Say What You Will

by Cammie McGovern

  So, yes, Amy, I see why you love this book and why you wanted me to read it, but I also want to say: Please don’t forget how Edna is being a little childish, too—stamping on her wedding ring and smashing the crystal vase. She married her husband to get away from her parents, and then she spends the rest of the book getting away from him. Okay, I think, but maybe she should have seen what was coming? I got to the end when she only sees the ways everyone has tried “to possess her, body and soul.” But would that really be the end of the world, Amy? To be possessed that way? What I’m trying to say is: I don’t think you have to tear up all your relationships to get away from people’s expectations of you. You can just not do what they expect, right?

  I don’t know if you’ve left school because your parents put too much pressure on you to go to the most high-pressure, competitive school possible, or if it’s something else completely.

  My guess is that this book doesn’t explain everything. I keep going over what you said that night after we got home from the beach. I understand what you were trying to say, but I also have to say I don’t believe there’s such a thing as casual sex for people like you and me. How could there be? We don’t have casual relationships with our bodies. They’re unpredictable, humiliating things that have failed us so much it’s hard not to hate them, and impossible to imagine being naked with another person and relaxed at the same time. I don’t know. Maybe that’s not it at all. Maybe this whole thing is my fault for things I haven’t even imagined yet. So I’m reading your books, and (yes, it’s true) emailing Sanjay, who, I’m sorry, is a jerk. Maybe I shouldn’t say that, so if it offends you, consider it a typo. Pretend I meant to say jock.

  But not worthy of you, Aim. Not worthy at all.

  Don’t disappear forever, Amy. Don’t die making a point that no one understands yet. Let us find you, and when we do, tell us what you’re trying to say.

  I read that final scene with Edna walking into the inky ocean to make her last statement to the world and I thought about the dream I once had of you and me swimming together, strong and whole. Please write me back. I don’t know where you are and I need to hear from you. (I also read that ending and wondered if all of this is all some elaborate suicide note on your part. Please, Amy, don’t let it be that. Please. I beg of you.)

  Love, Matthew, who is sorry for being about three months late saying all this.

  Instead of hearing back from Amy, he got this:

  To: mstheword@gmail.com

  From: hannah302@hotmail.com

  Hi, Matthew—I just wanted to write you a quick note to apologize for what happened after work last week. I didn’t mean to startle you with that big beanbag move. I promise I’m not a crazy stalker. I’m just sick of having stupid things with jerky guys who aren’t worth all the effort I put into thinking about them. I guess I was thinking, Yes, Matthew can be a very strange person, but in a sweet, good-hearted way, and maybe after all the jerks I’ve gone out with, he is the one I should get to know better. I don’t know what you’re thinking, or if I scared you, but I wanted you to know that I like you. That’s all. It’s fine if you don’t feel the same way. Or not fine, but it’s okay. That’s all. Maybe you’re still thinking about your old friend, I don’t know.

  Hannah

  Three days ago—the night before he got that first text from Amy—he stayed late at work and ended up side by side again with Hannah, in their beanbags. There was a new girl named Reenie with them, who asked, after everyone had been there for a few minutes, “So is this where everyone plays truth or dare?”

  Matthew panicked for a second and wanted to say, No. Not at all. Then he thought about Amy and how her old assignments were a little like truth or dare. He felt like Amy was watching him and would be mad if he said no. He felt like that a lot. Even though he was hanging out with new people, it was like she was there, watching everything he did.

  Of course they played. This crowd was born for playing truth or dare. On Hannah’s turn, Sue said, “Okay, Han, you’ve got to tell someone something you’ve always wanted to say but haven’t had the guts.”

  Right away, Hannah looked at Matthew and he got nervous. She’s going to tell me I’m weird and I clean too much, he thought. But no. She didn’t say anything. Instead she leaned forward on her hands, and she kissed him.

  At first he thought she’d made a mistake. Like she’d fallen down with her lips accidentally on his. Then he understood: this was a kiss. It had been five years since he had one, and he wished there’d been more time to ready himself. Loosen his jaw and warm his lips, maybe. He kept his eyes open too long and did nothing with his hands. It wasn’t a great kiss, but it wasn’t terrible, either. And afterward he felt no need to rush to the bathroom and wash anything. So that was good. In truth, he didn’t think too much about it afterward. In fact, his only thought driving home was: If Amy had been here, she would have been proud.

  But she wasn’t there, of course; that was the problem. He wrote Hannah back:

  To: hannah302@hotmail.com

  From: mstheword@gmail.com

  Can’t write much now. Have a friend in crisis. The one I told you about. Thank you for your note, though. You didn’t scare me. I’ll talk to you on Friday.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  IF AMY’S MOTHER WANTED numbers, here was one she could have.

  One.

  In the three months since Amy started college, she’d made exactly one friend. Hard to know exactly who to blame for this: the school, for deciding that Amy should live in an apartment next to the health-services office? Or her parents, who agreed so easily without ever consulting her? Amy wasn’t told about her housing assignment until they had arrived on campus for the first day of orientation and were standing in the office of the student housing administrator, who spoke quickly to her parents, highlighting all the pluses of the apartment without giving Amy any time to even ask a question.

  Outside the office, alone with her parents, Amy fired off all the questions she wasn’t allowed to ask in the administrator’s office. “WHAT ABOUT LIVING IN THE DORM? WHAT ABOUT THE ROOMMATE I’M SUPPOSED TO HAVE? HOW AM I GOING TO MAKE ANY FRIENDS?”

  Nicole steered them over to a bench and sat down. “The school went over your health records and they didn’t think a regular dorm room was a good idea, Aim.”

  “SO I HAVE TO LIVE IN THE INFIRMARY?”

  “Of course not. You won’t be in the infirmary. You’ll be next door.”

  “I DON’T WANT TO LIVE THERE. EVERYONE WILL ASSUME I’M SICK.”

  “No, sweetheart, it’s not like that,” Nicole said. “You’ll be in a more comfortable apartment, with your own refrigerator for your own foods. You’ll have an alarm system and a registered nurse next door, twenty-four hours a day, for any emergencies that crop up. It’s safer this way, that’s all.”

  “I DON’T NEED A NURSE! I DON’T NEED ANY OF THAT.”

  She saw her mother exchange a look with her father. Something to the effect of, You need to speak up here.

  “Here’s the thing, Aim,” her father said, placing a hand on her shoulder. “We know that you’d rather be in a dorm, but the college has some reasonable concerns about the safety of that. We talked to the people in the housing office for a while. We told them your personal-care needs and some of our safety issues, and they were pretty clear that a dorm wouldn’t work. They couldn’t provide the monitoring you would need.”

  “I DON’T NEED MONITORING! I NEED HELP IN THE MORNING AND AT NIGHT DRESSING! THAT’S ALL! I DON’T NEED A NURSE!”

  Her dad stepped away. He never lasted long if Amy really protested something. Nicole kept going. “The nurse won’t do any of that. You don’t have to see the nurse at all. They assured us that the apartment is very separate.”

  It was gradually becoming clear to Amy—all of this had be
en decided a while ago. Though she’d been given a dorm room in the packet that arrived weeks ago, she didn’t have one anymore. “YOU DECIDED ALL THIS WITHOUT TELLING ME?”

  “We thought it would be better if you were here and you could see the place. They sent us pictures and it’s lovely.”

  In her original welcome packet, Amy’s dorm assignment was on the freshman quad. After she opened it, she spent hours on Google Maps studying the exterior of her dorm building and the grounds around it. She memorized the paths that looked wide enough for her scooter to navigate. She imagined herself rolling along with a classmate beside her. But now it was clear: she could protest all she wanted, but she wouldn’t be living in a dorm this year.

  Was this a punishment for the summer she spent seeing Matthew behind her mother’s back? They were never caught, but Amy always wondered if Nicole suspected something. Early in the summer, her mother heard about the vodka-at-prom story from the mother of another classmate who told her she was so sorry about the way Amy had been used by the other kids at prom. When Nicole confronted her, Amy tried to argue. “NO ONE WAS USING ME! I AGREED TO THE WHOLE THING! IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN A STUPID MISTAKE, BUT IT WAS MY STUPID MISTAKE.”

  Nicole refused to see it that way. “It never would have happened if we hadn’t hired those peer helpers. They assumed you were desperate for friends and would do anything they asked you to. Turns out they were right, unfortunately.”

  The surprise after that was the absence of any punishment. Amy kept expecting something. That her mother would insist on signing Amy up for another online college-credit course over the summer. Something rigorous and ridiculous like statistics or medieval French literature. But no. Apparently she’d waited until now to exact her revenge.

  Nicole sat down on the bench across from Amy’s scooter and laid out all the other decisions they’d made without consulting her, including this: they would only hire professional PCAs to help with her needs.

  “HOW ABOUT SOME DISCRETION MONEY?” Amy suggested. “IF SOMEONE HAS A SIMILAR SCHEDULE AS ME, MAYBE I CAN HIRE THEM FOR A LITTLE HELP TAKING NOTES AND GETTING ME LUNCH?” Surely that wasn’t a crazy idea. Some flexibility in those first few months when she might be the loneliest?

  “Absolutely not,” Nicole said. “We’ve tried that once and we’ve learned our lesson.”

  What could Amy say to this? No, you’re wrong? Matthew and the rest of them have been wonderful friends? She had made mistakes, too. Worst of all with Matthew, who she misjudged so terribly their last night together. He’d walked out of her house without saying good-bye. Since then, he hadn’t texted or gotten in touch with her once.

  “OKAY, MOM,” she said, and started her scooter toward the apartment where she would live alone, in the back of a building that was mostly administrative offices. The following morning and every morning after that, Amy rolled out of her room to greet secretaries in business suits arriving for work. Because she had no dorm or resident advisor, Amy spent orientation week sitting by herself, on the side of all the activities, watching as her peers completed scavenger hunts and tossed water balloons back and forth to one another. The few people who spoke to her had evidently not heard that they needed to wait for a response, because three separate times, Amy typed answers to questions only to look up and realize the person had walked away.

  For those four days of orientation—the longest four days of her life—only the personal care assistants who came in the morning and evening to help her dress and undress heard her speak. Otherwise her glorious Pathway with its humanoid voice and amazing capacities went unnoticed by a single classmate. Amy tried to change that when classes started. She preprogrammed a funny introduction of herself. She studied her class syllabus so she could ask questions about supplemental reading. She was prepared for every possibility except the one that happened: three lecture courses with professors who never took attendance and only left five minutes at the end for questions and comments. Amy raised her hand, but was never called on. Her second weekend of college, she didn’t bother leaving her room at all. She stayed inside, ate yogurt and rice cakes, and listened to the thrumming baseline of party music across the quad.

  By late September, she felt as if she’d become a professional recluse. She went to classes and forced herself, for one meal a day, to eat in a cafeteria. Beyond that, she stayed inside, spending time on various chat rooms and discussion boards. Just as she was beginning to wonder if she might be truly losing her mind, one afternoon a “personal message” showed up in her Shakespeare discussion mailbox. It was from a boy named Brooks who she’d noticed in class, mostly because he talked a lot and had pale hands and the long, thin fingers of a pianist.

  Brooks: Hello, Amy. I wondered if you might like to talk privately sometime. I believe we share similar readings on some of these plays.

  She pictured his hands in class, carving pictures in the air as he spoke. Sometimes he kept his fingertips pinched together like the conductor of an invisible orchestra. Once she’d even had the thought: He looks weirder than me.

  Amy: Sure.

  Brooks: You seem to know your Shakespeare pretty well.

  Amy: The plays, yes. The sonnets, not so much. As a poet, I’d say Shakespeare was a wonderful playwright.

  Brooks: Yes, I agree.

  Amy couldn’t help it. The relief of talking to another human being again was so huge she laughed out loud, alone in her apartment.

  Amy: Who are some other writers you like?

  Brooks: Hard to say. I tend to like writers less the more I read of their work. I start finding their shortcuts, the similar points they make over and over. Like Shakespeare, for instance. How many times is he going to write about the way words fail to describe our deepest emotions? We get it already.

  Amy: Maybe words failed him.

  Brooks: Exactly.

  It wasn’t always clear if he understood her jokes. Probably not, judging by how serious he was about his literary passions. Shakespeare was okay, but his real love was reserved for early horror writers like H.P. Lovecraft, who he talked about a lot.

  For a few weeks, their exchanges went back and forth. She enjoyed them enough to imagine that she’d found her first friend on campus, and one day she asked him if he’d like to have lunch after class. “I don’t know about that,” he wrote back. She waited for him to explain. “It’s not you. Or your scooter. That’s not the problem.”

  Though she was alone in her room, her face burned red with shame. Obviously it was the problem. “Why not, then?” she typed.

  “It’s me. I’m socially awkward face-to-face. I hardly ever eat with anyone. I get repulsed easily by other people chewing. You should see some of these guys on my floor. They eat like animals.”

  She wrote another letter to Matthew—one of the many that she’d written but not sent over the last two months. Then she got in bed and cried as she had so many nights since she arrived.

  Though Brooks never spoke to her, even once, in class, she kept up their online conversations because he was interesting enough in his own strange way. He had Asperger’s, she decided, or something that made him unaware of the hurtful things he sometimes said. If he didn’t understand, how could she blame him, she decided. Their book discussions and nightly chats kept her going through the end of September and into October, when a strange feeling took over her body. It felt like a flu that came in waves, then drifted away. I’m sick, she’d think, grateful for an excuse to stay inside even more. And then, after she settled herself into bed, it would pass. Wait. No, I’m not sick.

  One rainy Saturday night, they found each other online and Brooks spent twenty minutes telling her the plot of his favorite Lovecraft story, “The Outsider.” It was about a narrator who’d lived alone in the catacombs of a castle basement, surrounded by books his whole life. One day he decides the time has come to venture into the world. It takes him a full day of crawling to find his way out of the dungeon, and when he finally emerges, he discovers the world he’s only known from
books is in the grip of terror over a monster that’s been unleashed in their midst. He wants to help, because even though he’s only been in it for a few minutes, he loves the world. Even with everyone screaming in fear and running inside around him, he loves the colors, the buildings, everything. When he finally sees the monster, he realizes they’re right. It’s terrifying, a hideous thing covered in scales and warts with teeth that stick out in every direction, but he’s determined to stay brave and save this world that he’s only ever known and loved through books, so he goes to kill it, and when he does, his hand hits a mirror.

  As Brooks told this whole story one sentence at a time, posted as another IM message so it read like a monologue interrupted every few seconds by his user name, Amy prayed this wouldn’t be the ending. He was the monster everyone feared! Locked in a mirrorless dungeon for years to save his book-loving heart from the truth about himself!

  Please, no, she thought. Let him recognize the similarity to my story. Surely it occurred to him: she was as isolated as this “outsider.” Since arriving at Stanford, she’d felt just as monstrously alone.