Chapter 5
Five
Logan
My jaw tightens when I hear the door of the private study room I booked in the library open, alerting me of Camden’s arrival for our first “tutoring” session.
Of course, he’s over thirty minutes late, so I don’t really know how much progress we’re going to make.
Especially with how annoyed I am with his tardiness.
“What happened to being here at seven?” I ask, attempting to keep my tone even.
Camden drops into the chair across from me and immediately pulls notebooks from his bag, not even looking up when he mutters, “Sorry. Practice ran long.”
It takes everything inside me not to lay into him about putting hockey before his studies. Considering he needs to do well on these make-up assignments to even play the rest of the season, it would make the most sense to refocus his priorities.
But I bite my tongue and manage to grind out a soft, “Well, we only have this study room for another half hour.”
His ocean blues lift to meet my gaze, and he frowns. “Tell me again why we can’t just do this at the house? From the comfort of our living room? Then it wouldn’t matter if I was running late.”
Two things happen in the span of a second.
The first? I’m irritated as hell by his lack of regard for my time.
The second? Well, Lexi’s face flickers into my mind.
The lies I’ve told her already feel like a mountain of deceit, and if I’m honest, the biggest reason we’re here and not at home is because I’m terrified I’ll fuck up this fake-boyfriend shit in front of her. That the truth will come out, and I’ll lose one of my best friends because of it.
Avoiding the possibility altogether feels like the best option. At least until I get better at pretending I’m into Camden, not her.
“Because the house has everyone coming and going, and you don’t need any more distractions than necessary,” I tell him, using the best excuse I can muster. “And speaking of distractions, hand over your phone until we’re done here.”
Camden, clearly one to take words at face value, chuckles as he drops his phone on the table and slides it over to me. “Yes, Drill Sergeant.”
Ignoring his teasing tone, I motion toward the stack of three notebooks on the table in front of him.
“Are those Theo and Holden’s notes from when they took the class last year? Did they label any of the stuff that was on the tests?”
“Uh, yeah, these are their notes,” he says, lifting the top two notebooks. “But I didn’t see anything marked as more important than anything else.”
Great, so we’re doing this the hard way.
I let out a sigh and rub my temple, fighting back my building frustration, before reaching across the table for the notebooks.
I set to work immediately, flipping them both open to the first page. “All right, then let me see what you have written down and we’ll cross reference them. Then we should be able to deduce what information they’ll question you on for finals if it shows up in both places.”
“And this is why I asked for your help to begin with,” he muses, leaning back in his chair.
I glance up at him, the picture of nonchalance, and mutter, “How the hell did you survive three years of college before this?”
“Do you really wanna know?” he asks with a suggestive wink, causing my stomach to drop.
“You didn’t sleep with your professors, did you?”
A bark of laughter leaves him, and he shakes his head.
“That would’ve been the easiest option, but no.
Just the TA. And before you get all high and mighty on me, it was only once for an English class freshman year,” he admits with a shrug—as if it’s the most normal thing in the world—before continuing to floor me further.
“Otherwise I’d either buy the tests off an upperclassman or pay someone to swap tests with me before handing them in. ”
Jesus Christ. I don’t know which is worse.
I gape at him, at a loss for words with how cavalier he’s being.
“You could get expelled for literally all of those things,” I tell him, my gaze locked with his as I grab the third notebook containing his own notes, dragging it toward me.
He shrugs, completely unperturbed. “I don’t test well.”
Scoffing under my breath, I drop my attention to his notebook and flip open to the first page. I expect for the pages to be relatively empty; maybe some doodles in the margins, since that’s the no-fucks-given attitude Camden clearly displays about school.
Yet to my surprise, the page is filled with notes, as is the next one, and the one after that.
The only issue is…
“Apparently, you don’t fucking spell or take notes well either,” I state, flipping through more and more pages. It all looks like utter nonsense. “Jesus, were you drunk in class when you wrote these?”
His nostrils flare slightly before he offers a clipped, “No, I wasn’t.”
“Then why do your notes look like you sent a three year old to your class?” I admonish, motioning toward the page in front of me. “Or better yet, why are you not just taking notes on the computer if your penmanship is this terrible?”
Even as the words leave my mouth, I’m aware I might be coming across a little too harshly. But, I mean, come on. When I agreed to this asinine idea of tutoring him, I wasn’t expecting things to be this bad.
I wait for some smart-ass—or dumb-ass—comment to come whirling back at me, but that’s not what happens. Instead, I watch as Camden’s jaw pulses, his gaze staring daggers at the open page in front of me.
“No. I’m, uh…” He trails off and glances toward the door before he mutters, “I’m dyslexic, actually.”
Guilt instantly slams into me like a stack of bricks, tightening my stomach into knots as my gaze falls back to the page in front of me.
When I first looked, it appeared as some half-English, half-gibberish words because of his spelling.
Yet now as I drag my gaze over the page, even my untrained eye can spot the signs of dyslexia I’d missed in my haze of irritation.
Letters out of place or flipped within their respective words. Spacing issues. Misspellings that, with a closer look, appear to be phonetically sounded out.
Unfinished sentences, like he was having trouble keeping up with the instructor.
Ah, fuck.
My teeth sink into my lower lip as I lift my attention back to him, only to find the frustration has left his body. Instead, he’s slumped back in the chair across from me, staring at his hands resting in his lap. The picture of defeat.
And I feel terrible.
Wetting my lips, I whisper, “Why do I get the feeling you’ve never told anyone this?”
He shrugs, eyes still cast down. “Because I haven’t. I mean, my parents obviously know, and my teachers in high school did too. But no one here does.”
“Why?” I ask, unable to keep the incredulity from the single word. It’s enough to have his gaze slowly lifting to meet mine, and once again, the embarrassment I see there is gutting.
Especially when the only thing he does is shrug again in response. Like he’s accepted this is how it has to be, when that couldn’t be further from the truth.
“Camden, you realize you can get extra testing time to account for your dyslexia, especially in classes where there is a lot of reading and writing,” I explain, being sure to keep my tone as far away from accusatory as possible.
“And you can record all your lectures instead of having to take notes—you just have to register with the disability office. There are programs with specialized tutors through Leighton to help, or I’m sure the team could get you someone who has office hours that better fit into your schedule. ”
“You don’t think I know all this?” he scoffs, shaking his head. “But all it’ll accomplish is showing everyone I’m even more stupid than they’ve already decided I am.”
The statement comes out with a bite of bitterness and, if I’m not mistaken, some resentment too. Then again, he’s telling this secret he’s kept for three years to someone who is guilty of treating him the exact same way.
Fuck, just this week, I called him a brainless Neanderthal to his face. And while I felt awful about it at the moment, it pales in comparison to how I feel right now.
Words can’t even begin to describe how much of an asshole I am.
“You’re not stupid. You have a learning disability.”
“I’m not sure anyone really gives a shit about that distinction,” he mutters, though it seems to be more to himself than to me.
But still, I hear it. And more than anything, it confuses me.
From everything I know about Camden—all that I’ve noticed during the past year or so of living with him—it’s that he’s the most carefree, easy-breezy person around. I’ve never met someone who couldn’t give less of a shit about other people’s opinions of him.
Which begs the question…
“Why does it matter what anyone else thinks about it?”
“It doesn’t,” is his instant reply. Or moreso, his instinctual lie.
Which is why I cock my head and ask, “Then why are you letting it stop you?”
His attention slices to me, a deafening silence filling the small study room we occupy. At first, I don’t think he’s going to answer. In fact, I’m waiting for him to play it off and fall right back into his blasé ways.
But he doesn’t.
Instead, he takes the knife currently lodged in my stomach and twists it further.
“Because when you hear something said to you over and over again about yourself, it becomes pretty easy to start believing it,” he mutters, his tone soft and even yet tainted with little bites of embarrassment and frustration.
“Every time someone calls me dumb or stupid or a dunce or an idiot for something I do or say, I start to believe it just a little bit more. It slowly becomes a part of who I am. So if it comes out that there’s actually something wrong with me?
Well, it just…solidifies everything they’ve said. ”