Chapter 23 Harper
Harper
I drove as fast as I dared without risking an accident or speeding ticket to Atlas Hall. One perk of living in Rhode Island was its tiny size; I made it there in under ten minutes—about a quarter to five. I checked in at the front desk and knocked on Orion and Easton’s door. No answer.
I knocked harder. Then pounded on the door. “Orion!”
“He’s not here,” said a guy peeking his head out a door from down the hall.
“Do you know where he is?”
“My roommate said he saw him heading back to campus.”
“When?”
The guy ran a hand through his hair. “An hour ago?”
“Thanks.”
I ran down the path from Atlas Hall, back to the Academy, sure it was going to be locked up.
But of course, it was busy with students and their extracurriculars.
I’d heard there’d been a terrible accident in the gym the day before, so I nearly skipped it, expecting it to be closed.
But it was business as usual, with athletes of all persuasions on the apparatuses.
I don’t know why I expected anything different.
But no Orion.
I contemplated heading to the STEM Wing to see if he was working on his NoSci project, or maybe the library for his history paper due tomorrow. But I knew in my heart, if he was still on campus, there was only one place Orion would be.
In the Arts Wing, I approached the door to our Advanced Piano classroom slowly and listened. Nothing. My heart sank, but I cracked it open anyway.
Orion sat at the baby grand in a lone circle of light from a small lamp on the teacher’s table beside him. No sheet music on the rack. Just him holding his head in one hand, the other hand resting idly on the keys.
My heart dropped again. He looked so utterly exhausted. Defeated. Touching the piano with nostalgia, as if it were some distant thing that was out of reach, instead of the instrument he’d mastered like the brilliant virtuoso he was.
I shut the door and stepped inside. Orion didn’t move or speak. I came down the aisle slowly and moved in front of him. He wore jeans, a tight-fitting long-sleeved shirt, and expensive-looking tennis shoes. Every part of him looked elegant and put together.
Because he’s still trying. Still trying to live up to some impossible standard…
“Orion?” I said again.
He looked up at me with tired eyes. “Bennett. Greetings and salutations.”
“I was worried.” I took a seat in Professor Wolfe’s chair. “What are you doing here?”
“Not sure,” he said. “Wolfe wants me to compose something for the spring concert, but that’s rather laughable.”
I could’ve played stupid and asked why, and that would’ve been my in to what I came to say to him. But the last thing he needed was me patronizing him or thinking I felt sorry for him.
I don’t, because there’s nothing to pity. Not one thing.
“Do you love to play?” I asked instead. A genuine question I wanted an answer to. “What does it mean to you?”
“I don’t know,” he said, his fingers trailing over the keys. “Sometimes I feel…”
I leaned forward. “Yes?”
“Sometimes I feel like I never gave myself a chance to find out. I’ve been so busy trying to not be an embarrassment to my family.”
“You aren’t,” I said automatically.
He looked up at me sharply. “No? In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not doing so hot in the academics department. Not like Odin or Octavian. I’m a wee bit of a failure, love.”
“You’re not a failure,” I said and swallowed hard, my heart pounding. “I think you might have dyslexia.”
His head snapped toward me. “I have…?” He stared for a moment and then barked a short, harsh laugh. “No,” he said. Petulant. Almost childlike. “No, I don’t.”
“I talked it over with Professor Wolfe—”
“You what?”
“—and you have a lot of the signs. How you said words have holes in them, memorizing lectures, and your handwriting…?”
“I don’t have dyslexia. That’s ridiculous.”
“Why is it ridiculous?” I asked softly.
“Because…it just is,” Orion said. “Dyslexia means you can’t read. Like when you look at a sentence and it looks like hieroglyphics or something. Or the letters are backward. That’s not how it is for me.”
I inhaled deeply and tried to make my tone as soft as possible. “That’s not what dyslexia is. Or that’s not all it is. It’s a spectrum—”
“That’s exactly what it is,” he said, practically shouting, his voice echoing in the auditorium. “It’s kids who can’t read at all, and need special classes in special schools or—”
“Orion, that’s a stereotype.”
He stopped, staring at me, looking so damn lost.
“Some people with dyslexia can read,” I continued. “They can read very well. Especially those with stealth dyslexia.”
“Stealth dyslexia,” he said, as if I were making words up. “Is that what you and Wolfe came up with? Behind my back?”
“He wants to help you. He’s the first damn adult who does,” I said, and took another breath. “He told me what he knew, and it made sense. So I’ll pass it on to you, and you tell me if it makes sense, okay?”
Orion glared at me, eyes hard, but he said nothing, so I continued.
“Some people with dyslexia memorize words by shape instead of decoding them. Or they substitute similar-looking words or their brain fills in the gaps, and they grasp meaning by context. They compensate. And if they compensate well enough, people don’t notice right away.
Others with stealth dyslexia might not realize they have it at all because they’ve built a ton of workarounds in order to get by.
For years, even. But all these workarounds cost so much energy that they can sometimes burn out.
” I huffed a breath. “Does any of that sound right to you?”
Orion stared at me a moment more, absorbing all this, then he shook his head. “No. I don’t have stealth dyslexia. I have ADHD.”
“Orion…”
“No,” he snapped. “If I had dyslexia, I would know.”
“Why?”
“Because I cannot have gone this fucking long not knowing!”
I flinched at his sudden rage but stood my ground, sitting calmly in the face of his storm. He was allowed to have it. If I’d been abandoned like he’d been, I’d feel shipwrecked too.
“This is ridiculous.” Orion stood up abruptly, pacing the small piano platform like a trapped animal. Then he stopped and stared at me, betrayed. As if I’d ripped out a plank holding up the entire scaffolding of his life. “Why are you doing this to me?”
I flinched. “I only want to help you.”
“It’s not…that,” he declared. “I’m just tired. That’s all. And you want to help me?” he shouted suddenly. “What is your obsession with diagnosing me? For the last time, love, you are not a doctor.”
“That’s not what I—”
“Because my parents did that already. They took me to doctors when I was a kid. Tests, evaluations, all of it. The whole Mercer Family Performance Package,” he said with bitter sarcasm. “The diagnosis was ADHD. I get distracted. I forget things. I lose focus. That’s it.”
I shook my head. “ADHD and dyslexia overlap all the time. Misdiagnoses happen—”
“Not this bloody time.”
I stared, trying to understand, and seeing a fury in his eyes that was covering something raw. Something old and buried. Not something I created, only unearthed.
“My parents told me. The doctors too, that reading was hard because of ADHD,” Orion seethed, voice low and shaking. “They said I just needed to try harder. Slow down and apply myself. Focus. And if it’s hard, it’s because I get lazy. Or I joke around. Or I don’t live up to my potential.”
My stomach twisted. “Orion…”
“So don’t sit there and tell me that after all these years of being told it’s one thing, you and Professor Wolfe, a piano teacher, for fuck’s sake, have decided that it’s something else.”
He started to go, striding for the door.
I firmed my voice, heart pounding. “What if they were wrong?”
Orion stopped.
“Your parents, the doctors, all of them,” I said, my voice quavering. “What if they were wrong?”
For a long moment, Orion did nothing but stand with his back to me. Finally, when I thought he’d continue out the door, he half turned his head over his shoulder, his voice heavy with defeat.
“If they were wrong, then Rhett was right. And I’m a fucking moron.”
My eyes flared, those words punching me in the gut. “That is not true. You’re not…anything like that. Or broken, or defective. And he’s a goddamn piece of shit for saying that.”
Orion shook his head. “I am. I’m stupid.”
“No—”
“Yes,” Orion said, turning around, his face a mask of conflicted emotions I couldn’t read.
“Because if everything you’re saying is true, and I was smart, I would have figured it out.
” He laughed harshly, a horrible, bitter sound.
“I’m eighteen, Harper. Eighteen. And I don’t even know what dyslexia is.
Sounds pretty fucking bloody stupid to me. ”
I stood up and slowly moved toward him.
“You’re not stupid,” I said softly. “You believed your parents. Because you were a kid. Because you trusted them. That’s what kids do.”
He shook his head, his eyes full of disbelief and something like grief. “I study. I memorize. I try so fucking hard. And all this time, all these years, I thought it was just me.”
“I know,” I said, my voice starting to crack.
“You’ve been working ten times harder than everyone else.
Building workarounds no one saw. Because you’re brilliant.
The memorization, your sketches and your piano...
God, Orion, your piano. Having dyslexia and ADHD while being that talented…
There’s a name for that. It’s called twice exceptional.
That’s what you are. That’s how you were able to keep going and no one knew. Not even you.”
“Wolfe told you that?” he said, and I could see him struggling to believe me.
I nodded. “The fact that you didn’t know only means you’ve been doing this alone. Surviving alone. And you never should have been abandoned like that. Never.”
Orion’s head dropped, shoulders bent, on the verge of giving in to the truth.