Free Counting to D by Kate Scott Page A

buzzing lights or a whirling fan can drive me totally bonkers. It’s easy for me to obsess about one thing. That’s why I’m so good at math. I probably fall somewhere on the autism spectrum, but I’ve never been formally diagnosed with that.”
    Eli pulled over to the side of the road, as if he couldn’t drive and talk at the same time. The attention made me feel really important. Plus, it was cute how seriously he took his driving. Now that I thought about it, there were a lot of things about Eli that were cute, but I noticed my heart rate stayed even — I wasn’t freaking out. “What have you been formally diagnosed with?”
    “I’m dyslexic,” I said. “I sort of can’t read.”
    “What?” He shook his head in confusion. “You know Macbeth upside-down and inside-out. I might not be a straight-A student or anything, but we sit right next to each other in class and I do have eyes. I know you can read.”
    “I listened to Macbeth . I didn’t read it. I listen to all my textbooks too. I’m good at math, and puzzles, and stuff like that. I’m sure I’d be in calculus no matter what. But the only reason I’m in so many other AP classes is ’cause it’s easier to get college-level textbooks in audio.”
    Eli ran his fingers through his curly brown hair. “Isn’t that kind of a cop-out?”
    “I like to think of it as a coping skill.”
    Headlights from oncoming traffic illuminated Eli’s bewildered expression. “I don’t mean a cop-out for you. I mean for the school. If you can’t read, isn’t it their job to teach you how? Not just hand you some audiobooks and send you on your way.”
    “Do you really think I should drop out of all my classes and start taking special ed?”
    “No, but I don’t think you should go through life not knowing how to read either.”
    Maybe it was the dark, or the odd safety of Eli’s mom-mobile, but for some reason, now that I’d started talking, I couldn’t stop. I wanted Eli to understand the truth. I wanted to understand the truth.
    My lies had caught up with me halfway through second grade, when I took a statewide assessment test. I was four grade levels ahead in math, and I couldn’t properly identify the twenty-six letters of the alphabet. Everyone freaked out: my teacher, my parents, the school administrators, the district administrators — everyone.
    For years, I’d managed to trick everyone into thinking I was some sort of child prodigy. Now, I became a mystery and an abomination. Nobody knew what to do with me, so they brought in some kind of specialist to run a bunch of tests. They gave me an IQ test. It was supposed to be culturally unbiased, which meant it was just a bunch of puzzles and didn’t have any words. It was like playing Tetris. When it was over, they told my mom I was a super genius. Then they gave me a second test, one that did have words in it, and I was disabled again.
    That afternoon, I curled into a ball on the corner of my bed, counting and multiplying, searching for a hidden number that would somehow set me free. My mom came into my room waving a couple of pieces of paper. She sat down beside me and started reading the first page.
    “Thomas Edison, Agatha Christie, Charles Schwab, Pablo Picasso, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ted Turner, Winston Churchill, Edger Allan Poe, Ansel Adams, Walt Disney, Nelson Rockefeller…Samantha Wilson.”
    I looked up at her and shook my head in disbelief. “Why is my name on that list of smart people? I’m an idiot who can’t read, remember?”
    “This isn’t just a list of smart people,” my mom told me. “This is a list of dyslexic people. And I know you’re going to do just as many amazing things in your life as the rest of these people. I’ve known that for years.”
    Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb. I doubted I’d ever do something that cool, but maybe I could at least pass second grade.
    I lifted a second sheet of paper off my bed. “Whose names are on this page?”
    She took the