“Yes! The answer is twenty-three.” The teacher shoved the paper at her. “Now, go sit down and finish the rest.”

Once she was seated again, Georgeanne looked at the second problem on the page. She studied the three bundles, carefully counted each stick, then wrote down twenty-one.

As soon as the dismissal bell rang, Georgeanne grabbed the new purple poncho her grandmother had knitted for her and practically ran all the way home. When she entered the back door, she noticed the pink petit fours on the blue and white marbled counter. The kitchen was small, the yellow and red wallpaper peeling loose in places, but the room was Georgeanne’s favorite. It smelled of nice comfortable things like cakes and bread, Pine-Sol and Ivory Liquid.

The silver service sat on the tea cart, and she was just about to call out to her grandmother when she heard a man’s voice coming from the parlor. Since that particular room was off limits to anyone except really important company, Georgeanne walked quietly down the hall toward the front of the house.

“Your granddaughter doesn’t seem to grasp abstract concepts at all. She reverses words or simply can’t think of the word she wants to use. For example, when shown a picture of a doorknob, she called it ‘that thing I turn to get into the house.’ Yet at the same time, she accurately identified an escalator, pickax, and most of the fifty states,” explained the man Georgeanne recognized as the doctor with the big ears who’d given her those dumb tests the week before. She stopped just short of the doorway and listened. “The good news is, she did score very high on comprehension,” he continued. “Which means she understands what she reads.”

“How can that be?” her grandmother asked. “She uses a doorknob every day, and as far as I know, has never even touched a pickax. How can she mix her words around, yet understand what she reads?”

“We don’t know why some children suffer from brain dysfunction, Mrs. Howard. And we don’t know what causes these disabilities, and we don’t have a cure.”