You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) (9 page)

We started rehearsing, objectively I was rocking the trills, and in the middle I looked over and saw Viktor waving his arms and head
around like Stevie Wonder. (No insult, he was just
into
it.) Out of his right eye, I could have sworn there was . . . moisture? Trickling?!
Was the meanest man I’d ever met having a stroke?! Was I having a stroke? What should I do?!
It freaked me out and I almost stopped playing. I didn’t, because I didn’t want to waste $2.25 a minute, but the impulse was definitely there.

After I was done, Viktor walked over and cupped my face in both hands like it was a Fabergé egg. “So good, so good, my heart!” He thumped himself in the chest. It was a gesture of . . . I’m not sure. Something positive, like CPR. As the pianist left, he screamed into his kitchen at his little wife, Raeza, who was always cooking while wearing a pair of medical scrubs, even though she wasn’t in the medical profession.

“Raeza! Borscht! We eat!”

He hauled me into the kitchen, a room I’d never entered in more than five years of studying with him, and ate disgusting blood-pink soup together.

He looked over the top of his bowl, smiling. “Yes?”

“It’s great!” I wanted to throw up.

“Good girl.” Viktor patted my head and slurped.

I think in Russia, he’d legally adopted me.

[
 College Timez! 
]

When I got into my teens, I took the violin more seriously. Because people would tell me how I was adorable when I played, and I’m a praise monkey. (Will perform for smiles!) I auditioned for the Juilliard pre-program when I was fourteen and was accepted, but finances wouldn’t allow us to move to New York City full-time. It was a crushing
blow because I was definitely ready to move out of the house. In fact, I was
always
ready to move out. I’d picked out a list of excellent boarding schools by age twelve and couldn’t understand why we weren’t wealthy enough for me to go abroad like in the “Madeline” books. Or, alternatively, rent me an apartment down the street. I forged my mom’s signature and paid all the bills for her anyway, so at that point it was just geographical logistics, right? My parents couldn’t understand my vision.

So when my professor offered to help me get into University of Texas at Austin, I was all over it like a rabid dog on jerky. Or whatever analogy. Look, I was excited.

We were living in San Antonio at the time, and my violin teacher was Mr. Frittelli, a professor at UT. He was a tiny man and a dazzling violinist who appreciated a good fart joke. My kind of guy.

One day he asked, “What are you doing for college?”

I sighed a dramatic teen sigh. “I have a ton of them picked out, but I dunno, I have forever to decide.” Being precocious was SO HARD.

“How old are you?”

“Fifteen, gonna be sixteen in June.”

“Do you want to go to college this year?”

“What?”

OMG
.

“Yes. Take me there now, please!”

I’m not sure who Mr. Frittelli blackmailed in order to get an underage teenager with literally NO school transcripts into a public collegiate institution, but a week after we spoke—*BOOM*—he’d arranged for a full scholarship for me to study music starting in the fall. All I had to provide was an SAT score!

Um . . . okay?

I had taken exactly one standardized test in my life. It was an IQ test to get into preschool. I got all the questions right except one where they asked, “Where is your mom in this picture? The beach or the shed?” I answered “the shed” because I thought they meant “the shade.” I knew at age five that my mom was paranoid about sun damage, no way was she hanging on the beach. So in a relative sense, I did perfectly. Anyway, whatever qualifications, I was not letting a stupid bubble test get in the way of this “escape homeschooling” opportunity. The SAT was the Rosetta stone for me. I had no idea what was going on with that thing, but I was gonna crack it!

I scheduled the test for the following weekend (five days of study seemed more than enough) and got one of those thick SAT practice books from the library. I filled out more than one hundred practice tests in five days. No joke. Hand cramped, eyes watering; in retrospect, it would have made a great movie montage with “Eye of the Tiger” playing in the background.

If this story followed classic movie plot construction, I would have failed the test horribly, given up, then discovered newfound resolve through an old homeless man’s inspirational words to try again and ace the results. But life doesn’t follow traditional story arcs. Whether it was by naïveté or the hand of Thor, I have no idea, but when the results came back, I’d gotten an almost perfect score. One of the few answers I missed was a vocabulary question defining “Spartan,” which does NOT mean “warrior-like” but “austere and sparse.” (To this day I still think that is misleading and stupid. I saw
300
. What am I, a fool?) But based on my scores, I was definitely, absolutely going to college!

Things were going to CHANGE! I could be on my own. To experience
life in bigger social contexts than just me and my brother and my online friends! I would move to Austin, be like Felicity or Doogie Howser, MD, plans plans plans . . . TIRE SCREECH.

Turns out, legally, I was too young to live in the dorms alone. My family’s solution? Move to Austin so I could attend school while living at home.

And my mom ended up driving me to college every day.

For four years.

Sigh.

I entered college just as I turned sixteen, with a plan to double-major in mathematics and music. The math thing was for my dad and grandpa, who were firm believers in Real Degrees. (I capitalize because that’s how they sounded when they said I had to get one. “A Real Degree.”)

You’d think jumping into a school of 30,000-plus students would be intimidating for a girl who’d had only her little brother to hang around for most her life, and you would be right. Luckily, most of my time was to be spent in the music building annex, which was a small underfunded island unto itself. So at least it was the shallow end of the pool I got thrown into without having any limbs to swim.

There were only about six hundred students enrolled in the music school, and people rarely left because it was assumed you locked yourself in a 4x4 practice room for eight hours a day or you were “never going to amount to anything as a musician, so why are you taking up room if you’re not serious?” No peer pressure or anything. The building sat on the fringes of campus and was supposed to house the next generation of artists. It had the aesthetics of a Hungarian women’s prison.

It was cold in the winter and hot in the summer, with elevators that broke all the time. There were long green couches on the first floor that smelled like failure and skin flakes, and no one would nap on them for fear of catching salmonella. I think the whole design was just a nefarious plot to force students back into their tiny LED-lit practice room cages. All senses besides hearing were punished.

I was, of course, nervous about this huge leap into adulthood, so I prepared a detailed strategy for my first day of class. It was mostly inspired by bad TV shows. I would dress as inconspicuously as possible so people wouldn’t notice me, and that way I could do recon to figure out my place in the world. Like going undercover in
21 Jump Street
. I would draw NO attention to myself, so no one would see how young or how awkward I was, and eventually, I’d just EXIST, unquestioned. Assimilated, like the Borg. Then, after I’d met everyone and fallen in love with qualified men, I’d get a cute outfit, do my hair, and arrive at school completely made over. The guys would fall at my feet, but the one who was nicest to me when I was plain and boring would have my heart, like that episode of
Beverly Hills, 90210
. Or
Boy Meets World
?
One of those. Who cares, none of it happened like that, anyway.

First day of class, I wore a huge pair of pleated jeans and a T-shirt that was a men’s large and a bigger sweater over it, like a late ’80s hip-hop star. Totally inconspicuous. I began college by lurking in corners, acting like the kind of kid people say, “But she was so quiet!” after a school shooting. But by noon, no one had approached me to talk. So far, so good!

Everyone who was enrolled in college orchestra had to audition on the first day of the semester so the conductor could figure out how good you were and what seat to assign you for the season. It was
The Hunger Games
for music majors. The conductor, I’ll call him Mr. Murray, was a young upstart who looked like Matthew McConaughey with Farrah Fawcett hair. It tousled around when he worked in the hottest way, waving like American golden wheat. Everyone had a crush on him, and I’m sure he could have slept with every woman in the building (me included), but he was a newlywed with an extremely hot wife who wore a black leather jacket and drove a motorcycle. He didn’t need the awkward foreplay of orchestra geeks.

My plan for the audition was to lowball my performance so the other students wouldn’t look at me for any reason, but as I entered the room, Mr. Murray said, “It will be nice having you in the orchestra this year. Mr. Frittelli has told me a lot about you.”

Sheer panic. Commence inner-anxiety monologue:
Mr. Frittelli told him about me? That means he told him I was good! And if I’m bad, Mr. Frittelli will look bad. But I don’t want to be TOO good, or the other kids won’t like me. But if I suck, they might take away my scholarship . . . B-U-T . . .
I freaked out inside, torn between fitting in with my peers and being a praise monkey teacher pleaser.

I looked deep into Mr. Murray’s cornflower-blue eyes, tried to gather my wits, and in the end, there was no choice. The hot adult wanted me to be good. So I played my heart out.

When the roster got posted that afternoon, I had been placed in the number two First Violin seat. Right in front of the conductor’s podium. The Park Place of orchestral real estate, right out of the gate. Crap.

As I looked at the board, I heard a grad student say behind me, “Who the hell is Felicia Day?!” and I slunk away, swimming in my huge acid-washed pants. It was going to be harder to navigate this whole schooling thing than
Saved by the Bell
had ever taught me.

In the following weeks, I tried to keep a low profile, hiding in the back of classes and practicing in the most out-of-the-way dungeon-like practice rooms, but I could tell everyone was curious about me. I looked ten years old, got placed in front of all the seniors and grad students, and I knew they were all thinking,
How good is this kid?

I caught a few of them eavesdropping outside my practice room door, and rather than make friends, I’d glare through the tiny glass window and stop playing to mark up my music in a real fake-spacework kinda way. The idea that I could open up to them never occurred to me. I wasn’t used to humans enough to have organic social impulses.

But as the weeks went by, anxiety started eating me up. I knew I couldn’t hide forever. They would hear me, and judge me. I wondered if it was too late to quit college and go back home to hang out with my brother and play Legos. It all came to a head when I performed in Professor Frittelli’s Master Class, a monthly class where a few people would play and get critiqued so everyone could learn from it. Public shaming, the great pedagogical tool, right? Answer:
No. I felt strange and isolated from everyone as it was, so in my brain, “
Master Class
” was emblazoned as:

I had no practical concept of my skills in relation to the other students. I was raised in such a vacuum, I could only gauge myself against recordings of famous dead people. In comparison to the greatest dead violinist in the world, Jascha Heifetz, I was horrible, so my preparatory mantra became,
Please don’t listen. Seriously, don’t. Oh God, they’re going to listen, aren’t they?!

I’ve always thought it’s harder to perform in front of five of your friends than five hundred strangers, and this was a perfect example. It was a small room, everyone stared at me as I got up to play, I took twenty times too long to tune my instrument, nodded to the pianist to start, and proceeded to have a panic attack that melted my brain stem into pudding.