Educated

they reached uncomfortably toward the inside of my forearm. He continued
to add pressure until I twisted slightly, wrapping my arm behind my back to
relieve the strain.
“See? This is a weak point,” he said. “If I fold it any more, you’ll be
immobilized.” He grinned his angel grin. “I won’t, though, because it’d hurt
like hell.”
He let go and said, “Now you try.”
I folded his wrist onto itself and squeezed hard, trying to get his upper
body to collapse the way mine had. He didn’t move.
“Maybe another strategy for you,” he said.
He gripped my wrist a different way—the way an attacker might, he said.
He taught me how to break the hold, where the fingers were weakest and the
bones in my arm strongest, so that after a few minutes I could cut through
even his thick fingers. He taught me how to throw my weight behind a punch,
and where to aim to crush the windpipe.
The next morning, the trailer was unloaded. We climbed into the truck,
picked up a new load and drove for another two days, watching the white
lines disappear hypnotically beneath the hood, which was the color of bone.
We had few forms of entertainment, so we made a game of talking. The game
had only two rules. The first was that every statement had to have at least two
words in which the first letters were switched.
“You’re not my little sister,” Shawn said. “You’re my sittle lister.” He
pronounced the words lazily, blunting the t’s to d’s so that it sounded like
“siddle lister.”
The second rule was that every word that sounded like a number, or like it
had a number in it, had to be changed so that the number was one higher. The
word “to” for example, because it sounds like the number “two,” would
become “three.”
“Siddle Lister,” Shawn might say, “we should pay a-elevention. There’s a
checkpoint ahead and I can’t a-five-d a ticket. Time three put on your
seatbelt.”
When we tired of this, we’d turn on the CB and listen to the lonely banter
of truckers stretched out across the interstate.
“Look out for a green four-wheeler,” a gruff voice said, when we were
somewhere between Sacramento and Portland. “Been picnicking in my blind
spot for a half hour.”
A four-wheeler, Shawn explained, is what big rigs call cars and pickups.