Page 210 of Boyfriend of the Hour

She has no idea how pretty she is. That’s always the best kind of pretty because people aren’t full of themselves.

She was very, very smart. I think she might have a photographic memory. Or at least knows everything on earth about horses.

She adores Nathan. I know he thinks she’s not very social, but she listens to everything he says, and she responds more to him than anyone. She and I will get along great.

Within about an hour, Isla started to get antsy. Her patience with the conversation began to erode as she tired of drawing andstarted struggling to control her body. I noticed more than once that she sat on her hands because if she didn’t, she would shake them by her ears or start pulling on her chin.

“I would like to go back upstairs,” she announced abruptly when Mary was in the middle of telling Nathan about a book Isla was reading for her English class.

Everyone turned to her as she yanked at the knees of her pants.

“Thank you for communicating that,” Mary said kindly. “Would you like to say goodbye to Nathan and Joni first?”

She had the option not to, and for a moment, I wouldn’t have blamed her if she had just left. It was obviously hard for her to do things like this, and I could tell how uncomfortable she was and how ready she was to leave.

But after she stood up, Isla paused and turned to Nathan and me with a few quick bobs of her head all the way down to her knees. “Goodbye, Nathan and Joni. Thank you for coming.”

She turned to leave, but then, almost as quickly, she turned back and gave Nathan a very quick, very awkward embrace, then sprang back almost as though she couldn’t handle anything else anymore. Isla grabbed her drawings and exited the room without another word.

Mary watched her go, then turned to us, eyes shining. “First hug, isn’t that?”

Nathan swallowed hard and wiped the corner of his eye as if there was something in it. “Yes, it was.”

Mary smiled warmly. “She likes it when you come. I hope you can continue to see her more often.”

With a polite goodbye to both of us, she followed her ward upstairs, leaving Nathan and me to exit the way we had come.

We wereboth quiet as we drove back through the campus. As I looked around, I wondered vaguely how much a place like this cost. Probably more than college. More than most people made in a year. People like the Hunts wouldn’t blink at paying that kind of price, but it was completely out of the question for most families struggling with disabilities.

Families like mine. If Nathan was right about me having ADHD, dyslexia, and who knew what else, how might I have benefited from some kind of intervention when I was a little kid? I doubted I would have needed this kind of twenty-four-hour therapy, but even so. What might I have been capable of as a child had I the benefit of therapists, counselors, or better tutors than the honor roll volunteers?

Even now, I made rudimentary spelling errors all the time, had never actually read a full book cover to cover, and couldn’t do basic addition without my phone or my fingers. I had also learned little tricks to hide my awkwardness—things like flirting and smiling to cover up the fact that I hadn’t been able to follow a conversation, staring a little too hard to demonstrate that I was actually listening, or making myself the butt of a joke when people pointed out how spacey I was. No one was better at making fun of me than me.

Sometimes, my life felt like one big mask.

But as I looked around the school, I couldn’t help but wonder what would my life have been like if I’d had this kind of support from the get-go? Would I have been able to finish high school without seducing my teachers? Or actually finished college like some of my smarter siblings?

Would I have even become a dancer at all?

That thought sobered me. Dancing was everything to me. Already, I was eager to get back in the studio, to start practicing the routines that would get me back into shape, to go back to auditioning and performing, to what I’d always thought I’d been made for.

So, not a world without dance. Never that. But maybe a world where I had more options. A world where I might actually be able to choose what I did and when instead of feeling backed into a corner every time I hit a rough patch.

Yeah. That would be nice.

“Thank you for coming,” Nathan interrupted my thoughts gently as he turned onto a freeway to head back to the farm. “She liked you. At least she’s very interested in you.”