I checked my name. There was no mistake. Somehow—and a miracle
was the only way I could account for it—I’d done it.
My first thought was a resolution: I resolved to never again work for
my father. I drove to the only grocery store in town, called Stokes, and
applied for a job bagging groceries. I was only sixteen, but I didn’t tell
the manager that and he hired me for forty hours a week. My first shift
started at four o’clock the next morning.
When I got home, Dad was driving the loader through the junkyard.
I stepped onto the ladder and grabbed hold of the rail. Over the roar of
the engine, I told him I’d found a job but that I would drive the crane
in the afternoons, until he could hire someone. He dropped the boom
and stared ahead.
“You’ve already decided,” he said without glancing at me. “No point
dragging it out.”
I applied to BYU a week later. I had no idea how to write the
application, so Tyler wrote it for me. He said I’d been educated
according to a rigorous program designed by my mother, who’d made
sure I met all the requirements to graduate.
My feelings about the application changed from day to day, almost
from minute to minute. Sometimes I was sure God wanted me to go to
college, because He’d given me that twenty-eight. Other times I was
sure I’d be rejected, and that God would punish me for applying, for
trying to abandon my own family. But whatever the outcome, I knew I
would leave. I would go somewhere, even if it wasn’t to school. Home
had changed the moment I’d taken Shawn to that hospital instead of to
Mother. I had rejected some part of it; now it was rejecting me.
The admissions committee was efficient; I didn’t wait long. The
letter arrived in a normal envelope. My heart sank when I saw it.
Rejection letters are small, I thought. I opened it and read
“Congratulations.” I’d been admitted for the semester beginning
January 5.
Mother hugged me. Dad tried to be cheerful. “It proves one thing at
least,” he said. “Our home school is as good as any public education.”
—THREE DAYS BEFORE I turned seventeen, Mother drove me to Utah to find
an apartment. The search took all day, and we arrived home late to