Counting to D (10 page)

Kaitlyn seemed to understand where I was coming from. She was good at splicing the sound so our lip movements lined up right when we jumped between shots. Watching her do something technical reminded me that she was Lissa’s little sister. I wondered if we could actually become friends.

When we were almost finished splicing the final frames, Kaitlyn’s phone rang. She moved to the other side of the room, and I finished putting the video together on my own. In the background, I heard her laughing. “Yeah, I’m almost done. I can be there in a half hour.”

She slid her phone back into her pocket, and I pushed the video’s play button. “You ready to see the final product?”

The five-minute video ran on Kaitlyn’s computer screen. Eli leaned back in his desk chair. “I can’t believe we made that. It’s so good.”

Eli hadn’t really done much to help, but it was good. “We make a good team,” I said.

“Yeah, Donavan will love this. Maybe he’ll give us enough extra credit that I’ll be able to skip out on reading
The Grapes of Wrath
.”

I looked at Kaitlyn, who was already touching up her makeup for wherever she was going. “Well, I guess we should go.”

She nodded, ready to push us out the door. If I’d been someone cooler, maybe she would have tried to include us in her afternoon plans, but I wasn’t and Eli was my ride, so we were obviously snubbed. I wondered if Eli regretted driving me.

When we got into Eli’s car, he asked me, “So do you have any plans for the rest of the day? Maybe a hot date with one of those seniors you’re always hanging out with?”

“I might be smart enough to take classes with seniors, but I’m also dorky enough to have no plans more exciting than homework this evening.”

“Good, so you’re free. Mind if we make a pit stop?”

“I guess not.” I’d told Gabby that I had a crush on Eli, but that wasn’t really true. Not only would he never want to go out with a girl like me, even if he did, I wouldn’t know what to do. But hanging out with Miles and Haroon had helped me realize how much I liked having guy friends. I obviously didn’t have any friends in the girl department, but I liked Eli, as a friend. He was comfortable to be around, and I was suddenly very curious about where he wanted to take me. “Where are we going?”

“You’ll see.”

He drove down the hill, past the high school, and into downtown. Instead of continuing on toward my apartment, he parked on a busy street and shoved a fistful of quarters into a parking meter. Then I followed him into a large concrete building, where he extended his hands in a grand gesture. “Welcome to Powell’s.”

I looked around. “It’s a bookstore? You brought me to a bookstore?” Even Nate had never dragged me to a bookstore, and he actually read.

“This isn’t just a bookstore; it’s Powell’s. This place is like the biggest bookstore in the world or something. It’s a total Portland icon.”

We wound up and down stairs, wandering through room after room. The store seemed to go on forever. I’d never seen this many books together in one place before, but it didn’t change the obvious. “Eli, it’s a cool store and all, but I don’t read.”

“No, but you’re going to start. You’re not quitting, remember?”

It was a bookstore intervention. I couldn’t believe it. Nate, the smartest guy I’d ever met, thought my audiographic memory was fascinating. Eli, a jock with perfect hair, was leading me to the children’s section.
Wait, the children’s section?
I’d listened to almost two hundred books last year — big, thick, juicy classics. Did Eli expect me to snuggle up with
Junie B. Jones
?

He pulled a book off the shelf and handed it to me. “What about this?”

I didn’t have to sound out the title — I recognized the cover illustration. “Harry Potter?”

“Yeah, I read it in second grade and loved it. There are a few big words, but the story’s entertaining enough to make you want to keep reading.”

I flipped open the book and scanned the first page. Eli may have read it in second grade, but it wasn’t a second-grade book. It would be hard for me — really hard. “
The Sorcerer’s Stone
is not a standalone book. Maybe,
maybe,
I could read this one.” I held up the first volume and then pulled
The Deathly Hallows
off the shelf. “But this one might as well be
Crime and Punishment
.”

Eli tucked
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
under his arm. “I’m buying you this book. If you decide to cheat and listen to
Crime and Punishment
later, that’s entirely up to you.”

“Listening isn’t cheating.” I followed Eli back through the maze of books toward the checkout counter.

“It’s not cheating for you to listen to your physics textbook on audio, but listening to books for fun because you’re too stubborn and lazy to learn how to read them — that’s cheating yourself. Thankfully, I have seven dollars in my pocket that says it’s time to stop.” Eli paid for the book and handed me the bag.

“Thanks. I memorized this book back in elementary school, so I know it’s really good.”

Eli slapped his forehead. “You have it memorized already?”

“I’ll read it, for real. I promise.”

M
y mom loved her new job so much, she decided to spend Sunday afternoon at the office. So I invited Nate to come over and keep me company.

He walked into my room and immediately spotted the bag lying on my desk. “You went to Powell’s?”

“Oh yeah, Eli and I went there yesterday. It’s a cool store.”

“Eli?”

I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. I was sure I was turning as red as a tomato, which was beyond stupid because Eli and I were totally just friends, not that Nate and I were anything more than friends either. Why had Gabby told me to try to make Nate jealous? “He thinks listening to everything all the time is cheating myself of the joy of actually reading or some crap like that. So he bought me Harry Potter.”

“Eli Zuckerman knows you’re dyslexic?”

His shoulders slumped, and I could’ve sworn he shrank two inches right before my eyes. “Yeah, I told him a couple days ago.”

“So he bought you Harry Potter?” Nate looked really sad, hiding somewhere deep inside his oversized sweatshirt. I remember what Miles had said about Nate not having anyone to talk to before I moved here. I hadn’t tried to hurt him, but somehow, I had.

“Moving here, and having to meet all new people — it’s been really hard.” I walked over to Nate and put my arm around him. “I like you a lot. You’re the closest friend I have in this town. But I need more than one person to talk to. Eli’s a good guy. He struggles with school stuff too, so he gets the whole not-being-perfect-at-everything deal.”

Nate pulled away from me. He reached for the Powell’s bag to remove the crisp new children’s book from its bag and finger the pages. “He’s right. You should read more.”

I reached toward him and let my hand hang in the air for an uncomfortable second before dropping it back down to my side. I hated seeing Nate shrivel up on himself like this, but I had no clue how to stop it from happening.

He handed me the book without looking up at me. “I have an English paper due tomorrow. Is it okay if I borrow your computer, while you
read?
”

“Sure.” I took the book from Nate, nestled into the corner of my bed, and started to read.
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone
was one of the first books I’d memorized back in elementary school, thanks to Arden’s Quidditch obsession. She probably read it to me a dozen times. Reading it now wasn’t too bad. I remembered all the character names and weird wizard terminology, so I could figure most of those words out just looking at the first letter or two, not needing to sound the whole thing out.

Just as the tabby cat sitting on the wall in front of number four, Privet Drive, transformed into Professor McGonagall, my printer started chirping. Nate abandoned my desk chair and came over to sit next to me on the bed. “How’s it going?”

“It’s going.”

He looked at the open book in my hands. “You’re only on page ten?”

“It’s been less than an hour. What page did you expect me to be on?”

“Sorry, page ten is good. Do you like the story?”

“Yeah.”

He scooted closer to me and slid his hand behind my back. He was acting like himself again, or at least the version of himself that I knew and liked. I rested my head on his shoulder, and he squeezed me closer. “Do you want to keep reading?”

“What would you do?”

“You could read it out loud. I like this story too, and it’s been a while since I’ve read it.”

I spoke slowly. “Fl-flokes-flocks off-of ow-owl’s…sh-shoo-shooting st-stars…” I paused before each word, examined each letter. Nate sat behind me, his chin resting above my shoulder. Sometimes, when I got really stuck on a big word, he’d give me the answer. But mainly, he just listened, waiting for me to figure it out myself.

When I’d listened to Nate read, it had felt like we were sharing a secret. This just felt childish. I was practically sitting on his lap and struggling to read a children’s book. I felt like a seven year old with her babysitter.

It took me another hour to finish the first chapter. Nate didn’t say anything mean about my crappy reading skills, but when I put the book down, he didn’t take advantage of our close proximity on the bed either.

He got up and stood in front of the painting of me at the beach. Did Nate see the prodigy constructing an abacus from pebbles and shells, or did he only see a lost daughter, a baby girl?

“I Googled your dad,” he said. “He’s sort of famous.”

“He’s a good painter, and a crappy father.”

“Will you tell me about him?”

“What do you want to know?”

“Whatever you’ll tell me.”

I had no idea where to begin when it came to my dad. I decided to start with the basics. “My parents met through work. My mom was the lead architect on a large public works project. My dad was commissioned to make a sculpture for the center of the building’s public square. My parents were creative in different ways, but they shared a vision of the space they were creating. They shared meals after work and then they decided to share the rest of their lives too.”

“A meeting of minds. That’s sweet.”

I crawled off my bed and moved to his side. “They got married, had me, and pretended they were happy for a while. But my mom was too rigid for him. She put harsh lines into all her buildings, and she put harsh lines into her home. She expected him to be and act a certain way, and he didn’t know how. He had a gnarly case of ADD. But he wouldn’t take Ritalin, because he thought it interrupted his art. He took vodka instead. His drinking spiraled out of control, and things started to get messy.”

Nate turned away from the girl in the painting to look at the real-life girl instead. I still felt small. “I started going to Arden’s house after school instead of home to my dad. Her world wasn’t as colorful. But it was a lot more stable and quiet. Having an audiographic memory isn’t all that great when everyone around you is fighting, and that’s all my parents seemed to do then.”

I swallowed back the threat of tears. “Everything blew up when I was seven. I was diagnosed with dyslexia and all of a sudden needed more support than my dad knew how to give. So he skipped town instead. He moved to New Mexico, claiming he wanted to paint the desert, and that was it. The end. No more dad.”

Nate put his arms around me and pulled me into a hug. “It isn’t your fault that your parents got divorced.”

That’s what people always said:
Don’t blame the kids for the grown-ups’ problems.
But it was hard to believe. Thinking about my dad always made me feel like I was tumbling off the edge of a cliff. Even though I wanted to change the subject or start calculating exponents in my head, I also wanted Nate to know me — I wanted him to know this. “The worst thing is that he’s dyslexic too.”

“Your dad’s dyslexic?”

“Yeah. He dropped out of school in eighth grade. His reading skills are even worse than mine. He’s just charismatic and creative enough that nobody cares. Everyone loves him, even when he’s plastered. He just didn’t want to love me.”

Nate stroked my hair and whispered something in a language I didn’t understand. I focused on his even breathing until my head stopped spinning.

He took my hand. “Come on. We need a change in scenery.”

I grabbed my coat and followed Nate to his car. “Where are we going?”

“To the beach.”

“That’s like seventy-five miles away.”

“Am I so boring you can’t stand ninety minutes in the car with me?”

“It’s raining.”

“It’s always raining in Oregon. But it’s okay. Skin is waterproof.”

When Nate and I showed up at lunch the following Wednesday, half a dozen art books were spread out across the table. We had an art history exam that afternoon, so everyone was busy studying. I was far more nervous about the exam than I wanted to admit. I knew the paintings — spelling the artists’ names on the exam was going to be the hard part.

“Who painted
Dance at Le Moulin de la Galette
?” Haroon flipped through a stack of flash cards.

“Pierre-Auguste Renoir,” I said.
Renoir,
I recited mentally.
R-E-N-O-I-R. I better not be expected to spell his first name.

Nate pulled his own textbook out of his bag and started flipping through the images. “I’ve been wondering, Sam, why are you taking art history anyway?”

“Why not? It’s an interesting class.”

“No.” Nate polished his apple on his shirt. “I mean, why are you studying art history and not art?”

My chest tightened, and breathing became difficult. I hadn’t sworn him to secrecy about my dad or anything, but I’d sort of thought that went without saying. “I’m not an artist.”

Lissa set her turkey sandwich down. “What are you guys talking about?”

“Sam’s dad.”

NO! He did not just say that.

“He’s a super famous artist. His name’s actually mentioned in our textbook.”

I wanted to crawl into a hole and die. I wanted to kill Nate.