Misfit Theater Company 2

12. Truths (Part One)

Mr. Taylor starts class with partner work surrounding "Self-Reliance," and since I don't know anyone else and we're sitting beside one another, even though we haven't spoken in days, Gina and I team up.

"So, I guess we're together?" she asks after literally everyone else in the room has paired up.

"Yep," I say in a tone that lands somewhere between disappointment and relief. I guess that's where my feelings land too. She has been so toxic, but there have also been plenty of times when she's been a great friend to me. And with everything happening with Paige, Gina actually may be the perfect person to vent to. If she'll let me after how our last interaction went.

"Alright, now that everyone has a partner," Mr. Taylor starts, stepping back up to the front of class, "I have four key points from Emerson's essay, and each group will receive one of the key points. Your job is to find textual evidence to support this point as well as to reflect on how you see this point playing out in your own lives. Questions? Comments? Concerns? No? Okay, great, let's do this."

He moves around the group to pass out key points from the text, starting with us. We receive, "Emerson wants his readers to be honest with themselves and with others with whom they are in relationships."

"Oooh," Gina says, "he wrote whom, what a show-off."

Mr. Taylor overhears this, smirks, and says, "Darn right," before continuing on.

Gina laughs. "He's, like, one of those teachers people have crushes on," she whispers.

"People like you?"

She pushes her turquoise hair from her shoulder. "Please, I have a boyfriend."

I chuckle. "Okay, so anyways. We need to find evidence of this key point. 'Emerson wants his readers to be honest with themselves and with others with whom they are in relationships.'"

Gina shrugs.

I guess it's up to me then. But even though I've become more confident with my dyslexia, I'm still dyslexic. I try to employ one of my strategies: finding key words.

"Let's skim for keywords then. How about you look for 'relationships' and I will look for... 'friend' or something."

She groans. "Okay." Gina has always been smart, but lazy. Her laziness now is not at all surprising to me.

We quietly begin searching the document. I find 5 instances of the word 'friend' before I find something that looks like it could be what we're looking for, since the word 'truth' always appears in the sentence.

"What about this part here?" I ask, pointing to it. "Can you read that out loud?"

It occurs to me now that maybe Gina doesn't know I'm dyslexic. Did I ever tell her? We weren't really talking when I was diagnosed, and it didn't come up afterwards. But she and I used to always do our homework together, and she would read out loud then, so... maybe she doesn't need to know. I don't exactly want to broadcast my struggles, especially not to someone who has made fun of me for struggling.

"Sure," she says, sliding my paper out from under my hands so she can read it better. "It says, 'Live no longer to the expectation of these deceived and deceiving people with whom we converse. Say to them, O father, O mother, O wife, O brother, O friend, I have lived with you after appearances hitherto. Henceforward I am the truth's. Be'... blah, blah, blah... okay, here: 'I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should.' Ugh, do you think we need to write all of this? Because this whole paragraph is basically saying the same thing."