Educated

Waiting for Christmas that year felt like waiting to walk off the edge of a
cliff. Not since Y2K had I felt so certain that something terrible was coming,
something that would obliterate everything I’d known before. And what
would replace it? I tried to imagine the future, to populate it with professors,
homework, classrooms, but my mind couldn’t conjure them. There was no
future in my imagination. There was New Year’s Eve, then there was
nothing.
I knew I should prepare, try to acquire the high school education Tyler had
told the university I had. But I didn’t know how, and I didn’t want to ask
Tyler for help. He was starting a new life at Purdue—he was even getting
married—and I doubted he wanted responsibility for mine.
I noticed, though, when he came home for Christmas, that he was reading a
book called Les Misérables, and I decided that it must be the kind of a book a
college student reads. I bought my own copy, hoping it would teach me about
history or literature, but it didn’t. It couldn’t, because I was unable to
distinguish between the fictional story and the factual backdrop. Napoleon
felt no more real to me than Jean Valjean. I had never heard of either.