non challenge cup in high school ( not!)

( this could be a whole novel and maybe one day I will write it but for the moment, Susan is waiting patiently to watch our latest guilty pleasure from Netflix on demand,  Mistresses, Google it. ) Can one start a sentence with parentheses?
My high school career started badly after a wonderful happy popular friendly time in junior high ( ages 9 - 13 in Britain that was in the 70s). It was like everyone changed over the summer between junior high and senior high. Everyone, dyed their hair, got a boyfriend, got an attitude and I got there completely in the dark and without having read the memo. To be truthful I would have ignored the memo anyway, but I eschewed this peer pressure to do all this weird stuff to ones body and just thought it was plain silly. I was also more notable plagued by a burgeoning case of OCD which meant that I flung all my clothes off when I got home from school, made everyone take off their shoes when they entered the house ( rare in the days before heavy duty hygiene was popular) and was frightened to death of dog shit ( it was everywhere in those days.)
After one year at the local high school we begged our parents to send us to a Quaker boarding school; ( we were brought up Quakers and went to fun summer camps with them, where we had a ball and fantasized about going to a sort of Quaker summer camp all year round). Quaker Boarding School (QBS) in England was not the fantasy we dreamed of. It was peer pressure without the inconvenience of parents' input, it was cliques - the trends and the plebs, and as a new girl in the fourth year with no fancy clothes and a northern English accent you can guess that I wasn't in the in crowd.
I don't have any fun pictures to share with you all right now, but I did have a Linda McCartney shaggy look, as well as  a big fat frizz perm, pigtails and  fifty pence piece glasses and finally contacts.  I was determined to overcome my braces, specs and frizz and I think I did eventually. We ( my twin sister and I) made our own clothes because we couldn't afford the nice fancy ones that the other students wore when they weren't wearing uniform. We never understood algebra because we arrived half way through that lesson and no one explained it to us properly. Thank-fully we excelled academically, learnt to play tennis ( you were nobody if you couldn't play tennis) on beautiful grass courts and got good grades. We finally acclimatized to the place and did our best to enjoy ourselves. I did win a cup, ( the "dwama" cup for being an excellent "dwama" person, directing plays and acting in them, and overcoming my horrid accent ( sic) to become the chosen reader at any big event with my lovely posh accent and darling delivery). And my twin sister won three of the other top honors. So there, snobs!