—
WITHOUT SHAWN AS FOREMAN, Dad’s construction business dwindled. I’d
quit my job at Randy’s to look after Shawn. Now I needed money, so
when Dad went back to scrapping that winter, so did I.
It was an icy morning, much like the first, when I returned to the
junkyard. It had changed. There were still pillars of mangled cars but
they no longer dominated the landscape. A few years before, Dad had
been hired by Utah Power to dismantle hundreds of utility towers. He
had been allowed to keep the angle iron, and it was now stacked—four
hundred thousand pounds of it—in tangled mountains all over the
yard.
I woke up every morning at six to study—because it was easier to
focus in the mornings, before I was worn out from scrapping. Although
I was still fearful of God’s wrath, I reasoned with myself that my
passing the ACT was so unlikely, it would take an act of God. And if
God acted, then surely my going to school was His will.
The ACT was composed of four sections: math, English, science and
reading. My math skills were improving but they were not strong.
While I could answer most of the questions on the practice exam, I was
slow, needing double or triple the allotted time. I lacked even a basic
knowledge of grammar, though I was learning, beginning with nouns
and moving on to prepositions and gerunds. Science was a mystery,
perhaps because the only science book I’d ever read had had
detachable pages for coloring. Of the four sections, reading was the
only one about which I felt confident.
BYU was a competitive school. I’d need a high score—a twenty-seven
at least, which meant the top fifteen percent of my cohort. I was
sixteen, had never taken an exam, and had only recently undertaken
anything like a systematic education; still I registered for the test. It
felt like throwing dice, like the roll was out of my hands. God would
score the toss.
I didn’t sleep the night before. My brain conjured so many scenes of
disaster, it burned as if with a fever. At five I got out of bed, ate
breakfast, and drove the forty miles to Utah State University. I was led
into a white classroom with thirty other students, who took their seats
and placed their pencils on their desks. A middle-aged woman handed
out tests and strange pink sheets I’d never seen before.