My Stepbrother's Dirty Little Secret novel Chapter 17

“Thank you for the ride,” I replied quickly, adjusting my backpack on my shoulder. “Goodbye.”

I hiked my backpack higher on my shoulder and walked toward the entrance. I reached the lab a few minutes before the lecture started.

The door was half open. I stepped in quietly and took my usual seat near the wall, not the front, never the front. The professor liked to ask questions there.

My laptop booted up slowly while I opened my notebook. The page from last week stared back at me.

Words scratched out, letters written twice, arrows pointing everywhere because I could not keep a straight line of thought on paper. It looked messy and childish. I pressed my lips together and flipped to a clean page before anyone around me could see.

The professor walked in a minute later and placed his bag on the desk.

“Today we continue with convolutional neural networks,” he said.

He began drawing a grid on the board. It was small squares, pixels. Then beside it he wrote a 3x3 filter matrix.

Numbers.

My brain caught onto it immediately. The grid moved in my head before he even finished explaining.

Slide the filter.

Multiply.

Add.

Move again.

Multiply.

Add.

The pattern formed so clearly it almost felt obvious like watching gears click together. My pen started moving quickly to keep up.

Convlution.

I stopped. The word looked wrong. I tried again.

Convoultion.

It was still wrong, I know it. My stomach tightened. I scratched the word out harder than I meant to.

This always happened.

My brain could hold the idea perfectly. I could see how the filter detected edges in an image. How multiple filters would find different features. How deeper layers turned edges into shapes.

But when the idea had to leave my head, through my mouth or my hand... everything broke apart.

Letters switched places, words came out backwards. Sentences tangled before they even formed.

Dyslexia.

Dysgraphia.

That was what the doctor called it when I was six years old. And to me it just meant something in my brain was built wrong.

Pretending I was not one bad question away from everyone realizing the truth.

“Worthless,” the voice in the back of my head hissed, an echo from years ago. “You’re a fucking disappointment, Gianna. I swear I tried with you, but there’s nothing in that head of yours. Nothing but empty space. You’re good for nothing.”

“No matter how hard you try, you’ll always be stupid.”

“I’ve tried being patient with you, Gianna, but patience doesn’t fix stupid.”

“Just sit there and stay quiet. The less you talk, the less everyone notices how slow you are.”

I looked at the screen, my vision blurring for a second. Get it together, Gianna.

I tore my eyes away from the notebook. I couldn’t let those voices win.

No one knew, not even my mom.

She thought I had grown out of it. That all the therapies, the endless appointments, the stupid drills they made me repeat over and over had actually fixed something.

In her mind, her daughter had beaten it. Her daughter was brilliant.

She didn’t know the truth.

I was a liar.

A good one. Too good.

I had spent years learning how to hide it, how to nod at the right time, how to smile like I understood everything, how to pretend I could keep up when my brain felt like it was tearing itself apart just to form a single sentence.