time. Londyn seems very normal and I get along with her in a way that makes it seem like we were raised very similarly, but I still must grapple with the fact that she went to the second most elite private high school in the city that costs $20,950 per year. That is more than I paid for college!

There are an incredible number of private high schools, and grade schools in the city. I always say that the way you measure age in STL is counting how many private grade schools you know of that have been shut down in your lifetime from lack of admittance. When I was in the eighth grade I had to volunteer with the fifth graders for confirmation at the church down the street from my house where my brother Caden and I had to do Sunday School. One of the fifth graders who went to the school connected to the church told me that his grade only had five girls and five boys in it.

Caden and I never went to school at the private school attached to the church, just Sunday School. They called it PSR though, short for Parish School of Religion. There was a huge divide between the private school kids and the “PSR kids”, the latter which was always said with a bit of disdain in their tone. Every Sunday when we went into the school classrooms to learn, the day would start off with our PSR teacher telling us that, once again, the private school kids had complained that PSR kids had moved things in their desk around, or stolen their erasers. We would just look around the classroom at each other, rolling our eyes, and we all knew the teacher was doing the same thing mentally.

Caden and I always played sports on the church league teams as well. It was mostly a team full of girls who went to school together mixed in with maybe three or four public school kids who went to that church. I never really had any problems with the private school kids, but I do know a couple of girls who also came from public school quit the team because they felt like they were being bullied.

Occasionally the private school kids would say something about the PSR kids then remember that I was on the team and say, “But we’re not talking about you, of course.”

I never really cared about what they were saying though, for three main reasons. I didn’t really like PSR either, I knew that when I was with my public school friends I made fun of the private school kids as well so of course they talked about me with their friends, and third, I generally wanted to stop talking and just play soccer.

As we got older the boys started coming into the equation. Except I didn’t really understand the appeal of having a boyfriend, probably to a detriment. When the private school boys started watching our games and talking to the team afterwards, they always strayed towards the public school kids because we were dangerous and mysterious and they had gone to school with the same 10 girls for their entire lives. That caused some problems, and some other public school girls quit because there were fights over boys. I thought it was going to be a problem for me at first as well, but then the private school girls realized that I wasn’t really impressed with the boy standing in front of me dressed and styled like a 40 year old man and we continued to be okay.

I enjoyed learning about the lore of private schools but was glad that I never actually had to attend. I remember hearing at softball practice in the sixth-grade that the school’s Spanish teacher had quit so administration just assigned a history teacher to do it who didn’t know any Spanish. I went running home to tell my mom, who also went to private school in STL, and she wasn’t even surprised.  It was then when I learned that teachers at private schools don’t even need a certificate to teach and it made me belly laugh whenever my private school friends would talk about their classes. The whole time these private school kids were acting like they were better than us, but at least my school had three Spanish teachers who actually knew how to speak Spanish!

In high school I didn’t play in the church leagues but by the end of my sophomore year I was playing on the #1 ranked field hockey club team in the nation, which happened to be in STL and unsurprisingly was filled with private school girls. Specifically girls from either the fancy all-female private school that costs $23,135 a year or the co-ed school that is the most expensive private school in STL at $29,400 per year. Once again I found myself as the only public school kid on the team.

I had a bit more trouble with these girls, because we were no longer in middle school just playing sports for fun and anytime I stood out on a field was attention taken away from them in the eyes of college recruiters. The all-female private school breeds little girls for field hockey success. The school starts in kindergarten and that’s when most of these girls started playing. The head coach of the school’s field hockey team is the daughter of the woman that runs the successful field hockey club. It’s a complete feeder program to win State every year, be the best in the nation, and send all the girls to D1 schools. I started playing field hockey my freshman year of high school so you can see where the problems came in. There was a lot of talk, especially amongst the parents, about the club coaches bringing on a public school girl onto the team who had only been playing for a year, saying I should be on the B team. The B team is generally the public school kids who started playing later than the others. I did start on the B team after the club head recruited me, but I only played with them for one weekend tournament before moving up. Some of the girls were pleasant to me. Some were not. I don’t think that the ones who weren’t pleasant were bad people, I think that they were just stressed about their future and getting the scout’s attention to play at a D1 school, and the pressure from their parents. Except for one of the girls who I will not name, she was just a bad person.

I am still friends with some of the girls I played church league with, or on the B team with, or just acquaintances with others on social media. Everyone has been graduating recently and posting about where they’re going next. There was one girl I played sports with in the church league, Alice, who was nice but also her family was the epitome of “private vs public school kids”. Her mom used to badmouth public school girls and PSR kids to my mom’s face and Alice wore big pink bows in her hair until the sixth grade. Well, Alice just announced that she is going to teach 8th grade at a public school! And not just any public school – the public school that her and her mom probably imagined in their head that I went to every day.

What is most well known about this particular school is that all the students have anger management issues. I doubt Alice would know that though, given she didn’t fraternize with the public school kids (except me, she was always nice to me). I used to play racquetball against the school all the time though, and it was always a somber day when we were facing them. Everyone was just kind of expecting something bad to happen, and it usually did. If you don’t know what a racquetball court looks like – it’s important to this story. You are – quite literally – shut in a cement box with your opponent. This means everything is super loud and echoes and there is only one tiny door in and out.

There was this red head I always played in doubles who would hit the wall with her racquet and scream whenever she lost the rally, cuss my partner and I out if we made a shot she couldn’t get to, and at the end of the game when she lost she would run off the court without shaking our hands. Everything was so loud in those little boxes and I was always thinking about how I might escape if she came after me, with there only being one door.

Another girl on the team that played one of my teammates would do something similar, except when she lost at state finals she kept hitting her racquet on the ground until it broke in half. You know that scene from “Challengers”? Exactly like that. She did it a few times before she got put in anger management. Then all of the sudden she came back all pleasant and the literal poster child for anger management therapy. She wanted to become our friend and didn’t really care about winning or losing anymore. I was suspicious of it for a while, thinking it was just a trap to lure us in. But then my team played her again, and she didn’t hit the wall or scream once. A smile never left her face. Our coach also told us that she had gone around and apologized to all the coaches for her previous behavior. We got to be friends back in high school, but now that we never see each other we’re just acquaintances who follow each other on Instagram.

The worst experience was when I was playing a girl from that team was the girl who got so mad in one game we were playing that she punched a wall and broke her hand right in front of me. I was standing in the serving box getting ready to hit the ball, but she had other plans. I’ll never forget the crunch sound that her hand made when it hit the wall, which, like all the other sounds, echoed in the box. She didn’t cry after she punched the wall, she just got mad that it hurt and kicked the same wall. Her toes were fine though. Her coach pulled her off the court, the match was forfeited, she was out the rest of the season, but she never went to anger management.

Alice will definitely have some fun!

Although I went to public school, it is still one of the bougiest, most privileged public schools in the city. Public schools are assigned to students based on where they live, and my high school encapsulated a lot of the richer neighborhoods. I live in a county that I unaffectionally renamed “LuluLemon County” which tells you pretty much everything you need to know about it. Being in the school felt a lot like a personification of social media. Sometimes now, having graduated college and therefore been out of high school for a while, I will see something on social media and think “there’s no way that ever happens in the real world,” then a memory will spring into my mind of something that happened in high school and I will know that sometimes, it does happen in the real world. Just how people talk to each other on social media and follow every single micro trend there is to seem cool.

I’ve talked to my friend Nola a lot about our differing high school experiences with her having grown up in the heart of San Francisco. It seems like the main difference is not necessarily the students in the school, but all the things surrounding the students in the school. The place we grew up didn’t give way for much creativity or independent thinking. LuluLemon County didn’t necessarily squander the people who chose to be independent thinkers, it just never really presented independent thinking as even an option on the list. There’s a lot of people who went off to college and were able to become independent thinkers, like this one girl Tatum who used to be quiet and proper in school and then went to university for art and I think she’s really cool and I’ve been plotting on how to reach out to her and become her friend for a few months now. Maybe more on that later if I find the right thing to DM her on Instagram.

It also has to do with the economics of St. Louis versus a place like San Francisco, and I’m not just saying that for a chance to remind people that I now officially have an economics degree. Nola’s parents both work in film, which is a very sustainable job when you live in San Francisco and can easily travel down to LA on the weekends. A lot of her other friends had parents who also worked creative jobs that fully funded the family, which isn’t generally plausible in St. Louis, at least not in the way it is in other cities. This also in turn meant that there just wasn’t a very big art scene, at least not in LuluLemon County. There was no music, art, skateboarding, or surfing culture like Nola had in San Francisco growing up. When there is no culture in the place you are growing up, how are you supposed to become cultured?

We were also living in suburbia and the areas in our county that aren’t suburbia are mostly chain stores and restaurants. Even in the thrift stores, there aren’t many unique clothes, these stores are generally proliferated by whatever was “in” on social media three months ago and entire racks dedicated to LuluLemon. Also Nola always cried over my descriptions of the lack of real clothes and the prolificness of athleisurewear. Recently I watched the “Brandy Hellville” documentary with Mother Hen and she said that she didn’t remember girls at my school ever wearing Brandy Melville. I told her that trend never made it to my high school, because that would mean girls would actually have to wear normal clothes instead of just athletic clothes.

I don’t say all of this to talk myself up in some way, if that’s how it sounds. I don’t really get the idea that talking other people down somehow makes you look cooler. I wore athletic clothes all throughout high school as well, mainly because my one personality trait was being an athlete. I did well in school and I did a lot of art, especially in the summers when I had more time, but I knew that everyone saw me as an athlete. The main reasons I never wore LuluLemon was because I’ve always hated tight clothing, spending money, and have always generally, although sometimes subliminally, rebelled against what I saw as mainstream. Just for fun. My parents never squandered my creativity, though they definitely didn’t understand it. But even with their support it always felt like I was put in a vacuum whenever I walked through those doors.

Alas, that was the STL of my past and now we need to discuss the STL of my present and future. Yes that is right, I have graduated college and I am back home in LuluLemon County for the summer, the first long period of time I have spent here since I was a high schooler. This summer I will be attempting to squeeze all the culture I can out of the city, meaning lots of driving 30 minutes towards downtown to where the art actually lives but I wasn’t able to take the highway to when I was 16. Visiting bars with open mic nights since I am finally 21 and doing what I can to navigate making friends as an Adult!

When I was home over winter break I tasked myself with doing a vintage scavenger hunt that I had found in one of the thrift stores in the Loop. It was 12 different stores and entitled, “St. Louis Vintage Hop”.

I had fun doing it and seeing different places in STL that I hadn’t spent much time in before, but most of them were curated vintage stores and therefore leaned more on the expensive side. I found quite a few good thrift stores in Oklahoma that didn’t just have the social media trending clothes and pushed me to try different styles and clothes, but I haven’t found those yet in St. Louis. This summer I will be reporting on the best thrift stores in St. Louis and all my motley finds.

To start on that mission I must first antiquate myself into society, which is going to be hard. I have been in STL since Sunday and have spent the days since doing very measly things. I haven’t even begun to unpack my car yet except for one suitcase that I pulled out of the back at random, hoping it would have the clothes I would need. That means I have been wearing the same pair of red Vans sweat shorts for the past three days and picking my shirt for the day very carefully as there were no bras in the suitcase. I need to start unpacking soon though, as I desperately need to drive my bike out to the Katy Trail and ride for hours on end and my bike won’t fit in either of my parents’ cars. It has been raining quite a bit though – ever since I got home – which is a nice excuse to stay in the house and watch New Girl for hours on end to relax. I’m also on my period right now, which means you really cannot ask me to do much.

Once I get reintroduced into society though, I will be meeting up with Lennon and Londyn and maybe even introducing them to each other if I feel confident enough. It’s an odd thing when your friends from two different universes merge into one so I will have to be feeling my absolute best for that to happen. Both Londyn and I and Lennon and I have made plans to cause general buffoonery in STL this summer, so expect lots of stories and reviews on our time doing that.

You will also hear more about Londyn as I have lots to say about graduation, and she is the one I spent that time with, and still things to say about my trip to California in April, but I am very busy, as stated before, doing very measly things. That is what post-grad life is all about.

Yours truly,

Calihan