Educated

I fetched the water. As I handed it over, I saw the smile on his face and
without thinking dumped the whole thing on his head. I made it down the hall
and was nearly to my room when he caught me.
“Apologize,” he said. Water dripped from his nose onto his T-shirt.
“No.”
He grabbed a fistful of my hair, a large clump, his grip fixed near the root
to give him greater leverage, and dragged me into the bathroom. I groped at
the door, catching hold of the frame, but he lifted me off the ground, flattened
my arms against my body, then dropped my head into the toilet. “Apologize,”
he said again. I said nothing. He stuck my head in further, so my nose
scraped the stained porcelain. I closed my eyes, but the smell wouldn’t let me
forget where I was.
I tried to imagine something else, something that would take me out of
myself, but the image that came to mind was of Sadie, crouching, compliant.
It pumped me full of bile. He held me there, my nose touching the bowl, for
perhaps a minute, then he let me up. The tips of my hair were wet; my scalp
was raw.
I thought it was over. I’d begun to back away when he seized my wrist and
folded it, curling my fingers and palm into a spiral. He continued folding
until my body began to coil, then he added more pressure, so that without
thinking, without realizing, I twisted myself into a dramatic bow, my back
bent, my head nearly touching the floor, my arm behind my back.
In the parking lot, when Shawn had shown me this hold, I’d moved only a
little, responding more to his description than to any physical necessity. It
hadn’t seemed particularly effective at the time, but now I understood the
maneuver for what it was: control. I could scarcely move, scarcely breathe,
without breaking my own wrist. Shawn held me in position with one hand;
the other he dangled loosely at his side, to show me how easy it was.
Still harder than if I were Sadie, I thought.
As if he could read my mind, he twisted my wrist further; my body was
coiled tightly, my face scraping the floor. I’d done all I could do to relieve the
pressure in my wrist. If he kept twisting, it would break.
“Apologize,” he said.
There was a long moment in which fire burned up my arm and into my
brain. “I’m sorry,” I said.
He dropped my wrist and I fell to the floor. I could hear his steps moving
down the hall. I stood and quietly locked the bathroom door, then I stared