Say What You Will (5 page)

Suddenly he felt even more embarrassed. What had he said?

“He really likes her. I can tell. And she likes him. It’s very sweet. They’re
friends
. I don’t know what she’s doing next year, but I assume if she’s going to college, it would be some correspondence situation. Maybe he could try something like that.”

As disorienting as it was to overhear this discussion, he had to admit, he didn’t mind the idea of living at home and taking college courses online next year. That solved the problem of telling people what his plans were. He had never asked Amy hers because he didn’t want to pretend he had answers himself. Now maybe he could.

In the car driving home, Matthew checked his phone and, to his surprise, found a text from Amy.

He laughed out loud, surprised at how relieved he was to hear from her. They’d moved past the awkwardness of their last conversation. They could keep going, apparently, the way they had been. A few weeks earlier they’d started a joke about the girls who wore I Heart NY shirts. He wrote her back:

With Amy, jokes were easy, he realized. The other stuff, not so much.

He thought about what his mother had said. He wished he could tell Amy somehow. A few minutes later, he texted again:

He got this back:

As they got closer to Christmas, Amy told Matthew that she’d thought about buying him a Christmas present but decided against it.

“That’s fine,” Matthew said. “I’m not a big present person.” He wasn’t a big Christmas person, either (since it always involved a fake, jolly dinner with his father’s new family), but obviously Amy, with her walker decorated in silver-and-gold tinsel, was.

“INSTEAD I’M GOING TO GIVE YOU A POEM.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“A GREAT, GREAT POEM. IT’LL KILL YOU WHEN YOU READ IT.”

“All right. I mean, I hope it doesn’t
kill
me, but okay.”

The poem was by Yeats. She emailed it to him, then printed out a copy she presented him with the next day at school:

“DID YOU LIKE IT?” she said, first thing in the morning.

“Oh yeah. It was great. Except you’re not poor.” He didn’t know this for sure. He’d never been to Amy’s house, but the clues were all there: the car her mother drove, the cost of her Pathway and the rest of her equipment. Plus the fact that her parents paid him sixty dollars every other week.

“IT’S SYMBOLIC. I’M POOR IN MANY WAYS EXCEPT MONETARILY.”

“Oh.” He nodded and smiled. “Okay.”

He
had
liked the poem a lot—enough to memorize it, which wasn’t necessarily significant. Sometimes his brain inadvertently memorized songs and poems he hated, but he did like this one. The problem was, he couldn’t think of anything to
say
about it. “I like that it was
you
telling
me
to walk carefully.” Right away, he knew this wasn’t the right thing to say.

She cocked her head, and stared at him. “THAT’S ALL?”

“I’m not good at poetry, Amy. I’m not sure what else to say.”

“DON’T YOU HAVE ANYTHING FOR ME?”

Now he understood his real mistake. She’d set this whole thing up so they could
exchange
presents without worrying about his having less money than she did. Why didn’t he understand these things sooner?

“I don’t have anything. I’m sorry.” He felt tongue-tied and awkward. It was a week before school let out for Christmas vacation. Should he run out and get her a present now? Wouldn’t that look stupid since he hadn’t thought of it himself?

He put it out of his mind because he felt like he had other, bigger things to worry about. He hadn’t asked her yet about her college plans, but he would soon. He’d already decided to sign up for whatever online college program Amy picked for herself. If they did it together, he’d point out, they could share books and laugh about the crazy people in their discussion groups.

For Matthew, it was both a relief to imagine and a little embarrassing to bring up. He didn’t want her to know that he hadn’t applied to any schools. That he downloaded some applications that made him too nervous to look at. That without this vague idea of doing something with her, he had no plans for next year. None.

Now he sat beside her at lunch. She’d been wearing a Santa hat all day that everyone commented on, the way everyone commented on everything Amy wore. He could feel her expectation, like she was waiting for him to say something. It made him mad. “I told you I’m not that great a reader. Poetry especially. I always feel like I’m missing the point.”

She waited a long time, though he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

“MAYBE YOU ARE,” she finally said.

A
MY DIDN’T FEEL JEALOUS
of Sarah anymore. That brief, two-day stab of crazy envy hadn’t been rational, she realized afterward. Matthew didn’t speak to Sarah, and Sarah could hardly remember his name. (She’d thought it was Martin when Amy asked, casually, how well Sarah knew her other peer helpers.) The jealousy fit was pointless except for the way it sharpened Amy’s impulse to tell Matthew how she felt. To say,
Do you feel this, too? Do you go to sleep at night thinking about me?

Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, it hovered in her mind every time she walked beside him and every afternoon that they spent in the Not-Really-Working-on-the-Yearbook Club. Embarrassingly, she understood, the Connie story was a misfire. She’d told it so that he would realize:
Yes, Amy is a regular girl, too. One who knows about and has discussed sex with other people.
Then she saw how anxious it made him, as did all her other efforts—her jokey texts, her flashy Christmas accessories, even her poem—which she assumed no one could miss the meaning of.
I have spread my dreams under your feet / Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
How could
anyone
miss what she was trying to say?

The problem, she realized, wasn’t her uncooperative tongue. After the rocky start in September, she’d figured out that asking questions made conversations with her other peer helpers easier: At first she asked about trivial matters (
Why do boys wear their pants so low? Why do some of them care more about their hair than girls?
)—but as she thought about Matthew more, she began asking more personal ones. Starting after Thanksgiving, she asked each of her other peer helpers if they’d ever been in love.

Poor Chloe was still riding three buses every Saturday to visit Gary, her incarcerated boyfriend: “He tells me to stop, but if I don’t go, he won’t have anyone on family day.”

“DOES THAT MEAN YOU LOVE HIM?” Amy asked.

Chloe wasn’t sure. “I
thought
I did. Now I don’t know. I wanted to be a person who stayed loyal no matter what. He needs
someone
. Even his mother won’t visit him there.”

From there, Amy got the idea to ask the others the same question. Sanjay grinned, a smile so wide his white teeth stood out against his dark skin. “I love all the ladies. I tell all of them to come to me when they’re in the mood for a little brown sugar.” This was the way Sanjay liked to talk.

“AND DO THEY ALL RUN AWAY?”

“Some do.” His smile didn’t dim. “Some are scared of their animal attraction for me.”

“OR THEY’RE JUST SCARED, SANJAY. BECAUSE YOU’RE CREEPY WHEN YOU TALK LIKE THAT.”

“Maybe I am, maybe I’m not. You might be surprised at some of my conquests on the love front.”

“EVEN THAT WORD IS A PROBLEM.
CONQUESTS.
YOU KNOW THAT, RIGHT?”

“Fine, but I’ll tell you this. I’m pretty sure Cindy Weintraub has no problem with it.”

Cindy Weintraub was a varsity cheerleader who had brown hair, and thighs that were infinitesimally bigger than those of her blond, short-skirted cheerleader sisters. For this reason, Sanjay had zeroed in on her as “possible.”

“I love all of them,” he said when Amy asked which one he liked best. “But Cindy has a special place in my heart. She and I know what it’s like to be overlooked.”

“BUT IS THAT LOVE, SANJAY?” Amy had never seen Cindy do anything except sit down next to him, say hello, and eat some of his fries.

Sanjay closed his eyes. “If the world were a different place, we’d be lovers by now. As it is, we have to settle for an unspoken but mutual understanding.”

Sarah’s response was a surprise. In Amy’s mind, Sarah always seemed older than her other peer helpers. More like an adult—which Amy assumed, early on, meant that Sarah would be easier for her to talk with, the way adults had always been. Instead it was the opposite. Sarah seemed overly interested sometimes, and distracted other times. She checked her phone constantly for messages that weren’t there. Amy asked Sarah if she’d ever been in love, because she’d asked the other two and she wanted to get as many opinions as she could. She had no idea what Sarah would say.

“Are you asking if I’ve ever had sex, or if I’ve ever been in love?”

Amy was surprised. No one else besides Connie had ever brought up the subject of sex with her. “I’M ASKING IF YOU’VE BEEN IN LOVE.”

Sarah opened her phone and checked it. “I thought I was,” she said. “But it was last year and I was an idiot.”

“WHO WAS IT?”

“Just this guy. He’s twenty-three. He manages a cell phone kiosk.”

Amy couldn’t contain her curiosity. “DID YOU HAVE SEX?”

Sarah stared at her. “He’s twenty-three. What do you think?”

“YES?”

Sarah smiled. “Yes, Amy. We had sex.” She shrugged. “I knew I didn’t love him by then. I just wanted to get it over with. That’s the thing about sex, I’ve decided. There’s this mystique around it, and the truth is everyone should probably just do it once and get it over with.”

Amy considered this for a minute. “IT WAS THAT BAD?”

“Not bad, exactly,” Sarah said, turning her yogurt spoon over in her mouth. “I just don’t think it’s worth waiting forever, like it’s going to be so special.”

“WHAT’S IT LIKE?”

“Painful, mostly. I mean, I’m sorry, but it’s true. I’m glad I got it over with, though.”

“WHY?”

Sarah considered the question. “This way when I’m in college and really fall in love, I’ll know what I’m doing.”

Afterward Amy had decided that if she never succeeded in telling Matthew how she felt, maybe it was okay. They
were
friends. Very good friends. They joked around a lot and made each other laugh, but they also talked honestly about hard topics, too. All of Sarah’s talk about sex made her wonder if maybe it wasn’t as great as everyone said and she should be grateful—really grateful—for what she had with Matthew.

Over Christmas vacation, Amy IM’d with Matthew as they’d taken to doing a few nights a week. He told her about Christmas Eve with his father’s family, awkwardness made excruciating when two people accidentally bought him the same present.

After she wrote this, she remembered him saying that reading made him anxious—that he always worried about making a mistake.

On New Year’s Eve, she asked if he’d like to wait up online until midnight with her. “Sure,” he wrote back. “That’s probably better than sitting with my mother
,
who likes to spend New Year’s Eve drinking too much wine and crying.”

They talked about music and the movies they disagreed about. He made fun of her for liking
The Sound of Music
. She told him to ask himself why only boys like
The Matrix
.

At 11:59 they counted down together to this: “Happy New Year, Amy. If I were there, I would kiss the back of your hand and thank you for being my friend this year.”

To which she wrote back: “I love being friends with you, Matthew, which you can interpret any way you like.”

Had she succeeded in telling him what she wanted to say? Had they—in their own awkward way—told each other? She hoped so.

M
ATTHEW WAS THE ONE
who talked her into signing up for Public Speaking. It was a required class that most people took in ninth and tenth grade, but Amy never had. She could have been excused, the way she was excused from the swim-test requirement in middle school. No guidance counselor would insist that Amy take a class that depended on something she couldn’t physically do.

Except for this: once Matthew suggested it, she wanted to sign up. It had started as a joke about Amy taking three APs and a fourth year of French. “Why don’t you sign up for something
really
hard?” Matthew said. “I mean, look at this—only three APs? It’s like you never challenge yourself.”

“THOSE CLASSES AREN’T HARD FOR ME,” she’d said.

Matthew shook his head. “What
is
hard for you, Aim? Seriously. I’m curious.” As she typed a response, he thought of something: “Public Speaking!” He laughed and clapped his hands like it was the funniest joke he’d made all morning.

She deleted the answer she’d been typing and thought to herself:
He’s right. That would be a challenge.

“Why
now
?” Nicole asked when Amy told her the class she was adding to her schedule. “When you’ve got so many other things to worry about. It’s your second semester of senior year. You’ll be hearing from colleges soon.”

Colleges had been such an obsession for Nicole she almost made a scrapbook of the brochures that were sent to the house following Amy’s PSAT scores, which qualified her for a National Merit Scholarship.

“WON’T I HAVE TO DO PRESENTATIONS IN COLLEGE?”

Nicole hadn’t thought about this. “You might.”

“SHOULDN’T I PRACTICE NOW? SO I DON’T EMBARRASS MYSELF LATER, IN FRONT OF STRANGERS?”

Her mother nodded. It made some sense.

Amy asked her peer helpers, all of whom had already taken the class, what they thought of the idea.

“Best class I’ve ever taken,” Sanjay said.

“Hard,”
Chloe told her with a mouthful of celery. “
Really
hard. Like, posture is part of your grade. No offense.”

“I think you should do it,” Sarah said. “I’d love to watch you deliver a speech.”

Matthew shook his head. She could tell he felt bad about suggesting it at all. “The whole thing was a nightmare. For my final speech, my feet were so sweaty I walked out of my shoes.”

Amy still wanted to do it. She planned to use her Pathway, of course, so the hard part would be standing relatively still, which was strangely a bigger challenge for her than walking. Walking, you’re supposed to move and make adjustments. Standing still, you’re not. Standing meant willing one side of her body not to move and screaming at the other side to move just an inch. It could be agony. Especially with people watching. But that was the whole point.

You could read a speech someone else had written (people circulated famously brief ones), or you could write your own speech. Amy wanted to write her own. She wanted to explain what it was like not just to be her, but to be her
right now.
To feel as if new doors were opening up. To have real friends for the first time, people she said more than hello to. She wanted to say,
I know this is old news to many of you, but it’s great, isn’t it? To really be able to talk to someone? To joke around?
If she struck the right balance, she hoped to achieve a message that was subtle, but not cloying.
Appreciate it, people.
Having friends is great.
She wrote a few drafts and tried the first one on her mother, who laughed politely throughout and afterward asked if the assignment was meant to be comedy.

“NO. I WANT TO MAKE IT LIGHT, BUT I ALSO WANT TO MAKE A POINT.”

“Oh!” her mother said. “It’s just that comedy is so hard anyway, and your Pathway can’t really do the timing it takes. That’s all, sweetheart.”

“YOU’RE NOT HELPING,” Amy screamed.

“Why don’t you read one of your old
essays.
Those were so good. This one, I’m less sure what you’re trying to say.”

Amy cut most of the jokes and added a different point—something she wanted to say to all of her peer helpers about how grateful she was, how thrilling it felt to hear about their lives and tell them about hers. It was what she’d wanted to say to Matthew for months but hadn’t found the right opportunity. Maybe this was it. Then she went a step further and added another point, something she also wanted to say to Matthew. She didn’t read this draft ahead of time to her mother. She didn’t want anyone to stop her. She wanted to just say it.

The day of her speech, Amy’s Public Speaking class of thirty swelled to include six extras: her parents and all four of her peer helpers. Two people spoke before her: one pretty good, one not so good. When it was her turn, Matthew stood up and walked over to where she was sitting. She could have walked up alone, but she was nervous enough to be grateful for his hand as she climbed the three stairs to get to the stage. At the last minute, he squeezed her elbow. “You’ll do great,” he whispered, seeming more nervous than she was.

To simulate the heightened pressure of a speech-making situation, a single light shone on an otherwise darkened stage, where she stood behind a lectern—both hands holding the sides for balance, her Pathway placed on the lectern, a microphone pointed directly down toward it. She looked out at the audience and pressed Play. She listened as the automated voice spoke:

“We who are disabled know what it’s like to have our bodies behave in unpredictable ways. Some mornings I wake up surprised by some new change. A knee that won’t bend. A fist clenched tighter than it was the day before. What’s this? I think. Yesterday I was fine. Now I’m really disabled.”

It was meant to be a joke, but only two people laughed—her parents.

“Making peace with a disabled body is a daily struggle. When I am out in the world, I must not only get from point A to point B, but I must also wear a face that says, ‘Don’t worry! I’m okay!’ Failing to do this means I’d move through a world of concerned strangers offering unwanted help. Making peace means forgiving both my body and the world. For the disruption I will make to any room I walk into, for the conversations I must have about it over and over.

“Oh, to meet someone and not have our first conversation be about my talking board! It would be my greatest wish, but I’ve started to think recently, maybe it’s the wrong one. Talking with my computer, about my computer, I’ve had a thousand versions of the same exchange but I’ve also made surprising discoveries, like this one: we never move from that conversation onto the weather. My obvious struggle opens a door and makes other people more honest about their own struggles. After three years of high school, I understand this is rare.”

She let her head drop so her hair hung in front of her face. She couldn’t look at her peer helpers for the next part.

“For the first time in my life, I’ve gotten over the barrier of my body and I have made what I consider the first real friends of my life. Doing this has taught me a lot about the world of able-bodied people. I have learned that some people who look fine are more crippled than I am, by fears they can’t explain. Other people are held back by shyness, or anger. In making friends, I see the way some people handicap themselves. I believe there are choices each of us make every single day. We can dwell on our limitations or we can push ourselves past them. I may be a nonverbal girl delivering a speech, but I am no braver than a shy person walking up to their crush and asking them out. Or a socially phobic person going to a party. I have learned not to judge people by their limitations, but by the way they push past them.

“I have learned that many people have disabilities they must make their peace with.”

Amy wasn’t sure what to make of the silence that followed. Her Pathway had no sense of theater. No way to raise its voice to indicate a conclusion. No one clapped. Maybe they didn’t realize it was over. Finally a light applause started from the general direction of her parents’ seats. Others joined politely.

Suddenly it was obvious.

The problem wasn’t her computer voice; it was her speech. She felt her face go warm as her legs froze. She had to take two steps from the podium to her walker, but she was afraid she wouldn’t make it. Then she knew she wouldn’t. She couldn’t even turn in the right direction.

How long would it take someone to come help her? Who would it be?

Anyone but my mother,
she thought.

Matthew,
she thought.
Come save me from this.

Then the lights came up and she saw: his seat was empty. He was already gone.

“I think Matthew was kind of upset,” Chloe said afterward. “Not that it wasn’t a great speech, Aim. Seriously. But he might have thought you were talking about him or something.”

Sanjay, standing next to her, rolled his eyes. “Gee, Chloe, why would he think that?”

Chloe didn’t realize he was being sarcastic. “
You know
. He’s the locker tapper. He’s got his issues, and Amy just talked about them in front of everybody.” She was trying to whisper, but too many nights in loud clubs had left Chloe unable to moderate her voice.

Amy felt her breath go short. Why hadn’t this occurred to her? Other people had watched Matthew, too. She had written the speech hoping to make a private point between the two of them.
We both have problems and we have to be brave. Look at me up here. If I can do this, you can, too.
She imagined it leading to all sorts of breakthroughs. Matthew getting help, starting medication, showing up at her front door one day to kiss her in gratitude for the inspiration she provided with her speech. “I think he’s pretty pissed,” Chloe said.

Sanjay whistled. “I’d call him rip-shit mad myself.”

For the rest of the day, Amy didn’t see Matthew. That night she texted him from home:

She pressed send and kept going.

For three days she didn’t hear from him.

On Monday, she looked for him all day at school. Unfortunately he knew her schedule well enough that he could easily avoid her, and her helper that day was Sarah.

“DID YOU THINK MY SPEECH WAS BAD?” she asked at lunch.

“No,” Sarah said. “I actually thought you were talking about me for most of it. Then I looked over at Matthew and thought,
Oh right—it’s got to be him
.”

Just as she was wondering if Matthew would ever speak to her again, she got another surprise: there he was after school, waiting for her outside the classroom door for yearbook. “Were you saying Sarah and the others have secret problems no one knows about?”

She was so happy to see him that she couldn’t help it: she squealed a little. She collected herself and turned on her Pathway. “EVERYONE DOES, MATTHEW.”

“But it was me you were talking about.”

“NOT ONLY YOU.”

He stared at her. “The others have fears they need to face?”

She could tell by his tone that he didn’t believe her. “SORT OF.”

He shook his head. “You shouldn’t have done that. What we talked about was private, and you announced it to the world.”

Amy thought about Sanjay and Chloe, how quickly they understood the problem. “DO YOU REALLY THINK IT’S A SECRET?” He didn’t say anything. “PEOPLE NOTICE, MATTHEW. THEY CALL YOU THE LOCKER TAPPER.”

“That’s terrible.” He shook his head and looked away. “Why would you
tell
me that?”

“WHY NOT? IT’S THE TRUTH. WHY IS THE TRUTH SO TERRIBLE?”

“It makes me never want to come to school again.”

“YOU COULD DO THAT, OR YOU COULD GO TO A DOCTOR AND GET HELP.”

“Why do you keep saying that?”

“BECAUSE YOU NEED IT.”

“I’ve read three books. I’m doing what they say. I have a mild case that isn’t that bad.”

Amy didn’t say anything. “It’s helping. I’m
getting better
.”

“FINE.”

“You don’t believe me.”

“NO.”

“I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“IT’S NOT A MILD CASE AND YOU AREN’T GETTING BETTER. I SEE YOU COUNTING ALL THE TIME. WHISPERING. TAPPING LOCKERS. IF ANYTHING, IT’S GOTTEN WORSE.”