My biological father gave me a car for my 17th birthday, then told my stepdad, “now he knows who his real father is.” — I wanted to humiliate him back, but then I came up with a lesson the whole family would remember.

I was sixteen and I was failing it and I had decided to drop it.

And he did not know any chemistry. None. He left school at sixteen and he fits kitchens.

So what he actually did, for about five weeks, was sit opposite me and make me read it out loud to him.

That is it. That is the entire method.

He would say “what’s that one mean” and I would have to explain it to a man who could not check whether I was right, and about half the time I would get four sentences in and hear myself and go: oh.

And he never once pretended to follow it. He never nodded along. If I said something and he did not get it he said “no, I’ve lost you,” and I would have to go back.

I got a B.

And at some point in about the March my mother told me he had been reading the textbook on his own in the evenings after I went up, and getting nowhere with it, and doing it anyway.

She told me that one too.

How I found out.

I am thirty and I bought a house in the spring.