Educated

I had the root canal. I bought my textbooks, paid rent, and had money left
over. The bishop said I should treat myself to something, but I said I couldn’t,
I had to save the money. He told me I could afford to spend some.
“Remember,” he said, “you can apply for the same amount next year.” I
bought a new Sunday dress.
I’d believed the money would be used to control me, but what it did was
enable me to keep my word to myself: for the first time, when I said I would
never again work for my father, I believed it.
I wonder now if the day I set out to steal that tax return wasn’t the first
time I left home to go to Buck’s Peak. That night I had entered my father’s
house as an intruder. It was a shift in mental language, a surrendering of
where I was from.
My own words confirmed it. When other students asked where I was from,
I said, “I’m from Idaho,” a phrase that, as many times as I’ve had to repeat it
over the years, has never felt comfortable in my mouth. When you are part of
a place, growing that moment in its soil, there’s never a need to say you’re
from there. I never uttered the words “I’m from Idaho” until I’d left it.