Say What You Will
Cammie McGovern
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HarperCollins Publishers
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Advance Reader’s e-proof
courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers
This is an advance reader’s e-proof made from digital files of the uncorrected proofs. Readers are reminded that changes may be made prior to publication, including to the type, design, layout, or content, that are not reflected in this e-proof, and that this e-pub may not reflect the final edition. Any material to be quoted or excerpted in a review should be checked against the final published edition. Dates, prices, and manufacturing details are subject to change or cancellation without notice.
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HarperCollins Publishers
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Dear Reader:
The truth: that’s what we all want, right? Someone who will be honest with us and tell it like it is. For Amy, finally finding that someone opens up her world—a world she didn’t even know she was missing.
After she meets Matthew, Amy tells him, “Maybe you don’t know this, but when you’re disabled almost no one tells you the truth. They feel too awkward because the truth seems too sad, I guess. You were very brave to walk up to the crippled girl and say, essentially, wipe that sunny expression off your face and look at reality.”
Amy and Matthew are both trapped in uncooperative bodies for different reasons, but both are also in desperate need of a friend. And during their senior year in high school, Amy and Matthew are thrust into each other’s worlds and begin a once-in-a-lifetime friendship that blossoms into so much more.
Say What You Will is beautifully written, clever, and emotionally poignant—it’s a universal story about the redemptive power of friendship and illustrates how we can all feel lost or out of place until we find someone who loves us because of our faults, not in spite of them.
I hope you enjoy reading about these wonderfully resilient characters as they try to find the words they need for each other.
Best,
Tara Weikum
Vice President, Editorial Director
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HarperCollins Publishers
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DEDICATION
dedication TK
CONTENTS
Cover
Disclaimer
Title
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
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Unsent message found on Amy’s computer in the hospital
You want the whole story, but you don’t realize—it’s impossible to tell the whole story. You probably think it was all about sex, but that’s where you’re wrong. It was about love. And you. Mostly you. Other people would look at me and think sex was impossible but love was not. Then it turns out, both are possible and also impossible.
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CHAPTER ONE
AMY’S EMAILS STARTED IN late July and kept coming all summer. Each one made Matthew a little more nervous:
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Re: I’m happy!
I just slipped into my mother’s office to look at the names of my new peer helpers, and I’m so happy! Your name is on the list! I thought maybe I’d scared you by coming right out and asking you to apply. I realize it’s an unusual setup, but try not to think of it as my parents offering to pay people to be my friend. I know there’s something unsettling and prideless in that. I prefer to think of it this way: my parents are paying people to pretend to be my friend. This will be much closer to the truth, I suspect, and I have no problem with this. I’m guessing that a lot of people in high school are only pretending to be friends, right? It’ll be a start, I figure.
The note made him anxious, but still he wrote her back:
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Re: I’m happy!
I don’t mind, Amy. It’s a good job, plus your mother says we might get community service credit. Best, Matthew
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Re: I’m happy!
Community service credit? For a paid job? I’m trying not to take this personally, Matthew, but does the job sound so onerous you should get both money and volunteer credit for doing it?
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Re: I’m happy!
Sorry, you’re right. No, I didn’t mean that. The truth is I’m very glad to do this job. I don’t have a lot of friends at school, so I’m happy I’ll get to know you and the other people working with you. Matthew
P.S. Maybe I shouldn’t have said that thing about community service but, come to think of it, maybe your mother shouldn’t have suggested it, either. I think we all got a little confused.
Already Matthew had a feeling this wasn’t going to work out. The more he thought about it, the more certain he was it wouldn’t. He’d known Amy since second grade, but he didn’t know her. They weren’t friends. He remembered her, sure, but he remembered a lot of people from elementary school that he wasn’t friends with now.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Re: I’m happy!
Why don’t you have many friends? You seem pretty normal, right? I remember you having friends in elementary school.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Re: I’m happy!
I have some friends, I guess. I was never all that good when it started to be about sleepovers. Those things made me nervous.
He wasn’t sure why he’d written that. Being too honest was always a mistake—especially with someone like Amy, he was afraid. He had no idea what he’d say if she asked him why he had trouble with sleepovers.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Re: I’m happy!
Why do you have trouble with sleepovers?
He didn’t answer her quest
ion. He couldn’t because here was the real question: Why did she keep writing to him? He wasn’t sure what she was doing this summer, but he assumed she was taking some college-level summer classes. He heard a rumor once that Amy took courses through UCLA Extension every summer, and had enough credits to start college a year from now as a second-semester sophomore. It probably wasn’t true, but that’s what he’d heard. There were a few stories like that about her.
After a week, he felt guilty for not responding and wrote this:
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Re: I’m happy!
Sorry I couldn’t write back for a while. I got really busy.
Can you believe school is about to start? I’m looking forward to the training sessions for this job. That should be interesting. Do you attend, too? Your mother didn’t say in her letter.
He sounded like a dork. Oh well. At least he’d written her back.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Re: I’m happy!
No, I won’t go to the training sessions. Why do sleepovers make you nervous?
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Re: I’m happy!
How did it go? My mother said you were there but you were pretty quiet the whole time and then you left early, which makes me nervous that maybe you’ve changed your mind. Please don’t change your mind, Matthew.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Re: I’m happy!
Matthew? Are you there? Please write back. My mom said you came to the training session today but she can’t tell whether you’re really interested in this job. She has her doubts. I told her to give you a chance. Everyone else is doing this to round out their college application. With you, it’s different, I think. Maybe I’m wrong about that. But please don’t quit.
She was right about this much: he wanted to quit. One “training session” with Nicole, Amy’s mother, talking about choking hazards and seizure risks was enough to make him feel like there was no way he could do this. Seizure risk? Just hearing that phrase made him start to sweat and wonder if he was having one.
At the end of the session Nicole made it clear: “We’re replacing adult aides with peers because this is Amy’s last year of high school and she wants to learn about making friends before she goes off to college. This is her number one goal for the year and we’re hoping you all can help her achieve it.”
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Re: I’m happy!
Your mom has pretty high goals for your peer helpers. I’m not sure I’m cut out for this.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Re: I’m happy!
What goals?
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Re: I’m happy!
She wants each of us to introduce you to five new people a week. Does that seem like a high number? It does to me, but then, as you know, I don’t have a ton of friends, so I’m not sure.
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Re: I’m happy!
PLEASE don’t worry about it.
He was worried about it. Very worried. Now that he’d told his mom about the job, though, he wasn’t sure if she’d let him back out.
“Wait a minute,” his mom said, after he told her he might be working as Amy’s aide one day a week. “Do I remember this girl? From sixth-grade chorus? Did she sit in a chair up front and sing louder than everyone else?”
“Yes,” he said, embarrassed by the memory.
“And she waved her hands the whole time, like she was conducting the audience?”
“Yes,” he said. This conversation made him think of a line Amy had written in one of her first emails to him. I want you to tell me when I’m doing stuff wrong. That request alone was enough to worry him: Where would he begin?
His mother clapped her hands and threw her head back, laughing like she hardly ever did anymore. “I loved that girl. I always wondered what ever happened to her.”
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Re: I’m happy!
Okay. See you at school. I’m not scheduled to work until Friday, which pretty much confirms that your mom thinks of me as the least promising of your peer helpers. I’m fairly sure she isn’t saving the best for last. I think she’s hoping someone else will show up between now and then. If that doesn’t happen, I’ll see you on Friday, I guess. . . .
To: [email protected]
From: [email protected]
Re: I’m happy!
Sorry to harp on this but why don’t you like sleepovers?
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CHAPTER TWO
THE NIGHT BEFORE SCHOOL started, Matthew lay awake in bed and tried to picture himself doing this job—walking beside Amy between classes, carrying her books as he’d only seen adults do in the past. Maybe it would work out okay, but it didn’t seem likely. Because of her walker, Amy couldn’t really walk and talk at the same time. There would be silences that could be excruciating. Until this summer when she emailed him, he’d never known she was funny and easy to talk to. But what good would that do if they couldn’t talk? Not much.
Then there was Amy’s mother who had high expectations and obvious doubts about him. All through the training sessions Nicole kept saying, “If you don’t feel comfortable with any aspect of this job, please let me know,” looking straight at him as if she could tell he felt uncomfortable with pretty much all of it.
He’d only applied because Amy wrote him in July and asked him to. And that was such a surprise he couldn’t think of any reason to say no, though he probably should have.
They didn’t know each other, really. They’d only had that one conversation that he still thought of as horrible and awkward, though apparently Amy didn’t.
Maybe it wasn’t right to say he didn’t know her at all. He still remembered the first time he saw her in second grade, and the speech the teacher made before she arrived, about how Amy might “look different on the outside but inside she’s exactly like everyone else.” Because the teacher didn’t explain what she meant by “look different,” Matthew imagined a girl covered in fur, or wrinkly skin with bug eyes like Yoda. That year, Matthew had discovered the Human Freak section in the Guinness Book of World Records, and used to stare at pictures of the men covered in warts and the women with heavy beards. When Amy appeared just before lunch, inching into the classroom with her wheeled walker in front of her and an adult on either side, he was disappointed.
Mostly she did look like other girls. She had curly blond hair that hung down her back and she wore a flowered pink dress. Sure, she couldn’t walk without her contraption, but beyond that she had no particularly freakish qualities. Yes, her mouth hung open. Yes, she drooled enough to wear a bib most days—which was embarrassing, maybe—but she wasn’t a true freak like he’d hoped. She was most interesting when she tried to talk at morning meeting, where everyone else sat on a carpet square—except Amy, who sat in a low, blue plastic rocking chair she sometimes fell out of. She never raised her hand to speak. Instead she rocked in her chair and squawked like something was caught in her throat.
“Oh my goodness,” the teacher said the first time Amy did this. She looked at Amy’s aide. “Is she all right?”
“She has something she wants to say,” the aide said.
They all waited while Amy’s mouth opened and closed. No sound came out. A minute ticked by and finally the teacher couldn’t wait anymore. “We’ll let Amy gather her thoughts and come back.”
The next year they moved up to third grade, where the teacher, Mrs. Dunphy, talked abo
ut Amy when she was out of the room. “The doctors predicted that Amy would be a vegetable for the rest of her life, and look how far she’s come! The most important thing for you all to know is that she’s extremely bright with a very high IQ.”
This was news to Matthew, who was in the highest reading and math group. For the rest of third grade, Matthew waited for Amy to do or say something extremely smart. Maybe she did. Mrs. Dunphy called on her regularly but the problem was no one—including Mrs. Dunphy—understood anything Amy said.
She spoke in a language that used no consonants, only a long string of vowels. Matthew tried to imitate it once, and sounded like he did when a doctor asked him questions with a tongue depressor in his mouth. Amy’s aide understood a few words: Bathroom. I need a break. Some girls pretended to understand secrets Amy whispered in their ear at recess. They went up one by one, held their ear to Amy’s mouth, and ran off to giggle on the bench. The joke was ended by a recess monitor who wasn’t sure, but thought the game might be hurting Amy’s feelings. Matthew overheard the conversation between two teachers. “I thought Amy liked it,” one of them said. “It’s better than sitting by herself the whole recess, isn’t it?”
“No,” the other woman said. “They’re making fun of her and she knows it.”
Matthew noticed that neither one of them asked Amy, which he supposed made sense. They all knew by then Amy wouldn’t have answered with a simple yes or no. She never did. She had long, complicated answers for every question she was asked, answers no one ever understood. Sometimes Matthew watched adults pretend to understand Amy—laugh at one of her “jokes” or nod at a comment—and he thought: they look like the freak, not her.
