Learning Curve
It doesn’t… look right.
It’s the closest he has ever come to a nice description of what is really wrong with him, that he is simply too dumb to read. He’s known since he was seven and his teacher kept nagging him because he didn’t make enough progress.
Nice years later, he is squinting at his brother’s homework, until Sammy exclaims, “You’re too slow!” and shoves him away, and he pretends it doesn’t hurt.
He won’t finish school anyway. Dad has been dropping more and more hints lately that he expets him to come working at the garage full time, and he’s fine with that, really. It’s easy. Cars, he gets.
Cars don’t mock him like his classmates did before he firmly established himself as the womanizing alpha male of the school, they don’t look at him like he’s stupid like his teachers, they don’t tread him condescendingly (as Sammy has started to do lately). They are right, of course, but it still hurts.