In seventh grade, everything started to make sense.
School was much easier that year than it had been for Gabriel in any of the tortuous years in the past. He didn't spend long hours curled up in his living room with a history textbook, trying to remember the connections between obscure monarchs that helped or hindered centuries-old wars. He didn't erase and re-write grammar diagrams twenty times. He didn't wrack his brains for the right equation in beginning algebra. His stomach didn't even sink when he saw the rope hanging in the gym.
Because obviously intermarriage between royal families made sense from a political perspective, and obviously sentences had specific structures, and obviously x could not be confused with y, and obviously all the rope required was just the right combination of movements.
When Gabriel's first report card of the year arrived, his father was so pleased that he tacked it up on the wall over his workbench.
"See?" said his mother. "You can do well in school if you keep trying like this."
His father coughed and rubbed his glasses on a corner of his shirt.
The report card had a note from his algebra teacher which read "a great grasp of the practical, but a limited imagination," and the next morning Gabriel looked at his teacher and felt that she was small, afraid of how much this child knew that she hadn't yet taught him. What he felt must be true—hadn't she said his imagination was limited? Besides, he didn't see how imagination would be of much help in algebra. You knew how to work the problems or you didn't. There was a right way to do them, and a wrong way. Simple brainpower.
Gabriel's mother started talking about the right classes, and the right colleges, and the right careers. He could be a lawyer, a doctor, a physicist, a politician. He could make a difference. He could be somebody, the first somebody in a family of nobodies.
His father worked nine to five in what he called a "cubicle farm" and fixed watches in the evenings for the extra money. Since he was a very small boy, Gabriel had always loved to draw up a chair next to his father's workbench and observe him at work, taking old worn-down watches apart, cleaning the parts, putting them back together so they ran properly once more.
"Good as new," his father would sigh when he finished, wiping his hands on a piece of clean cloth. Or, if it had been a particularly good night, "Better than the maker intended."
In seventh grade, Gabriel started helping his father with the watches. He had time in the evenings, now that homework was so much easier, and he enjoyed the peaceful rhythm of the work, sitting there beside his father in companionable silence and making broken things right. Sometimes customers would bring in clocks, too, which required similar yet different skills to those needed for working on watches. Gabriel soon had both skill sets at his disposal.
"Still at that?" his mother would sniff when she came home, smelling of bleach from her job cleaning the offices of important people. "Careful," she'd warn his father. "You're gonna turn him into a watch repairman."
"What's wrong with repairing timepieces?" Gabriel asked once, turning from the workbench where he and his father were working on restoring a clock for their own apartment.
His mother came over to him and placed her hands firmly on his face. His eyes watered from the bleach smell.
"You can do better," she said. "One of these days you'll shake the dust of this neighborhood off your feet and travel the world. One of these days," she said, pulling him into a quick hug, "you're gonna do something great. I can feel it."
In seventh grade, he saw that his mother loved him for something he wasn't yet, something he might never be.
Special.