Educated

sooner. I’d been afraid of how I would feel, afraid that if he died, I might be
glad.
I’m sure the doctors wanted to keep him in the hospital, but we didn’t have
insurance, and the bill was already so large that Shawn would be making
payments a decade later. The moment he was stable enough to travel, we took
him home.
He lived on the sofa in the front room for two months. He was physically
weak—it was all he had in him to make it to the bathroom and back. He’d
lost his hearing completely in one ear and had trouble hearing with the other,
so he often turned his head when people spoke to him, orienting his better ear
toward them, rather than his eyes. Except for this strange movement and the
bandages from the surgery, he looked normal, no swelling, no bruises.
According to the doctors, this was because the damage was very serious: a
lack of external injuries meant the damage was all internal.
It took some time for me to realize that although Shawn looked the same,
he wasn’t. He seemed lucid, but if you listened carefully his stories didn’t
make sense. They weren’t really stories at all, just one tangent after another.
I felt guilty that I hadn’t visited him immediately in the hospital, so to
make it up to him I quit my job and tended him day and night. When he
wanted water, I fetched it; if he was hungry, I cooked.
Sadie started coming around, and Shawn welcomed her. I looked forward
to her visits because they gave me time to study. Mother thought it was
important that I stay with Shawn, so no one interrupted me. For the first time
in my life I had long stretches in which to learn—without having to scrap, or
strain tinctures, or check inventory for Randy. I examined Tyler’s notes, read
and reread his careful explanations. After a few weeks of this, by magic or
miracle, the concepts took hold. I retook the practice test. The advanced
algebra was still indecipherable—it came from a world beyond my ability to
perceive—but the trigonometry had become intelligible, messages written in
a language I could understand, from a world of logic and order that only
existed in black ink and on white paper.
The real world, meanwhile, plunged into chaos. The doctors told Mother
that Shawn’s injury might have altered his personality—that in the hospital,
he had shown tendencies toward volatility, even violence, and that such
changes might be permanent.
He did succumb to rages, moments of blind anger when all he wanted was
to hurt someone. He had an intuition for nastiness, for saying the single most