Nate measured out two grams of zinc and poured it into a second beaker. “What did you do when your first-grade reading group dared to cover a book your mom hadn’t read you?”
The first time that happened, I panicked. The story worked its way around the classroom, each child reading in turn. The unknown words drew closer and closer, and I scrambled to find a way out. I’d rather be sent to the principal’s office for pulling Arden’s hair than read aloud. But it didn’t seem fair to injure an innocent bystander for my own failure to learn my letters. I could get up and do a pee-pee dance and hope the story moved past me before I got back from the bathroom. But I’d probably have to take a buddy with me to the bathroom, and she would know I didn’t actually have to pee.
Arden sat next to me, reading each word clearly and precisely. Then we all flipped the page. The picture in front of me was of a group of kids standing in front of a lion’s cage. The story my classmates had been reading to me featured a child’s trip to the zoo. I could have made up a boring few lines about the lion’s mane and prayed I shared a brain wave with the author, but that felt risky.
So I jumped out of my chair and exclaimed, “Then the lion raised his head and let out a terrifying roar. He leaped across the concrete moat that held him in his artificial jungle and bounded toward the watchful children.” I jumped across the room and bore down upon Gabby. “Then the lion opened his mighty jaws and swallowed Gabby whole.” Gabby screamed right on cue, her silky black pigtails flying as she reeled away from me.
My teacher’s eyes narrowed. “Samantha, please select a book from the shelf and silently read at your desk. The other children in this classroom would like to learn and do not need to put up with any more of your distractions.”
I carefully selected the book my mom had read me the night before. My secret remained safe. Getting people to believe I was an obnoxious little brat was easy because everyone wanted to believe smart kids have a problem with lack of stimulation. They assumed I wasn’t being properly challenged. Nobody thought to ask me what sound an
r
makes.
Nate just sat there staring at me for a long time, making me totally uncomfortable. “Thanks,” he finally broke the silence. “For telling me, now, I mean.”
I shrugged. “Hey, I really needed a Spanish tutor.”
He ran his fingers through his hair and shot me a crooked smile. “Yeah, about that. I’m obviously going to have to type up this lab report myself. But if you want to pretend to be helpful, you could maybe come over this afternoon. We could start trying to pull up your Spanish grade after.”
I suddenly forgot how to breathe. My palms were clammy and my cheeks were so hot, I had to be sweating. Realizing that only made me freak out even more. He blinked, his crazy long eyelashes batting away.
Swoon.
“Okay.”
“Awesome.” He beamed, unleashing actual dimples. Focusing on completing our chemistry lab suddenly became a lot harder.
Nate followed me to my locker after art history. I grabbed my coat and hat and stuffed my Spanish notebook into my bag. Kaitlyn, the bitchy girl in my English class, had the locker right next to mine. When she showed up, we did our best to ignore each other, like always, until Nate reached out and pulled her hair. “Hey, Kaitlyn, how’s it going?”
She slapped his hand away and unleashed a glare that put Graham’s to shame. “Ugh, why don’t you go back to whatever rock you crawled out from under and die?”
I slammed closed my locker and turned to leave.
“Later, Kaitlyn. It was good seeing you,” Nate said as he followed me down the hall, like he’d completely failed to notice that she was an evil bitch.
I raised an eyebrow at him. “Please don’t tell me you have a crush on her.”
Nate laughed, and I felt my chest lighten a bit. “No, I just enjoy giving her crap.”
“How do you even know her?”
“Kaitlyn is Lissa’s little sister. If you didn’t already know that, how do
you
know her?” At the end of the hall, Nate held the door open for me, and we walked outside.
“In case you didn’t notice, Kaitlyn’s locker’s right beside mine. Plus she’s in my English class.”
“Oh yeah, in addition to baby Spanish, you’re in bonehead English too. How’s that going?”
“I have Mr. Donavan. Kaitlyn and her cohorts are annoying, but I’m pretty sure I’ll pass.” We walked through the faculty lot toward student parking. “Is she seriously Lissa’s sister? They’re nothing alike.”
Lissa and Kaitlyn were both tall and slender with blond hair, blue eyes, and high cheekbones. Now that I thought about it, they looked really similar. No wonder Lissa dyed her hair blue.
“The Banks women are all crazy competitive. Their mom’s the district attorney. Somewhere along the line, Lissa and Kaitlyn just decided to stop fighting for the same title. Kaitlyn obsesses over clothes and always dates the most popular guys in the school. Lissa has blue hair and perfect grades. Kaitlyn’s actually smart too. She doesn’t take crazy classes like you because she thinks it will ruin her image, but she has a four point.”
“So, Kaitlyn’s like me? She just wants the world to see slutty bimbo before they see brain?”
“Turns out you’re just as narrow-minded as I am. Now doesn’t that make you feel better?” We reached the center of the parking lot before he stopped to ask, “Where are you parked?”
“Dude, I’m fifteen. I take the bus.”
“Eco-friendly, I like it. Are you okay with carpooling in a hybrid today? Or should I write out the bus route for you, and let you meet me there?” He clicked the button attached to his keys, and the lights flashed on the Prius parked in front of us. “Oh wait, you can’t read so that wouldn’t work. You should probably just get in.” He smiled, like he was laughing at his own joke, which would have pissed me off if he weren’t so cute.
I pulled open the passenger door. “Ha ha, very funny.”
N
ate drove into the hills on the west side of town. The houses became more and more opulent with each turn. I knew my mom had rented an apartment in a posh area — public schools in the ghetto don’t offer AP Art History. Still I was impressed when Nate pulled into the driveway of a big craftsman-style house with a giant front porch, complete with a swing. I sighed as we walked up the front steps. “I love porches.”
“Really?” He fumbled with his keys before unlocking the front door. “Why?”
“I don’t know. I just do.” I walked over to the porch swing and sat down. “It’s like an outside room. And just look at that view! You can see Mount Hood from here.”
He dropped his backpack next to the front door and came over to sit beside me. “The view is nice, I’ll give you that. I come out here a lot in the summer, but considering it’s currently February and forty degrees out, do you maybe want to come inside?”
“Sure.”
Inside, the living room was filled with designer furniture. Everything matched, but the place was so clean, I doubted anyone did any actual living there.
Nate kicked off his black high-top Converse and flung them toward a coat rack. I untied my sneakers and put them next to Nate’s shoes before following him upstairs. He pushed open a door, and I followed him into a large bedroom suffering from a serious book infestation. Books spilled over the desk in the corner, nearly burying the computer. A large bookshelf covered the entire opposing wall, and even more books mixed with dirty laundry on the floor. Seeing that many books in one place slapped me with a giant wave of sorrow — Arden would love it here.
Getting invited into a cute boy’s bedroom shouldn’t have made me miss Arden, but it did. I brushed three paperbacks aside to find a seat on his unmade bed. “Read much?”
He smiled and flopped down beside me, not even bothering to move the half dozen books he fell on top of. “Yeah, I know we’re in calculus and chemistry together and stuff, but I’m actually really into poetry. That’s the main reason I love learning foreign languages. Did you know it’s easy to translate novels, but almost impossible to properly translate poetry?”
“So do you ever write poetry? Or just read it?”
He started blushing and hid his eyes behind his overgrown bangs. “I dabble.” Crap, he was emo after all. Smart, considerate, poetic, blushing, emo Nate.
“Can I hear some?”
He bit his bottom lip. Did I remember to put adorable on that list? “Maybe later. Today we’re here to talk Spanish.”
Nate sat facing me on his bed. He pulled his legs under himself and stared into my eyes. God, when did he get so intense? “I want to help you. I really do. But I’m guessing walking through the conjugations of a couple verbs isn’t going to do the trick. So tell me about English.”
I scooted back and leaned against Nate’s wall. “Where should I start? Do you know anything about dyslexia?”
“Not really. Except that the whole seeing-things-backwards thing is just a myth. It’s a myth, right? Cause if you want me to hang a mirror over your Spanish book, I’m all over it.” I couldn’t help but smile. Hanging a mirror over my textbook would be way too easy.
“Dyslexia is an inability to comprehend the symbolic representation of sound.”
“Okay?” Nate gave up on his stare down and scooted over to lean against the wall beside me.
“Basically, that means my ears work fine and my eyes work fine, but there is something messed up in my brain that makes it hard for my ears and my eyes to communicate. I can see the letter
c
on a paper, and I can hear the sound
ka,
but I can’t understand that they’re the same thing.”
“That’s weird, and way more complicated than the seeing-things-backwards myth.”
“Yep.”
Nate straightened his legs, and his foot brushed against my knee. “Miles is more than a little bit hyperactive, so he takes Ritalin every day to help him focus on stuff. But I’m guessing there’s no drug treatment for your crazy eye-ear-disconnect thing.”
“No drugs, but there are other ways to rewire the brain. I wouldn’t exactly call myself literate, but I have learned that a
c
makes a
ka
sound.”
“You said something before about having a tutor when you were in elementary school. What did she do to help rewire that brain of yours?”
My tutor’s name was Martha. I went to her house after school every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday for four years. She had a million tricks designed to make me literate. We spent fifteen minutes of each of hour-long session together reading books.
Somehow, she possessed an infinite supply of books I didn’t have memorized. On a mechanical counter, she checked off each word I properly decoded. Martha promised me that as soon as the counter hit the number ten thousand, we would take a trip together to the zoo. In normal talking, people say two hundred words per minute. In an hour conversation, I hear ten thousand words, so that seemed like it would be an easy goal. Somehow, it still took me more than two years to make it to the zoo.
The light of late afternoon trickled through the venetian blinds, giving Martha’s makeshift classroom a zebra print that painfully reminded me how far away my trip to the zoo remained. I twisted and turned my hand in the striped light and then set my fingers on the table and watched my black-and-white hand gallop across the wooden savannah.
A tray filled with rice sat on the table between Martha and me. She ran her finger across the surface of the rice, drawing a large capital
C.
She then looked up at me and gently placed her hand upon my galloping zebra. “Samantha, you need to focus on this,” she reminded me in a soothing tone. “Now can you tell me what letter this is?”
I scrunched up my face, hoping desperately for an epiphany that failed to come. “An
o?
” I finally guessed.
“No, this is a
c.
” Martha told me, “An
o
is a closed circle like this.” She drew an
o
in the rice before looking back at me. “Can you see the difference between these two letters?”
“Yeah, that one is closed.” I pointed to the
o
. “And that one is open.” That seemed backwards — why wasn’t the
o
open and the
c
closed? Letters never made any sense.
“Very good. Now I have a harder question for you.” I groaned, knowing I’d just gotten the last question wrong. “Samantha, can you tell me what sound a
c
makes?”
“Um, let’s see, a
c
… Does it make a
sss
sound?”
“Yes, very good. Sometimes,
c
does make a
sss
sound. Can you tell me when it makes that sound?”
I had no idea and wildly guessed, “When it is followed by a vowel?”
“A
c
makes a
sss
sound when it is followed by the letters
e, i,
and
y.
And yes, those are vowels. But do you know what sound a
c
makes if it is followed by an
a, o, u,
or a consonant?”
“Um…ah…um.”
“When
c
is followed by the vowels
a, o, u,
or by any consonant, it makes a
ka
sound, such as in the word
cat.
”
“Oh, okay.” I hoped she didn’t expect me to remember that.
Martha pushed the tray of rice in front of me and asked me to write the letter
c
in the rice. As I did it, she instructed me to say, “
C, ka ka, cat.
” I continually wrote the letter while repeating its name and sound in the rice for the next twenty minutes.
I learned writing in rice is the cornerstone to the Orton-Gillingham Method of Multisensory Education, which is often considered the most effective method for teaching severe dyslexics. I couldn’t connect what I was seeing to what I was hearing, but if I saw the letter and felt the letter at the same time as I heard the sound and felt the sound, eventually my mind would rewire itself into understanding that I was seeing a sound. The process was very long and tedious, and I had a very short attention span.
The light continued to stripe its way across the rice, taunting me as I worked. When I had finished my
c
-writing duties, I dug deep inside myself for a trace of knowledge I knew I must possess. Finally, I lifted my finger and drew three lines across the rice tray, making a perfect capital
Z
. The zebra hidden in my palm came back to life and trotted across the table. “
Z, za za, zebra,
” I said with a smile.