Educated

radiator or throwing the five hundredth chunk of steel into the bin, I’d find
myself imagining the classrooms where Tyler was spending his days. My
interest grew more acute with every deadening hour in the junkyard, until one
day I had a bizarre thought: that I should enroll in the public school.
Mother had always said we could go to school if we wanted. We just had
to ask Dad, she said. Then we could go.
But I didn’t ask. There was something in the hard line of my father’s face,
in the quiet sigh of supplication he made every morning before he began
family prayer, that made me think my curiosity was an obscenity, an affront
to all he’d sacrificed to raise me.
I made some effort to keep up my schooling in the free time I had between
scrapping and helping Mother make tinctures and blend oils. Mother had
given up homeschooling by then, but still had a computer, and there were
books in the basement. I found the science book, with its colorful
illustrations, and the math book I remembered from years before. I even
located a faded green book of history. But when I sat down to study I nearly
always fell asleep. The pages were glossy and soft, made softer by the hours
I’d spent hauling scrap.
When Dad saw me with one of those books, he’d try to get me away from
them. Perhaps he was remembering Tyler. Perhaps he thought if he could just
distract me for a few years, the danger would pass. So he made up jobs for
me to do, whether they needed doing or not. One afternoon, after he’d caught
me looking at the math book, he and I spent an hour hauling buckets of water
across the field to his fruit trees, which wouldn’t have been at all unusual
except it was during a rainstorm.
But if Dad was trying to keep his children from being overly interested in
school and books—from being seduced by the Illuminati, like Tyler had been
—he would have done better to turn his attention to Richard. Richard was
also supposed to spend his afternoons making tinctures for Mother, but he
almost never did. Instead, he’d disappear. I don’t know if Mother knew
where he went, but I did. In the afternoons, Richard could nearly always be
found in the dark basement, wedged in the crawl space between the couch
and the wall, an encyclopedia propped open in front of him. If Dad happened
by he’d turn the light off, muttering about wasted electricity. Then I’d find
some excuse to go downstairs so I could turn it back on. If Dad came through
again, a snarl would sound through the house, and Mother would have to sit
through a lecture on leaving lights on in empty rooms. She never scolded me,