Echoes Between Us - McGarry, Katie Page 0,42
front of you in math last year, and you’re a math god. Shocking, I know, that we shared a class, since you ignored me.”
“It’s not like you talked to me,” I counter, but there’s something in how she looks at me without blinking that makes me wonder if I’m wrong.
“I was surprised you aren’t taking the math AP course this year,” she says.
Me, too. Along with discovering that Mom had placed me in AP English, it turns out she also switched me from AP math to another class. We fought over the change, but like always, she won. “My mom and Coach are worried about me keeping up my grades so they didn’t want me to overload my schedule.”
“My dad was like that when I was first diagnosed, but he got over it pretty quick.”
“You proved him wrong?”
“No, I can be a real bitch when I want to be.”
I laugh and the sound causes several people to look over at us.
Veronica touches a flower barrette in her hair and a hint of sadness tarnishes her beautiful face. “It helped that Mom was on my side. Dad always listened to her.” She shrugs like what she said didn’t mean anything and tries to smile. “Anyhow … life happens.”
I want to ask about her mom. I’ve not seen a woman at the apartment yet, and I can’t help but wonder if her parents are divorced, too. I don’t ask as I don’t want the question turned around on me. “Does the tumor make things harder?”
She fiddles with her pen, and as I’m about to take the question back, she says, “I have bad migraines. Some are super awful, and I can hardly function. I’ll miss school over them, but when there’s something important happening, I try to fight through the pain and show. I promise I won’t let my migraines get in the way of the project.” She drops the pen then plays with the edge of her notebook, and I can tell that admitting that wasn’t easy. “The headaches are out of my control, and sometimes they take over my life.”
I understand something taking over my life—being all twisted up until you can’t breathe.
“Thanks for not telling anyone,” she says. “I don’t want to deal with people’s pity and whatever else they’d say about me because of the tumor.”
We’re in the corner of the room, isolated from everyone else, yet I have a hard time wrapping my head around having such a deep conversation with so many people near. At least for me. I don’t like having people in my personal business, but she’s sharing and it feels wrong not to share as well.
“Having dyslexia … sometimes people think I can’t do things. When people find out I have it, I see how their face draws down like they feel sorry for me, and I hate it. Dyslexia sucks, it’s not something I’d choose, but it doesn’t make me less.”
“What’s dyslexia like?”
“It’s different for everyone. What I experience isn’t what another person with dyslexia might experience. We can all be different. For me, the letters jump around in a word, and it’s not like once they jump they stay that way. They keep moving. I can read, but it takes a ton of concentration. I can understand what I’m reading, too, but it takes so much time to read that I can barely finish reading a passage on those damn reading comprehension tests before time is called.
“I have an IEP—Individualized Education Program. Sometimes it helps because I do get more time, but sometimes it doesn’t help. Sometimes I have teachers who forget I have an IEP, and sometimes I don’t feel like having to remind them. It brings more attention on me, and sometimes I get tired of it.”
I take a moment as the past tugs at me, not good memories. “It took until my freshman year to be diagnosed. I remember one time in elementary school, in third grade, we had to answer introductory questions about ourselves and draw a picture. You know, the typical stuff—what I like to eat, sports I play, favorite movie. The teacher put up our posters of ourselves on the bulletin board in the hallway for open house. I remember coming home and crying, begging Mom and Dad not to go to open house because I didn’t want them to see my poster next to everyone else’s. Everyone’s handwriting was perfect, the words spelled right. Mine looked like a mess and hardly anything was spelled