Educated

“I saw you talking to Charles,” he said. “You don’t want people thinking
you’re that kind of girl.”
“The kind that talks?”
“You know what I mean,” he said.
The next night, Shawn came into my room unexpectedly and found me
smudging my eyelashes with Audrey’s old mascara.
“You wear makeup now?” he said.
“I guess.”
He spun around to leave but paused in the doorframe. “I thought you were
better,” he said. “But you’re just like the rest.”
He stopped calling me Siddle Lister. “Let’s go, Fish Eyes!” he shouted
from across the theater one night. Charles looked around curiously. Shawn
began to explain the name, so I started laughing—loud enough, I hoped, to
drown him out. I laughed as if I loved the name.
The first time I wore lip gloss, Shawn said I was a whore. I was in my
bedroom, standing in front of my mirror, trying it out, when Shawn appeared
in the doorway. He said it like a joke but I wiped the color from my lips
anyway. Later that night, at the theater, when I noticed Charles staring at
Sadie, I reapplied it and saw Shawn’s expression twist. The drive home that
night was tense. The temperature outside had fallen well below zero. I said I
was cold and Shawn moved to turn up the heat. Then he paused, laughed to
himself, and rolled all the windows down. The January wind hit me like a
bucket of ice. I tried to roll up my window, but he’d put on the child lock. I
asked him to roll it up. “I’m cold,” I kept saying, “I’m really, really cold.” He
just laughed. He drove all twelve miles like that, cackling as if it were a
game, as if we were both in on it, as if my teeth weren’t clattering.
I thought things would get better when Shawn dumped Sadie—I suppose
I’d convinced myself that it was her fault, the things he did, and that without
her he would be different. After Sadie, he took up with an old girlfriend, Erin.
She was older, less willing to play his games, and at first it seemed I was
right, that he was doing better.
Then Charles asked Sadie to dinner, Sadie said yes, and Shawn heard
about it. I was working late at Randy’s that night when Shawn turned up,
frothing at the mouth. I left with him, thinking I could calm him, but I
couldn’t. He drove around town for two hours, searching for Charles’s Jeep,
cursing and swearing that when he found that bastard he was “gonna give
him a new face.” I sat in the passenger seat of his truck, listening to the