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“When did you realize it?” I ask, rubbing his shoulders. “Were you diagnosed?”
He shakes his head.
“I was bad at school, always. I understood what the teachers said, but books and worksheets were all muddled. But I didn’t know any different, so I didn’t realize it wasn’t the same for other kids. I didn’t talk to anyone. Never said, ‘hey, why are the letters all jumbled on the worksheet’ so someone could tell me they weren’t.”
The thought of Rex as a little boy, so painfully shy that he doesn’t even know he’s different, gives me a funny emptiness in my stomach.
“Didn’t your teachers ever talk to your mom or something?”
“We moved so much I was never in the same school for long. My teachers thought I was dumb, or lazy. No one asked about it, though. Why I didn’t do the work. After a while, my mom stopped keeping my records because we moved every six months sometimes. She never asked to see my homework or my grade on a test. She didn’t care about stuff like that. Didn’t know about it, really. By the time report cards got mailed home, we were long gone, so she never knew I did badly and I never told her. I don’t think she would’ve noticed if I just never went back. So….” Rex glances up at me nervously. “I didn’t. I never finished high school. After Jamie—I never went back.”
Rex looks embarrassed. I run my fingers through his thick hair, the few silver strands glinting among the brown.
“Ginger never finished high school either,” I say carefully. “She dropped out in her junior year to do her apprenticeship at the tattoo shop. Her parents were furious.”
He nods and I can feel him relaxing, his tense thighs softening slightly, shoulders unclenching.
“I just don’t want you to think I’m ignorant,” he confesses. “At school, people thought I was… like, learning disabled because I never talked and I….” His voice is thick with shame and he won’t meet my eyes. “Before I learned… ways to deal with it, people would—” He shakes his head. “I just… part of why I like it here is that people don’t think it’s weird that I didn’t finish school. Yeah, I just don’t want you to think I’m—”
“I don’t think that,” I reassure him. “I’m just…. Rex, I’m sorry. I didn’t notice. I feel terrible about tonight. I just feel like I should’ve—”
“I didn’t want you to,” he says heatedly. “Don’t you see? I mean, look at you. You’re a professor, for god’s sake. You read and write for a living. I didn’t want you to think I was like one of those students who do everything wrong.”
I feel a rush of hot shame. I sat in this house, reading student papers out loud, pissed because they didn’t write proper thesis statements, and all the while Rex sat and listened to me being a judgmental dickhead, assuming the students didn’t care, never considering that maybe it was just hard for them. What a stingy, prissy thing for me to do.
“Fuck,” I mutter. “I shouldn’t have talked about my students that way. It’s not even really what I think when I’m not grading.”
Rex nods.
“It’s just, people are good at different things, you know?” he says. “And just because you tell someone how to do something doesn’t mean they can just understand.”
“I know. You’re right.”
“I can tell you that it doesn’t make you weak to let me in, but it doesn’t mean you can just do it, right?”
Touché. I hang my head. Of course he’s right. I feel like shit. Like exactly the kind of privileged, life’s-a-breeze, pastel-wearing rich kids I met in school. Is that what I’ve become? So isolated in my little academic bubble that I think what’s true for me is true for everyone? Fuck me.
Paging Daniel, as Ginger would say: this isn’t actually about you.
“Every day there are things I have to figure a way around or pretend or fake,” Rex is saying. “Things I never do because I can’t stand how flustered I get when I get nervous. How everything goes to mush. I don’t want to feel like I did as a kid: smart enough to know everyone thought I was an idiot and too fucked in the head to do anything about it.”
“Hey, don’t say that,” I tell him.
“It’s pathetic, Daniel. I ordered the special when we went to dinner the first time without hearing what it was because I could barely keep my dick in my pants, much less concentrate on reading with you sitting right next to me. With your hair and those goddamned eyes. I couldn’t even think.”
His eyes are boring into me. God, he seemed so in control that night until that whole thing with Colin, but now I remember that his pasta had artichokes, which he didn’t like.
