Oh, what a difference a year makes.

Last September, Charlotte Hicks rode through the wrought-iron gates of Tiffin Academy for the first time in the passenger seat of her mother’s garden center van, the lone student entering the school as a junior (known at Tiffin as a “fifth-former”). The drive to Tiffin—located in western Massachusetts—from her Baltimore suburb had been tense: Charlotte (who went by “Charley”) and her mother, Fran Hicks, weren’t speaking. Fran was opposed to Charley going to boarding school—but Charley despised her mother’s new husband, Joey, and would not live in the house with him another minute. Charley’s father, Thad Hicks, who had died unexpectedly the previous fall, had gone to boarding school, and Charley decided she would too.

But Charley had been terrified. When they’d stopped for breakfast at a Panera in Connecticut (they’d left their house in the middle of the night in order to reach Tiffin by nine), Charley took only a few bites of her oatmeal before excusing herself to throw up in the restroom.

What had she set in motion? Was her mother actually…right? Should Charley have stayed at Loch Raven High School, where she was securely at the top of her class, with her best friend, Beatrix, by her side? Charley held no delusions: While she was respected at Loch Raven for being smart, and accepted because Beatrix dragged her out to parties on the weekends, Charley knew she was nobody’s idea of normal. The back of her mother’s van was filled with crates of books and Charley’s collection of houseplants.

She was a freak.

Charley recalls riding onto Tiffin’s campus, past the buildings she now knows are the Edward Tiffin Student Union (the “Teddy”), the Mary Tiffin Sinclair Library (the “Sink”), the Manse, the Schoolhouse, and the Gothic chapel, taking it all in as she watched the suspiciously attractive members of the student body greeting one another with squeals and hugs. Charley had to remind herself that she wasn’t at Tiffin to make friends, and she certainly didn’t come to fall in love. She was attending Tiffin to escape the hellscape of her house…and to get an elite education.