Amy did ask for him specifically—it was true—but he had no idea how his mother knew this. It made him nervous. Like maybe people knew more things than he realized. He couldn’t hear what his grandmother said.
“We haven’t talked about that,” his mother said. “I’m trying not to put pressure on him.”
Mumble mumble mumble.
“That’s your opinion, Mother. Not everyone is ready for college the minute they graduate from high school.”
This was a surprise. His mother had been worrying about what he’d do next year?
“We’ve talked about him taking a year off, maybe.” (No, they hadn’t.)
“Maybe he’ll get a job and save some money.” (He would? What job?)
He strained to hear what his grandmother was saying, but he couldn’t.
“All I know is that working with this girl has been good for him. It’s made him think about someone else’s problems. He’s good at it, Mother. I wish you could hear him talk about her.”
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.
Feel like barfing but thinking of you. Don’t know why the two together. Happy Turkey day. Heart A.
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:
Grandmother’s turkey dry as the suede fringe on my cowboy vest that still hangs in my guest bedroom here. Real studs. Fake suede. Maybe I’ll show you some time. Hey, thanks for writing. M.
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:
Got to overhear my mother’s opinion of my job with you. Apparently she approves. We both give thanks that your battery pack needs to be changed.
He got this back:
My battery pack is thankful for you, too.
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:
Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Inwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
“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 tonguetied 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.
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CHAPTER NINE
AMY 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.
aimhigh: What present?
mstheword: Don’t ask.
aimhigh: Tell me.
mstheword: A tenth-anniversary Calvin and Hobbes. Yes, I am a fan. I know this tells you too much about both my maturity and my reading level.
aimhigh: It’s fine, Matthew.
mstheword: I love Garfield, too.
aimhigh: Are you serious?
mstheword: My whole bookshelf at home is pretty much Garfield collections.
aimhigh: See, that worries me a little.
mstheword: I had a feeling it would. That’s why I’ve never mentioned it.
aimhigh: You need someone to make some book suggestions.
After she wrote this, she remembered him saying that reading made him anxious—that he always worried about making a mistake.
mstheword: Maybe I do need that. Like who?
aimhigh: I happen to have gotten the Librarian’s Summer Reading Award every year for ten years. I know that seems remarkable, but there’s a secret to winning.
mstheword: What’s the secret?
aimhigh: Short books count, too.
mstheword: So maybe you know some short books you’d recommend?
aimhigh: I know some very short books.
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.
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CHAPTER TEN
MATTHEW 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 j
oke 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.
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