Say What You Will (3 page)

A
MY HAD ANOTHER REASON
for pushing the idea of hiring peer helpers for this year. In June, her parents had bought her the newest edition of the best communication device she’d ever had, a Pathway2000 that was infinitely faster than anything she’d ever used before. By the end of fourth grade, Amy had mastered Minspeak and later, Unity, the code languages of speech devices that condensed the work of typing tenfold, but this new model was more flexible and faster than anything Amy had ever had before. It remembered her favorite expressions, learned the rhythm of her sentences, and anticipated responses with amazing accuracy. It also had something she’d never found in a speech output device before: an honest-to-God human-sounding voice. For years she’d never understood why these devices could include wireless capability, Bluetooth connection, 3G internet access, and still make a girl sound like Stephen Hawking. With her new Pathway, it was different. Programmable as the beautifully simple “teenaged girl,” she sounded exactly like—well, what she was. She wondered if this was what someone with a new sports car felt like: if they wanted to test-drive the power it had, to see if flashy things could really change your life.

For the first three days of school, Amy discovered the answer was, sadly, no.

Even with the beautiful new Pathway at her side, walking down halls with a peer helper turned out to be exhausting and awkward. With adult aides, Amy could be quiet; with a peer, she could not. She spent most of her class periods trying to think of things to say, and couldn’t believe how quickly she ran out of ideas. She ended up complimenting arbitrary pieces of clothing. She told Chloe she liked her shirt twice.

The worst part turned out to be the one she was initially most excited about: eating in the cafeteria. After all these years of hiding away for lunch in resource rooms and teacher offices, she thought it would be so thrilling to sit in the cafeteria like everyone else. But the cafeteria was louder and more crowded than she expected. For her first lunch, she sat with Sarah at the end of a table full of girls who said hi when Sarah introduced her, then nothing more to Amy or Sarah for the rest of the meal. Mostly the girls complained about the trips their parents had forced them to take over the summer. Afterward, even Sarah felt bad. “That’s what those girls do. They complain about stuff the rest of us don’t have. I don’t know why I’m even friends with them.”

Her first day with Sanjay, Amy spent most of lunch period with her cooler from home, waiting at a table while he bought his lunch from the cafeteria. When he finally emerged with a tray, he sat down with other people as if he’d forgotten all about her. A few minutes later, he ran over. “Amy, I’m so sorry. I’m over here. I have some people who want to meet you.”

Her foolish heart leapt.
They do? Really?
She walked over, thinking they might compliment her essay from
Kaleidoscope
, but no. They were the second tier of the football team, even less interested in Amy than Sarah’s crowd had been.

At least Chloe hadn’t bothered sitting with other friends. “I pretty much hate everyone at this school,” Chloe said. “I’m sorry, but I do.”

Thursday night, Amy came home shaking with exhaustion. Adult aides were easier. With them, she didn’t have to feel nervous or wonder what they were thinking of her the whole time. She’d done all this so she could get to know Matthew, but by the time she got to Friday—Matthew’s day—she wondered if it was worth it.

Friday morning, she waited outside the front vestibule for Matthew in the same spot she’d met her other peer helpers. She was nervous, and so tired at that point, she just wanted to make it through the day and get to the weekend. She watched him walk toward her, smiling a little, his arms stiff at his sides, his hair hanging in front of his face. Before she could say good morning, he spoke first.

“I like your shirt,” he said.

She looked at him. Was he trying to be funny? Did he know she’d been using this stupid compliment all week? She looked down at her shirt, an aqua-blue one that she saved to wear today with him.

“THANKS,” she said.

“My problem is I don’t like talking in the hallway,” he said as they walked up the hall. He kept close to one wall, tapping lockers as he went, every other one. “I just don’t.”

“THAT’S OKAY.”

They walked down two corridors and stopped. He followed her into her classroom, opened her backpack, and pulled out her textbook. None of her other peer helpers had done this. “See you after class,” he said, tapping the book.

“QUIET IS NICE,” she said at the start of their next passing period.

“Good. I think so, too.”

By the time they got to lunch, Matthew had to be honest. “I need to tell you that I don’t have a lot of friends to introduce you to. The ones I do have, you probably don’t want to know.”

“DON’T WORRY,” Amy typed. “SANJAY INTRODUCED ME TO FORTY-SEVEN PEOPLE ON WEDNESDAY.”

Matthew smiled, then frowned, then looked away. This whole day had been confusing. Amy looked prettier than she had last spring, her face tan, her hair even longer and curlier than he remembered. It made him feel shy in spite of the emails they’d exchanged, her last two saying how happy she was that he’d be doing the job. He wasn’t sure why she liked him so much. They’d only had the one conversation. He’d probably only disappoint her now.

“I DID HAVE ONE IDEA,” she typed.

He looked up. “What’s that?”

She typed for a moment. He liked the slowed-down rhythm of conversation with Amy. It gave him a chance to breathe and think. “YOU COULD INTRODUCE ME TO THE CAFETERIA LADIES. THEY’RE ALL WEARING NAME TAGS.”

He laughed and thought,
Maybe I’ll make it through the rest of the day.

He did. Much to his surprise, it was easier than he expected. And more interesting, too. He got the sense Amy didn’t agree with her mother’s approach. “SHE’S A SCIENTIST,” Amy explained over lunch. “SHE LIKES TO MAKE GOALS, THEN TRACK DATA TO PROVE IF SHE’S MET HER GOAL OR NOT.”

Matthew thought about this. “Even if the goal is making new friends?”

“EXACTLY. IT’S A LITTLE HARD TO FIND MEASURABLE BENCHMARKS FOR POPULARITY. SHE THINKS PEOPLE SAYING HI SHOULD BE ONE.”

They were five days into the school year. “How’s that been so far?”

“WELL, YESTERDAY FORTY-SEVEN PEOPLE FELT OBLIGED TO SAY HI, SO GOOD, I GUESS.”

He laughed again. He could tell when she was joking even if the computer delivery was slightly off. He started eating his lunch, carefully the way he always did, holding his sandwich still half-wrapped in its baggie. He looked at her lunch, a single can of Boost. “Don’t you have more than that?” he asked.

“NO,” she said. “JUST THIS.”

He remembered the old days in second grade when mothers brought in cupcakes for birthdays, and Amy ate hers like a baby painting itself with frosting. The problem wasn’t her good hand that had freakish control over her talking board. It was her wavering head and mouth. Eating must still be a little like target practice.

Toward the end of the day, it occurred to him: the job was going better than he’d expected. The strangest thing of all: last night he worried for hours about hearing the voice while he was walking next to Amy. And then—surprise, surprise—no voice at all! This whole day, it stayed silent. Perhaps because he had other things to think about: Amy’s cooler, her books, the battery pack. He had his own schedule and hers, two sets of classrooms to walk quickly between. After seventh period, his legs were tired but he’d never felt more energized. One half of his brain had taken an all-day vacation. It was possible! He was free! He wished he didn’t have to wait four days to be her peer helper again.

“SO I HOPE THIS WASN’T TOO AWFUL FOR YOU,” Amy said when they were outside, waiting for her mom in the parent pick-up circle. On the other side of the road, he saw Bus #12—his own—pull away. He didn’t care. Easy enough to walk the mile and a half home.

“Awful?” he said. “Hardly. I’ve had a great time.” He laughed, though neither one of them had made a joke.

“YOU HAVE?”

Did he sound overeager? Was it wrong to like a job you were getting paid for? “Yeah.” He swallowed. “I mean, yeah. You’re interesting, Amy. You always have been.”

Her head flopped from one side over to the other. Her ear looked like it was listening to a secret from her shoulder. “HOW SO?”

He saw her mother’s car pull in. “Well, I can’t tell you now; your mother’s here.”

All at once he remembered his biggest failure of the day: he’d introduced her to no one.

Lie,
the voice said.
Don’t be stupid. Just lie.
It sounded angry. As if it had been watching him all day, waiting to remind him of all his failures.

“Hi, Aims! Hi, Matthew! How did it go?” Nicole got out of her car to open the trunk.

“I don’t have many friends,” he mumbled to Nicole as he loaded her walker and her backpack into the trunk of the car. “None Amy would want to know. I’m sorry.”

Unable to look either one of them in the eye, he turned quickly and sprinted away.

That night after dinner, Matthew stood at the sink washing pots and pans. He’d told his mother very little about his day. It was fine, he’d said. Amy was nice. His mother told him a story from work as she sipped her wine. As he finished the dishes, his mom touched his shoulder and asked why he checked the faucet so often. “It’s off, honey. I promise.”

He tightened the faucet again. He couldn’t help himself. “I know.”

“So why do you keep checking?”

He couldn’t look at her. She’d never asked him about the faucet thing before. She’d asked about other things, but not this one. “No reason.”

She took a deep breath. “I see you do these things that I never used to see you do. I worry that it’s taking up so much of your time.”

He wanted to tell her the truth; he really did.
It’s taking all my time, Mom. I don’t understand. I hate it but there’s nothing I can do.
He heard a noise—like water moving through pipes, only it was blood in his capillaries, rushing to his face, up the back of his neck.

“Can you tell me why?”

He should tell her. He wanted to. His throat grew tight. He couldn’t speak. He feared for a minute that he couldn’t breathe.

Don’t tell her,
the voice hissed.
It will make her cry and she’s sad enough as it is.

“A woman at work—Cheryl, you remember her? She has a sister she told me about. Apparently she has these—oh, I don’t know—routines, she calls them. Where she checks on things before she can leave the house. The stove, the coffee, her hair dryer, all that. She has to go through the house over and over. Checking and rechecking. Some days it’s so bad she leaves work at lunch and goes home to recheck.”

That wasn’t his problem. He wanted to laugh and say,
She sounds
crazy
, Mom.

“Is it a little like that for you?” She waited. “Where you try to calm your worries with these routines?”

“No,”
he said. “It’s
nothing
like that.”

It was, though. It was like that.

Don’t tell her,
the voice said.
Whatever you do, don’t tell her the truth.

“Because if it is, honey, you can get help. It’s a treatable thing.”

“I just told you it’s not.”

“All right, all right. You don’t have to yell.”

“I don’t want you to worry about me being too worried. That’s not going to help.”

“Okay.”

A
MY FIGURED SOMETHING OUT.
Her mother—who had come around to the idea of peer helpers eventually—hated the actual people who signed up. At the end of the first week, Nicole came in to Amy’s darkened room and sat down on her bed. “I can’t help it,” she said. “They all seem so ordinary and unworthy of you.”

“MOTHER—”

“That’s how I feel.”

“THEY’RE MY FRIENDS NOW. YOU’RE NOT ALLOWED TO JUDGE THEM.”

“Fine, I won’t. But I told Chloe that she’s fired if she puts any makeup on you.”

“MOM. PEOPLE WEAR MAKEUP.”

She shook her head like she was trying not to cry. “I know they do.”

“I’M SEVENTEEN NOW.”

“I know.”

“THIS IS PART OF YOUR JOB. YOU’RE LETTING ME GO.”

“Will you promise to tell me if these people do or say anything that makes you uncomfortable?”

“PROBABLY NOT.”

“You must, Amy. You must tell me if anything doesn’t feel right.”

“YES. OKAY, FINE. I WILL.”

No, I won’t,
she thought.

Amy surprised herself. Though the second week had gone marginally better than the first, it wasn’t by much. It was still slightly agonizing to creep along beside someone who wanted to walk faster. And humiliating to watch Sanjay flirt with cheerleaders by saying, “What I do is I’m kind of a babysitter for Amy. I love it! Best job I’ve ever had.”

And yet here she was—defending her friends. Yes, anyone could see that Chloe was overly devoted to a boyfriend who was in a juvenile detention center instead of school. Sure, Sarah texted a lot during their time together, probably more than she should have, but what did Amy know? Sitting across from Sarah bent over her phone, Amy looked around the cafeteria and saw about a quarter of the people there doing the same thing. Her mother was right, in a way. Maybe they could have gotten more responsible—or at least more polite—people. But if they had, then the group wouldn’t have been a real cross section of peers, and it wouldn’t have included Matthew.

That was the important part. That was why Amy felt defensive of them all. Because she needed the others to get Matthew every fourth day.

With Matthew it wasn’t painful or awkward. With Matthew, the silences felt okay. He didn’t make nervous excuses about why he needed to be on the phone with someone else. He didn’t grimace when she did something clumsy. He was just there. Happy to pick up the contents of her spilled backpack, happy to wipe her face and shirt, happy to get hair out of her jacket. With Matthew it felt both easy and real. She tried to think of the right word to describe him, and finally it occurred to her: he felt like a friend.

“Greetings,” Matthew said. It had been four weeks since the peer-helper program started, and he wasn’t sure why, but he’d started goofing around more with Amy—bowing when she walked up, saying, “At your service. . . .” Now he held out his hand and said, “May I carry your buff-colored card for you?”

It was the last day of add-drop period and they were all carrying around schedule cards to collect teachers’ initials. He took her backpack and plucked the card out of her hand.
“BIEN SUR,”
she typed. She was just getting out of French. She’d switched her Pathway out of foreign language mode so it sounded like she was saying, “BEEN SEWER.”

“Charming.” He smiled. “I’ve been a little sewer myself.”

Being with Amy continued to surprise Matthew. This was his fifth day, and each time it felt easier. Before the year started, he’d wondered how he’d think of things to talk about over lunch, and was grateful for the list of Amy’s interests Nicole gave them during their training session. “Amy needs to find people she has things in common with,” Nicole had said. “To help with that, I’ve come up with a list of Amy’s favorite things.” She passed them out:

The list went on, but even Matthew could see the problem with Nicole’s thinking. High-school students don’t sit around and talk about the diary of Anne Frank. No one broke open their lunch bags, saying, “Who here loves Bette Davis?” Teenagers didn’t talk about
subjects
. Teenagers made fun of one another or, failing that, made fun of their teachers.

Now, at lunch with Amy, Matthew mentioned the hobby/interest list. He assumed she knew about it, but apparently not. Amy squawked in either a laugh or a gasp of horror. “OH MY GOD. WHAT WAS ON IT?”

He told her the items that he could remember.

“
ANNE FRANK?
ARE YOU SERIOUS?”

“I thought maybe that sounded a little funny. Not that Anne Frank wasn’t a great writer.”

“I WAS TEN WHEN I READ THAT!”

“Really?”
For Matthew it was assigned two years ago. He liked the book, but it took him a long time to read and was harder than he expected. “Were you really ten? That seems young. Were you a reading prodigy or something?”

“NO. I USED TO READ A LOT. NOT MUCH ELSE TO DO.”

She told him she didn’t understand why her mother listed that book when there were so many others she’d read and loved more recently. It was like Nicole wanted people to be impressed with her fifth-grade accomplishment. “IS THAT WEIRD? IMPRESSING PEOPLE WITH HOW SMART I
USED
TO BE?”

“I don’t know.” Matthew shrugged. For the first time, he tried to imagine his own mother as involved in his life as Amy’s was. Since that faucet discussion a few weeks ago, she hadn’t asked him many questions. She hadn’t even asked what he was doing about college applications, which seemed strange since that was the only thing his classmates talked about these days. “It sounds like you were pretty smart.”

“I STILL AM! WHAT ABOUT THE BOOKS I’M READING NOW?”

He couldn’t tell if she was really upset or joking. Her head moved side to side and her hand pushed her Pathway to the edge of the table. “Okay.” Matthew smiled and pushed the computer back near her hand. “What books are you reading now?”

“I DON’T WANT TO TALK ABOUT IT.”

She
was
upset. She pushed her computer away again and stopped sipping from her can of Boost. He was pretty sure Amy was mad at her mother, not him, but still he wasn’t sure how to get her out of this mood. “I used to read a lot, but I don’t anymore,” he said. “It makes me too anxious.”

The expression on Amy’s face changed. “WHY?”

Now that he’d said it, he realized he shouldn’t have. However he explained himself, it wouldn’t sound right. She waited. He had to say something: “I get worried about reading things the wrong way. Sometimes I have to read the same page over and over. I keep thinking I’ve made a mistake.”

“HOW DO YOU GET THROUGH HOMEWORK?”

By taking forever,
he almost said.
By not doing it
. He couldn’t tell her this. Or that reading sometimes felt like a battle with the voice. “Slowly, I guess. I don’t always do all the reading. I can’t.”

“WHY DO YOU READ THE SAME PAGE OVER AND OVER?”

He could hear the voice now.
You missed a word. Go back. If you don’t go back nothing will make sense.
He’d made a mistake telling her. “No reason. Just trying to be careful.”

When he got to chemistry, his first class after lunch, he opened his notebook and realized he hadn’t given Amy her schedule card back. He laid both their cards side by side on his desk and noticed that her birthday was one day after his. His was April twenty-fifth, hers the twenty-sixth. Typed out on the line below—
Place of birth: Mercy Hospital
.

What a coincidence,
he thought, and then he remembered Nicole telling them that Amy was fine at birth but had an aneurism the day after she was born. His heart began to pound against his chest.
You were there,
the voice said.
You were with her when it happened.
He waited for the inevitable:
It probably was your fault.

He began to sweat. Was it possible? Were they infants lying beneath the same warming lights when it happened?

Suddenly the fear consumed him. What if he and Amy
were
infants lying together under a plastic oxygen tent? What if he rolled over and cut off her oxygen supply? It was possible, wasn’t it? He’d been a ridiculously big baby, over ten pounds, all cheeks and rolls of fat, his mother used to say. He would go home and look it up, but he was pretty sure aneurisms meant the oxygen supply was cut off to the brain.

Maybe this explained his lifelong fascination with Amy and her body’s quirks. He caused them all! He must have! Why would he feel so responsible otherwise?