Freedom Reader: Part One

      “Look out, guys, it's the walking Brain Tree!”

      “Hey there, Window-Eyes, read any good dictionaries lately?”

      I sighed, keeping my head low as I slunk past my tormentors and up the stone steps to school, using the book I was holding as a buffer. The cruel names didn't faze me much anymore; I'd since gotten used to them. In fact, I heard them so often at school that I sometimes forgot my own name.

      “Feivel! Feivel, wait up!” My sister Gentle Heart, a yellow Kacheek with a bow in her hair as bright as her fur and a heart that lived up to her name, careened into me, knocking my thick black square-framed glasses off my face and sending both our armfuls of books sprawling across the pavement.

      “Sorry,” Gentle Heart said quickly as she dropped to her knees to pick up our books while I groped around for my glasses.

      Pushing them back onto my nose, I took my books from her and stood up.

      We were about to walk inside when I heard a voice shout, “Hey, hey you, the blue Kacheek, hey!”

      I turned to see who had identified me, bracing myself for a dirt clod to the head or a well-aimed rotten Negg. Instead I saw a teacher I didn't recognise, a blue Zafara sporting a white shirt and a red and white polka-dotted bow tie, similar to the one I'd seen in the toy shop that squirted water at those unfortunate enough to stand too close. He was also holding a book in his hand, and I recognised it as my dictionary, the one I habitually carried around with me.

      “You dropped this, Sonny,” the Zafara said, adding it to the pile of books already in my arms. “My name's Mr. Griffith by the way, what's yours?”

      “F-Feivel,” I stammered, peering up at him nervously from over the rim of my glasses. “I-I don't think I've seen you around here before, sir,” I added.

      Mr. Griffith smiled. “I should suspect not, Feivel; I'm the new guidance counsellor, only started last week.”

      “Oh,” I said lamely, dropping my gaze to my books and feeling my cheeks turn pink as I tried to think of something more intelligent to say. Coming up empty, I squirmed my way out ungracefully by stammering, “I-I think I'd better go... the bell's gonna ring soon.” I started to walk off, but something made me pause. I turned around and looked back at the strange new teacher with his even stranger taste in bow ties, “M-maybe I'll see you around.”

      Mr. Griffith smiled. “Maybe you will.”

      Class began as usual, and soon I forgot about the stranger. I whipped through my math problems, blazed past everyone in science, rattled off answers during social studies... and proceeded to commence my regular duck-and-cover routine all throughout reading.

      You'd think that a guy who carried books around with him all day would be an avid reader, one of those kids who could never put the things down. That was the persona I tried very hard to keep up. And with good reason.

      As I stooped to pick up my “dropped” pencil just as the teacher, Ms. James, the red Chomby, was scanning the room in my direction to get someone to read from The Lonely Grundo to the class, an idea popped into my head, and the face of that odd Zafara, Mr. Griffith, materialised in my mind. Perhaps he could help me.

      I needed help because I had a big problem, a problem that, should it be discovered, I would never be able to live down for the rest of my life, and I'd probably end up crawling into a cave on the Tyrannian plateau just to avoid the humiliation. My problem revolved around the reason for my “book-wurm” façade. I couldn't read.

      Ever since I was old enough to start learning how to read, I'd been dying to figure it out, to make something of those funny shapes and squiggles that Mama always created such wonderful tales from. I'd stare at pictures in books like My First Book, and Kyrii ABCs in a vain effort to decipher the letters, but I couldn't, no matter how hard I tried.

      By the time I was in the first grade, and most of the other kids were learning how to read, the teachers had started becoming worried about me: When grasping beginning literature is a prime focus in the classroom, it is much harder to avoid demonstrating your skill (or lack thereof).

      So I was sent to the school nurse for testing. She diagnosed me with a permanent and mild form of Blurred Vision, and equated the fact that I couldn't read with the fact that I couldn't see. So I got my first pair of glasses.

      With my glasses, my vision did improve, but not my comprehension of even basic words. Every day I slogged through reading simple words like “the” and “in” only to discover that I'd forgotten them within a few hours.

      By second grade, the teachers had returned me to the school nurse to see if I had Dyslexia, but the nurse reported that, no, I wasn't skipping lines as I read, or jumping between words, so that wasn't my problem. The trouble was, she couldn't really know; when she'd asked me to read for her so she could gauge how my eyes followed the words, I had refused, saying I'd rather read silently. And for all intents and purposes, it looked like that was what I was doing as I allowed my eyes to glide in a straight, steady line over the funny squiggles, while not taking in a single word.

      By third grade, everyone was getting rather tired of my distinct lack of progress, no matter how hard I tried. They all assumed I was just being lazy and careless, so they stopped trying. I, and my reading, fell through the cracks.

      In time, I grew frustrated with my incredible effort that yielded no fruit whatsoever, and so I began to resent reading, to loathe the very idea of it. I excelled in other subjects that didn't require it as much; math was all numbers (except the word problems, which I always ignored), science I could get through fine, so long as I memorised the lists of names for plant parts, and the order in which the rock cycle progressed, and kept it in my memory. Social studies was easy too; I could read a map just by looking at the pictures on it and their relationship to each other within the boundaries. I remembered which countries went where, and in time it wasn't necessary for me to be able to read the countries' names. Besides, it wasn't too hard to tell the difference between land markings as different from one another as the Haunted Woods, the Lost Desert, and Terror Mountain.

      One would think that because I couldn't read, it meant that I couldn't write. That was not strictly true. Many of my letters were either backwards or upside down, and I almost never spelled a word correctly, but as long as I knew what I wanted to say, I could muddle through it, then give it to Mama, the only one in the world who knew my secret, and she would correct my mistakes. Then I'd go back and copy each new letter, that was no more than a shape to me, perfectly, completely unaware of what I was writing. Mama could change my entire story and I'd have no idea.

      I kept up my book-wurm persona so that no one would find out I couldn't actually read any of the books I was forever lugging around. Even my brother and sisters, all three Kacheeks, had no idea my books were just for show. Any time any of them opened the door to my room, I'd grab a book and open it to a random page, so that when they entered, it looked like I was busy losing myself in a story.

      That was what I was doing that afternoon, the day I had met Mr. Griffith. Bluebelle knocked on my door and pushed it open.

      Quickly I put down the sheet of math problems I was scratching out on my notebook and picked up the closest book I could find, flipping to the middle and putting on my best thinking face as I stared at the squiggles. I didn't have a reading face, so my thinking face always had to suffice.

      Bluebell, who was, inexplicably red, not blue, poked her head in and smiled, “Hey book-wurm,” she chuckled. “What-ch'a reading this time?”

      I glanced at the cover; it had a picture of two fierce looking Grarrls fighting on it. “It um, it's about Grarrls,” I said, hoping she wouldn't ask anything more. I hated lying about the contents of books in case anyone I talked to ever read it themselves.

      Bluebelle chuckled. “Of course it's about Grarrls, silly Harris,” she said, using the affectionate nickname she'd chosen for me due to my rather fuzzy head. “I was hoping for a little more detail than just what I could get from the title.”

      I really wanted to ask her what the title said, but obviously I couldn't, so I settled for a good old-fashioned deflection. “Well, what do you think the story's about?” I asked, cocking my head and giving her my best teacher gaze.

      Bluebelle was about to reply when we heard Mama calling us downstairs to supper. I closed my book and followed my sister downstairs. I never did figure out what book I'd been reading.

To be continued...