Authors: Cammie McGovern
Matthew nodded. Mostly he remembered the collective relief they all felt when she broke up with Gary, her incarcerated boyfriend. Chloe kept going. “Marcus invited me up to San Francisco to see this band he loves, and I asked if we could stop by Stanford on the way and say hi to Amy—I just had this feeling like I should see her—I don’t know why.”
Matthew swallowed. He’d had that feeling every single day and forced himself to ignore it.
“I have to tell you, when I first saw her, I almost didn’t recognize her. She looked really sick, with black circles under her eyes. Her face was really thin, but then her hands and legs were kind of swollen. I don’t know if that was from being in the scooter. Like maybe not walking is bad for her? Marcus said he once knew someone who had gland problems who looked like that.”
Did Amy have a gland problem? Not that he remembered.
“That wasn’t even the worst part, though. When I went to hug her good-bye, she started to cry and couldn’t stop. I’ve never seen a nervous breakdown before, but I swear that’s what it looked like. I don’t know how else to describe it. She was crying so much she couldn’t type anything. It kept going for about ten minutes, but it felt like a lot longer. I never figured out what it was about because she was crying too much to type anything. I told her I’d come back the next day and she finally typed, ‘JUST DON’T TELL MY MOM. PROMISE YOU WON’T TELL MY MOM.’ The next day, we didn’t get there until three in the afternoon. I said we’d take her out to lunch, so I felt bad that we were late, but I texted her a few times. She didn’t text me back, and when we got there, she was gone. No note, nothing. Her room was locked and we couldn’t find her anywhere. We left and I still haven’t heard back from her. I feel so bad about the whole thing. I haven’t called her mom yet because I keep thinking there was something important she was trying to tell me but she couldn’t get it out. Instead she just begged me not to tell her mom. Which makes me feel like I shouldn’t tell her mom, right?”
Matthew couldn’t stay. There was a line forming and he could hear Hannah asking Carlton, “Where’s Matthew? Please don’t say the bathroom.”
He thanked Chloe for stopping by and spent the rest of his shift trying to decide what to do next. That night, he emailed Sarah:
Sorry to be writing again so soon, but it turns out Chloe saw Amy before she left school and she didn’t look good at all. Supposedly she couldn’t say much and she couldn’t stop crying. I guess I’m writing you because I have to ask someone: Did Amy ever seem depressed to you? Or even suicidal? I keep thinking no, it’s impossible, but I know she was different with each of us. Maybe she talked to you about this? Sorry if I’m writing too soon but it’s been twelve hours. I’m panicking a little and you must be out of that lab by now.
A few minutes later, he got a text:
She’s not dead. I can’t tell you where she is or what’s going on, but I can tell you she’s not dead. You can also tell her parents this. Sarah
He answered:
Thank you for writing to me. If I promise not to say anything to her mother, can you just tell me: Did she get in touch with you at Berkeley? Is she staying with you now?
A half hour later, he got this:
She’s not with me, but yes, I helped her move out of the dorm. Bad situation all around. I’m shocked her parents let that go on as long as they did. She promised she’d contact her parents after November first. You should wait until then and she’ll get in touch with you, too.
Matthew looked at the date today: October 27.
Matthew: Why is she waiting four days?
Sarah: She has her reasons. Don’t ask.
Matthew: Is she getting emails?
Sarah: I don’t know. I think so. Don’t worry. She’s okay now. Or better anyway. Staying at school was the problem. It was bad this semester, but that was only part of the problem. That’s why she’s being mysterious about it. I can’t say any more than that. I’m sorry.
That night after work, he went home and composed a long email.
So, Amy,
I don’t know if you’re reading these emails, but I’m going to write you anyway because there are a few things I need to say. I’m sorry for what happened at the end of the summer: that’s the main thing.
I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand what happened between us. You always said I never read enough, that all my problems would be solved if I read more novels. So I’ve been trying this fall, going through some of the books you suggested, and I have to be honest. Usually I’ll get halfway into
House of Mirth
or
Anna Karenina
and I’ll think,
My God, have I really just read two hundred pages about a garden party?
Then I’ll pick up
All Quiet on the Western Front
and I’ll think,
Jesus, is this war ever going to end?
It’s not that I don’t like the books; I do. You’re right—they’re great books, but I keep feeling like they’re all about people who are horribly trapped by their circumstances. They’re hard to read, aren’t they? Don’t you feel that, too? Maybe it brings me to my real point. Do you remember the conversation we had about
The Awakening
, the book you were reading at the beach this summer? It turns out you left the book under the passenger seat in my car. I found it a few weeks ago and started to read it. When you first told me about it, I thought it sounded like another one of those setups you love so much, where characters are trapped by a society that forces them to do nothing for most of the book. (I’m sorry, Aim, but those are some of your favorite stories. Where the plot creaks along for hundreds of pages and finally the earth cracks open when a glove gets removed or a teacup dropped.) I expected this story to be like that, but it isn’t. Or yes, it is, and even so, I’ve gotten caught up in this world and have even fallen a little in love with Edna, and the ocean and those magical beach nights where she finally claims herself. I didn’t read it until now because I always assumed it was all about sex. Now I have to say, I don’t think it really is about sex. It’s about her claiming a life for herself, and unfortunately the only thing she can do to make that happen is have sex with someone who isn’t her husband.
So, yes, Amy, I see why you love this book and why you wanted me to read it, but I also want to say: Please don’t forget how Edna is being a little childish, too—stamping on her wedding ring and smashing the crystal vase. She married her husband to get away from her parents, and then she spends the rest of the book getting away from him. Okay, I think, but maybe she should have seen what was coming? I got to the end when she only sees the ways everyone has tried “to possess her, body and soul.” But would that really be the end of the world, Amy? To be possessed that way? What I’m trying to say is: I don’t think you have to tear up all your relationships to get away from people’s expectations of you. You can just
not do
what they expect, right?
I don’t know if you’ve left school because your parents put too much pressure on you to go to the most high-pressure, competitive school possible, or if it’s something else completely.
My guess is that this book doesn’t explain everything. I keep going over what you said that night after we got home from the beach. I understand what you were trying to say, but I also have to say I don’t believe there’s such a thing as casual sex for people like you and me. How could there be? We don’t have casual relationships with our bodies. They’re unpredictable, humiliating things that have failed us so much it’s hard not to hate them, and impossible to imagine being naked with another person and relaxed at the same time. I don’t know. Maybe that’s not it at all. Maybe this whole thing is my fault for things I haven’t even imagined yet. So I’m reading your books, and (yes, it’s true) emailing Sanjay, who, I’m sorry, is a jerk. Maybe I shouldn’t say that, so if it offends you, consider it a typo. Pretend I meant to say
jock
.
But not worthy of you, Aim. Not worthy at all.
Don’t disappear forever, Amy. Don’t die making a point that no one understands yet. Let us find you, and when we do, tell us what you’re trying to say.
I read that final scene with Edna walking into the inky ocean to make her last statement to the world and I thought about the dream I once had of you and me swimming together, strong and whole. Please write me back. I don’t know where you are and I need to hear from you. (I also read that ending and wondered if all of this is some elaborate suicide note on your part. Please, Amy, don’t let it be that. Please. I beg you.)
Love, Matthew, who is sorry for being about three months late saying all this.
Instead of hearing back from Amy, he got this:
Hi, Matthew—I just wanted to write you a quick note to apologize for what happened after work last week. I didn’t mean to startle you with that big beanbag move. I promise I’m not a crazy stalker. I’m just sick of having stupid things with jerky guys who aren’t worth all the effort I put into thinking about them. I guess I was thinking,
Yes, Matthew can be a very strange person, but in a sweet, good-hearted way, and maybe after all the jerks I’ve gone out with, he is the one I should get to know better.
I don’t know what you’re thinking, or if I scared you, but I wanted you to know that I like you. That’s all. It’s fine if you don’t feel the same way. Or not fine, but it’s okay. That’s all. Maybe you’re still thinking about your old friend, I don’t know.
Hannah
Three days ago—the night before he got that first email from Amy—he stayed late at work and ended up side by side again with Hannah, in their beanbags. There was a new girl named Reenie with them, who asked, after everyone had been there for a few minutes, “So is this where everyone plays truth or dare?”
Matthew panicked for a second and wanted to say,
No. Not
at all
.
Then he thought about Amy and how her old assignments were a little like truth or dare. He felt like Amy was watching him and would be mad if he said no. He felt like that a lot. Even though he was hanging out with new people, it was like she was there, watching everything he did.
Of course they played. This crowd was born for playing truth or dare. On Hannah’s turn, Sue said, “Okay, Han, you’ve got to tell someone something you’ve always wanted to say but haven’t had the guts.”
Right away, Hannah looked at Matthew and he got nervous.
She’s going to tell me I’m weird and I clean too much,
he thought. But no. She didn’t say anything. Instead she leaned forward on her hands, and she kissed him.
At first he thought she’d made a mistake. Like she’d fallen down with her lips accidentally on his. Then he understood: this was a kiss. It had been five years since he had one, and he wished there’d been more time to ready himself. Loosen his jaw and warm his lips, maybe. He kept his eyes open too long and did nothing with his hands. It wasn’t a great kiss, but it wasn’t terrible, either. And afterward he felt no need to rush to the bathroom and wash anything. So that was good. In truth, he didn’t think too much about it afterward. In fact, his only thought driving home was:
If Amy had been here, she would have been proud.
But she wasn’t there, of course; that was the problem. He wrote Hannah back:
Can’t write much now. Have a friend in crisis. The one I told you about. Thank you for your note, though. You didn’t scare me. I’ll talk to you on Friday.
I
F
A
MY’S MOTHER WANTED
numbers, here was one she could have.
One.
In the three months since Amy started college, she’d made exactly one friend. Hard to know exactly who to blame for this: the school, for deciding that Amy should live in an apartment next to the health-services office? Or her parents, who agreed so easily without ever consulting her? Amy wasn’t told about her housing assignment until they had arrived on campus for the first day of orientation and were standing in the office of the student housing administrator, who spoke quickly to her parents, highlighting all the pluses of the apartment without giving Amy any time to even ask a question.
Outside the office, alone with her parents, Amy fired off all the questions she wasn’t allowed to ask in the administrator’s office. “WHAT ABOUT LIVING IN THE DORM? WHAT ABOUT THE ROOMMATE I’M SUPPOSED TO HAVE? HOW AM I GOING TO MAKE ANY FRIENDS?”
Nicole steered them over to a bench and sat down. “The school went over your health records and they didn’t think a regular dorm room was a good idea, Aim.”
“SO I HAVE TO LIVE IN THE INFIRMARY?”
“Of course not. You won’t be
in
the infirmary. You’ll be
next door.
”
“I DON’T WANT TO LIVE THERE. EVERYONE WILL ASSUME I’M SICK.”
“No, sweetheart, it’s not like that,” Nicole said. “You’ll be in a more comfortable apartment, with your own refrigerator for your own foods. You’ll have an alarm system and a registered nurse next door, twenty-four hours a day, for any emergencies that crop up. It’s safer this way, that’s all.”
“I DON’T NEED A NURSE! I DON’T NEED ANY OF THAT.”
She saw her mother exchange a look with her father. Something to the effect of,
You need to speak up here.
“Here’s the thing, Aim,” her father said, placing a hand on her shoulder. “We know that you’d rather be in a dorm, but the college has some reasonable concerns about the safety of that. We talked to the people in the housing office for a while. We told them your personal-care needs and some of our safety issues, and they were pretty clear that a dorm wouldn’t work. They couldn’t provide the monitoring you would need.”
“I DON’T NEED MONITORING! I NEED HELP IN THE MORNING AND AT NIGHT DRESSING! THAT’S ALL! I DON’T NEED A NURSE!”
Her dad stepped away. He never lasted long if Amy really protested something. Nicole kept going. “The nurse won’t do any of that. You don’t have to see the nurse at all. They assured us that the apartment is very separate.”
It was gradually becoming clear to Amy—all of this had been decided a while ago. Though she’d been given a dorm room in the packet that arrived weeks ago, she didn’t have one anymore. “YOU DECIDED ALL THIS WITHOUT
TELLING ME
?”
“We thought it would be better if you were here and you could see the place. They sent us pictures and it’s lovely.”
In her original welcome packet, Amy’s dorm assignment was on the freshman quad. After she opened it, she spent hours on Google Maps studying the exterior of her dorm building and the grounds around it. She memorized the paths that looked wide enough for her scooter to navigate. She imagined herself rolling along with a classmate beside her. But now it was clear: she could protest all she wanted, but she wouldn’t be living in a dorm this year.
Was this a punishment for the summer she spent seeing Matthew behind her mother’s back? They were never caught, but Amy always wondered if Nicole suspected something. Early in the summer, her mother heard about the vodka-at-prom story from the mother of another classmate who told her she was so sorry about the way Amy had been used by the other kids at prom. When Nicole confronted her, Amy tried to argue. “NO ONE WAS USING ME! I AGREED TO THE WHOLE THING! IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN A STUPID MISTAKE, BUT IT WAS
MY
STUPID MISTAKE.”
Nicole refused to see it that way. “It never would have happened if we hadn’t hired those peer helpers. They assumed you were desperate for friends and would do anything they asked you to. Turns out they were right, unfortunately.”
The surprise after that was the absence of any punishment. Amy kept expecting something. That her mother would insist on signing Amy up for another online college-credit course over the summer. Something rigorous and ridiculous like statistics or medieval French literature. But no. Apparently she’d waited until now to exact her revenge.
Nicole sat down on the bench across from Amy’s scooter and laid out all the other decisions they’d made without consulting her, including this: they would only hire professional PCAs to help with her needs.
“HOW ABOUT SOME DISCRETION MONEY?” Amy suggested. “IF SOMEONE HAS A SIMILAR SCHEDULE AS ME, MAYBE I CAN HIRE THEM FOR A LITTLE HELP TAKING NOTES AND GETTING ME LUNCH?” Surely that wasn’t a crazy idea. Some flexibility in those first few months when she might be the loneliest?
“Absolutely not,” Nicole said. “We’ve tried that once and we’ve learned our lesson.”
What could Amy say to this?
No, you’re wrong? Matthew and the rest of them have been wonderful friends?
She had made mistakes, too. Worst of all with Matthew, who she misjudged so terribly their last night together. He’d walked out of her house without saying good-bye. Since then, he hadn’t texted or gotten in touch with her once.
“OKAY, MOM,” she said, and started her scooter toward the apartment where she would live alone, in the back of a building that was mostly administrative offices. The following morning and every morning after that, Amy rolled out of her room to greet secretaries in business suits arriving for work. Because she had no dorm or resident advisor, Amy spent orientation week sitting by herself, on the side of all the activities, watching as her peers completed scavenger hunts and tossed water balloons back and forth to one another. The few people who spoke to her had evidently not heard that they needed to wait for a response, because three separate times, Amy typed answers to questions only to look up and realize the person had walked away.
For those four days of orientation—the longest four days of her life—only the personal care assistants who came in the morning and evening to help her dress and undress heard her speak. Otherwise her glorious Pathway with its humanoid voice and amazing capacities went unnoticed by a single classmate. Amy tried to change that when classes started. She preprogrammed a funny introduction of herself. She studied her class syllabus so she could ask questions about supplemental reading. She was prepared for every possibility except the one that happened: three lecture courses with professors who never took attendance and only left five minutes at the end for questions and comments. Amy raised her hand, but was never called on. Her second weekend of college, she didn’t bother leaving her room at all. She stayed inside, ate yogurt and rice cakes, and listened to the thrumming bassline of party music across the quad.
By late September, she felt as if she’d become a professional recluse. She went to classes and forced herself, for one meal a day, to eat in a cafeteria. Beyond that, she stayed inside, spending time on various chat rooms and discussion boards. Just as she was beginning to wonder if she might be truly losing her mind, one afternoon a “personal message” showed up in her Shakespeare discussion mailbox. It was from a boy named Brooks who she’d noticed in class, mostly because he talked a lot and had pale hands and the long, thin fingers of a pianist.
Brooks: Hello, Amy. I wondered if you might like to talk privately sometime. I believe we share similar readings on some of these plays.
She pictured his hands in class, carving images in the air as he spoke. Sometimes he kept his fingertips pinched together like the conductor of an invisible orchestra. Once she’d even had the thought:
He looks weirder than me.
Amy: Sure.
Brooks: You seem to know your Shakespeare pretty well.
Amy: The plays, yes. The sonnets, not so much. As a poet, I’d say Shakespeare was a wonderful playwright.
Brooks: Yes, I agree.
Amy couldn’t help it. The relief of talking to another human being again was so huge she laughed out loud, alone in her apartment.
Amy: Who are some other writers you like?
Brooks: Hard to say. I tend to like writers less the more I read of their work. I start finding their shortcuts, the similar points they make over and over. Like Shakespeare, for instance. How many times is he going to write about the way words fail to describe our deepest emotions? We get it already.
Amy: Maybe words failed him.
Brooks: Exactly.
It wasn’t always clear if he understood her jokes. Probably not, judging by how serious he was about his literary passions. Shakespeare was okay, but his real love was reserved for early horror writers like H. P. Lovecraft, who he talked about a lot.
For a few weeks, their exchanges went back and forth. She enjoyed them enough to imagine that she’d found her first friend on campus, and one day she asked him if he’d like to have lunch after class. “I don’t know about that,” he wrote back. She waited for him to explain. “It’s not you. Or your scooter. That’s not the problem.”
Though she was alone in her room, her face burned red with shame. Obviously it was the problem. “Why not, then?” she typed.
“It’s me. I’m socially awkward face-to-face. I hardly ever eat with anyone. I get repulsed easily by other people chewing. You should see some of these guys on my floor. They eat like animals.”
She wrote another letter to Matthew—one of the many that she’d written but not sent over the last two months. Then she got in bed and cried as she had so many nights since she arrived.
Though Brooks never spoke to her, even once, in class, she kept up their online conversations because he was interesting enough in his own strange way. He had Asperger’s, she decided, or something that made him unaware of the hurtful things he sometimes said. If he didn’t understand, how could she blame him, she decided. Their book discussions and nightly chats kept her going through the end of September and into October, when a strange feeling took over her body. It felt like a flu that came in waves, then drifted away.
I’m sick, s
he’d think, grateful for an excuse to stay inside even more. And then, after she settled herself into bed, it would pass.
Wait. No, I’m not sick.
One rainy Saturday night, they found each other online and Brooks spent twenty minutes telling her the plot of his favorite Lovecraft story, “The Outsider
.
”
It was about a narrator who’d lived alone in the catacombs of a castle basement, surrounded by books his whole life. One day he decides the time has come to venture into the world. It takes him a full day of crawling to find his way out of the dungeon, and when he finally emerges, he discovers the world he’s only known from books is in the grip of terror over a monster that’s been unleashed in their midst. He wants to help, because even though he’s only been in it for a few minutes, he loves the world. Even with everyone screaming in fear and running inside around him, he loves the colors, the buildings, everything. When he finally sees the monster, he realizes they’re right. It’s terrifying, a hideous thing covered in scales and warts with teeth that stick out in every direction, but he’s determined to stay brave and save this world that he’s only ever known and loved through books, so he goes to kill it, and when he does, his hand hits a mirror.
As Brooks told this whole story one sentence at a time, posted as another IM message so it read like a monologue interrupted every few seconds by his user name, Amy prayed this wouldn’t be the ending. He was the monster everyone feared! Locked in a mirrorless dungeon for years to save his book-loving heart from the truth about himself!
Please, no,
she thought.
Let him recognize the similarity to my story.
Surely it occurred to him: she was as isolated as this “outsider.” Since arriving at Stanford, she’d felt just as monstrously alone.
For a long time, she couldn’t think of anything to say.
Brooks: Amy? Are you still there?
Amy: Yes, I’m here. I have to ask you—am I like that monster?
Brooks: No. My God. I can’t believe you’d say that.
Amy: You tell a whole story about someone who has lived in isolation and enters the world only to discover the extent of their freakishness. You have to admit, there are parallels.
Brooks: Oh. I guess so.
Amy: I lived a very isolated life for a long time. All my friends were teachers and books. I don’t think I even realized it until last year, when I made real friends for the first time. I loved it so much I felt like I would do anything for those people. I
did
do anything. It was wonderful.
Brooks: And what happened?
Amy: I don’t know. It didn’t last. I discovered the extent of my own freakishness, I guess.
Brooks: You should really read this story.
She hadn’t ever asked him this question, but she had to now:
Amy: Why did you want to be friends with me?
Brooks: I told you: I liked your comments on the discussion board. Plus, I’m from Orange County, so I read that newspaper article about you. I thought you’d be someone I should get to know.
She shouldn’t have asked. It only made her feel worse—he was a boy obsessed with the idea of freakishness that she represented. Even if he couldn’t put it into words, she understood. Instead of typing any more, she pushed herself away from the computer and felt a wave of nausea roll up through her body. She was truly alone. Worse than alone, because she’d shared too much time with a boy who was casually, unthinkingly cruel.
The nausea stayed with her for the rest of the night.
For three solid days afterward she was sick. On the fourth morning, she woke up and, still wearing her nightgown, walked down the hall to the infirmary. “I FEEL LIKE I’M DYING,” she told the nurse. The room seemed distorted, the walls wavery. She wondered if the nurse would scream and run away from her.