Counting to D (4 page)

“Macduff discovers King Duncan is dead and notices the lucky coincidence that the king died in Macbeth’s home shortly after Macbeth became second in line and helps to uncover the treachery.”

“So Macduff’s the bad guy?” Eli furrowed his brow.

“Bad guy? Good guy? It’s hard to say sometimes in Shakespearean tragedy. But Macduff is Macbeth’s downfall.”

“Why does Macduff care, if he’s not next in line?”

“Probably because Macbeth killed Macduff’s wife and kids as a part of the whole kingly takeover and cover-up. After it happened, Macduff was pretty pissed. I think his words were:

Cut short all intermission; front to front,

Bring though this fiend of Scotland and myself;

Within my sword’s length set him; if he ’scape,

Heaven forgive him too!”

“And that’s old-timey-confusing-as-hell for he’s really pissed off?”

Eli wasn’t Arden, but he was trying. “Yeah, that’s old-timey for really pissed off.”

The blond chick glanced up long enough to notice the closed book on my desk. “New kid, do you have this whole play memorized or something?”

Oops, I should have opened my book before I started quoting. I shrugged lamely.

Kaitlyn coughed, “Loser.” It wasn’t remotely subtle. I looked back toward Eli, wondering whose side he’d take.

He pretended not to hear Kaitlyn and flipped the page in his book. “So who’s Malcolm?”

We had a calc exam on the Thursday of my first week at Kennedy High. Thankfully, a derivative is a derivative regardless of what state you live in. The test was straightforward and blissfully devoid of story problems. It had always pissed me off the way math teachers tried to squeeze reading into their exams. I’d gotten good at skimming the questions for numbers and attempting to deduce the nature of the questions. But there’s no mystery in ∫ sec
xdx
. It equals ln | sec x + tan x | +
C
every time.

When Ms. Russle passed back our exams the next day, she paused at my desk. “Nice job, Samantha.”

I glanced down at the
100%
written across the top in red pen. “Thanks.” Haroon and Graham both turned to face me. I blushed and slid my paper into my notebook.

At lunch, Graham practically attacked me. “Spill it, baby brain.”

“What?”

“Let us see your calculus exam. We’re letting you sit at our table on faith. Now we want the proof.”

I glanced at Lissa and Nate for reassurance before asking Graham, “Are you serious?”

Lissa smiled. “It’s not a big deal. We do this after every test.” She pulled her own test out of her bag and dropped it on the table. “Ninety-seven percent, tah dah.”

Miles, Haroon, Nate, and Graham all tossed their papers onto the table as well: 96 percent, 94 percent, 95 percent, and 98 percent.

“It looks like Graham’s the winner again.” Miles retrieved his exam from the stack.

The smirk on Graham’s face made my blood boil. Like him getting a 98 percent on a stupid math test somehow made him better than everyone else. I wanted to slap that smug smile off his face. Suddenly, I didn’t want Graham to win. It might have been mean and vindictive, but I wasn’t the one who started this stupid competition. I slid my exam out of my notebook and dropped it on top of Graham’s. “Or not.”

Lissa raised her pierced eyebrow at me. “It appears our baby does have a brain. You’re not scared, are you, Graham?”

He grumbled something under his breath and snatched his exam. Apparently, I’d passed my first test. So why did my chest feel hollow? I stared at my turkey sandwich, no longer in the mood to eat.

Nate hid behind a book all through lunch, and I didn’t think he’d even noticed the whole 100 percent thing. But maybe he’d spent some of his time studying me, because when we walked into chemistry together, he asked, “You okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.”

I headed over to the hood to get the chemicals we’d need for that day’s experiment. When I got back, he hadn’t even bothered to open his lab notebook yet — he was just sitting there staring at me. “About lunch — ”

“It’s okay.” I felt hot and wondered if I was sweating. I thought I’d handled Graham pretty well, but maybe I’d had a minor freak-out without even realizing. What did Nate see when he looked at me, and why was he suddenly so concerned? “What would happen?” I asked.

“What would happen if what?” Nate stopped staring at me long enough to hook up our Bunsen burner.

“If one of you got a B on a test? If I hadn’t gotten a hundred? If you and your friends weren’t all perfect at everything?”

Nate shrugged. “The world wouldn’t end. I got a B+ on one of my English papers last semester. The gang all made fun of me about it.”

I looked up at him in alarm.

“Not because they’re all mean, just because English is normally my best subject. My failure to come up with anything interesting to say about
David Copperfield
amused my friends for a couple of weeks. It was more entertaining than the book was. And then we moved on to
Candide
and all was forgotten.”

I didn’t understand, and I wasn’t even sure I wanted to. “You and your friends have history. Somehow, they understand that you getting a B+ is supposed to be funny. But I just moved here. What would have happened to
me
if my grade today had been eighty-five percent instead of a hundred percent?”

I noticed a sadness in his eyes. “It wasn’t eighty-five percent though. You’re a smart kid. Stop worrying about it and help me with this lab.”

It was all the answer I needed. Nate and his friends could never find out I was dyslexic — ever. I was a smart kid; that was true. And that was all they could ever know about me.

I was almost relieved that none of my so-called new friends called me that first weekend. I hadn’t seen my mom much since she started her new job, and I kind of expected to spend the weekend exploring our new city together. Mom always threw 200 percent of herself into everything she did. And for a year and a half, her only job had been being my mom. She’d been super-mom. Her constant attention had annoyed the crap out of me most of the time, but now I was starting to miss her. A weekend of exploring would have been really fun.

It didn’t happen, though. I was no longer my mom’s only project. Now she had thirty stories of design calculations to consume her attention. Just like flipping a switch, she’d gone from super-mom to super-architect, leaving me at home alone with nothing to do but unpack.

My new room was slightly more rectangular than the one I’d had in San Diego, so I couldn’t make it look exactly the same, but I did my best. Once the wall above my bed was completely covered in photos of Gabby and Arden, it started to feel a little like home.

After I’d finished hanging all my clothes in the closet, I went out into the hall and grabbed an acrylic painting from a stack of yet-to-be-hung artwork. I looked at the image of the little girl playing at the beach for a long minute before hanging it on the blank section of wall next to my closet. The apartment didn’t feel much like a home yet, and somehow, sharing a bedroom with that lost little girl seemed fitting.

When I finished putting my new room in order, I got ahead on homework. Considering how seriously people took grades at my new school, it was probably a good thing.

Arden called me on Sunday afternoon, and we spent a while comparing San Diego boys to mythical creatures. No real-life boy seemed as interesting as a fetching werewolf. Unfortunately, hearing Arden’s crazy ramblings only made me feel more lost and alone.

A week later, Señor Gonzales gave me my first Spanish test. Since I’d failed to understand a single thing he’d said since I’d moved, it wasn’t a repeat performance from calculus.

When Nate and I walked out together he announced, “Ninety-four. You beat me for sure.”

“Nope.” I shoved my hands into my pockets, balling them into fists, and looked straight ahead.

“You got an A−?”

I shook my head and kept on walking. “A B? How is that even possible?”

Why did he care? I should have been allowed to pass and fail whatever classes I wanted to. It was none of Nate’s business. Except Nate was the closest thing I had to a friend in this town. And pretty soon, he wouldn’t be anymore.

In the back of my mind, I heard Kaitlyn coughing, “Loser.” She’d made it more than clear that I could never pass for
normal,
and now the brainiacs were going to reject me too. Two weeks of marginal companionship was all I’d get. Everything was falling apart already. I didn’t want to think about Spanish or my serious lack of friends or anything else.
3, 9, 27…2,187; 6,561; 19,683…

“Sam?” Nate reached out and touched my shoulder.

I slowly unclenched my fists and looked up at him. “What do you want?”

“To be your friend. Talk to me.” His voice was pleading, like I’d done something to hurt him, not the other way around.

“I didn’t get a B either. I got a D.”

Nate started laughing.
Laughing.
“Good one.”

“I’m not kidding.” I stopped and leaned against a locker. Sliding my bag off my shoulder, I fished inside until I came up with my exam. My hand was shaking as I pulled the paper out and handed it to Nate.

The number
62
screamed across its cover. He flipped through pages of illegible handwriting overwritten with red pen. “How is this possible?” He shook his head in confusion. “Sam, you’re the smartest chick at this school. You’re even smarter than Lissa, which is just insane. You’re not a D student.”

My knees buckled, and I slid to the floor.
531,441; 1,594,323; 4,782,969…
“I am a D. A giant D.”

Nate sat down in the middle of the hallway facing me. Masses of students skirted around us on their way toward the cafeteria. “What are you talking about?”

N
ate faced me in the crowded hallway. I could still turn back. I could still make up a lie. I knew how — I’d been doing it for years. But I didn’t. “D as in dyslexic. There’s a reason I waited until my sophomore year to start taking Spanish. I still haven’t even figured out how to read English.”

He brushed back his shaggy black hair and blinked at me with those giant brown eyes. “You can’t have a learning disability. How are you taking so many APs?”

I swallowed the lump growing in my throat and tossed my MP3 player to him. Then I leaned forward to flip it on. I ran my thumb across the menu and pulled up our chemistry text. Nate sat there blinking as his eyes darted from me to my MP3 player.

“I’m not stupid. I’m just illiterate, and as it turns out, it’s a lot easier to get audio versions of college textbooks than high school ones. Last year, I convinced the administration at my school in San Diego to let me start taking AP classes without any prerequisites. When I moved up here, Kennedy let me transfer my schedule. Since I’ve never attempted to take a foreign language before, I didn’t have any major hex marks on my transcript…yet.”

Nate rested his hand on my knee. It was gentle and warm, just like the rest of him. “Sorry, apparently I’m slow. You can’t read?”

“Not really,” I shrugged. “I endured something like five hundred hours of private tutoring back in elementary school that supposedly taught me how to read. I can usually sound out the questions on my exams and stuff now. But the last
novel
I read was written by the good Dr. Seuss.”

Nate studied my MP3 player more carefully. “You’re a fifteen-year-old math genius who just happens to be illiterate, and…” He waited for me to finish.

“Has an audiographic memory.”

He handed the MP3 player back to me and squeezed my fingers. He was smiling, like I’d let him in on a giant secret. I guessed I had. “You’re so cool.”

I let out a nervous laugh. “You’re not going to make me find a new lunch table?”

“Of course not,” he winked at me. “But let’s not tell Graham about your D in baby Spanish.”

I banged my head against the locker behind me. “God, Nate, I got a D. What am I gonna do? Gabby, my best friend from San Diego, is bilingual. She was tutoring me, but now she’s a thousand miles away and Señor Gonzales isn’t even teaching Spanish — he’s teaching verb conjugation. I’m so confused right now, I don’t even know how I got sixty-two percent of the questions right on that test.”

“I’m not a native speaker or anything, but I can tutor you if you want.”

“Seriously?”

“Of course. You’re a cool kid, and some tutoring experience might look good on my college applications.”

My heart sank. Nate wasn’t banishing me — which was good — but he obviously thought of me as a child. I’d sunk from baby brain to tutoring client. I’d never really believed Nate could become my boyfriend — I wasn’t even sure if I wanted him to — but now it didn’t feel like we could be regular friends either.

That afternoon, Nate read the chemistry lab procedure aloud while I riffled through the cupboard under our table, pulling out all the necessary equipment. Halfway through the instructions, he set his paper down and stared at me. “I just noticed.” He shook his head in disbelief. “You sit next to me in five classes. You’re my lab partner, for crying out loud. How is it possible that I just noticed?” He brushed his bangs out of his eyes and glanced from me to the lab notebook he’d dutifully filled out for me ever since my first day at Kennedy. “I’ve never seen you read or write anything — ever.”

“People are usually small-minded, even people like you.” I smiled and handed him the Bunsen burner. “You believe what you want to believe. You see what you expect to see. You think it’s impossible to be smart and dyslexic, so obviously, I can only be one. I just introduced you to the smart me first.”

“Why do I think I’m not the first person you’ve fooled?”

“Because you’re not.” I lit the flame on the Bunsen burner and set a beaker of water to boil. “At first it kind of happened by accident. When I was four, I taught myself how to multiply. The term
child prodigy
was whispered around me all the time. I never had to try and convince people I was smart — I just was. When I got to first grade and realized all the other kids were grasping this crazy new reading concept and I wasn’t, I could have told my parents or my teacher or someone. But I didn’t want to lose my whiz kid status, so I paid extra close attention to all the bedtime stories my mom read me instead. I didn’t just memorize all the words; I memorized when to turn the pages too. I was in second grade before anyone figured out I didn’t know the alphabet.”