I am going to tell you about a rather wonderful, yet fleeting experience I had the summer before senior year. From the outside looking in, it could have been the experience of any 17-year-old. That spring I had been accepted to the South Carolina Governor's School for the Arts and Humanities, a prestigious program, and I was ecstatic. All my hard work had finally paid off, all the English classes, poetry contests, and writing workshops where I was the only one under 35, and then the only girl who didn't carve gnomes in her arm with a butter knife in her spare time while eating a box of dou…