I close my eyes and I can’t resist any longer.
I slip on my headphones and start the gentle recitation of pi.
—
“David?” One hundred and thirty-four digits in, I look up, and there Kit is, standing in front of me, looking exactly the same as she always does. There is no readjustment to a new iteration. That, at least, is a relief. She’s not smiling.
The sky is low and gray and bloated. If this were a novel, it would be described as foreboding.
“Hi,” I say, and take off my headphones. I realize I am woefully underprepared for this moment. I should have written a speech. Or drawn a picture. At least figured out what I wanted to say. It occurs to me now that I never thought Kit might actually show up. “Do you want to sit?”
She nods and plops down next to me on the bench. She shields her eyes from the nonexistent sun with a cupped hand. We sit quietly like that for a few minutes.
“So?” she asks. “You asked me to come here.”
“Do you ever think about how your name doesn’t fit you? I mean, you’re usually Kit in my head, but really I think your name should have a Z in it, because you’re confusing and zigzagged and pop up in surprising places—like my lunch table and these bleachers. I really didn’t think you’d come—and maybe also the number eight, because…never mind, and the letter S too. It’s my favorite. S. So yeah, Z8S-139. Or 139-Z8S. That’s how I think of you sometimes. In my head,” I say, glad that words are at least coming out of my mouth. I’m too nervous to evaluate whether they are the right ones.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” Kit says.
I keep going.
“And my name doesn’t fit either. I mean, really: David? Did you know there are approximately 3,786,417 Davids in the United States? My parents couldn’t have gotten me more wrong. I should be a…a…I don’t know what. Something with a Y in it.”
“I literally have no idea what you’re talking about right now.”
“What I’m trying to say—badly, I guess—is that we each have the way the world sees us, and you were the very first person at this school, maybe the first person pretty much anywhere besides my immediate family, who looked at me and saw more than the weirdo flapping kid that everyone here has known as David, or I guess shithead. You listened to me talk. And I can’t tell you how much I appreciate that. It was like the equivalent of being given a better name.” She nods, and I wonder if she will get up and leave and we are done. Not friends. Not enemies. I tell myself I can count that as a win.
“I still…I mean, are we just not going to talk about what happened? Your kind of weird wasn’t good or charming the other day. It was cruel. You hurt me,” Kit says. “And I don’t really care what your name is. Stop changing the subject.”
“We never started on the subject—” Kit sighs, so I clear my throat. Begin again. “You’re right. I’m so, so sorry. I can try to explain what happened, I mean, with my brain, because I hope you know I would never, ever, ever be intentionally cruel, especially to you. You’re my favorite person. The thing is, I get hyperfocused, and that’s what I was thinking about, the nugget inside, the answer, not what it all meant, actually. Does that make sense?”
Kit shrugs, a gesture that is in my mental Pictorial Dictionary of Ambiguous Gestures, and I don’t know what to do. If I should keep talking or stop.
“I’m sorry. And I hope you can forgive me,” I say, and I turn to look at her. Not her clavicle or her jaw or her left arm. But right in the eyes, where it’s hardest.
“I dunno, I guess,” Kit says, but she’s the one to look away first. “That doesn’t mean, though, that, like, we are suddenly besties again or something.”
“We were best friends?” I ask. Of course she’s mine, excepting Miney, who is family and therefore doesn’t count. Never thought I would count as hers, though.
“I just mean I know I was the one who asked you to start the Accident Project in the first place. I know that. The whole thing was super messed up. I know I didn’t tell you the truth, or at least not the whole truth, but you shouted out my biggest secret—the worst thing that has ever happened to me, the worst thing that will hopefully ever happen to me—to the whole world. Like it was nothing. Like you didn’t give a crap about my feelings.”
“I’m sorry. Not just for the shouting. Or how inappropriate I was. I do stupid things like that sometimes. I am sorry for all that, of course, but what I’m most sorry for is that any of it happened to you in the first place, and that I haven’t said that out loud to you. It’s not fair. The fact that you were driving that car—the inexplicable cruelness of that bad luck—is the only thing in the world that I can think of that can’t be explained by math or quantum theory. See, I don’t usually use words like bad luck, and yet there are some things so totally out of our control that science hasn’t even come up with a label for them. And they suck. And you don’t deserve any of it. The accident wasn’t your fault. Even the math says—”
“Okay,” she says, cutting me off, like it’s some sort of decision, like she’s uninterested in my fault algorithm. Of course, I have no idea what that decision is or if it has anything to do with me at all.
“You couldn’t have braked. There was nothing you could have done,” I say, thinking this is the one last gift I can hand over, even if she’s not sure she wants to hear it. After this, I’m all out. No more food or drawings. It’s me.
“Of course I could have braked. I could have been faster with my foot. There must have been a moment—that’s all I wanted to know. The when. So I could see it differently. Even if it was just in my mind,” she says, looking out into the distance. I follow her gaze but don’t know what she’s staring at. All of Mapleview, I guess.
“No, you really couldn’t have. If you’d braked, then everything would have been worse. Someone else would have died too, Kit. There was a Mini behind you, so if you stopped short, that car would have been crushed from two different sides. Both cars would have been hit. I can show you the model and the simulation I made, if you want.”
“I don’t think so,” Kit says. “I mean, thank you, but there are some things…I just…can’t.”
“This wasn’t your fault. Mathematically or legally. There is nothing you could have done. So instead of trying to watch it happen differently, why don’t you try to not watch it at all?”
She looks up at me, her face full, but I don’t know of what.
“I didn’t meet her. The woman driving the Mini. I don’t even know her name.”
“You saved her life,” I say.
“Maybe,” she says, and nods, but she’s again like water. Her smile is slippery and starts to fall off her face. “Thank you. Again. This was really nice of you.”
“You saved her life,” I repeat, because I don’t think she’s hearing my certainty. That this is a fact.
“You really think so?” she asks.
“I don’t think so. I know so. Math doesn’t lie.”
“People do, though,” Kit says. “All the time.”
“Not me.”
“No, not you,” she says, and her smile firms up a little.
“So we’re friends again?”
“Sure.”
“I mean, we don’t have to sit at the same lunch table—you looked happy back with Annie and Violet—but it would be cool if we still talked sometimes. Like at school during other periods.”
“Of course we can talk,” she says, and I feel my stomach fill with relief. I have not lost everything.
“Just to be clear, I assume that there will be no more kissing?” I ask. She laughs, loud and hard, and it feels as good as it did the very first time I made her laugh. When it comes to Kit’s laughter, I don’t care much about my intentionality.
“We’ll see about that.”
“So…so…there might be?”
She elbows me, a friendly nudge, I think, and I nudge back. I take this to mean a warm no, thank you.
“Right. How about hand-holding? Can we do
that?” I ask.
“David?”
“Right. I’ll stop talking. We can just sit here quietly together.”
“That would be a good idea.”
“Okay,” I say.
“Thank you,” she says.
David and I are sitting in the bleachers and all of Mapleview is spread out before us like a restaurant menu, and it’s that hour in a late winter day when everything turns the same color of washed-out gray. The air is so thick, I feel like I could slice it and serve it like pie. Our small town looks even smaller from up here.
I let his words settle over me. The idea that I couldn’t have changed a thing. There is math to point to, a model on his computer, apparently. I don’t know yet how I feel about any of this, whether this changes things. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe there is no such thing as relief for me, only time.
I’m sure David has quantum theories to point to—the unraveling of our future selves, the existence of alternate universes, how healing can occur on a molecular level. I don’t, though. I think it’s all so much simpler than that. My dad was right: Unimaginably bad shit happens. We are left to choose whether to grow or to wither. To forgive or to fester. I’m going to choose to grow and forgive, for both myself and my mom. She deserves the same grace.
I look over at David and he looks over at me and he smiles and then so do I. We turn around again and face outward. I think, for some reason, of those three portraits now hanging in my closet. My chest tattooed with freckled possibility. Pi. Infinity. One open, one closed. Both forever. The thought makes me feel lighter, closer to whole. Bigger somehow.
“139-Z8S?” I ask. “Really?”
“Or if you prefer, I can call you: Z8S-139. Or Z8 for short.”
“I’ll think about it,” I say. Looking at him now, I realize he’s right. He’s not a David. Not even a little bit. “What should I call you, then?”
He shrugs, that unnatural shrug he does, and today I find it adorable.
“I’ll think of something,” I say.
“Will you think more about the kissing?” he asks, and I laugh again and mimic his shrug. If he only knew how much I’ve thought about the kissing.
“Will you reconsider hand-holding?” he asks.
Instead of answering, I move my arm so it’s next to his, so we are lined up, seam to seam. He reaches out his pinky finger and links it around mine and a warm, delicious chill makes its way up my arm.
We stay that way for a minute, in a pinky swear, which feels like the smallest of promises.
And then I grab his whole hand and link all his fingers in mine.
A slightly bigger promise. Or maybe a demand: Please be part of my tribe.
It’s pretty simple, really. For once, things are not complicated. Right now, right here, it’s just us, together, like this. Palm to palm.
The most honest of gestures.
One of the ways through.
Maybe the best one.
I realize I’m breaking one of the novelist’s cardinal rules by admitting that What to Say Next is my favorite of the four books I’ve written (five, if you count the one that will forever stay in a drawer). It’s pretty much like a mom picking her favorite kid. But before this book, meeting my main characters has always felt a lot like looking at myself in a fun-house mirror—they’re all alterna-mes.
With What to Say Next, though, instead of having to stare down my demons in a mirror, the experience felt much more like the best parts of giving birth. I love these characters (and writing about them) in that wholehearted, inexplicable way that I love my own children, which is to say, so much more than I love myself.
One of the many things I love about Kit is that she comes from a family that looks not so different from mine. Her mother is first-generation Indian American (her grandparents hail from Delhi) and her dad is American. My husband’s grandparents are from that same region of India, but he’s British and I’m American. When my real-life children are old enough to read this book and meet their fictional siblings, they’ll get to see someone who looks like them represented in a novel.
And of course, this book also belongs to David, whose voice I will miss in my head most of all. There is a famous expression that when you meet one person with autism, you meet one person with autism. Labels can be liberating, but they can also be limiting. In What to Say Next we meet David. Just David. And what a joy he is.
I wanted to write a story about unexpected connections and finding your tribe. About the wonder of finding an honest and true friend when you feel at your most alone. About the miracle of discovering that special someone who can see you clearly when you feel at your most misunderstood.
I hope you care about Kit and David as much as I do.
Although my name gets to be on the cover of this book, the truth is that writing a novel takes a village. So if you didn’t like this one, here are all the other people you can blame. Just kidding. All mistakes are mine. All credit is theirs.
First off, thank you to Beverly Horowitz, my editor, who pushed me to keep working and editing and tinkering and to ultimately just do better; I’ve met my perfectionist match and I’m so grateful. I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to my agent, Jenn Joel, one of the smartest and sharpest people I know; I feel so lucky to have you on my team. A forever thank-you to Elaine Koster, who is deeply missed.
A big thank you and huge hug to all the amazing people at Random House Children’s Books: Jillian Vandall (the best publicist a girl could ask for), Kim Lauber, Hannah Black, Dominique Cimina, Casey Ward, Alissa Nigro, John Adamo, Nicole Morano, Rebecca Gudelis, Colleen Fellingham, and the awesomesauce Laura Antonacci. Deeply appreciative to the international rights team at ICM, to Sharon Green, and to my Internet water cooler, the Fiction Writers Co-op. A monster hug to Julia Johnson. And a shout out to Kathleen Caldwell and A Great Good Place for Books, which is indisputably the best indie bookstore in the world.
I did an enormous amount of research for this book. If you’re interested in learning more about the autism spectrum or how to be an ally, please email me through my website and I’d be happy to share my reading list as a starting place. I’m still learning. I hope you’ll join me.
To the readers out there who make this writing books thing possible, you are my favorite tribe. I can’t thank you enough for letting me do every day what I only used to daydream about. Thank you for your emails, for your letters, for your tweets, for your blog posts, for your photos, for coming out to say hi on tour, for all your support. You guys rock. I owe you my eternal gratitude.
And lastly, thank you to my kick-ass friends and family. To my dad and Lena for making everyone you’ve met since birth come to my events. To my brother for cheering me on. To Mammaji for all the child care and for making sure I nailed the details of Kit’s family. To the rest of the Flore clan for letting me join the family. To my mother and grandmother, who, if the quantum physicists are right, I like to think live somehow in the souls of these pages. And lastly, to Indy, Elili, and Luca, who breathe meaning and love into my every day. I am the luckiest girl in the multiverse.
JULIE BUXBAUM is the author of Tell Me Three Things, her debut YA novel. She also wrote the critically acclaimed The Opposite of Love and After You. Her work has been translated into twenty-five languages. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two young children.
Visit Julie online at juliebuxbaum.com and follow @juliebux on Twitter.
What’s next on
your reading list?
Discover your next
great read!
* * *
Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.
Sign up now.
-moz-filter: grayscale(100%); -o-filter: grayscale(100%); -ms-filter: grayscale(100%); filter: grayscale(100%); " class="sharethis-inline-share-buttons">share
What to Say Next Page 23
