The system of violations was, I found, the most difficult thing to learn at Covenant. While the rules of the student handbook seemed firm and finite—spelled out in the Covenant Code in detail so acute you’d understand what you were doing wrong and the punishment you’d receive in the same bullet point—the violations were seemingly as arbitrarily created and enforced as my parents’ rules at home. Terrifying at first, but once you understand how to outsmart them you realize how little effort it took in the first place.

We had a lot of rules growing up, and I spent a long time not questioning any of them. Mostly because they were all formed out of the three basic principles—poverty, chastity, obedience—that I had been taught since the day I was born. I didn’t know any better or any other way. So I did what my parents told me to do.

Throughout the years, my parents also formed the habit of publicizing their punishments. A slap across William’s face for talking back. A night without dinner for Elin after staying out too late. Two days behind a locked bedroom door for Adam after being caught with a playing card that had a naked woman on it. The punishments only got worse as my brothers got larger, stronger, smarter.

But I grew up thinking I knew everything. I studied—hard. I followed every single rule. I watched my brothers carefully and learned how to not do what they did. I knew how to mow the grass and clean the troughs, and also how to tend to the sourdough starter and tell if a squash in the garden is ripe enough to pick. I knew the Bible back and forth, and sometimes after dinner my father would perch me on a chair and question me in front of my brothers, like I was the biblical encyclopedia he always wanted. When I was little, I thought I knew everything.

I didn’t realize my family was different from others until I was eleven. It was the first time I was allowed off the farm besides to go to church: to accompany my mother to the grocery store. She had hurt her back and right shoulder in a fight with my father and couldn’t even open the oven herself. There was no chance she could push a cart or pull bags of rice from the shelf without making a scene. Before we left, my father examined my clothes—loose hand-me-down corduroy pants held at my waist with some thick leftover rope; a long-sleeved white shirt squished beneath a too-small navy sweater. I wasn’t used to wearing shoes. I was uncomfortable, too hot and too cold at the same time, and everything felt itchy against my skin, like there were invisible bugs all over my body. I couldn’t stop fidgeting. But I didn’t care. I was going somewhere.