Growing up in St. Louis, Missouri, the process of someday choosing a high school looms over young students from the day they enter middle school. Each of the city’s co-ed public schools and gender-split private schools creates an image for its students that is projected onto them during the first day of their freshman year. Some are well-known for sports, while others are known to academically challenge their students or thrive in the arts.
As a seventh-grade student, my reputation was solidified as “the smart girl.” After I’d been moved up to eighth-grade level math earlier in the year, my parents and school principal had decided that it only made sense for me to skip ahead to high school. I had missed the application period, but the largest, all-girls school let me take their academic placement tests and promised to accept me if I decided that I wanted to attend.
On the morning that I shadowed at Cor Jesu Academy, my legs trembled as I walked into the lobby. Smiling, the principal introduced me to Megan, the girl who I would be attending classes with for the day, and as soon as I saw her excitement, my fear lessened. Stepping into the hallway, we were sucked into a wave of identically dressed students, plaid kilts and navy polos swallowing us as we fought our way through the crowd. The morning passed in a blur of Spanish conjugations, mazes of hallways, and an energetic volleyball game. At lunch, the roar of the cafeteria grew louder each second, as girls zigzagged between tables, stressing about the upcoming history test, and comparing grades on the latest theology quiz.
After a particularly terrifying biology lab studying live crawfish, I made my way back to the office. Excitement bubbled out of me as Sister Mary Katherine asked me for my official decision. I tripped over my words trying to tell her how incredible it was to be in an environment that was full of bright women who all wanted to be challenged academically. I had found the place I wanted to spend the next four years; I had found my home.
The next three years at Cor Jesu were filled with choir practices, tears and laughter, and nights of endless homework, all of which brought me the closest community of friends that I’ve ever experienced. There were no boys to fight over, no pressure to wake up and put on makeup to impress anyone, no need to feel anything other than equal to the six hundred other Cor Jesu students. The confidence and strength that we found in each other, even in such a challenging academic environment, created a bond that we thought was unbreakable.
The smell of newly wet grass enveloped me as I stepped through Cor Jesu’s front door. The squeaking of my shoes was deafening in the early morning quiet of the nearly empty building. For the first time in a week, I finally had a reprieve from the constant barrage of quizzes and tests, and the calm fog that blanketed the newly spring green trees outside matched my relaxed mood. My best friend had yet to show up in homeroom, but I figured this meant I would get to hear an amusing story about sleeping through an alarm or getting stuck in traffic. My stomach dropped as I saw the tears that arrived instead.
That morning after Artemis came out to me, I didn’t know what to do. Tears welled in my eyes, a combination of pride that he felt loved and safe enough to tell me and worry about his future with his family and at Cor Jesu. I pulled him into a hug and gripped him as tightly as I could, knowing that I could never make up for what he had been through. The calm of the day was replaced with turmoil as he told me about sleeping in his car the night before and trying to find a place to stay. I walked numbly through the rest of my day, wondering what was going to happen.
We spent hours in the choir room after school, talking to our director and trying to figure out how he could stay safe and stay with us at Cor Jesu. We frantically searched for resources, worried that if we didn’t find something soon, we would lose each other forever. Artemis’s Catholic parents had threatened to pull him out of school by the end of the week. Questions raced around in my head, making it impossible to focus on anything but the fear that the best friend that I’d grown to love so much would be gone because he’d decided to be who he truly was.
The last month of the school year flew by, and in the fall, Artemis didn’t come back. He wasn’t allowed to attend Cor Jesu, and he’d started taking classes at the community college for a chance at making it to a university the next year. The all-girls community that I had once found my home in had taken my best friend away from me. I still loved being there, but the pain of seeing Artemis come out as transgender and lose that same community is something that will stay with me forever.
The love, solidarity, and strong foundation I built every day with the strong women around me at Cor Jesu is something that I don’t think I’d ever find anywhere else. Gone were the stigmas that women can’t be as smart or as strong as men, that we can’t hold the same jobs, or that we deserved less. However, seeing what happened to a transgender student at an all-girls high school calls me to question the gender-based environment. I believe that the all-girls’ environment of Cor Jesu Academy fosters both a positive environment for its students and conflict in today’s society where LGBTQ+ rights are a prevalent issue.