Say What You Will

by Cammie McGovern

  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. Ivycovered 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:

  I promise you won’t have to do anything embarrassing. I want you to apply because I want someone who will talk to me honestly about things. You’re the only person who ever has. Maybe you don’t know this, but when you’re disabled almost no one tells you the truth. They feel too awkward because the truth seems too sad, I guess. You were very brave to walk up to the crippled girl and say, essentially, wipe that sunny expression off your face and look at reality. That’s what I want you to do next year. Tell me the truth. That’s all.

  Amy

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THAT 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 w
hen 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.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  CHAPTER FIVE

  AMY 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.”