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Most important to Chinma, however, was his eyesight. Cole and Mrs. Malich had both noticed the trouble he had reading and, even more, writing. The way he would track back over letters he had already written, or write them twice. Here in America they didn't assume he was stupid or lazy, the way the teacher in the village had. They assumed he was dyslexic, that letters appeared in the wrong order for him. But the reading tutor they found for him said that she could find no such problem.
It was Lettie who saw what no one else had noticed. He was struggling to read one of his textbooks and, as usual, having a terrible time, when Lettie said, "Why do you move your eyes like that?"
He didn't know what she meant.
"You sweep back and forth across the page. Why don't you just look at it!"
"I am looking at it."
"No you're not. You're looking past it. Sweep, sweep, sweep. It's like trying to use a broom to drive in a screw. Sweep sweep."
He thought she was making fun of him, and so he held his tongue and kept his face from showing anything.
"No I'm not making fun of you, Chinma, I'm trying to understand what you're doing. Why don't you hold your eyes still when you read?"
"Nobody does," said Chinma. "Everybody reads the letters in a row, sweep sweep."
"Right, like this. Look at my eyes. I'm reading. See how my eyes barely move? But you read like this." She moved them back and forth far more quickly, and traveling farther each time.
"When I don't do that, the letters hide," said Chinma.
"Hide?"
"They disappear. I have to keep going past them to catch them before they disappear."
"They don't disappear. That's just crazy. Look, here's what you've been reading. All the letters are there. None missing!"
"I didn't say they disappear forever," said Chinma. "Just when I look at them." And then, because he was feeling like part of the family now, he went ahead and said what he might have said to an annoying little half-sister. "I wish I could look at you and make you disappear."
Lettie whooped with laughter. "Oh, you're a brat after all," she said. "I was wondering if you had any feelings."
But later, she must have talked to Mrs. Malich, because she took him to an ophthalmologist, who did a complete examination. They touched his eye with things, and shone too many bright lights in, but he did what they asked and in the end, the doctor said, "I can't tell with these instruments whether it was congenital or he burned his retina by staring into the sun as a baby, but there is a gap in the rods and cones exactly at the focal point of the lens. It doesn't affect his far vision, only near vision, and anything larger than a normal-size letter on a page would be visible at the fringes. But normal-size letters completely disappear when he focuses on them."
They found large-print editions of everything they could, and what they couldn't find readily available, the school district paid someone to scan into a computer and make it larger. The letters now had a hole in the middle of them, but they were there and he could read them. He was also allowed to write very large letters on the papers he turned in, or type them into the computer where his word processor had a very large font. His schoolwork improved dramatically.
Mrs. Malich was all for seeking a doctor who could do surgery to correct the problem, while Cole thought that it wouldn't be such a terrible burden for Chinma to work with large print his whole life.
Chinma didn't really care how the argument turned out. He had found out he wasn't stupid and that other people read better because the letters never disappeared for them.
Meanwhile, Lettie had spent the past few months becoming tolerable. She even climbed trees with him, though she was careless enough that when she was with him he wouldn't do any really hard climbs. She would follow him no matter what he said, so he simply didn't go as high as he might have. And they would talk about things. Or about nothing. Just talk. He found out that she really wasn't mean. She was just direct—her word—and said what was on her mind.
"There are worse things in the world," she said. "I could lie and pretend only to have nice thoughts and happy feelings, and then one day I'd start poisoning all my teachers and they'd say, She was a loner, she kept to herself, we always thought she was strange."
"You are strange," said Chinma.
"At least I don't have an accent."
"Yes you do," he said. "An American one."
"Can you teach me some Ayere words?"
So whenever they were in a tree together, he would teach her words in Ayere, and to his surprise, she remembered them all. She would add them to her English conversation, to the annoyance of Nick and Annie. But J.P. loved it and laughed when she did it. "That was Ayere, wasn't it?" he'd say, and then mutter the new word to himself over and over.
"Why are you learning Ayere?" Annie asked Lettie and J.P. one day. Lettie didn't have an answer—a rare thing for her. It was J.P. who said, "We're his tribe now, aren't we?"
The monkey sickness was coming here to America. Already there were cases reported in Miami and Los Angeles and along the Mexican border. There was no more attempt at quarantine. It was going to have its way with the world, this disease that a sick and frightened monkey had sneezed into Chinma's face more than a year ago. Something that had struck him first was going to strike everybody.
Cole and Mrs. Malich had gone over it with the children, what to expect, how it felt. "I won't kid you," said Cole, "it makes your head hurt like somebody was driving screws into it from inside your skull. But I promise you, it passes, it ends."
