ice-blue sofa and pale walls. I smell its sterilized air. I hear the ticking of a
plastic clock.
Sitting across from me is my father, and as I look into his worn face it hits
me, a truth so powerful I don’t know why I’ve never understood it before.
The truth is this: that I am not a good daughter. I am a traitor, a wolf among
sheep; there is something different about me and that difference is not good. I
want to bellow, to weep into my father’s knees and promise never to do it
again. But wolf that I am, I am still above lying, and anyway he would sniff
the lie. We both know that if I ever again find Shawn on the highway, soaked
in crimson, I will do exactly what I have just done.
I am not sorry, merely ashamed.
The envelope arrived three weeks later, just as Shawn was getting back on his
feet. I tore it open, feeling numb, as if I were reading my sentence after the
guilty verdict had already been handed down. I scanned down to the
composite score. Twenty-eight. I checked it again. 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