In that moment, I devoured every other headline I could see. White Lies Every Guy Tells Their Girl. Thirty Days until Your Best Abs Ever. Deep Sex: What Is Vaginismus and What Our Experts Recommend. New Facts about Your Va-Jeen! Ten Workouts to Burn Off That Donut—FAST! The Hottest Hair Trends This Summer. Should the Drinking Age Be Eighteen?

There was so much I didn’t know. So many questions I didn’t understand and answers I never could have come up with. It was then that I realized how small my world was. Before I knew what I was doing, I’d slipped the magazine into the waist of my pants, pulling my shirt loose over it. Then I grabbed another and did the same. I loosened the belt a little bit, found a third, and stuffed it into my pants just seconds before my mother came back, rushing to the conveyer belt to continue with the groceries.

Accompanying my mother to the grocery store became my newest chore, and shoplifting magazines my new favorite hobby. Cosmopolitan. Seventeen. Teen Vogue. Glamour. Self. Lucky. InStyle. People. One by one, each magazine made its way into my pants, then under my mattress until I knew I had a moment to myself; until I could open its pages in the dark and read it cover to cover with more vigor than I’d ever read the Bible.

I treated the magazines like another homeschool course, one I could only teach myself. It was everything I had been missing—opening up my world to things like sex and style and exercise, to trends and boys and celebrities; things my parents never would have taught me. It’s also where I learned about college. Not from Cosmopolitan—though the idea did first show up there, in a column about “how to protect yourself from party rape and the freshman fifteen”—but in a local newspaper tucked within the magazine’s glossy pages. In my haste to not get caught, I didn’t notice until I got home that I had accidentally grabbed The Weekly Woodchucker along with my magazines. Right before I threw it out, I noticed an advertisement on the back: Apply To Covenant—Where Christian Leaders Are Made.

When I told my parents I wanted to go to college, they reacted as I imagined they would, by detailing all the reasons why I shouldn’t go. Massive debt, authoritarian schedules, wavering morals. My mother lingered on that last point, looking at me with her gray braided head cocked to the right, her fiery brown eyes thin and leery. I was their only daughter and that made my parents suspicious of everything I did. My motivation for traditional schooling was no exception.