high school dropout severely neglected driver who missed so much school even before he dropped out and was never taught things by his parents or guardians and he just. doesn’t know so much stuff. he has all this practical knowledge, whip-smart in his own way, street smart and infinitely technically intelligent when it comes to cars and engines and mechanics. he’s fantastic at what he does. but when it comes to book smarts and common sense, the sorts of things school and parents and family teach you, normal life teaches you, there are just so many gaping holes in his knowledge.
he doesn’t really understand math beyond the practical basics, doesn’t know big or complex words — he doesn’t like reading because it makes him feel stupid to not understand things, to have to ask what words mean, and he feels annoying asking, used to not be allowed to ask without an explosion of aggression from his mother or father or foster carers, so he learned to stop asking and stay out of the way and be quiet. he was taught that he’s stupid and a lost cause and it’s a waste of time him trying, anyone trying.
he doesn’t have much of an understanding of science at all, even less than grace’s twelve-year-old students do, and often he struggles to grasp things even as they’re explained and taught to him, because he just doesn’t have the base knowledge. nobody ever bothered to give it to him. he’s smart, grace knows he is — grace won’t allow for a second for driver to continue thinking he’s stupid, or worthless, or any other awful thing that’s been drilled into his head — and grace is as patient as anything when he teaches him.
driver only allows it because he knows grace likes teaching, otherwise the level of attention and patience required would make him want to gut himself. sometimes he still wants to gut himself, sitting tense and ashamed while grace uses his middle school worksheets to teach him about things he knows he should know. sometimes grace will still overestimate him, accidentally — on one notable occasion he prompted driver to try and solve an equation, and driver left the apartment before confessing hours later, once he’d been for a drive and the sting had soothed, that he doesn’t know what that means. but grace always corrects.
there’s a sharp contrast between them. what feels like miles of empty space, between grace’s doctorate and dissertation and driver’s single year of high school that he can’t even remember if he passed. but grace bridges the gap. it makes him nauseous to think how many people have failed driver, how many people who were supposed to protect him instead wilfully hurt him and left him behind, and sometimes it feels so ridiculously ineffective — too little too late — to sit beside him now and reassure him, trying to soothe the bone-deep hurts that were carved there twenty years ago.
but grace will. he’ll adjust his explanations as many times as it takes for understanding to light up in driver’s eyes, define as many words as he has to, reassure driver as many times as it takes, always willing even when he’s exhausted, because driver’s always got that look like he’d understand if grace finally snapped and hit him. grace will be the one single person in river’s twenty-six years to give him the gentleness he deserves.
