They tested you for what you couldn’t do.
Nobody asked what you were built for.

My brother could read for hours.

Straight A’s. Every time. It looked easy for him. I’d watch him sit with a book the whole afternoon and think, that’s amazing. I couldn’t do that. The words wouldn’t hold still long enough for me to follow them across the page.

Here’s the part I never forgot.

He’d get mad — real mad — that I was the better athlete. I never once got mad that he was the better reader. I was happy for him. I thought what he could do was special, and I told him so.

Even as a kid, somewhere in the back of my head, I wondered why it didn’t go both ways. Why my gift made him angry, and his gift made me proud.

I didn’t have the words for it then. I do now.

One of us had the strength the world had already decided to count. The other one didn’t. And the one who had it was the one who felt threatened — because deep down, he must have known the counting was rigged. On a different field, the score would flip.

• • •

Then came the testing.

Second grade. They pulled me out of class. Sat me down in a little room. Ran me through all of it. Question after question.