A PERFECT RENDEZVOUS

Date Night

Ten minutes later, Harry was seated on a stool by the kitchen counter, completely relaxed, laughing because they couldn't decide what to do with their evening. "I'll make out a list," Harry teased, pulling a scratch pad and pencil closer to him. "So far, you've suggested making love." Harry wrote that down while Zayn leaned over him and watched with a grin, his hand resting on Harry's shoulder. "And making love. And making love."

"Did I only bring it up three times?" Zayn joked when he finished writing.

"Yes, and I agreed all three times, but we were supposed to be thinking of ideas for the early part of the evening."

It hit him then what he'd noticed earlier when Harry was writing on the index cards, and he complimented him on it:

"Your handwriting is so precise; it looks as if the words have been typeset."

"Which isn't surprising," Harry replied with a smile over his shoulder, "since I spent years working on it. While other thirteen-year-old boys and girls were starting to drool over you in your early movies, I was staying home, perfecting my handwriting."

Zayn sounded dumbstruck at such a waste of effort. "Why?"

Turning slowly on the stool, Harry looked up at him. "Because," Harry said, "I was completely illiterate until I was almost twelve. I couldn't read more than a few words and I couldn't write anything other than my name and that not legibly."

"Were you dyslexic or something?"

"No, just illiterate from lack of schooling. When I told you about my youth, I left that part out."

"Purposely?" Zayn asked, as Harry got up and walked around the counter to get a glass of water.

"It might have been deliberate, although I didn't consciously decide to hide it from you. Funny, isn't it, that I could easily admit to being a petty thief, but my mind recoiled from saying I'd been illiterate?"

"I don't understand how that could happen, not to someone as bright as you."

Harry gave him a look of jaunty superiority that made him long to snatch Harry into his arms and kiss it off him soft lips as Harry said loftily, "For your information, it can happen to anyone, Mr. Malik, and being bright doesn't have a thing to do with it. For example, one out of every five women in this country is functionally illiterate. They missed school when they were little because they were needed at home to help with siblings or because their families were itinerant or a dozen other reasons. When they can't catch up, they decide they're stupid and they just quit trying. Whatever the reason, the results are always the same: They're condemned to a life of menial jobs and welfare; they'll stick with men who abuse them because they feel helpless and unworthy of anything better. You can't imagine what it's like to live in a world filled with information that's beyond your understanding, but I remember how it was. The simplest things, like finding your way to the right office in a building, is completely beyond you. You live in a state of fear and shame. The shame is unbearable and that the reason to hide it.

"Were you ashamed, as young as you were?" Zayn asked, reeling from this new insight into his childhood.

Harry nodded, swallowing some water, then he put the glass aside. "I used to try to sit in the front row when I did go to school, so I wouldn't have to see the other kids' faces when they laughed at me. I convinced the teachers that my eyes were bad."

Zayn hardly knew how to cope with the emotions raging inside him at the thought of him as a little child, trying to bluff his way through life in a sprawling, dirty city where no one cared. Clearing his throat, Zayn said, "You said lack of schooling was the initial cause of the problem. Why weren't you sent to school?"