I put down my fork in my pile of gross carrots. “Lots of people have it?” I said.
Mom nodded. “And if you have it, then we need to know. You’d get extra time to take tests, extra help with your homework.” She smiled. “We might finally get those grades of yours up. Wouldn’t that be nice?”
I thought about that. Extra time on tests did sound sort of nice. Maybe I wasn’t so bad at school after all. Maybe I was just one of those smart people like Mom was talking about who mixed up their numbers. “Yeah,” I said.
• • •
Mom let me have ice cream even though I didn’t finish all my carrots.
“Don’t worry about it, okay?” she told me again as she flipped through the channels on the TV. I was curled up next to her on the couch, because Dad was working late, so he couldn’t get mad about ice cream in the living room. “It’s only a test.”
But I could tell by the way Mom patted my leg with one hand as she watched the channels flick by that she wanted, more than anything, to find out that I had it. That big-word-x reading disorder.
I let my spoonful of cherry chunk ice cream melt into a tiny circle on my tongue. It was weird, I thought, knowing your mom wanted you to have a disorder. I always thought disorders were bad.
I scooped out another spoonful of ice cream.
I sort of hoped I had it too.
patience.
Patience is hard to have sometimes. Like with my A-10 Thunderbolt. Sometimes I couldn’t wait for Dad to be home to help me, because I just wanted to work on the plane so bad. I wanted it to be a real whole Thunderbolt that flew, not just pieces in the box. So sometimes, when Dad wasn’t home, I would take the pieces out of the box, out of their little plastic bags, and read the directions over and over and over and over until I could figure out where each tiny piece went. It was hard to tell a lot of times, because the directions were confusing, but if I stared and stared at the pictures, usually I could figure it out in the end. I’d mash the pieces right up next to each other, where they should go, and imagine what the plane would look like with everything finished. It would look exactly like the big A-10 Thunderbolt, the real one the air force pilots flew, that was at the Sea, Air, and Space Museum me and my dad went to one time.
A couple times I really didn’t have patience, and I couldn’t wait at all. I must’ve had ants in my pants like my mom said or something, but whatever the reason, I’d use the glue in the tiny bottle that came in the kit to glue some of the pieces in place. I was very careful with the bottle, to wipe down the tip with a wet paper towel when I was done and screw the lid on tight so no glue dried up. I always liked when new pieces of the plane were glued on permanently, because then I could start to see what it was going to look like. A real A-10 Thunderbolt. I must’ve been super bad at patience, because I did that a lot—gluing on pieces to see what they’d look like. Only sometimes. Only every now and then. When I got antsy pants waiting for Dad to help me. After I glued both wings on, the plane got too big to stick back in its box, so I had to hide it under a pillowcase on the top shelf in my closet. After that, I tried really hard to have better patience. Every once in a while, I would take the plane down and look at it, but I didn’t add any more pieces, because I knew it would be more fun when Dad could help me. But I would look at it, and make it pretend zoom across my bedspread, and think about how after it was finished, me and Dad could put it on a display stand in the living room like Dad said. I really wanted to finish it. A year and a half was a long time to have patience. But I kept waiting. Because Dad said he wanted to help me build it, and I knew he’d be sad if I went ahead without him.
I could have patience for Dad.
friday.
Where can you find the most math teachers?” Mr. Clifton asked us on Friday, when we were all sitting down at our desks.