Page 62 of Left on Read

Hayden: You’re dyslexic?

River: maybe? Never got tested or anything

River: whoever made up that word was a sadist

River: like who thinks ‘lets put a bunch of random letters together and make that the word for people who mix up letters’

River: kinda wish someone had cared enough to test me for it. everyone just called me dumb and told me to pay attention

I paused, unsure what to say to that.

I’d seen plenty of students in my years of teaching who’d fallen between the cracks and didn’t get the support they needed for their learning disabilities. I knew how debilitating it could be to have to struggle just to get yourself up to everyone else’s baseline, and I’d seen how much damage teachers could do when they belittled students for things they couldn’t control.

River: that’s one of the reasons texting is so hard for me

River: I have to read everything twice to make sure I don’t sound like drunk autocorrect and half the time I say the wrong thing anyway so

He sent the shrugging emoji.

Hayden: How long before you have to go to work? We can switch to video if you want.

I felt bad now that I knew the extent of how much River struggled with texting. The only reason I didn’t like doing video calls was because I hated how I looked on camera. But that was a selfish reason to cause him extra stress or make him struggle just to talk to me.

River didn’t answer, but my phone screen lit up with a Snapchat call.

“Hi,” River said brightly when I answered.

“Hi.” I looked around my room. Should I go downstairs?

“Did you have a good time with Ryan?” he asked.

“Yeah. It was fun.” I scooted up my bed and leaned against the wall. Crossing my ankles, I stretched my legs out. “He caught me up on all the office gossip.”

“Anything juicy?”

“A few things. He told me about a colleague who was the victim of a lunch thief and spiked his soup with laxative to catch them.”

River howled with laughter. “Oh my fucking god, that’s amazing.”

“I take it you’re team laxative?” I chuckled.

“Hell yeah. Zane and I used to work at a warehouse just outside town, and some asshat kept stealing from our lunches. Not the whole lunch, but like, half a sandwich, or they’d take a few bites out of an apple, or open a chocolate bar and take some of it but leave the rest.”

“That sounds like a personal vendetta and not like a random lunch thief.”

“It was. We eventually figured out it was the guy who got hired at the same time as us. Zane…he doesn’t suffer fools well, as our nana used to say, and this guy was a moron with a capital M. And not like a legit moron, but a moron by choice.”

“A legitimate moron?” I asked.

“Yeah. You know how some people are morons, but they don’t do it on purpose? Like me. I say a lot of stupid shit, but I can’t help it.”

“You’re not a moron, and you don’t say stupid stuff.”

He rolled one shoulder in a sort of shrug. “Maybe not stupid, but I miss a lot. I guess oblivious is the better word. But, like, this guy was a moron by choice. He deliberately made things harder for everyone by not following instructions and always asked a million questions to make meetings go later because it would give us a few extra minutes of pay when the rest of us just wanted to go home after working our asses off for twelve-hours.”

“He sounds like a nightmare to work with.”

“He was. I gave him the benefit of the doubt and figured he was just doing the best he could, but Zane saw through him. He ended up exposing the guy and making him admit in front of our supervisors that he figured other people would do his work for him if he kept messing up or if they had to explain it to him a million times. He got mad and started stealing our food.”

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