By all rights of the universally acknowledged teenage social pecking order, a guy like Brody should never have thought about going out with a “nice girl” like me. He was made for someone pretty and perfect.

Like Ayisha.

But date we did.

The two of us lasted for almost a year, and I’m not sure we would have if not for the fact that Brody Tuck was dyslexic. A monumental fact you’d think someone would have noticed before I came around, but they didn’t. Maybe they were distracted by his overall Brody-ness, because here’s the thing—Brody was so gorgeous he came dangerously close to being beautiful, with thick, light brown, wavy hair that meant the most natural instinct was to want to reach out and grab hold of it and go to town. He also had beautiful blue eyes with thick eyelashes that were ridiculous. Add to that the fact he had reached six foot one by the time he was in the eighth grade. It was a wonder he didn’t spend all of his free time either fending off girls who wanted to date him or other guys who wanted to beat him up because every girl wanted to date him. Instead, he was the quarterback, star pitcher, captain of the basketball team, regardless of the grade or who else might have been around him.

Though Brody had his fair share of flaws, too.

One of the biggest being he approached studying like a cat being forced to do tricks. Having to repeat his sophomore year had been humiliating for him and he confessed later that he’d considered joining the army, but he was still too young. What his having to repeat a grade and my having skipped a grade meant, though, was that we wound up in several of the same classes, otherwise I probably would have had to settle for admiring him from afar.

But when he failed his first two tests in our English class, Mr. Kritchinger threatened to give him an F, which meant Brody was at risk of not being able to play on the varsity football team. That simply would not do.

Now, normally when an athlete wasn’t doing well in their studies the end result was coach intervention, but there were always a few teachers for whom any kind of pressure to help a jock was ineffective and Mr. Kritchinger was one. When that happened, the services of a guy like Carson Pettibone were usually called upon. Carson was the smart kid with enough athletic ability to be kept on various sports rosters to function as the team tutor, but unfortunately for Brody, Carson had graduated early from Christmas High School to pursue a premed degree up in Nebraska and was thus no longer available.

Enter me.