Counting to D Read Online Free PDF

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    Nate hid behind a book all through lunch, and I didn’t think he’d even noticed the whole 100 percent thing. But maybe he’d spent some of his time studying me, because when we walked into chemistry together, he asked, “You okay?”
    “Yeah, I’m fine.”
    I headed over to the hood to get the chemicals we’d need for that day’s experiment. When I got back, he hadn’t even bothered to open his lab notebook yet — he was just sitting there staring at me. “About lunch — ”
    “It’s okay.” I felt hot and wondered if I was sweating. I thought I’d handled Graham pretty well, but maybe I’d had a minor freak-out without even realizing. What did Nate see when he looked at me, and why was he suddenly so concerned? “What would happen?” I asked.
    “What would happen if what?” Nate stopped staring at me long enough to hook up our Bunsen burner.
    “If one of you got a B on a test? If I hadn’t gotten a hundred? If you and your friends weren’t all perfect at everything?”
    Nate shrugged. “The world wouldn’t end. I got a B+ on one of my English papers last semester. The gang all made fun of me about it.”
    I looked up at him in alarm.
    “Not because they’re all mean, just because English is normally my best subject. My failure to come up with anything interesting to say about David Copperfield amused my friends for a couple of weeks. It was more entertaining than the book was. And then we moved on to Candide and all was forgotten.”
    I didn’t understand, and I wasn’t even sure I wanted to. “You and your friends have history. Somehow, they understand that you getting a B+ is supposed to be funny. But I just moved here. What would have happened to me if my grade today had been eighty-five percent instead of a hundred percent?”
    I noticed a sadness in his eyes. “It wasn’t eighty-five percent though. You’re a smart kid. Stop worrying about it and help me with this lab.”
    It was all the answer I needed. Nate and his friends could never find out I was dyslexic — ever. I was a smart kid; that was true. And that was all they could ever know about me.
    I was almost relieved that none of my so-called new friends called me that first weekend. I hadn’t seen my mom much since she started her new job, and I kind of expected to spend the weekend exploring our new city together. Mom always threw 200 percent of herself into everything she did. And for a year and a half, her only job had been being my mom. She’d been super-mom. Her constant attention had annoyed the crap out of me most of the time, but now I was starting to miss her. A weekend of exploring would have been really fun.
    It didn’t happen, though. I was no longer my mom’s only project. Now she had thirty stories of design calculations to consume her attention. Just like flipping a switch, she’d gone from super-mom to super-architect, leaving me at home alone with nothing to do but unpack.
    My new room was slightly more rectangular than the one I’d had in San Diego, so I couldn’t make it look exactly the same, but I did my best. Once the wall above my bed was completely covered in photos of Gabby and Arden, it started to feel a little like home.
    After I’d finished hanging all my clothes in the closet, I went out into the hall and grabbed an acrylic painting from a stack of yet-to-be-hung artwork. I looked at the image of the little girl playing at the beach for a long minute before hanging it on the blank section of wall next to my closet. The apartment didn’t feel much like a home yet, and somehow, sharing a bedroom with that lost little girl seemed fitting.
    When I finished putting my new room in order, I got ahead on homework. Considering how seriously people took grades at my new school, it was probably a good thing.
    Arden called me on Sunday afternoon, and we spent a while comparing San Diego boys to mythical creatures. No real-life boy seemed as interesting as a fetching werewolf. Unfortunately, hearing