Educated: Chapter 22 Summary & Analysis

When Tara arrives back home, Mother is already cooking the Thanksgiving meal. Charles is coming for dinner—and Shawn is in a mood about it. As Tara lays out some nice china on the table, Shawn tells Tara not to bother. Charles’s standards aren’t that high, he says; after all, Charlies is dating Tara. When Tara continues setting the table, Shawn jabs her in the ribs. When she shrieks at him not to touch her, he knocks her off of her feet and pins her to the ground by pressing his arm into her windpipe. “When you act like a child,” he tells Tara, “you force me to treat you like one.” Mother casually shouts for the kids to “knock it off.” Tara quickly apologizes to Shawn, and he lets her up.

Charles comes over for dinner, and Shawn continues behaving badly. He brags about his gun collection and talks about “all the ways he could kill a man.” When Tara walks past Shawn’s seat with a plate of dinner rolls, he jabs her in the ribs again, and she drops the plate. Tara yells at Shawn for making her drop the rolls, and Shawn grabs a fistful of Tara’s hair and begins dragging her down the hall to the bathroom. Tara panics, desperate to keep Charles from seeing her like this. Shawn gets Tara’s head in the toilet, but she manages to scramble away from him. He pulls her by her hair back into the bathroom as Charles comes down the hall to help. Charles pulls Tara up from the floor as she laughs a “demented howl,” trying to play the whole thing off as funny, normal, brother-sister roughhousing.

Charles leaves. Several hours later, he calls Tara and asks her to meet him at church. They sit together in Charles’s car in the empty parking lot while he cries and tells Tara he won’t come up to Buck’s Peak anymore. Tara tries to convince Charles that what he saw was normal, but Charles cannot be fooled. When they begin arguing, Tara screams that she never wants to see Charles again. Before she returns to BYU for the end of the semester, they meet up one final time. Charles tells Tara that he loves her, but he cannot “save” her—he warns her that only she can save herself. Tara says she has no idea what Charles is talking about.

Tara returns to school, and her stomach ulcers flare up again. What’s more, her big toe—hurt badly in her Thanksgiving day fight with Shawn—has turned black. Robin tries to take Tara to a doctor, but Tara refuses to go. A few days later, Robin leaves a pamphlet for university counseling services on Tara’s desk. Tara, however, is determined not to admit that anything is wrong—as long as she sweeps her physical and mental distress under the rug, she is “invincible.” When she receives a perfect one hundred on her algebra test, she convinces herself that she is “untouchable.”

Tara returns to Buck’s Peak for Christmas. She is surprised to find that Dad is encouraging her brother Richard to study for the ACT and apply to college. Dad believes that Richard is a “genius,” and “five times smarter than that Einstein.” He wants Richard to go to school to “disprove all them socialist theories” and revolutionize the American university. During Dad’s tirade, Tara notices that Richard looks “miserable.” Later that night, in private, Richard confides in Tara that he’s been scoring terribly low on his ACT practice tests, and is terrified to take the real one.

On a break from work in the scrap yard one afternoon, Tara and Shawn drive to the grocery store for a snack. In the parking lot, Tara spots Charles’s Jeep. Embarrassed by her filthy work clothes and dirty hair and face, Tara tells Shawn she’ll wait in the car while he runs for food, but Shawn, sensing what’s happening as if he can “smell shame,” starts forcing Tara out of the car. When she tells him not to touch her, Shawn flies into a rage, yanking Tara from the car and pinning her to the icy asphalt. She sobs and begs for him to let her go, but he bends her wrist back and sprains it, dragging her upright and into the store. They walk through the entire supermarket, but Charles is not inside—the Jeep was not his.

That night, Tara writes in her journal about the painful encounter in the parking lot. Shawn knocks on her door and enters the room to apologize, explaining that he was just playing a “game” and had no idea he’d hurt her. He brings Tara a pack of ice, urging her to tell him if “something is wrong” the next time they’re “having fun.” Tara begins questioning whether she actually screamed for Shawn to stop or not—she believes her injured wrist is her own fault. As Tara falls asleep, though, the memories of the incident surge back to her, and she realizes that Shawn’s violence against her is a direct attempt to humiliate and undermine her.

The next night, back at BYU, Tara returns to her journal and writes another entry in which she tries to tell herself that the fight with Shawn was simply a “misunderstanding.” As she writes the words “I don’t know” over and over again, she realizes that her life has been “narrated for [her] by others”—it has not yet occurred to her, though, that her voice “might be as strong as theirs.”