No one ever seems to have heard of the tiny speck of a town in New England that Gabriela Markey calls home. It’s ironic, she ponders, how almost everyone within the perimeters of Forestview knows each other, but it is rare that anyone from elsewhere is aware of its mere existence. Her dad is a European literature teacher at a local private boarding school, which makes her and her sister, Melanie, faculty kids. She is far from oblivious to the shreds of gossip that buzz around them as they meander through campus: They’re Mr. Markey’s girls – I bet the teachers go easier on them. Or, Mr. Markey is so irritating and strict – I bet his girls are just as arrogant and uptight.

Being a faculty kid affords Gabriela the privileges of easy access to prized privacy and convenient access to quality food. She realizes that boarding students whose homes are beyond the borders of the state often long for such luxuries. But Gabriela’s status also means that she finds herself perpetually in limbo between the lifestyle milieus of day students versus boarding students – the cultural codes of family versus peers. From the uneasy daily encounters (Should she say hi to her dad as her group passes him on the path to the dining hall?) to the deeper undercurrent involved in gaining the trust of boarders (Should she report them if she hears that they snuck out?) — there is a taxing balance to be maintained. Every day, she contemplates the pros and cons of just how much to cater to each group. Her Creative Writing teacher is her dad’s close friend. She has to act like a respectable, mature student around him and a carefree, nonchalant teenager around my classmates, all at once.

Her family lives in a moderate shingled house that shares a wall with an upperclassmen boys dorm. What onlookers might not realize about this arrangement is that, after painful displays of embarrassing family moments in general living areas (It’s fine for me to wear this shirt tomorrow, she tells her Dad — everyone wears this kind of shirt!), working with these boys in chem lab or on a history project the next day can be awkward. And the noise and mess that waft through the thin barriers are sources of never-ceasing annoyance. As she enters her junior year, Gabriela continues to experience a sense of exclusion from those late-night, in-dorm hangouts and the liberation of living so much more independently from parents. The boarding girls rehash manicure artistry and campus scandals, while she plays evening after evening of Scrabble with her parents and little sister.

But this is not to say that Gabriela’s social life around school is completely dull; she has formed strategic friendships with fellow faculty kids who share the same pressure to appear as if they fit somewhere, who feel conflicted when enjoying a moment of solitude in their own bedrooms while slurping homemade soup, simultaneously wondering what they’re missing in the dorm during baking night. Without even speaking of it, they know that they float together in a moving bubble, caught between the vaulted position of privilege attached to a faculty association and the scorned status of a figure with ties too close to the power structure. The other faculty kids also empathize with her distaste for the petty grudges that can smother the campus and her wish that two of her closest friends would make an effort to resolve theirs. And they understand quieter nuances of her character, such as that she prefers “Gabriela” to “Gabi,” even though “Gabriela” can feel choppy in its length – and that she has a penchant for a meticulously planned schedule rather than what feels like the reckless-abandon approach employed by others. These small choices give her a sense of self-determination and control in surroundings that otherwise run circles around her. She'll just keep acting like she flows effortlessly between my worlds, and maybe they’ll believe it.

It is a breezy, gentle summer that Gabriela spends at a writing workshop in a remote mountainous region of Vermont. Before the end of the season, she returns home to campus. When school begins, she and her peers will fall back into a familiar routine. Each morning waking to the jolting summons of a 7:30 a.m. alarm, sometimes collapsing back into bed for a few precious stolen minutes before the inevitability of preparing for the trudge to class. And always looking forward to time spent with Melanie – reading laughable articles on friendship, journaling about new paths to forge, and planning dream vacations to presumed paradises in Italy and Hawaii. Gabriela and Melanie get each other more completely than anyone else, and they savor their comforting moments of uninhibited relaxation together on the carpeted floor of Gabriela’s bedroom, their laptops and pencils propped comfortably on their laps; their words, spoken and written, whirling about; their laughter weaving through the empty spaces. They don’t have to act effortless here because it just is.

It sometimes seems as though their thoughts and insights press against the compactness of Forestview, yearning for expanded quantity and variety in the resources available nearby: the one traffic light,  the pressure to be consistent with the personalities that everyone already perceives them to have, the provincialism of home and school coexisting in a confined space. At times, it feels entrapping. But the familiarity of the town often alleviates the need to approach new groups of people, which reduces the apprehension that Gabriela sometimes feels at the daunting task of socialization. She ponders these juxtapositions, the highs and lows of the Venn diagram of her life, as she strolls through the streets of Forestview. Her laptop tucked under her arm and formative writing ideas spinning through her head, she smiles a greeting to another faculty kid across the street at the one traffic light, knowing that they both are savoring the last few precious days of summer, breathing more easily in the less monitored space of the off-season before returning to the constraints of the campus. She hopes she can go through the motions, maintaining her dispassionate veneer for another year, she thinks – and continues on.