Educated

was silence while forks scraped plates. Mother asked if he was serious. He
said he wasn’t, that he figured he’d find somebody better before he actually
had to go through with it. Emily sat next to him, wearing a warped smile.
I didn’t sleep that night. I kept checking the bolt on the door. The present
seemed vulnerable to the past, as if it might be overwhelmed by it, as if I
might blink, and when my eyes opened I would be fifteen.
The next morning Shawn said he and Emily were planning a twenty-mile
horse ride to Bloomington Lake. I surprised both of us by saying I wanted to
go. I felt anxious when I imagined all those hours in the wilderness with
Shawn, but I pushed the anxiety aside. There was something I had to do.
Fifty miles feels like five hundred on a horse, particularly if your body is
more accustomed to a chair than a saddle. When we arrived at the lake,
Shawn and Emily slipped nimbly off their horses and began to make camp; it
was all I could do to unhitch Apollo’s saddle and ease myself onto a fallen
tree. I watched Emily set up the tent we were to share. She was tall and
unthinkably slight, with long, straight hair so blond it was nearly silver.
We built a fire and sang campfire songs. We played cards. Then we went
to our tents. I lay awake in the dark next to Emily, listening to the crickets. I
was trying to imagine how to begin the conversation—how to tell her she
shouldn’t marry my brother—when she spoke. “I want to talk to you about
Shawn,” she said. “I know he’s got some problems.”
“He does,” I said.
“He’s a spiritual man,” Emily said. “God has given him a special calling.
To help people. He told me how he helped Sadie. And how he helped you.”
“He didn’t help me.” I wanted to say more, to explain to Emily what the
bishop had explained to me. But they were his words, not mine. I had no
words. I had come fifty miles to speak, and was mute.
“The devil tempts him more than other men,” Emily said. “Because of his
gifts, because he’s a threat to Satan. That’s why he has problems. Because of
his righteousness.”
She sat up. I could see the outline of her long ponytail in the dark. “He said
he’ll hurt me,” she said. “I know it’s because of Satan. But sometimes I’m
scared of him, I’m scared of what he’ll do.”
I told her she shouldn’t marry someone who scares her, that no one should,
but the words left my lips stillborn. I believed them, but I didn’t understand
them well enough to make them live.