“You’re not a failure,” I said and swallowed hard, my heart pounding. “I think you might have dyslexia.”
His head snapped toward me. “I have…?” He stared for a moment and then barked a short, harsh laugh. “No,” he said. Petulant. Almost childlike. “No, I don’t.”
“I talked it over with Professor Wolfe—”
“Youwhat?”
“—and you have a lot of the signs. How you said words have holes in them, memorizing lectures, and your handwriting…?”
“I don’t have dyslexia. That’s ridiculous.”
“Why is it ridiculous?” I asked softly.
“Because…it just is,” Orion said. “Dyslexia means youcan’t read. Like when you look at a sentence and it looks like hieroglyphics or something. Or the letters are backward. That’s not how it is for me.”
I inhaled deeply and tried to make my tone as soft as possible. “That’s not what dyslexia is. Or that’s not all it is. It’s a spectrum—”
“That’s exactly what it is,” he said, practically shouting, his voice echoing in the auditorium. “It’s kids who can’t read at all, and need special classes in special schools or—”
“Orion, that’s a stereotype.”
He stopped, staring at me, looking so damn lost.
“Some people with dyslexia can read,” I continued. “They can read very well.Especially those with stealth dyslexia.”
“Stealthdyslexia,” he said, as if I were making words up. “Is that what you and Wolfe came up with? Behind my back?”
“He wants to help you. He’s the first damn adult who does,” I said, and took another breath. “He told me what he knew, and it made sense. So I’ll pass it on to you, and you tell me if it makes sense, okay?”
Orion glared at me, eyes hard, but he said nothing, so I continued.
“Some people with dyslexia memorize words by shape instead of decoding them. Or they substitute similar-looking words or their brain fills in the gaps, and they grasp meaning by context. They compensate. And if they compensate well enough, people don’t notice right away. Others with stealth dyslexia might not realize they have it at all because they’ve built a ton of workarounds in order to get by. For years, even. But all these workarounds cost so much energy that they can sometimes burn out.” I huffed a breath. “Does any of that sound right to you?”
Orion stared at me a moment more, absorbing all this, then he shook his head. “No. I don’t havestealthdyslexia. I have ADHD.”
“Orion…”
“No,” he snapped. “If I had dyslexia, I would know.”
“Why?”
“Because I cannot have gone this fucking long not knowing!”
I flinched at his sudden rage but stood my ground, sitting calmly in the face of his storm. He was allowed to have it. If I’d been abandoned like he’d been, I’d feel shipwrecked too.
“This is ridiculous.” Orion stood up abruptly, pacing the small piano platform like a trapped animal. Then he stopped and stared at me, betrayed. As if I’d ripped out a plank holding up the entire scaffolding of his life. “Why are you doing this to me?”
I flinched. “I only want to help you.”
“It’s not…that,” he declared. “I’m just tired. That’s all. And youwant to help me?” he shouted suddenly. “What is your obsession with diagnosing me? For the last time, love, you are not a doctor.”
“That’s not what I—”
“Because my parents did that already. They took me to doctors when I was a kid. Tests, evaluations, all of it. The whole Mercer Family Performance Package,” he said with bitter sarcasm. “The diagnosis was ADHD. I get distracted. I forget things. I lose focus. That’s it.”
I shook my head. “ADHD and dyslexia overlap all the time. Misdiagnoses happen—”
“Not this bloody time.”
