Free Stay With Me by Garret Freymann-Weyr Page B

go to after the shock of Before and After wears off.
    "You're my best friend," I say to Ben, wondering if that's still true.
    If I've told a lie, I'll find a way to make it up to him. It's important to me that I never make him feel bad.

Eleven
    I WRITE D A A LONG LETTER telling him about Acca and how when I'm not working, I'm doing "lots and lots" of homework. This is not a lie, and in fact, the school part of school has improved dramatically since Raphael appointed himself my full-time homework assistant. This makes exactly the kind of difference that experience has taught me it will. Up until eighth grade (a stretch of time I think of as B.T., for Before Tutor), I dreaded every second of school, with its dark, confusing cloud of information. Now I tend to think of the information as falling into two categories: hard and impossible.
    In spite of Raphael's best efforts, English (but not math) has morphed from hard to impossible. We've been reading books and short stories by E Scott Fitzgerald. Originally we were supposed to read Tolstoy and Chekhov, which I thought would be great because I've already read the Chekhov plays. But the teacher changed the entire plan after the city was attacked.
    "I think we need to look at something purely beautiful," she told us. "There's despair here, make no mistake, but beauty is his main aim."
    Ben thinks she's going to get fired because she didn't ask Mr. Nordman, our headmaster, for permission to change the books. I've heard other students complain that she overuses words like
beauty
and
despair.
I like her because I always know what she's talking about. And, I like Fitzgerald.
    Before January, we'd read one novel and a ton of short stories. They're all kind of the same. People are rich. People are beautiful. They're frequently cruel. And they always lose the one thing that's most important to them. Often a blonde girl is the precious thing that gets lost. How could any blonde girl on the planet not like this kind of stuff?
    My tutor says I'm needlessly simplifying Fitzgerald's work and not reading it properly. Maybe so, but I like it. The stories are, if unhappy, also yummy. So it's a shock to discover that I can't understand the second book, which we started reading at the end of January.
    It's doubly humiliating because I am about a hundred pages in before I realize that I don't know what the book is about. Ben says not to worry, that the book is boring, who cares what it's about. The thing is, the book
isn't
boring. It's something else entirely. Something I don't get, which is misery inducing. My tutor, however, is happy to hear it.
    "Now we're finally reading," she says, and comes up with a plan of action.
    I'm to read the book twice. Once to have read it and then again to have understood it. I don't know that it's working other than to make me feel like I have two part-time jobs. One waiting on the small round tables at Caffe Acca, and one reading
Tender Is the Night.
    When my shift at Acca is extra slow, Hal lets me stand in the back and read. I put my book up against the wall next to the pay phone and mark every passage that I think is important. My book is littered with pencil marks, which can't be right. Not everything can be important. I'm beginning to suspect that what matters is what happens
between
the events which are written down. Happens offstage, if you can say that about a book the way you do a play.
    The story also goes backwards in time and then forwards again, which does not help my inept dyslexic self. I'm very close to deciding that people are like theater sets, some designed for certain things but not for others. It's as if I'm interested in stories more than I'm designed to
read
them. Perhaps they have to be attached to a real person in order for my brain to work.
    For example.
    There's a man who comes into Acca every Monday and Wednesday. He always orders chocolate raspberry cake and rarely eats any of it. He usually gets a coffee as well and drinks all of that.