Now, that seemed like a pretty stupid question. If they’re new words, you’ve never seen them before, so of course they would be hard to read. But I knew that wasn’t the right answer.

“No,” I said.

“Does reading ever make you tired?” she asked.

Another stupid question. Didn’t reading make everybody tired? That would be like asking “Does playing wallball make you tired? Does running a marathon make you tired?” But again, I knew that wasn’t what she wanted to hear.

“Not really,” I said. I wondered how many questions were left. I rubbed at an imaginary spot on my shoe.

“Do the words ever look blurry or like the letters are moving?”

I didn’t say anything, but I knew that Ms. B. knew that I knew what she was talking about.

“This was more successful,” she said. She showed me another paper. It was my eyeball page with the three ways me and Bertie were the same and the three ways we were different.

I didn’t know how much to tell her. “I copied Bertie,” I finally said.

“Excellent,” Ms. B. said. I looked up. That was weird.

Ms. B. got a laptop and some headphones from the computer cart. She did some typing and clicking and handed me the headphones. “How about you give this a go while I work with some of the other friends?” she said.

I put the headphones on and started listening. The computer would say a silly word, like zab or zop or zus. And even though they weren’t real, I kind of liked the way they sounded. Then the computer showed me the word written out, and I got to say whether it had gotten the word right or wrong.

After a while, Ms. B. came back and showed me how I could get the computer to read things for me in its super-polite robot voice. Then she showed me how it could listen to my voice and write the words on the screen or help me figure out how to spell them.

I acted like it was all super-interesting and I had never, ever done that before. Truth is, I always thought getting the nice phone lady to help you was just about the same as cheating, but Ms. B. didn’t seem to think they were the same at all.

“That’s what Dee’s using to write his compare-and-contrast essay,” she said. “He says it works better in the hallway, where you don’t have other noises interfering. He also claims that the more you use it, the better the computer gets at recognizing your voice. I don’t know about that, but maybe he can give you some pointers.”

“Pointers,” Dee announced from the doorway. He pointed his two index fingers at me. I think he might have been making a joke.