Welcome Back, Maple Mehta-Cohen

Chapter 2
“We’re holding Maple back.”
Those were the four little words that ruined my life.
It was last April. Ms. Littleton-Chan called a meeting with my parents and me. She said it was “quite important,” and my mouth was already dry when we sat down in front of her desk. I’d never had a “quite important” meeting with my parents and a teacher before.
Look, under normal circumstances, I love Ms. Littleton-Chan. Last year was her first year teaching at the Barton, and she was different from all the other teachers I’d ever had. I loved her right away, from the first day of fifth grade. It wasn’t just because she also has a bicultural last name, although I appreciate that. It matches my Indian-Jewish hyphenated situation (Hin-Jew, my parents call me). More than that, it was that she seemed so interested in all the things she taught us. Like when we did a unit on ocean ecosystems, she could barely contain herself telling us about how the blue whale eats up to 40 million krill per day. Those are like little shrimp. Forty million shrimp! I’m telling you, she was practically levitating with enthusiasm. Ms. Littleton-Chan cares about things, about us, in a way that felt new. She notices things.

Which, in retrospect, might be why she was the first person to notice the real me. The me I’d been hiding in big and small ways, every day, since I don’t remember when.
I can’t read.
Or, I mean, I can’t really read. Not well. Not easily. Here’s what
it feels like to look at a page in a book, if you’re me: Some of the letters look sideways or upside down. Sometimes the letters flip around. Or they swim around on the page and won’t stay still long enough for me to grab them with my brain. There might be a picture of a dog and I know the word should say dog, but I’m looking at it and it says odg. So I can read it, kind of, but it’s confusing. And if the word odg is next to a picture of, like, a cat or a rainbow, then I’m extra confused. And on their own, the words look less like sentences and more like a puzzle. A whole page is like an ocean. When I look at it, I feel like I’m drowning. I can swim really, really slowly. But it hurts my brain to try.
When I hear a story out loud, I understand everything. But when I have to read to myself, it all goes out of whack. I can sound words out, sure. But it takes me a long time. Too long. So long that by the time I get to the end of a sentence, I’ve practically forgotten what happened at the beginning. It’s hard to put it all together. It’s frustrating to spend that much time on what seems so easy to everyone else. I usually just give up.
Up until Ms. Littleton-Chan came along, I kept it a secret. We almost always work in groups at my school, and I’m really good at looking at other people’s papers without looking like I’m looking. Or when we talk about the book we’re reading, I’ll listen for a while, and then add an idea that builds on someone else’s.