Perkins Day

Perkins Day is a local private school that Auden attends after a brief spell at Jackson High. It marks an intermediate stage in her increasingly specialized education, and later serves as a reference point for the social experiences she missed while pursuing academic achievement.

Identity and Place in Auden’s Education

After Auden’s mother notices a spelling mistake and a grammatical error on her English syllabus, Auden leaves Jackson High after only a couple of weeks and transfers to Perkins Day. The school is smaller and more academically rigorous than Jackson High. Auden attends it before moving on to Kiffney-Brown, an elite charter school with a much smaller enrollment and a university connection. Her successive school changes reflect the importance her family places on academic standards, while also repeatedly placing her in educational settings unlike those of many other teenagers.

Former Classmates and Missed Milestones

Auden’s time at Perkins Day remains socially relevant after she has moved on. Her former friends spend their senior year discussing familiar rites and activities, while Auden’s own attention is fixed on academics. Prom is the only such milestone she considers; Jason Talbot, her chief competitor for the highest GPA, asks her as a kind of peace offering, but cancels at the last minute after receiving an invitation to an ecology conference. The missed prom crystallizes the gap between academic competition and participation in the social life her classmates share.

Summer Visits and Social Distance

During the summer before college, Auden receives invitations from her former Perkins Day friends to dinners and trips to the lake. She wants to see them, but their conversations about summer jobs and boyfriends feel remote from her experience after two years at the highly academic Kiffney-Brown. A few awkward outings lead her to make excuses and decline further invitations; eventually, her friends stop asking. Perkins Day thus represents not simply an earlier school but a social world Auden once knew and can no longer comfortably rejoin.

Narrative Significance

Perkins Day provides a measure of the cost of Auden’s academic drive without being portrayed as the cause of her isolation on its own. The contrast between her former classmates’ senior-year memories and her own intense preparation for college makes visible what achievement has displaced: shared experiences she dismisses as unnecessary, yet privately wonders about. The school’s importance in the narrative lies in this contrast between educational advancement and the ordinary teenage life Auden has had little opportunity to experience.