“If I leave school now, I’m afraid I might not ever finish,” I said, although what I meant was: I knew if I quit I wouldn’t ever finish. I’d been raised to be a servant of the family, as had my grandmothers and great-grandmothers before me. An object in motion stays in motion, and an object at rest stays at rest. If I stopped moving right then, I knew I would stay home, taking care of my brother and the rest of the family, forever, and that would be the end of the line for me.
