Say What You Will (2 page)

Matthew felt terrible. He didn’t know, of course. He only knew Amy after years of watching her from a distance. That year he sat behind her in Biology and had discovered a few new quirks to her body. The left side was more spastic than the right. Her floppy head made her look worse than she was. He learned to interpret the sounds she made. He knew she loved the cell unit, because she squealed every time the overhead projector with “Parts of the Cell” came up on the screen. She also liked genetics, but not physiology. On frog-dissection day, they both let their partners hold the knife—Amy for obvious reasons, Matthew for less obvious ones.

The next day in Biology, Amy surprised him by turning around at the end. “COULD I TALK TO YOU AFTER CLASS?” her computer said.

He’d heard her automated voice often enough in class discussions, but it still scared him. “Okay,” he said, looking down at the floor.

When they got out to the hallway, Amy pushed a single button to play a preprogrammed question. “WHY DID YOU TELL PEOPLE MY ESSAY WASN’T TRUE?”

“I don’t know,” he said, breaking out in a sweat. “Because I don’t believe it. I don’t believe anyone could be so well adjusted.”

She typed. “WHY NOT?”

“You said you look at your friends’ lives and feel like your own is better, which is fine, except that you don’t have any friends.”

“HOW DO YOU KNOW THAT?”

“I sit behind you. I notice things.”

“WHAT KIND OF THINGS?”

“It’s not your fault that you don’t have any friends. You always have an aide with you. No one is going to be themselves when there’s a teacher standing right there. Plus, you talked about parties and dances, but I don’t think you’ve even been to any, so how would you know what you’re not sorry to be missing?”

He kept going. He started saying too much, telling her all the things he’d noticed—that she never said hi to other kids, that she never answered questions when people asked her things before class. “I’m not pretending I’m Mr. Popularity or anything. I’m just saying you’ve got this whole message that doesn’t seem believable. To me, anyway.”

“I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU’RE SAYING THIS.”

Her facial expressions were impossible to read. He couldn’t tell how mad she was. Probably pretty mad. “I’m sorry. You’re right. I shouldn’t have said anything. It’s none of my business. Like, none
at all.
I don’t know why I just said all that. I had this theory that you’re trying to be a certain kind of person, and that must be hard. But God, I’m hardly one to talk. So let’s forget the whole thing. Please. I’m sorry.”

It startled him when her machine blurted out a single word. “NO!”

“No what?”

“DON’T BE SORRY. YOU’RE RIGHT. MY GOSH, I CAN’T BELIEVE HOW RIGHT YOU ARE.”

E
VERYTHING CHANGED FOR
A
MY
after that conversation with Matthew.

For most of her school life, Amy had felt a little like Rapunzel, locked in the tower her walker created when she walked down hallways. In eleven years, no one had ever called up to her window or asked for her hair. No one had ever tried to be her friend.

Impossible,
you might say.
Everyone has
some
friends.

No,
Amy would have to say.
Not everyone.
It
was
possible to spend a decade with the same children—from kindergarten through eleventh grade—and never receive a phone call once, though your number was listed every year in the directory. It was possible to have a mother who tried for years to schedule play dates with other children of mothers who never called her back or did so with apologies and talk of impossibly busy schedules. It was possible to be partnered on a school project and watch others build a Pueblo Mesa out of brown-painted mini marshmallows, a project you were never, in two weeks, allowed to touch.

Most surprising of all: it was also possible—for eleven years!—not to see this as a problem.

Or to put it another way: it was possible to believe that the adults who loved her—the teachers, therapists, and aides who laughed at everything Amy said—counted as friends. It was possible to feel their love so strongly that she lived in oblivious happiness for over a decade.

Then Matthew came along and pointed out the holes in her thinking. He stood in front of her and told her he’d come, not to climb her tower but to shatter it. In his clumsy way, he was like a prince who arrived with sweaty armpits and bad hair.
At least I’m here,
he might have said.
That’s better than nothing.
And it was.

The very same day that she talked to Matthew, she went home and made some decisions: It was too late to do anything about it that year. But next year—her senior year—would be different. She would make friends before she graduated. She would look at her life with a more critical eye.

When he’d insisted that she couldn’t be as happy as she pretended to be in her essays, he’d said something she’d never considered.
You don’t have any real friends because no one acts like themselves around you. You’re always with an adult.
For years Amy had blamed her lack of peer friendships on any number of factors: Typing was slow. She’d try for a joke that came out five comments too late to be funny. She was too clumsy to play at recess, too messy to eat lunch with, too slow to keep up. Until Matthew pointed it out, though, this idea never occurred to her:
being with you means being with a teacher.

It was so obvious, she wanted to laugh.
Get rid of the adult and you might make some friends.

That conversation opened up electrifying possibilities in her mind. Just because she’d never had friends didn’t mean she wasn’t interested in her classmates. Since she started middle school, she’d developed a habit every year of picking a different handful of peers to spy on and keep track of. Usually she picked one surly type (a troublemaker to see how much trouble they got in); a do-gooder to see if their phony persona broke down; a boy she might have had a crush on in a different life; and a shy girl like herself (or the person she would have been if she could walk and talk). She memorized their schedules and their lockers. If they were in a play, she went for the uninterrupted two hours she could spend watching them. So far as Amy knew, no one she’d kept tabs on knew what she was doing. Of course, she’d never talked to any of them, so she couldn’t be sure. Which was why that conversation with Matthew floored her.

The shock wasn’t his saying such unpleasant truths out loud. The shock was his saying,
I’ve watched you over the years.
She couldn’t help it; she blushed.

Then he kept going:
You don’t even try to talk to people. You walk past them without saying hi. You don’t answer questions. You laugh when no one is making a joke.
He pointed out every social failing she had. Ten years without practice had left her with plenty. It didn’t embarrass her to hear it; it thrilled her.

He’s just like me,
she thought.
He does the same thing.

Matthew had never been one of her chosen people, but he could have been. He was for the remainder of their junior year. Until she decided she wanted more for next year. She wanted to make some friends. She wanted to get to know Matthew.

The law mandated every child with a disability have equal access to the same education all children had, meaning that—to some extent anyway—an aide had to do whatever Amy needed. They bubbled her answers on Scantron tests, changed her sanitary napkins, helped her get in and out of the bathroom with a minimum of fuss. But that conversation with Matthew helped Amy say something she wanted to tell her mother for months.
“I DON’T NEED SOMEONE ALL THE TIME.”
Amy took class notes herself and kept her own schedule. She needed someone in between classes to carry her books and charge her battery pack, but in class, not so much.

Her idea had a beautiful simplicity at first. She approached her mother a week after school ended. “WHY DON’T WE HIRE STUDENTS TO WALK ME IN BETWEEN CLASSES?” They could get trained on charging her battery and other details. Girls could help her with the bathroom; they had in the past. Boys couldn’t, of course, but that wouldn’t matter. She could drink less on those days and improvise more. Having gotten the idea, she wanted to make it clear to her mother: boys should be hired, too. “WE’LL SET A SCHEDULE AND ROTATE. MAYBE WE’LL MAKE EATING LUNCH PART OF IT SO I’LL MAKE SOME NEW FRIENDS.”

For years Amy had eaten her yogurt-and-hummus lunches in the special-ed teacher’s resource room. Fine for the dribbling girl who had to wear bibs because she still dropped food all over herself, but now she was better. She could eat simple things in front of other people. Her stomach danced at the thought. She could eat in the cafeteria! All they had to do was pay people to sit with her!

Her mother hated the idea at first. “You don’t know how self-absorbed teenagers can be. They’d have a test one day or breakup with their boyfriend and forget all about you.”

“WE COULD HAVE A SUBSTITUTE LIST. WE’LL TRAIN LOTS OF PEOPLE. AND PAY THEM MORE THAN THEY MAKE AT McDONALD’S.” Amy had once overheard two girls talking about how much they hated their jobs at McDonald’s, with the terrible uniforms and the rude customers.

“You don’t
pay
people to be your friend, Amy. I don’t like what that suggests.”

Amy pressed harder. “KIDS NEED JOBS. I HAVE ONE THEY CAN DO.”

As it turned out, nothing was as easy as Amy imagined. The school said they would only pay for a “trained paraprofessional,” but if her parents were willing to cover the salaries and sign a waiver, they would try the idea as an experiment.

Over the summer, Amy drew up a schedule where people worked a total of two hours a day, three if she stayed after school to join a club.

“A
club
?” her mother groaned.

“THAT’S MY GOAL. I WANT TO JOIN A CLUB AND MAKE TEN FRIENDS.”

Nicole loved goals. She loved evidence-supported theories and data-driven techniques. Say the word
goal
, Amy knew, and her mother would be looking to check it off.

At least this used to be true. This time, though, her mother surprised her. A shiny line of tears appeared in Nicole’s eyes. She shook her head. “Did we make some terrible mistake? Did we not prioritize socialization enough?”

Yes,
Amy wanted to type.
We never prioritized it at all.
Not when academic successes came so easily. Why bother with friends when there were As to earn and state-mandated tests to ace? Why bother with movie outings when Amy had such a knack for languages that her French teacher once joked that she’d be nonverbal but fluent in three languages before she graduated? Amy filled every summer with extra courses and reading because it never occurred to her she had any other options. “YES, MOM. I NEED TO MAKE THIS A PRIORITY.”

She thought about Matthew, a little taller than her, with freckles and curly, dark brown hair that fell in his face, sweating as he argued his point:
You’re not really lucky. Get out more and you’ll see. It’s a hard life out here.
She almost laughed out loud remembering it, and then had to catch herself. Her mother would hate this being another person’s idea.
You’re not like other children,
Nicole always said.
You don’t need to act like them, so please don’t.

A far better argument, Amy knew, was this: “IF I’M GOING TO GO TO COLLEGE, I NEED TO PRACTICE RELATING TO PEOPLE MY AGE.”

College had always been the number one goal. Ivy-covered walls. Dorm mates. Nicole had talked about it since Amy was in elementary school. “You might be right,” her mother said. “This might be more important than I thought.”

Over the summer, a letter was mailed by her guidance counselor to a small group of handpicked students, mature enough for such a job. When response was low, another letter went out to a wider group, including all student council members and everyone in the leadership society, meaning anyone with a B plus average or better.

That was when Amy first wrote to Matthew and urged him to apply:

T
HAT WHOLE FIRST DAY
of school, Matthew was grateful that Amy’s mother hadn’t liked him enough to put him on duty from the beginning. He saw Sarah Heffernan, one of Amy’s other peer helpers, from a distance, standing outside the bathroom holding two backpacks and looking uncomfortable.

The next day, he saw Sanjay Modhi, another peer helper, leave Amy alone for most of lunch period in the cafeteria. Matthew told himself he’d never do anything like
that.
He’d spent enough time miserable and alone in the cafeteria not to let that happen to Amy.

The problem (or
one
of them anyway) was expectations. Matthew couldn’t figure out what to expect or, even worse, what Amy expected of him. When he read that first email she wrote him in July, he thought,
She’s wrong again, about pretty much everything
.

He wasn’t brave. He was the opposite, actually. He was afraid of everything and had been for years. The worst of his fears started in sixth grade and only got worse in middle school when everyone, seemingly overnight, changed. Boys grew four inches over the summer and girls came to school dressed like their older, slutty sisters. Matthew hated all of it. The talk about shaving, the visible bra straps. The voice in his head came back, louder this time and more insistent.
Wash your hands
.
Like a surgeon to the elbows.
By then it made him check faucets, too.
Make sure they’re off
.
Just double-check.

Counting made him less nervous. Twenty-four steps from the bathroom to math class. Thirty-six chair desks, four left-handed. Counting was a relief. Almost a pleasure. A way to measure and contain a world that otherwise spun too quickly for him. He thought of his brain as divided. One half understood that counting had no bearing on his parents or his life. The other half hoped maybe it did. Gradually, that first year in middle school, he began to understand—there were many ways to be a freak. Amy had no choice, but other people did. If you worked hard and concentrated, you could hide your freakish thoughts. You could keep the same handful of friends you’d had since third grade. You couldn’t push those friendships too far or sleep over at anyone’s house when there were nighttime rituals to worry about, but you could look okay.

That’s what he assumed.

In eighth grade that changed again. Steven, his best friend, moved away, leaving Matthew with no one to eat lunch with. Sitting alone beside the trash cans, his fears grew worse. He went to see a guidance counselor and told her about his worries, though he didn’t get specific or mention the voice. He also said nothing about the deals he made with his brain.

The counselor reassured him by saying there were other students like him. “You’re just anxious, that’s all.” She told him to think of his mind as a Worry Wheel with three parts—an anxious mind, anxious body, and anxious actions. She said an anxious mind got the Worry Wheel spinning, and an anxious body kept it going until anxious actions made it spin out of control. She talked about breathing and visualizations and “calm-body” tools. She told him some people squeezed their fists to release the tension from their body. “Yo-Yo Ma does this,” she said. And some basketball players whose names she couldn’t remember before they took free throws. “Believe it or not, everyone gets anxious,” she said. Did that mean Yo-Yo Ma went to the bathroom six times a day to make sure he didn’t have skid marks in his underwear? Did Shaquille O’Neal say
excuse me
seven times if he farted?

Amy might have called him brave in that email but he was afraid of everything about Amy, especially her body, which had the terrible problem of being crippled
and
attractive. He wondered if other people noticed that, too. In ninth grade, she grew her curly, blond hair long like some princess in a fairy tale, and she was pretty now, in a bent, crooked sort of way. That was also the year she grew boobs. Did other people notice that?

The other problem with expectations was that Amy’s mother made it pretty clear what hers were. “As long as we’re prioritizing friendship building, I want to be scientific about it,” Nicole had said in their first training session. “We’re going to ask that each of you introduce Amy to three new people a week. Keep track of the names and give them to me so I can keep a central database. We’ll also ask that each of you invite at least one other person to join you when you eat lunch with Amy.”

At that first training session, there were four peer helpers, all seniors, all people Matthew knew vaguely. Sarah Heffernan was a girl he’d had a crush on in ninth grade because her mother died around the same time Matthew’s father remarried, which meant they were both sad and quiet most of that year. He’d never talked to Chloe McGlynn before, mostly because she hung out with a Goth crowd and wore motorcycle boots to school and he’d always been scared of her. Now, mysteriously, she wore a green IZOD shirt and khaki shorts and seemed to have left her Goth days behind. He’d gone to preschool with Sanjay Modhi, though twelve years had passed and they hadn’t spoken since then. Apparently Sanjay had worked at Hot Dog on a Stick over the summer, where the uniforms were striped polyester and included a mustard-colored baseball cap. “No surprise why I’m here,” Sanjay said when Ms. Hynes, the guidance counselor, asked them to introduce themselves and say why they were interested in this job.

Because Amy wasn’t there, apparently they all felt free to be honest. Chloe said her boyfriend, Gary, had been arrested in July, and she was trying to turn her life around. “Like, I pretty much have to change everything. My friends, my focus, everything. I guess I’m hoping doing this job with Amy will help.”

On her turn, Sarah said, “I’m here because I loved that essay Amy wrote. It made me want to get to know her better and find out how she got to be such a good writer.”

Nicole smiled and nodded. “That’s wonderful. Thank you, Sarah.”

Matthew was the last to speak. He felt his throat close up before he could start, like his brain was spinning cotton and stuffing it in his mouth. He coughed a few times and counted the empty desks in the room. “I don’t know Amy,” he finally managed after a silence that felt excruciating. “But I would like to.”
Good enough,
he thought, stopping before he did something horrible like throw up on his shoes.

They spent most of that first training session going over how Amy’s talking computer worked. They learned about preprogramming what she might say in class if an idea was complicated or too long to type in while everybody waited. They learned about battery packs and which bathrooms were best for Amy to use in school. They learned how much weight she could safely carry herself (almost none) and how to read her body’s signals of overexhaustion: facial twitches, spasticity, louder vocalizations. But mostly Nicole talked about expanding Amy’s “friendship circles.”

“We know friendships don’t happen because you’ve been introduced to a person or eaten one lunch together. We’re looking for a start. For eleven years, kids have been unsure about talking to Amy. They see that walking is hard work for her and they don’t want to interrupt. With all these introductions, we’re hoping to convey the message: Go ahead! Interrupt her! She wants to get to know you!”

Chloe raised her hand. “When we’re making these introductions and giving you the names, should we make some distinction between who we think Amy
should
be friends with and who she shouldn’t bother with? Like, should we put a star by people we know are jerks?”

Sanjay laughed so hard one of his flip-flops fell off. Chloe shot him a look. “Well, I’m sorry, Sanj, but we all know some of my friends aren’t model citizens. I’m just being honest.”

“No, I appreciate that,” Nicole said. “Chloe has a good point. We want Amy to find people she shares common interests with. But we also want Amy to get a little practice deciding for herself who the jerks are.”

Matthew was less worried about the quality of people he could introduce Amy to than how quickly he’d run out of names he knew. He imagined himself in any of a dozen awkward scenarios. With someone whose name he thought he knew but wasn’t sure. (“Amy, this is Vic or Nick; I’ve never been sure.”) Or someone whose name he knew perfectly well—an athlete or a cheerleader—who had no idea who Matthew was or why this introduction was taking place. It was a big high school, sixteen hundred students—every year Matthew got the exact numbers within the first week—which meant some people were well known and an equal number unknown—a beige, amorphous mass. Ever since the worst of his troubles started, Matthew worked hard to be part of the latter group. Unnoticed. Unseen.

He rarely talked in class. So rarely, in fact, that his comment in English at the end of last year might have been the first thing he said all trimester. (Before that day, the room had made him too uncomfortable—with an odd number of everything—desks, ceiling tiles, blackboards, file cabinets. Usually he sat there counting things he knew would come out even. Feet! Hands! Windowpanes!) Amy’s essay was an exception because it had been on his mind anyway. He’d been sitting there that day counting, quoting Amy, counting, quoting Amy when he realized the subject actually
was
Amy. He raised his hand.

That was how he got here, readying himself for a job he was fairly sure he wouldn’t last a full day at.