Educated

upright. The kitchen was spinning; strange flecks of pink and yellow drifted
before my eyes.
Mother was sobbing, clawing at her hair.
“I see you for what you are,” Shawn said. His eyes were wild. “You
pretend to be saintly and churchish. But I see you. I see how you prance
around with Charles like a prostitute.” He turned to Mother to observe the
effect of his words on her. She had collapsed at the kitchen table.
“She does not,” Mother whispered.
Shawn was still turned toward her. He said she had no idea of the lies I
told, how I’d fooled her, how I played the good girl at home but in town I
was a lying whore. I inched toward the back door.
Mother told me to take her car and go. Shawn turned to me. “You’ll be
needing these,” he said, holding up Mother’s keys.
“She’s not going anywhere until she admits she’s a whore,” Shawn said.
He grabbed my wrist and my body slipped into the familiar posture, head
thrust forward, arm coiled around my lower back, wrist folded absurdly onto
itself. Like a dance step, my muscles remembered and raced to get ahead of
the music. The air poured from my lungs as I tried to bend deeper, to give my
wrist bone every possible inch of relief.
“Say it,” he said.
But I was somewhere else. I was in the future. In a few hours, Shawn
would be kneeling by my bed, and he’d be so very sorry. I knew it even as I
hunched there.
“What’s going on?” A man’s voice floated up from the stairwell in the
hall.
I turned my head and saw a face hovering between two wooden railings. It
was Tyler.
I was hallucinating. Tyler never came home. As I thought that, I laughed
out loud, a high-pitched cackle. What kind of lunatic would come back here
once they’d escaped? There were now so many pink and yellow specks in my
vision, it was as if I were inside a snow globe. That was good. It meant I was
close to passing out. I was looking forward to it.
Shawn dropped my wrist and again I fell. I looked up and saw that his gaze
was fixed on the stairwell. Only then did it occur to me that Tyler was real.
Shawn took a step back. He had waited until Dad and Luke were out of the
house, away on a job, so his physicality could go unchallenged. Confronting