Dan Reynolds was six years old.
Ahem, six and eleven months. Almost seven. It was the summer before second grade, and as of right now his biggest problem was that his best friend was being boring.
Daniel Sermon, or Wayne, as he always insisted on being called, was just barely ten years old now, and Dan was beginning to worry that his friend was outgrowing him. After all, lately Wayne just wanted to read or watch movies, not play games. He wanted to fit in with the other fifth graders, liking what they liked and wearing what they wore and saying things that Dan didn't quite understand. It made him sad. Wayne was the coolest kid in the whole world. Dan wanted to be just like him. He wanted Wayne to like him as much as he liked Wayne. But still, he felt like a baby.
"Reading is boring!" Dan said angrily after thinking about this one afternoon. They were sitting in Wayne's backyard, Wayne with a sci-fi book that was, in fact, made for middle schoolers (and he was very proud of this).
In all honesty, Dan didn't know how to read. All the other kids his age seemed to just already know, but no one ever made time to teach him at home, and whenever he tried to learn things in school it all looked confusing and scary and he couldn't understand anything. His first grade teacher told his mom about it once, using big scary words like learning disability and grade level and specialist. Dan knew because he listened at the door during his parent-teacher conference, but his mom told the teacher he'd catch up and shortly took him home.
"You'll like it when you're older," Wayne responded, not even looking up. Dan knew he wouldn't understand. He was always in the smart group in class. He read big books and did challenge homework.
"No I won't. It's boring." Dan pouted.
Wayne closed the book, putting it next to him. "Books are cool."
"I'm too stupid to read," Dan grumbled. That's what the smart kids in his class told him.
"You're not stupid. Want me to read to you?"
Dan nodded and lay down next to Wayne in the grass to listen. He liked the way Wayne read to him, always making his voice sound dramatic and changing its pitch for different characters. Sometimes he'd even show him the book and help him read a sentence by slowly sounding out each letter for him.
"I can't read it," he said, frustrated as Wayne pointed to a word that was long and unfamiliar. He put his head on his arms and tried not to cry.
"C'mon," Wayne said gently. "Look, you know that first sound. B. And then that's an A and an L and another A..."
"Bala...balan..."
"Good...now this C makes a sound like an S...sss..."
"Balansss?"
"Yeah. Balance. Good job."
Dan beamed proudly, Wayne's approval glowing in his head. He read a little bit more before growing tired of it. The large effort it took to make sense of the tiny printed nonsense wore down on him, and he lay back down in the grass so Wayne could keep reading it to him.
Eventually, Dan, who was now at the phase where naps are for babies despite occasionally needing one in the afternoon, felt his eyelids drooping as Wayne read a very long description of the setting without even stumbling over a single word. As he fell asleep, he could almost imagine himself in the place the book described.
>><<
When Dan woke up, he was lying on the couch in Wayne's basement. Wayne was playing piano across the room, and Dan quietly stood up and sat down next to him on the piano bench. It continued to get harder for both of them to fit, but they still could.
"What have you been learning?" Dan said. Wayne furrowed his brow and began playing something from memory, his fingers flying around faster than Dan thought his ever could. He sat quietly and watched until Wayne was finished, then stared at him in slight awe.
"That was really good," Dan said.
Wayne shrugged. "Could've been better."
Wayne was never happy with what he did. His mom called him a perfectionist and Dan didn't know what that meant, but he heard the word perfect in it so he decided that must be right.
"Show me what you're learning," Wayne said, scooching over so Dan could reach the keys better. He nodded, and began to play the much simpler song that he was supposed to he working on. He hated his piano teacher. She was mean, and she liked his brothers better than him, and she made music boring even though he loved it. His fingers shook as he played, and after a few measures he had to stop because he couldn't even remember the next note.
"I hated playing that song when I had to learn it," Wayne said, ignoring Dan's embarrassment. "It's stupid."
"Yeah." Dan smiled a little.
"Play something else. Something you like."
So Dan started to play something else, something a little easier, with a different sort of rhythm than the other piece. Wayne watched with interest, because he had never learned that when he was young.
"What was that?" he asked when Dan finished.
"I made it up," Dan said.
"You just made it up?"
He nodded.
"Teach me how to do that," Wayne said. "That's cool."
Dan shrugged. "I don't really know how I do it."
Wayne looked down at the keys. "Maybe when we grow up we can be rockstars and you can write songs."
This brought a grin to Dan's face. "Yeah. Rockstars."
He was happy with that all day, deciding that rockstars did not need to learn how to read.
