What to Say Next

by Julie Buxbaum

  “Maybe skip the gift.”

  “Everyone likes fruit dipped in chocolate.”

  “Trust me on this one.”

  “What if she doesn’t forgive me?” I picture my empty lunch table again. If Kit doesn’t forgive me, maybe I could join José and Mullet and Chloe’s table, which is only three over from mine. The new acoustics and perspective would take some getting used to, but I could do it. Although they are not as fun to look at and be with as Kit.

  Miney shrugs.

  “Kit’s loss. There are other girls in the world.”

  “Don’t go,” I say, though I don’t really mean it. I am just putting into words the urge I have to throw myself at her legs to keep her from leaving, like I used to do to my mom when I was a little kid. I realize she needs to return to school, that my own feelings on the matter should be irrelevant. “By the way, your physics tutor can’t be that smart if he doesn’t realize how great you are.”

  Miney smiles the old Miney smile, the kind she used to wear all the time, and then she envelops me in a huge hug. Though I don’t feel like being hugged, I let her, because she’s my sister and my favorite person in the world and in a few hours she’ll be far, far away.

  “I love you, Little D. Just the way you are. So yeah, you can change, but don’t ever really change, okay?”

  “Okay,” I agree, though I have no idea what that means at all. “I’m scared, Miney.”

  “All the best people are,” she says.

  “People are surprisingly nice to you when they discover you killed your father,” I announce at lunch, toying with a new persona now that my secret is out. Jokey, as if I’m not drowning in shame, as if treating this as something light can make it bounce right off me. I’m, of course, back at my old table. I haven’t seen David since McCormick’s. Jack, who always seems to appear just when I do and do not need him the most, was somehow miraculously at the restaurant with Evan. He drove me home. I was too shaken to register that it was my first time seeing him since my mother’s confession. For that five-minute ride, he was Uncle Jack, and he delivered me to my mother, who took one look at my face and went straight to the bathroom cabinet to get me a Valium.

  What happened in McCormick’s went viral, just like David’s notebook, though in my case through texts and whispered conversations. You can still Google my name without finding a thing.

  “Stop saying that,” Violet says, though she doesn’t flinch. Both she and Annie spent all of Sunday on my couch, after showing up at my house armed with pizza and a jumbo-size bag of M&M’s. At first, I didn’t say a word, and they didn’t ask. We just sat and ate and watched television, and instead of resenting them, I appreciated that they were being delicate with me. Remembered that they had always been my tribe. Only later did the words start to form, and once I started talking I found I couldn’t stop.

  “My dad and I both wanted a Snickers bar,” I said, staring straight ahead. I couldn’t bring myself to look at them. “That’s why we went out that night. But we told my mom we were just going to get milk. And my dad made me drive because he wanted me to get extra practice. You want to hear the strangest thing? The accident happened on the way home, and the milk carton was still sitting in the backseat. Not crushed, not even, like, a little bit dented. So weird. I still have half of the Snickers bar. I keep it on my desk, like some sick souvenir.”

  “It would be totally inappropriate of me to make a ‘no use crying over spilt milk’ joke, right?” Annie asked, and for reasons I can’t explain, both Violet and I thought that was hilarious, and we laughed until we all had tears running down our faces. I realized then that maybe humor could help me through. Another way to bend time.

  “It was an accident. It really wasn’t your fault,” Annie says. This is their new favorite mantra. Again with the words accident and fault, as if they are made of magic. I am absolved. Poof. It’s all better. I don’t mind hearing it, because I need everything I can get. I shouldn’t have waited so long to talk to my friends. They’ve been so supportive. The opposite of David.

  “I don’t get why your mom wanted you to keep it a secret in the first place,” Violet says.

  “She was just trying to protect me,” I say, and then I can’t help it, I reflexively look over to David’s table. But he’s not there. He’s a few rows over with the kids from Academic League. He catches me looking, and I quickly turn my attention back to the girls. “If no one knew, then maybe it wouldn’t define me. And you know my mom. She’s totally hard-core about everything. She makes me drive to school every day and run all sorts of errands, because she’s worried that driving will become a thing for me. Like a phobia.”

  “Is it working?” Annie asks.

  “Sort of,” I say. “I still get a little shaky in the car, but it gets a tiny bit easier each time.”

  I have already warned my friends that the girl they used to know and love is gone. That they should give up trying to revive the old me. I’m not braver or stronger, as my mom hoped. I’m a new version. Possibly someone they could one day like better. Who knows? Maybe I’ll turn out funnier.

  My mom has found me a therapist who specializes in grief counseling, and she got herself one too. She’s even talking about us seeing a third psychologist we can talk to together. We are mobilizing.

  “Vi and I have decided to go stag to prom, and we’ll be taking Uber. No driving needed. So will you come with us? Just us girls?” Annie asks. “Please, please, please!”

  “Sorry, I can’t,” I say.

  “Why not? If I can go and watch Gabriel and Willow make out all night, you can at least come and pretend to have fun.” I shrug. My dad would have been excited about prom. He would have taken a thousand pictures of me and posted them on Facebook without my permission and begged me to text him the DJ’s playlist.

  “Come on!” Violet whines.

  “Sorry, guys.”

  “It’s David, isn’t it? Forget about him. He’s a weirdo,” Annie says. “Obvi we’re no longer Team David.”

  “This is not about David,” I say, though maybe it is, just a little bit. Because perhaps for a second there, before David was the enemy, I had pictured both of us dressed up and slow-dancing to some cheesy song. I had pictured another night just like at Dylan’s party, when he looked at me like I was something worth looking at, when I allowed myself to forget.

  After what happened at McCormick’s, he sent me only one text. It was composed of two words: I’m sorry.

  I might have killed my father, but I think even I deserve better than that.

  I spend the first week after screwing everything up with Kit too ashamed to do anything except write her a stupid text. I keep it short, limit it to the words I know can’t be the wrong ones: I’m sorry. I don’t trust myself not to make a bigger mess of things by saying more. Whenever I pick up the phone to text again, I freeze up with anxiety. I don’t feel like I deserve the chance to explain. I don’t even deserve to share the same air molecules as Kit.

  I have spent all my waking hours following rule number four by trying to imagine what she must be thinking. My guess is she assumes I am a sociopath. I smiled. At McCormick’s, while we were talking about the accident, one in which she was driving and her father was a passenger, one that resulted in her father’s death. I smiled.

  And then, then I had the nerve to yell.

  Since I am in my own brain, I understand why I did all that—the sequencing makes perfect sense to me—but to her, a person on the outside of my mind, a person who knows nothing about my synaptic responses, I must seem like a monster.

  Here’s what happened in that booth, with Kit sitting across from me and the cold milk shake in my stomach and the strange dimensions of my new clothes: My brain got narrow. It did what it’s best at. It tunneled in. If that moment was a Russian nesting doll, I was paying attention to the smallest figurine. Pawing my way through the details of blood spatter and brake data and an algorithm I had elegantly designed. I found an answer, right there, at the
very center. A tiny nugget. That’s all I could see. The solution to a mathematical equation that had been troubling me for weeks. The missing data point.

  I did not see all the other metaphorical dolls. The one wrapped around the smallest one, and the one wrapped around the next-smallest one and the next and the next after that.

  What neurotypical people call the context.

  I did not see Kit or the people nearby or the delicate nature of what we were discussing. Honestly, I did not see anything else at all.

  —

  “David, if I gave up every time I pissed someone off, I wouldn’t have any friends either,” Trey says a week later, after I’ve told him the whole sad story, even the parts that are hard for me to admit in the retelling. Our lesson today will be one hundred percent about social skills, since I am so shaken up about Kit I don’t even bother to take out my guitar.

  “She probably won’t forgive me,” I say.

  “Maybe not. But you have to at least try. And if you really do your best to apologize and she doesn’t forgive you, then you move on. You messed up. It happens. There will be other girls, man.”

  “Not really. I mean, of course there are other girls in the world, but by definition there’s no one else exactly like Kit, with her precise genetic and environmental makeup.” I regret that I left my guitar in the closet. My hands want to move. The strings would come in handy.

  “What’s the worst thing that can happen if you try?” Trey asks.

  “I make her hate me even more. I humiliate myself again. I spin out and crawl into the fetal position and start rocking in front of the entire school.”

  “I see you’ve given this a lot of thought.”

  “You’re not helping,” I say.

  “How about this: You can’t control how she reacts, but you can control what you do. So you do you. Be your best and hope for the best.”

  “I am paying you forty dollars an hour, and all you can come up with is you do you?” I ask.

  “Your parents are paying me, smart-ass.”

  “Fair enough,” I say, because it’s true. They are.

  —

  And so five full days after my conversation with Trey, five days in which I apply my Russian-nesting-doll focus to winning Kit’s friendship back, five days in which I think hard about what it means for me to do me—though I’m not sure the expression can be converted from second to first person—I am ready to put my plan into action.

  I start with food. After all, we met at my lunch table.

  The following Monday I come home to find an insulated cooler on my doorstep with my name scrawled across the top. Inside is a huge container of homemade chicken tikka masala and white rice. The note attached has no words. Just three seemingly identical sketches of me in which I look sadder and prettier than I do in real life. Of course, I know immediately they are David’s, but it takes me a minute to notice the differences between them.

  In the first, the freckles on my chest are their normal shape. Almost but not quite a circle.

  In the second, David has rearranged them into the shape of pi.

  In the third, they form the infinity symbol.

  I tack the three me’s up on the back of my closet door, in a line, my sketched faces turned toward my hanging clothes. A place where only I will see them. Me transformed into art.

  That night my mother and I eat David’s food at the counter in the kitchen. We sit on our neighboring stools, the weight of truth nestled in the space between us. We are slowly growing used to honesty in this house, accepting the million different ways it unzips your skin and leaves you vulnerable. We are trying to be open to the terrifying possibility of being understood. And the opposite too, which is so much scarier. Opening ourselves to the terrifying possibility of not being understood at all.

  The chicken is delicious. Almost as good as my grandmother’s and way better than Curryland’s.

  —

  On Tuesday, I open my locker to find a fat, dusty book, an old edition of the DSM. There’s a big Post-it note and an arrow pointing to the section titled “Asperger’s Syndrome.”

  I’m pretty sure I have Asperger’s. This is an old DSM (the new one folds my diagnosis under autism spectrum disorders). I think this will tell you a lot about why I am the way I am (and why I acted the way I acted), though I can’t use the Aspie thing as an excuse. It’s more an explanation than an excuse.

  There’s a famous expression that if you’ve met one person with autism, then…you’ve met one person with autism.

  So you met me.

  Just me.

  Not a diagnosis.

  I realize I hurt you. I forgot to think about you first. I did not put myself in your shoes, as the expression goes. (Though as a sidebar, I think wearing other people’s shoes is kind of disgusting; I’m only okay with the concept metaphorically.)

  So you know, you are all I think about.

  P.S. I recommend you change your locker combination for security purposes, but not till next week. I guessed your code on only my fifth try.

  —

  On Wednesday, in class, three tickets to a Princeton basketball game fall out of my laptop, with yet another note and another drawing. This time I am sitting in the bleachers of a crowded game next to Annie and Violet. I don’t look sad. Instead I’m grinning, and there’s something about my hair—it’s loose around my shoulders and falling in a perfect pattern—that makes me look liberated somehow.

  Because you said you loved spectator sports. You think I’m the weird one. (That was a joke, by the way, even though I’m not sure if I’m allowed to joke with you yet. Probably not, since we haven’t spoken out loud to each other since the McCormick’s Incident. This is my new life goal, by the way. To one day have permission to make you laugh again.)

  —

  On Thursday, in my mailbox, a bonsai tree.

  You said your dad loved this kind of tree. I thought/hoped maybe you did too?

  —

  On Friday, I open my locker to find a new sketch taped to the inside. The picture is of two numbers, 137 and 139, but they are drawn to look human. 139 has a backpack like David’s and his new short hair. 137 carries a shoulder bag like mine, and it wears a big man’s shirt just like my dad’s. The numbers walk down Clancy Street holding hands.

  I just wanted you to know these are my favorite numbers and my favorite twin primes: 137 and 139. And since they are my favorite, I wanted to give them to you.

  137 and 139.

  They’re yours now.

  Please take good care of them.

  —

  On Saturday, when I check my inbox, I have an email from David with the subject “This Gives Me Hope…” It links to an article about a Russian scientist who has, under lab conditions, created two identical snowflakes. I smile goofily at the screen.

  —

  On Sunday, David leaves an old-fashioned emergency crank radio on my front porch.

  So we can always hear each other’s waves. Clearly I need one of these more than you, but buying myself a gift did not seem in the spirit of this multistep apology.

  —

  On Monday, after last period, Annie stops me from getting into my car. My hands are trembling a little, like they always do before I get into the driver’s seat, but this time I don’t try to hide them.

  “David asked me to give this to you,” she says, and hands over a piece of paper that looks ripped from his notebook. I look at her, a question in my eyes: What should I do? She shrugs.

  “It never mattered before what I thought of David. It shouldn’t now,” she says, and gives me a go get ’em shoulder punch.

  I unfold the paper.

  I’ve read all of it before, when his words first found their way onto the Internet from his stolen notebook, but now there is a big X through the entire entry, and written over it, in all caps:

  FAVORITE GIRL IN THE WORLD. STILL MY FRIEND?

  Please meet me on the bleachers after school. Please. And I’m sorry. So
rrier than any person has ever been sorry in the history of sorry people. I’ll put in one last please for good luck, even though I don’t believe in luck. I believe in science. Sorry. Again.

  I wait in the bleachers, in the exact same spot we sat on that first day when Kit was just Kit Lowell to me, an entry in a notebook and someone I cautiously put on the Trust List. A few Notable Encounters. Nothing more. Now it occurs to me that outside of Miney, she’s the first friend I’ve ever made. If she doesn’t come, I will be heartbroken. Not literally, of course. My heart will continue to beat. I think. But there will be a literal and figurative ache.

  I close my eyes and remember our first kiss. How she reached up and cupped the back of my neck. That feels like much longer than fourteen days ago. Time has changed shape since I met Kit. Can love be so powerful a force that it can skew the space-time continuum? Does it have the particle and wave heft of something like consciousness? I make a mental note to later think through the implications of applying quantum theory to love, or at least its chemical and hormonal approximations. That could make for a satisfying thesis for my future PhD.

  She’s not coming. It’s obvious to me that this past week will turn out to have been just a fruitless series of desperate acts. I watch my classmates spilling out of school, in groups of two or three, their formations intimidatingly organic. Atoms into molecules.

  Like usual, I am alone.

  My headphones sound a siren call from my bag. I force myself to leave them in there. I will wade through all the noise around me, let it saturate my brain. The distant bell. Car engines revving. The anxiety humming through my body.

  It was a long shot and I lost. Kit doesn’t need more friends. Certainly not ones like me.

  I direct my attention to the remote possibility that Trey is right. That one day I won’t need Kit. That I will find a way to fill up my life with other people. That there are other girls in the world, and that maybe one of them will also feel like my Goldilocks of a person. Of course, all statistics point to Kit being an outlier. To this never happening again.