Educated: Chapters 9–16

I had rehearsals most nights at the Worm Creek Opera House, a dilapidated theater near the only stoplight in town.

“You should take this one,” she said, passing me a navy dress with white braided cords arranged across the bodice.

Sometimes he played the part of an agent or manager, correcting my technique or suggesting songs for my repertoire, even advising me about my health.

He sat as if posed, with no agitation, no embarrassment, as if there were a perfectly mundane explanation for why he was sitting up, alone, at near two in the morning, watching Ralph and Alice Kramden prepare for a Christmas party.

He slipped into despondency, dragging himself in from the junkyard each night, silent and heavy.

But after, when it was just the two of us, the mask lowered, the bravado peeled off like a breastplate, and he was my brother.

They stayed, stubborn relics of a misplaced childhood, reminding anyone who witnessed his pointless, endless, feckless belligerence, that this man was once a boy.

They stayed, stubborn relics of a misplaced childhood, reminding anyone who witnessed his pointless, endless, feckless belligerence, that this man was once a boy.

I still don’t know what he meant by it, but what I understood at the time was that I could trust myself: that there was something in me, something like what was in the prophets, and that it was not male or female, not old or young; a kind of worth that was inherent and unshakable.

What I knew of physics I had learned in the junkyard, where the physical world often seemed unstable, capricious.

I would remain a child, in perpetuity, always, or I would lose him.

His eyes were closed, his jaw slackened, as if he were listening to seraphic voices.

I lacked even a basic knowledge of grammar, though I was learning, beginning with nouns and moving on to prepositions and gerunds.

I’d need a high score—a twenty-seven at least, which meant the top fifteen percent of my cohort.

Dad had a contract to build a milking barn in Oneida County, about twenty miles from Buck’s Peak, so Shawn puttered around the yard, adjusting schematics and measuring I-beams.