Say What You Will

by Cammie McGovern

  When he got there, he only pretended to smoke, pinching his lips and sucking air loudly around the end of the joint. He didn’t want to get high—he couldn’t on his meds—but he wanted to pretend and see what these girls would do.

  “See, Matthew,” Hannah said after ten minutes in the flickering lights that felt like Batman’s cave. “Spend a little time back here and you won’t care anymore which way the candy boxes are facing.”

  After a few minutes, she was right. He didn’t care.

  They’d become a group with inside jokes. Some nights they stood outside after work to finish telling their stories. Once Hannah asked if he’d mind waiting across the street with her for a bus because she hated waiting alone; it freaked her out. He’d never had another person admit to being scared and ask for his help. “Of course,” he said, and stood with her for almost twenty-five minutes. When the bus finally came, she said, “Oh my God, sorry this took so long. THANK YOU!” as she hopped on.

  “My pleasure,” he called after her. And it was.

  After years in isolation, belonging to a group felt a little intoxicating.

  He also understood, with the fuzzy-edged clarity medication had brought, that these friendships were different than the one he had with Amy. He understood on some level that he’d made a terrible mistake, walking out of Amy’s room their last night together. Even if he was angry he should have stayed and talked to her. After all, they’d been friends for a year by that point. Friends let their friends have sex with other people. Friends even let their friends talk about having sex, which he’d learned from listening in on Sue, who regularly told Hannah about the “hilarious sex” she’d had with someone who’d just bought jujubes from Matthew. He might have failed to get into (or even apply to) any colleges, but he’d learned a lot the last five months—more than he was ready to admit to Amy. I know you’re right, he’d have to tell her someday. It wasn’t terrible, what you did. I just don’t like thinking about it.

  He even had a revelation with his therapist, Beth. The real problem with his type of OCD—chronic fear of hurting other people—was that you thought so much about not running over children, not sideswiping pedestrians, not poisoning strangers with germs on your hands—essentially not killing a world full of strangers—that you ended up hurting the people you loved most. He saw that now.

  He tried to talk about it with Hannah the night he stayed late and pretended to get stoned with them. They sat side by side in two beanbags wedged close together. She asked him what was happening with his love life, the way girls did sometimes as a joke. “I don’t know about love life,” Matthew said. “I had a very good friend for a long time. I guess in a way, I thought of her as my girlfriend, except not really. Then we had a fight and she went away to school and it made me realize—I don’t know. How much I miss her, I guess.”

  Hannah turned, punched the blue Naugahyde of her beanbag to make a pillow. “Oh God, this is my fantasy! Where those just-friend boys suddenly realize they love me.”

  “I don’t know if this was like that.”

  “What happened?”

  He thought for a moment. “Well. I realized I loved her.”

  Hannah gasped. “Oh God, that’s so sweet.” She turned to Carlton and Sue, who were sitting behind them. “You guys—listen to this. Matthew is in love. Tell them—” She waved her hand, but he didn’t repeat the story. The others were too stoned to care, and the movie was almost over, which meant they’d need to clean the theater and lock up in a few minutes.

  After that night, Hannah asked him about it a couple of times. Did anything ever happen? Did he ever tell her how he felt? Every time she asked, his heart began to race.

  “I tried to tell her when we went to prom, but I don’t think she understood what I was saying.”

  “What happened?”

  “She went home with someone else.”

  Hannah’s eyes bugged out a little. “From prom? Are you serious?”

  He hated the picture this gave Hannah of Amy. “We were all friends. I had disappeared for a while. She thought I left without her.”

  “Oh, wow. Had you?”

  “No, of course not.”

  All this explained why he was so happy, after three months of silence, get this text:

  Can we talk sometime? I have a problem I need your help with. Lots to catch up on. xo Amy

  He’d been waiting to hear from her for so long. Short as this note was, it felt significant. He liked that she had a problem she needed his help with. Recently he’d been thinking along the same lines himself, making up reasons to get in touch with her. He never wrote his notes down, but he composed them in his mind.

  —I HAD A HORRIBLE NIGHT AT WORK. THE ICE MACHINE BROKE DOWN AND MY REGISTER WAS SIXTEEN DOLLARS SHORT. IN CASE YOU’RE WONDERING, THE ANSWER IS YES, IT COMES OUT OF MY PAYCHECK. I KNOW SIXTEEN DOLLARS ISN’T THE END OF THE WORLD, BUT AT THE END OF A LONG, POINTLESS NIGHT, IT FEELS LIKE IT MIGHT BE.

  Or this:

  —JUST WANTED TO TELL YOU MY FATHER’S NEW WIFE IS PREGNANT, WHICH IS (OF COURSE) VERY GROSS BECAUSE IT MEANS THEY ALMOST CERTAINLY HAD SEX. FOR MY MOTHER, IT MEANS AN EXCUSE TO BECOME EVEN MORE DEPRESSED.

  And the overwhelming thing he wanted to write:

  —I DON’T KNOW WHAT I’M DOING WITH MY LIFE. I READ A LOT BECAUSE I WAS TIRED OF HEARING YOUR VOICE IN MY HEAD SAYING I HAVEN’T READ ENOUGH. I WRITE BECAUSE I HEAR YOU SAY, “IF YOU REALLY WANT TO GET BETTER, YOU NEED TO KEEP A JOURNAL. YOU NEED TO WRITE DOWN YOUR FEELINGS.” SO I’M DOING THAT, TOO, EXCEPT THE MINUTE I START TO WRITE EVERYTHING DOWN, I FEEL LIKE A CHARACTER. I START EXPLAINING BACKSTORY TO MY JOURNAL SO IT UNDERSTANDS WHERE I’M COMING FROM, EVEN THOUGH MY JOURNAL IS ME. DOES THAT HAPPEN TO YOU?

  He didn’t write or send that letter. Instead he sent this:

  Good to hear from you, Aim. Sure. Write me back. I have no news and nothing in my life has changed much. Except, of course, I’m sorry about . . . well, you know. Everything.

  Then he waited. For an hour without moving from the computer. Then longer. He had to go to the bathroom, but didn’t dare move. Finally he ran and came back, zipping his fly in front of his computer. Without washing hands because he didn’t have time. Amy was back in his life with a problem she needed his help on and he didn’t want to disappoint her again. He waited four hours, reading a little and playing music. Before he left for work, he fired off another email:

  Have to work. World might end if people can’t buy their movie snacks. I’ll have my phone if you text me. Otherwise, home by ten thirty. Don’t leave me hanging. Just want to know if you’re okay.

  She did leave him hanging. The next day at noon, he still hadn’t heard from her. He would have called her house if there were any way of ensuring he’d get her father on the phone, not Nicole, whose last communication to him was a direct request not to contact Amy ever again after school was over. He allowed a full day to go by before he tried an email:

  To: vandorna@stanford.edu

  From: mstheword@gmail.com

  Okay, you’ve got me a little bit worried now. You write out of the blue and then disappear out of the blue. What’s the problem? I hope school is okay. I’ve thought about you a lot, Amy. I’m still working at the movie theater and believe it or not, it’s gotten sort of fun. Or it’s not terrible anyway. Hey, it turns out you were right way back when. Having a job is good for me.

  Another day passed, and he wrote:

  To: vandorna@stanford.edu

  From: mstheword@gmail.com

  I’m writing every address I have and texting your old number.

  If I don’t hear from you by tonight, I’m calling your mother.

  And you know how much your mother wants to hear from me.

  Twenty minutes later, he wrote this:

  To: vandorna@stanford.edu

  From: mstheword@gmail.com

  Okay, Amy, now I’m freaking out. A few minutes after I wrote that note, your mother called me to say that you’ve LEFT school? After t
wo months? I don’t need to tell you she’s going out of her mind. She must be to have stayed on the phone with me for as long as she did. (Over an hour! She cried twice, and twice I said, “Don’t worry, Nicole. We’ll find her.” It was like we were old friends, Aim. You would have been so proud of us.) But that’s not the issue, of course. The issue is you and what the hell is going on? I don’t think this has anything to do with me. I’d like to imagine I had that much impact on your life, but I can’t believe that’s true. Still—if that’s one small piece of what’s going on—please know that I think about that night, and you, every single day, and every single day, I write these notes in my head where I try to explain to you how sorry I am and how much I miss being your friend.

  And then I don’t send them.

  This whole fall has felt confusing and hard and I keep trying to figure out why, and then I remember—oh right. It’s because I can’t log on at night and IM with Amy. I’d give anything to hear from you. Email. Letter. Morse code. Even if you just want to yell at me, that’s okay. I just want to know what’s going on.

  To: aimhigh@comcast.net

  From: mstheword@gmail.com

  Aim? Just trying this account. Copying a message I sent to your school account.

  To: mohdis@mit.edu, heffernans@berkeley.edu, chloe.tripp@yahoo.com

  From: mstheword@gmail.com

  Hi, everyone—Hope you’re all well and school is going along okay. Hard to believe five months has passed since graduation, right? I’m writing to ask a favor of you. I’ve recently been in touch with Nicole again and apparently Amy has had a hard time in her first semester. Two days ago she left school and Nicole is trying to figure out where she is. She’s heard from Amy by email saying she’s not in danger, but Amy won’t tell her where she’s staying now or what’s going on.

  I told Nicole I’d write you guys and see if you’ve heard from Amy this fall. If you haven’t, that’s fine, but let me know that. And if you have heard from her, I’d love to know when and how she sounded. Thanks. Hope you’re all well.

  To: mstheword@gmail.com

  From: heffernans@ucberkeley.edu

  Hi, Matthew—Thanks for getting in touch. I have to get back to you later because I’m headed into a lab right now. But I’ll write you tonight. Sarah

  To: mstheword@gmail.com

  From: modhis@mit.edu

  No word. Sorry. Hope everything turns out okay. Sanjay

  That night at work, Chloe, who had quit a month earlier to concentrate on her classes at community college, stopped by during a lull between movie start times. “Can I talk to you for a second?” she said, and looked at Sue, who was staring at them. “Privately.”

  They walked back to the staff-break room that Matthew tried to keep as tidy as possible, though it was mostly a losing battle. Most people didn’t bother with the lockers provided; they piled their things in heaps around the room. Today there was a grocery bag in the middle of the table with an open Tupperware container and the remnants of someone’s dinner still clinging to a fork.

  “Just let me tell you this before you start cleaning,” Chloe said. Matthew stopped. He was bent over the Tupperware, about to carry it over to the sink. He looked at Chloe. “I saw Amy about two weeks ago. You remember that guy I was telling you about, Marcus, who I’m starting to date?”

  Matthew nodded. Mostly he remembered the collective relief they all felt when she broke up with Gary, her incarcerated boyfriend. Chloe kept going. “Marcus invited me up to San Francisco to see this band he loves, and I asked if we could stop by Stanford on the way and say hi to Amy—I just had this feeling like I should see her—I don’t know why.”

  Matthew swallowed. He’d had that feeling every single day and forced himself to ignore it.

  “I have to tell you, when I first saw her, I almost didn’t recognize her. She looked really sick, with black circles under her eyes. Her face was really thin, but then her hands and legs were kind of swollen. I don’t know if that was from being in the scooter. Like maybe not walking is bad for her? Marcus said he once knew someone who had gland problems who looked like that.”

  Did Amy have a gland problem? Not that he remembered.

  “That wasn’t even the worst part, though. When I went to hug her good-bye, she started to cry and couldn’t stop. I’ve never seen a nervous breakdown before, but I swear that’s what it looked like. I don’t know how else to describe it. She was crying so much she couldn’t type anything. It kept going for about ten minutes, but it felt like a lot longer. I never figured out what it was about because she was crying too much to type anything. I told her I’d come back the next day and she finally typed, ‘JUST DON’T TELL MY MOM. PROMISE YOU WON’T TELL MY MOM.’ The next day, we didn’t get there until three in the afternoon. I said we’d take her out to lunch, so I felt bad that we were late, but I texted her a few times. She didn’t text me back, and when we got there, she was gone. No note, nothing. Her room was locked and we couldn’t find her anywhere. We left and I still haven’t heard back from her. I feel so bad about the whole thing. I haven’t called her mom yet because I keep thinking there was something important she was trying to tell me but she couldn’t get it out. Instead she just begged me not to tell her mom. Which makes me feel like I shouldn’t tell her mom, right?”

  Matthew couldn’t stay. There was a line forming and he could hear Hannah asking Carlton, “Where’s Matthew? Please don’t say the bathroom.”

  He thanked Chloe for stopping by and spent the rest of his shift trying to decide what to do next. That night, he emailed Sarah:

  To: heffernans@berkeley.edu

  From: mstheword@gmail.com

  Sorry to be writing again so soon, but it turns out Chloe saw Amy before she left school and she didn’t look good at all. Supposedly she couldn’t say much and she couldn’t stop crying. I guess I’m writing you because I have to ask someone: Did Amy ever seem depressed to you? Or even suicidal? I keep thinking no, it’s impossible, but I know she was different with each of us. Maybe she talked to you about this? Sorry if I’m writing too soon but it’s been twelve hours. I’m panicking a little and you must be out of that lab by now.

  A few minutes later, he got a text:

  She’s not dead. I can’t tell you where she is or what’s going on, but I can tell you she’s not dead. You can also tell her parents this. Sarah

  He answered:

  Thank you for writing to me. If I promise not to say anything to her mother, can you just tell me: Did she get in touch with you at Berkeley? Is she staying with you now?

  A half hour later, he got this:

  She’s not with me, but yes, I helped her move out of the dorm. Bad situation all around. I’m shocked her parents let that go on as long as they did. She promised she’d contact her parents after November first. You should wait until then and she’ll get in touch with you, too.

  Matthew looked at the date today: October 27.

  Why is she waiting four days?

  She has her reasons. Don’t ask.

  Is she getting emails?

  I don’t know. I think so. Don’t worry. She’s okay now. Or better anyway. Staying at school was the problem. It was bad this semester, but that was only part of the problem. That’s why she’s being mysterious about it. I can’t say any more than that. I’m sorry.

  That night after work, he went home and composed a long email.

  To: aimhigh@comcast.net

  From: mstheword@gmail.com

  So, Amy,

  I don’t know if you’re reading these emails, but I’m going to write you anyway because there are a few things I need to say. I’m sorry for what happened at the end of the summer: that’s the main thing.

  I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand what happened between us. You always said I never read enough, that all my problems would be solved if I read more novels. So I’ve been trying this fall, going through some of the books you suggested, and I have to be honest.

  Usually I’ll get half
way into House of Mirth or Anna Karenina and I’ll think, My God, have I really just read two hundred pages about a garden party? Then I’ll pick up All Quiet on the Western Front and I’ll think, Jesus, is this war ever going to end? It’s not that I don’t like the books; I do. You’re right—they’re great books, but I keep feeling like they’re all about people who are horribly trapped by their circumstances. They’re hard to read, aren’t they? Don’t you feel that, too? Maybe it brings me to my real point. Do you remember the conversation we had about The Awakening, the book you were reading at the beach this summer? It turns out you left the book under the passenger seat in my car. I found it a few weeks ago and started to read it. When you first told me about it, I thought it sounded like another one of those setups you love so much, where characters are trapped by a society that forces them to do nothing for most of the book. (I’m sorry, Aim, but those are some of your favorite stories. Where the plot creaks along for hundreds of pages and finally the earth cracks open when a glove gets removed or a teacup dropped.) I expected this story to be like that, but it isn’t. Or yes, it is, and even so, I’ve gotten caught up in this world and have even fallen a little in love with Edna, and the ocean and those magical beach nights where she finally claims herself. I didn’t read it until now because I always assumed it was all about sex. Now I have to say, I don’t think it really is about sex. It’s about her claiming a life for herself, and unfortunately the only thing she can do to make that happen is have sex with someone who isn’t her husband.