The Door Cherilyn Opened: Two Girls and the Secret School of Avalon

By Janet Kira Lessin
Contributor: Dr. Sasha Alex Lessin

The Sealed Room Above the Boulevard

For years I flew. Most nights my soul rose out of the front bedroom at 800 Orchard Avenue and lifted over the rooftops of Avalon, the small borough along the Ohio River Boulevard where I spent my childhood. I moved with ease through doors, windows, walls, and ceilings.

One destination pulled at me above all the rest: a tall house at the corner of the boulevard and Prospect, the building that stands today at 735 Ohio River Boulevard and is called Captain’s Quarters. A riverboat captain built it around 1865, and its top level holds a crow’s nest room that overlooks the Ohio.

I rose to that height night after night, and the top floors held me out. Whatever lived in that crow’s nest kept its threshold sealed against a child who slipped through every other barrier in her world.

I pictured ghosts behind those windows, the original builder, the families who had lived there across a hundred years. The truth stayed hidden from me. I would learn only later who waited behind those sealed doors.

Cherilyn Across the Alley

My soul circled that sealed height and ached to enter, and the wanting ran deep enough that I spoke it aloud to the one person who might understand. Cherilyn was my best friend, a year older than me, and she lived straight across the alley behind our homes.

Her house rose larger than mine, two floors and a full attic above a first-floor apartment, and her family kept the upper floor, her parents and her grandfather and her two older brothers. Her kitchen window sat on the second floor and looked down over my backyard, and my mother’s kitchen door faced up toward it, so the two kitchens watched each other across the alley.

Our mothers knew each other across that gap. From the time we could walk, the two of us crossed between the doors on our own, and our mothers watched from the back while we looked both ways and stepped across, because the borough kept small girls safe enough for the journey. At four or five years old I told Cherilyn what I longed for. I wanted inside that building.

The Girl Who Knocked

Cherilyn came last of six children, born to a mother of my own grandmother’s generation, cherished and sure of her welcome in every house on the hill. That certainty made her bold.

She was as magical to me as the small teachers themselves, and I adored her and followed her every whim. A timid child might have felt the pull toward the sealed building and stayed outside circling the windows the way I did. Cherilyn felt it and knocked.

Cookies and Milk at the Captain’s House

Cherilyn took my hand. She walked me down the road to the tall house at the lower corner and knocked on the kitchen door. The kitchen faced the rear the way our own kitchens did, and the back door served as the true entrance for everyone on our side of the hill, because the boulevard out front had grown to four lanes with heavy trucks.

An old man and an old woman opened the door and welcomed us in for cookies and milk. My whole body buzzed with excitement and nerves at once. My manners kept my questions quiet. I hoped for a tour and held my tongue, and the two of us sat in that kitchen, two small girls and a kind old couple, while the sealed floors waited above us.

The Hill Before the Houses

I stand in that back yard again when I remote view, and I lay the older world over the one I knew. The streets fall away. The neighborhood dissolves into farms and woods, and the valley opens clean to the river below. My home at 800 Orchard began as the original farmhouse, raised in 1848 on the highest point of the hill, and its acres once ran down toward the water.

A barn likely stood where the captain’s tall house rose later. From my yard on the summit, before anyone sold the lots and filled them with homes, a person could see straight to 735 and straight down to the Ohio, and the view was gorgeous. The railway was only then reaching along the river.

The Land Remembers Its Shapes

I imagine the two riverboat captains knew each other. One built high on the hill, one built lower toward the water, close enough to wave across open land. They may have stood as neighbors. They may even have been brothers.

The pattern repeated a century later in my own family, for when my mother’s sister married, she moved into a house only four doors away, and June and Shirley lived out their lives about the same span apart as the two captains, though in opposite directions. The land remembers its shapes. Two houses on one hill, two sisters four doors apart, two girls across an alley, the same measure of closeness laid down again and again.

Two Schools, One Friend

The same partnership followed us into our daylight lives. When I begged my mother to enroll me in the church kindergarten, the rule was that I was too young. Cherilyn went there, and I wanted to walk beside her in that school the way I walked beside her everywhere else. I pressed my mother to ask the church board anyway. The board set aside its own rule and let me in, and a man of God found the request beyond his power to refuse. That first day my mother walked us to the door. Every day after, the two of us walked to school and home again on our own, a long way across many streets, past the school guard, among hundreds of children of every age streaming between the grade school and the high school that stood side by side.

Door After Door Opened

Those years belonged to a different world. Mothers stayed home. Most owned no cars and never learned to drive, so children walked, and the borough held them while they did so. We walked into the choir together and sang like angels, and I carried a natural gift for harmony. Between the ages of five and twelve, we roamed the neighborhood and knocked on doors to sing carols, and the neighbors welcomed us back whenever we learned new songs. Our reward ran to milk and graham crackers, sometimes water on a hot summer afternoon, sometimes nothing at all, and we stayed happy either way. We loved the bond with all those people old enough to be our grandparents. Door after door opened to two small girls who came singing.

The Hidden School We Both Carried

I understand now why Cherilyn could lead me to the captain’s house with such ease. She lived in the same double world I lived in. Neither of us carried the upper school in our waking minds, yet our souls carried it whole, and one soul recognized the other. Cherilyn crossed the alley to fetch the younger girl who kept circling the windows from the outside, and she did it on a pull she could no more name than I could name mine.

The Teachers Who Gathered Us

The teachers came warm. Small and gentle, the size of children themselves, they felt safe because they matched us. I found them cute. A being who stands at a child’s own height carries little threat, and the school above the corner ran on that mercy; teachers built to reassure the students they had gathered. There they showed us how to wake the dormant strands of our own DNA, skills we needed because we already bridged two worlds. Cherilyn and I were two of those students, chosen young, walked in through a kitchen door by a girl one year older who moved on the same hidden knowing.

Neither of us held the school in our waking minds. Our daylight selves knew only a pull, a wanting, a building at the corner that claimed a small girl’s whole attention. Our souls held the rest. That is the way of the Experiencer, who lives in separate rooms until the hour arrives to open them, our lives and minds kept apart until the time is right. The old couple met us with kindness and a gentle confusion, two tiny girls at their kitchen door, and they walked us in while the sealed floors waited above. We stayed in the kitchen. Our manners held us there. My whole body wanted to bolt through the house and climb to the top and confirm with waking eyes what my soul already knew by night, and I trust Cherilyn felt the same tug. We held still, ate what they set before us, drank our milk, and walked back up the road in silence. We climbed to the alley where our two backyards met, and there we parted for our own kitchen doors, neither of us saying a word that mattered.

Two Ways of Knowing

That is the part I hold closest. A child obsessed with a sealed building, circling it in flight and failing to enter, and a best friend who took her hand and walked her to the door. The astral child pressed against the upper floor and stayed sealed out. The earthly child, Cherilyn beside her, knocked and won a welcome for cookies and milk. Two ways of knowing, and the humbler one opened the door. We learned together, two girls of Avalon, in a school the daylight world stayed blind to.

The Book That Named It

The memory waited in me for decades, sealed the way the upper floors stayed sealed, until the hour arrived to open it. That hour came in February of 1997. A friend I will call Adam pressed a book into my hands as I ran for my plane to Australia, Whitley Streiber’s The Secret School, and he went out of his way to be sure I carried it aboard. Adam knew me from the day we met at a spiritual center, and he knew me at once for what I am. He cared, without agenda, the way a true friend cares. I read the book across the Pacific and felt a sealed piece of my own childhood turn like a key, the school at the Captain’s house rising into my waking mind at last. Streiber’s pages held many echoes of my own and more differences besides, and they gave me words for a thing I had carried since I was four.

When the Key Turned

I spent my 43rd birthday in Australia. By summer I met Sasha. 1997 became the finest year of my life, and it opened with a mystery piece of my grand personal puzzle sliding home.

You will know when it is time.