“Hey Rachel, what is a harlot?” “Shut up, I’m trying to study,” I replied with my usual teenage sensitivity. It was study time at Stringer Hall, our residential school, and that also meant it was officially quiet time.

My classmate had such a gift for asking jarring questions out of the blue. Questions like, “Where do you suppose that guy got his clothes?”

As though I knew the answers to everything. Mostly, I think she was just using her rhetorical inquiries to lead into something else she had on her mind. She had to do it now, of all times, when I had an urgent assignment due the next day.

But I was curious now, so I had to know:

“Why do you ask?”

“It’s just that Mrs. Aech was razzing Ethel earlier about doing her makeup the way she does. She said she looked like a ‘harlot.’ Okay, so what’s a harlot?”

“It’s some kind of a whore from the Bible, okay?” I answered peevishly. “Anything else you want to ask me now that I can’t concentrate?”

“Doing her makeup the way she does,” meant too much blue eye-shadow, pasted on mascara, and any number of other garish colours collected from wherever it was that Ethel found her makeup.

Privately, the girls often joked that she had a secret supply of “ugliness” she would dip into from time to time. Cruel, but quite ordinary. It is one of life’s mysteries that, while we are in our teens, our sense of cruelty for some reason becomes honed to a fine edge.

And then there are those who carry that cruelty into adulthood. Mrs. Aech (not her real name) was one of those, and she took every opportunity to humiliate Ethel (also not her real name) and the rest of us girls.

It seemed a trivial matter then, part of day-to-day existence, but looking back upon it all through adult eyes makes me shake my head at Mrs. Aech’s complete tactlessness.

Back then, it seemed, we had no identity of our own. It was bad enough to be herded into a dining room like cattle for study period, but to have your appearance made the subject of comment for all to hear was bordering on abuse.

It was a given, though, that Mrs. Aech seemed to have it in for the older girls — especially in the looks department. A day didn’t go by where an unfortunate girl wouldn’t be sent back from sitting down to lunch or dinner, made to change a “too revealing” blouse or skirt. Sometimes, it was to re-style the hair.

The boys, oddly, didn’t seem to become the objects of Mrs. Aech’s wrath. The boys, it seemed, could get away with anything from ripped jeans to long hair. The girls could not.

This was not the only double standard. There was also the fact that Mrs. Aech herself was a livid mess of powders, bloody red lipstick and rouge. Her hair was a perpetual nest of thickly dyed purple.

It seemed strange to me that the least bit of makeup on us girls made us “The Whore of Babylon!” as Mrs. Aech liked to call us. All this from a woman armoured in cosmetics, whose every gesture was accompanied by the sparkle of numerous jewels.

Not only was this double standard damaging to a developing girl’s self-esteem, but, in a way, it betrayed exactly what Mrs. Aech thought of Inuit girls.

Or wished to think of us? Were we, in her mind, really little Whores of Babylon? According to this overly made-up woman, the least bit of makeup on us (as well as giving us cancer, in her opinion) made us harlots.

Most of us Stringer Halls kids came from small Inuit communities, and almost all of us had no money to spend on clothing. We wore the school uniform of white, long-sleeved shirt, navy slacks, and boarding-school-issue mukluks. And, of course, when we needed glasses, we got the nice, big, black, standard, welfare issue things.

I have always felt that the residential school system was somewhat schizophrenic in its approach to raising kids. True, it was cruel as well, but this is a well-known fact. But what exactly did they think they wanted us to be?

Next week: Lessons in adversity