Educated

The rest of my class arrived. When they saw the outfits, they rushed into the studio to see what Caroline had for them. Caroline ...

had no idea the costume would be so immodest. “I’m furious with Caroline Moyle!” she said. I leaned forward to see Mother’s face ...

obsessed with balance and often slapped my knees to remind me to stand powerfully, to take up my own space. After a few lessons, ...

moment, then his eyes began to shine and he shook Papa Jay’s hand like they were old friends. I’d never seen this side of my fat ...

9 Perfect in His Generations The summer I sang the lead for Annie it was 1999. My father was in serious preparedness mode. Not s ...

pit and buried it with a shovel, carefully planting nettles and sow thistle in the freshly tossed dirt so they would grow and co ...

In our basement I found an oversized knit sweater, stained and hole-ridden, and an ugly blue dress, which Mother bleached to a f ...

years just to see me corrupted on a stage. Then he drove me to the rehearsal. Nearly every night he said he was going to put a s ...

wanted to tell you something.” I braced myself, for what I wasn’t sure, then he said, “I wanted to tell you that your singing is ...

panic. What if he found the root cellar? What if he discovered the fuel tank? Then I understood, finally, what the rifle was for ...

I held my breath. One more minute, I thought, before everything is gone. Then it was 12:00. The TV was still buzzing, its lights ...

10 Shield of Feathers When January 1 dawned like any other morning, it broke Dad’s spirit. He never again mentioned Y2K. He slip ...

Then I’m in a hammock on the back porch, rocking lazily in the orange light of the desert sunset, and Audrey appears and says Da ...

couldn’t seem to gain my balance. I looked around but saw no one. The van was empty. My family was gone. I circled the wreck twi ...

distorted, as if I were looking at her through a pool of water. Her voice was high in pitch, cheerful. It told me to imagine mys ...

My own memory of Shawn begins in the kitchen, perhaps two months after the second accident. I am making corn chowder. The door s ...

11 Instinct When Grandpa-down-the-hill was a young man, there’d been herds of livestock spread across the mountain, and they wer ...

these horses as they bucked, reared, rolled or leapt. I hit the dirt in a hundred sprawling postures, each time righting myself ...

paws stilled. In the space of a moment, he had accepted our claim to ride him, to his being ridden. He had accepted the world as ...

It was a hazy summer evening, a month before I turned fifteen. The sun had dipped below Buck’s Peak but the sky still held a few ...