Educated

would need to do, or not do, to get along with the other girls in the apartment.
No keeping rotten food in the cupboards or leaving rancid dishes in the sink.
Robin explained this at an apartment meeting. When she’d finished another
roommate, Megan, cleared her throat.
“I’d like to remind everyone to wash their hands after they use the
bathroom,” she said. “And not just with water, but with soap.”
Robin rolled her eyes. “I’m sure everyone here washes their hands.”
That night, after I left the bathroom, I stopped at the sink in the hall and
washed my hands. With soap.
The next day was the first day of class. Charles had designed my course
schedule. He’d signed me up for two music classes and a course on religion,
all of which he said would be easy for me. Then he’d enrolled me in two
more challenging courses—college algebra, which terrified me, and biology,
which didn’t but only because I didn’t know what it was.
Algebra threatened to put an end to my scholarship. The professor spent
every lecture muttering inaudibly as he paced in front of the chalkboard. I
wasn’t the only one who was lost, but I was more lost than anyone else.
Charles tried to help, but he was starting his senior year of high school and
had his own schoolwork. In October I took the midterm and failed it.
I stopped sleeping. I stayed up late, twisting my hair into knots as I tried to
wrest meaning from the textbook, then lying in bed and brooding over my
notes. I developed stomach ulcers. Once, Jenni found me curled up on a
stranger’s lawn, halfway between campus and our apartment. My stomach
was on fire; I was shaking with the pain, but I wouldn’t let her take me to a
hospital. She sat with me for half an hour, then walked me home.
The pain in my stomach intensified, burning through the night, making it
impossible to sleep. I needed money for rent, so I got a job as a janitor for the
engineering building. My shift began every morning at four. Between the
ulcers and the janitorial work, I barely slept. Jenni and Robin kept saying I
should see a doctor but I didn’t. I told them I was going home for
Thanksgiving and that my mother would cure me. They exchanged nervous
glances but didn’t say anything.
Charles said my behavior was self-destructive, that I had an almost
pathological inability to ask for help. He told me this on the phone, and he
said it so quietly it was almost a whisper.
I told him he was crazy.