Chapter 9: Not the Word You Think

Mattias waited for the laugh.

He had waited for it since he was nine years old, in a hundred classrooms, and it always came.

It did not come.

Maki stood on the other side of the fallen pages with his glasses crooked and his hands open at his sides.

"You read 'the' as 'then,'" Maki said. "Both times."

"I know what I read," Mattias said.

"That's not stupid. That's a thing with a name."

"Don't."

"It has a name, Mattias," Maki said. "A lot of people have it."

"My father says it's an excuse."

Mattias heard his own voice and hated it.

It was thin and young, the voice from the back seat of a car on the way home from a doctor.

The doctor had said the word.

His father had said the other word.

The whole house used that one after, and no one in it ever said the first one again.

Excuses.

Maki crossed the room.

Mattias braced for it, for pity or a lecture or the careful voice teachers used.

Instead Maki walked past him to the wall and switched off the lamp.

The room went dark.

"What are you doing?" Mattias asked.

"You said the dark doesn't count."

Maki's voice was level and warm.

"And I said nobody lies in it. So tell me, in the dark. I won't tell anybody."

Mattias stood where he was.

His heart was going hard enough to hurt his shoulder.

He heard Maki sit down on the floor with his back against the desk.

He heard him pat the boards beside him.

After a long time, Mattias sat.

"I've never been able to," he said.

It was easier to say it to the ceiling.

"The letters move. They flip. I read a whole line and it doesn't stay."

"Since when?" Maki asked.

"Since ever. They tested me when I was nine. My mother was still around. She cried in the car."

He pressed the heel of his hand to his eyes.

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