“I never said that I was.”
“But you’ve thought it, and you’re wrong. Just look at yourself. You can barely read. You aren’t any better than any of the losers in this class. So stop acting like it.”
“I’m not acting like anything. I know I suck at reading. That’s why I’m here.”
“I know who your friends are. Graham and Nate and Miles. They’re all the same. And you’re just like them. You think you’re better than everyone else, but you’re not. You’re an illiterate freak.”
What had my friends done to this kid? Nate and Miles were nice guys. They’d never make fun of a special ed kid to his face. Graham might, but not Nate. But maybe that wasn’t entirely true. Nate and Miles and the rest of my friends made fun of AP students to their faces. Getting a B on a single test was grounds for public scorn. They held themselves to irrationally high standards. They probably didn’t publically tease Logan, but maybe they didn’t have to.
“I’m nothing like Graham Claremont. Trust me. I hate that guy just as much as you do.”
“Whatever.” He looked back down at his book and continued reading.
A part of me wanted to stop Logan again and ask him what his deal was. He didn’t look disabled. For a while, I’d kind of wondered if he was dyslexic, but his reading was a lot better than mine. Not perfect, but not painful either. If he was dyslexic, he had his life under control way better than I did. I didn’t want to pry and give him a reason to beat me up, so I sat in my beanbag chair and listened until Logan finished his page. Then I started struggling to sound out each word on my page all over again.
Maybe I did look down on the other kids in special ed. Maybe I was still pissed off about having to drop art history. Logan was right, though. I wasn’t better than him. I wasn’t better than anybody.
I didn’t go straight to the library when class ended. Instead, I headed to Nate’s locker. “You ready to go?” He slid his hand around my waist.
“Um, not exactly. Eli’s failing algebra, and he asked me to tutor him. I’m supposed to meet him in the library right now.”
“You’re tutoring Eli Zuckerman?” He was jealous. My having nothing but male friends did complicate things sometimes.
“He’s a fellow struggling student who doesn’t want to give up on himself. I have to help him, Nate.”
“So how long will you be working with him?”
“Probably only a couple hours.” I grabbed Nate’s hand and squeezed his fingers. “Do you think maybe you could come back to drive me home at, like, four thirty?”
“You know how much I love reading. I’ll just hang out in the library until you’re ready to go.”
I forced myself to believe he only wanted to read. We walked hand in hand to the library, where he kissed me quickly, in a way that felt more like he was marking his territory than showing he really cared about me. Maybe I was still upset about my conversation with Logan, but for some reason Nate was seriously pissing me off. I let go of his hand and headed toward Eli, who was sitting at one of the round library tables. Nate made his way into the stacks.
“Thanks again for agreeing to help me, Sam.” Eli didn’t say anything about my lurking boyfriend.
“No problem. I totally love algebra. This should be fun.”
He laughed. “You have a seriously twisted definition of
fun.
”
“So what exactly are you getting hung up on?” I ignored the open textbook sitting in front of Eli on the table.
“The whole letters thing. I get the numbers part of math, but when you throw letters into it, it’s like I have a mental block or something. None of it makes any sense.”
“You understand basic arithmetic right?”
“Yeah.”
“So what’s seven times three?”
“Twenty-one.” Eli furrowed his brow. “And I promise you, that isn’t going to be a question on my algebra test.”
I knew Eli only wanted to pass his test so he could play basketball, but I hated hearing people dis math. I wanted him to fall in love with algebra. “What do you have to multiply with seven to get an answer of twenty-one?”
“Three.”
“And twenty-one divided by seven equals what?”
“Three.”
I grabbed a sheet of notebook paper out of the binder Eli had on the table and wrote:
7
x
x
= 21
x
= ?
“Three?” Eli looked at the paper.
“And you said algebra was hard.”
“But why do they use
x?
The whole thing about throwing letters into the middle of the equations still seems confusing.”
“All right, we won’t use letters then. What’s the answer to this one?” I wrote:
4 + ☺ = 15
“What does the happy face equal?”
“Fifteen minus four is eleven?”
I clapped my hands. “Bravo, bravo.”
“This kind of makes sense, but for my test, I have to do equations with multiple variables. I mean, how am I supposed to solve this?” Eli pushed his textbook in my direction. I scanned the problems and got an idea of what Eli was working on.
I picked up my pencil and wrote him a new problem:
2♥ + 6☺ = 30 and 4♥ - 8☺ = 20
“So what does the happy face equal.”
“I have absolutely no idea.”
“Solve the first equation for the heart.” I pushed the paper toward Eli.
“How?”
“Subtract the six happy face from both sides and divide by two.”
Eli nodded and wrote:
2♥ = 30 - 6☺
Then below that he wrote:
♥ = (30 - 6☺) ÷ 2
“Can you simplify that?”
♥ = 15 - 3☺
“Nice job. Now just plug fifteen minus three happy face into the heart spot in the second equation.”
4♥ - 8☺ = 20 so 4(15 - 3☺) - 8☺ = 20
Eli looked up at me, and I nodded encouragement. He bit his lower lip and simplified the equation.
60 - 12☺ - 8☺ = 60 - 20☺ = 20.
“Now solve for happy face.”
20☺ = 40
He broke out in a broad smile. “Happy face equals two.”
“And what does heart equal?”
♥ = 15 - 3(2) = 15 - 6 = 9
“Nine.”
“If I make up another problem and put
x
’s and
y
’s in it, are you going to freak out?”
“I’ll try not to.”
When I reached over and picked up Eli’s pencil, our fingers brushed together, and I felt a charge of heat rush through my body. I didn’t even like Eli. I was totally happy with Nate, even if he was a know-it-all who enjoyed torturing special ed students. I was sure Eli had never made anyone feel inferior and insignificant, except maybe in sports. He was probably really good at making people feel weak and feeble, but we weren’t in PE together, so I didn’t have to worry about that.
Algebra
. I was just here to talk about algebra so Eli could help make all the basketball players who didn’t attend Kennedy High feel inferior and insignificant. I lifted his pencil and scribbled:
3
x
+ 9
y
= 15 and 2
x
- 7
y
= 29
Eli took a deep breath. “Solve the first equation for
x?
”
His mind was still on math; mine was the one in the gutter. “You can do it.”
3
x
= 15 - 9
y
so
x
= 5 - 3
y
“Now plug that into the second equation.”
2(5 - 3
y
) - 7
y
= 29
10 - 6
y
- 7
y
= 29
10 - 13
y
= 29
13
y
= 39
y
= 3
“Look at you, doing algebra. Now solve for
x
and you’re done.”
x
= 5 - 3(3) = 5 - 9 = -4
“You gave me a negative answer?”
“You ready for me to give you a problem with fractions in the answer?”
“No.”
I handed Eli his textbook. “I generally hate using these nasty things. But teachers seem to like them. Why don’t you try doing a couple of the homework problems?”
Eli spent a half hour working though the homework set. He got stuck a few times, but he wasn’t too hard to untangle.
“I think you might pass this test, after all.”
“Do you really?’
“I’ll tell you what. Spend tomorrow night going over as many problems from the book as you can. The answers to the odd problems are all in the back. That doesn’t mean you should cheat and copy down the answers. But if you work through all the odd problems and then check your own work, you can get a better idea of where you’re still getting stuck. I’ll plan on meeting you here again on Wednesday, and we can go over anything you still think you need help with.”
“Thank you so much.”
“You’re welcome.” I stood up, prepared to leave.
“Hey, Sam, can I ask you something?”
I felt my heart race. “What?”
“If you can’t read and write and all that dyslexia stuff, why are you so good at algebra?”
“It’s way easier to do mental math than mental reading.” That was the short answer, but Eli was still sitting there, his face open and expectant. I sat back down across from him.
“Numbers are stable and predictable. They’ve always made sense to me. In elementary school, when everyone else was learning to read, and I wasn’t, I fell even farther into numbers, wanting to prove to people that I wasn’t totally stupid. For years, I did everything in my head, really complicated stuff that most people can only do with a calculator or a computer.”
Eli was smiling at me in a way that was disturbingly cute. I didn’t know how much he cared about my answer, but nervous energy drove me to keep talking. “Eventually, I got to the point where I had to learn how to write it down, to communicate what I was thinking. The biggest problem for me in reading and writing is connecting the sound of the letter to the symbol and then stringing the sounds into words. With math, each symbol has its own distinct meaning that doesn’t have anything to do with sounds or words, only with ideas.
“Like the hearts and happy faces. The symbols don’t mean anything by themselves. They only represent an idea, a piece in the puzzle. So it’s a lot easier for me to look at a page of numbers and pull out their meaning. I don’t have to translate anything. Still, if something is really complicated, sometimes I solve the whole thing in my head first before writing it down. That way I can check and make sure I didn’t mess something up in the writing process.”
Eli closed his book and dropped it into his backpack. “You’re kind of a freak of nature, you know that?”
“Yeah, I know.” I was totally blushing, and I could feel Nate spying on me. Nate, my boyfriend, who I liked — a lot.
“It’s cool, though. The way you’re so different than everyone else. I mean, you’re dating Nate Larson, and he’s, like, Nate Larson. You live in this crazy world that doesn’t make any sense to me at all. But when I’m with you, I don’t feel like a total retard the way I do around most of the nerd herd. Somehow, you make me believe I can do this stuff.”
I wanted to tell him to share his insight with Logan, but this was Eli’s moment, not mine. “You can do this stuff. You’re going to pass your test, Eli. I know it.”
He nodded. “Thanks, again. You’ve totally saved me, and the rest of the basketball team too, ’cause they’re all lost without me.”
“You’re welcome.”
“You’re pretty cool, even if you do think algebra’s fun. I’m glad we became friends.”
Friends.
Eli knew I was dating Nate, and he wasn’t jealous or weird about it. Eli was my friend, nothing more and nothing less. I’d had a lot of fun at the mall with Kaitlyn, but a part of me still didn’t completely trust her. That had to be what I was feeling toward Eli. It was knowing Eli thought of me as a friend that somehow made me feel warm inside, like I’d just drunk a large cup of hot chocolate. It wasn’t weird or inappropriate at all; it was friendship.
Nate emerged from the stacks as Eli finished packing up his bag. “You ready to go?”
“Yeah.” I took Nate’s hand. “Go over those practice problems, Eli. We’ll meet back here again on Wednesday.”
E
li picked things up quickly. It should have made me feel good, knowing I was a good tutor. But it mainly made me feel stupid. How many hundreds of hours of private tutoring and special education had I endured? But I still couldn’t be classified as more than functionally illiterate. At least I wasn’t dysfunctionally illiterate anymore — at least not in English. Spanish though, that was a whole other story.
Nate was a good tutor. I just wasn’t a very good student. While Eli was home cramming for his algebra makeup test, I sat across from Nate at his dining room table, my Spanish book open between us. “You know this, Sam. Just sound it out.”
I did know it, sort of. My regular chats with Gabby and Nate’s constant support had made me pretty good at speaking Spanish. Better than the average first-year student. I was sure I knew all the words in the passage I was supposed to read for that night’s homework. But talking and reading weren’t the same thing.
Sound it out,
I thought. I looked at the first word in the paragraph.
Que.
Q-U-E. Q-U:
kw.
E:
ee
. “
Kw-ee.
” That wasn’t right.
But what else could it be?
“
Kw-eh.
”
The letter e never makes an eh sound at the end of a syllable,
I reminded myself. So I was back at: “
Kwee
.” But I knew Spanish — at least I knew enough of Spanish to know that
kw
ee isn’t a word. I had no idea how to sound out
que.
“The
q
and
u
together make a
kah
sound, not a
kw
sound,” Nate explained.
“
Kah-ee?
Key?” I knew that word in English. But not in Spanish.
“The
e
makes a long
ay
sound in Spanish.”
“
Kah-ay
, what.
Que
means ‘what.’”
“Good job.”
“One word down, two pages left to go.”