Educated

The stomach ulcers returned, burning and aching through the night. Once, I
awoke to Robin shaking me. She said I’d been shouting in my sleep. I
touched my face and it was wet. She wrapped me in her arms so tight I felt
cocooned.
The next morning, Robin asked me to go with her to a doctor—for the
ulcers but also for an X-ray of my foot, because my big toe had turned black.
I said I didn’t need a doctor. The ulcers would heal, and someone had already
treated the toe.
Robin’s eyebrow rose. “Who? Who treated it?”
I shrugged. She assumed my mother had, and I let her believe it. The truth
was, the morning after Thanksgiving, I had asked Shawn to tell me if it was
broken. He’d knelt on the kitchen floor and I’d dropped my foot into his lap.
In that posture he seemed to shrink. He examined the toe for a moment, then
he looked up at me and I saw something in his blue eyes. I thought he was
about to say he was sorry, but just when I expected his lips to part he grasped
the tip of my toe and yanked. It felt as if my foot had exploded, so intense
was the shock that shot through my leg. I was still trying to swallow spasms
of pain when Shawn stood, put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Sorry,
Siddle Lister, but it hurts less if you don’t see it coming.”
A week after Robin asked to take me to the doctor, I again awoke to her
shaking me. She gathered me up and pressed me to her, as if her body could
hold me together, could keep me from flying apart.
“I think you need to see the bishop,” she said the next morning.
“I’m fine,” I said, making a cliché of myself the way not-fine people do. “I
just need sleep.”
Soon after, I found a pamphlet for the university counseling service on my
desk. I barely looked at it, just knocked it into the trash. I could not see a
counselor. To see one would be to ask for help, and I believed myself
invincible. It was an elegant deception, a mental pirouette. The toe was not
broken because it was not breakable. Only an X-ray could prove otherwise.
Thus, the X-ray would break my toe.
My algebra final was swept up in this superstition. In my mind, it acquired
a kind of mystical power. I studied with the intensity of the insane, believing
that if I could best this exam, win that impossible perfect score, even with my
broken toe and without Charles to help me, it would prove that I was above it
all. Untouchable.