The Amy Virus

STAGE I:

  Disease begins to grow in one area of the body; the first symptoms might manifest here, but are frequently mistaken for those of a different disease.

  DAY 15

  School starts again in thirteen hours, seven minutes, and twenty-four seconds, and I’m sitting on my twin bed in my shoebox of a bedroom, picking at the pills of my twentieth-century blue polyester comforter, trying with all my might to get my nerves to calm down. Tonight is the night I have to walk the thirty feet between here and my parents’ workspace to tell my parents I want to be Cyan Beaut. It was going to be Friday night, but I got caught up in doing Amy research (which has come to almost nothing), and put it off until Saturday. On Saturday, I came down with a migraine. Today I still don’t feel so hot; my stomach is cramping so hard it feels like my digestive tract is pumping out brown diamonds, and my pulse is going like I just ran up twenty flights of stairs with a live panda strapped to my chest. But it has to be done now.

  The reason it has to be done now is because when I walk into school tomorrow, I want to be able to tell everyone that this is my name now, and even if it can’t be officially legal yet, it will be soon, so I have the right to call myself that. Really, I shouldn’t have waited this long. But I know this is not going to be a walk in the park. I’ve brought up the idea of changing my name before, although not what I wanted to change it to (because I didn’t know yet), and they think I’m drama royalty for even thinking the name Cindy Butt is what’s slowing me down. I just have to smile more. Be friendlier. Ask people questions about themselves and never talk about myself. But don’t ask too much, or they’ll think I’m nosy. And don’t just smile and nod, because then they’ll think I’m dull. Know when I’m supposed to look happy for them and when I’m supposed to cluck with sympathy. Laugh at their jokes, but not too loudly, and understand just what it is I’m supposed to be laughing about, even if I don’t. Yeah. It’s a lead-pipe cinch, right?

  What they don’t get is that everyone else in this family is pretty, and I’m not. If I was a Pretty Butt, I could skate by with the name. If I was really pretty, nobody would give a rodent’s hindquarters about my social skills, either. But I can’t be sandbagged with being funny-looking and having a jokey name and being socially Butt-backwards. The combination is lethal. And since it would be ludicrously expensive to make me pretty even if it were physically possible, and I have the dead-man’s learning curve when it comes to meshing with people in spite of Tam’s Herculean efforts all summer, it has to start with the name change. With the name change, I can leave behind the Butt of All Jokes for good. That girl will not exist anymore. There will be a new girl in town, full of sultry rhythms and off-the-charts creativity, who just happens to inhabit the same set of cells. The transformation will shock them in exactly the right way, as much as Amy’s performance on Your Generation shocked those little kids.

  What’s in a name? Only everything. I don’t care what William fracking Shakespeare said; if a rose was called a stinkburger, it would smell like a stinkburger. I do not want to smell like a stinkburger, or a Butt, for one second longer than I have to.

  I have all of this written down on index cards for when I talk to them. They will be in their study/office, working on bloggy things. Dad handles the tech stuff, Mom does the writing. I should not be this terrified of talking to my parents. It’s not like they’re going to beat me up for this or anything. But getting laughed at is a definite possibility.

  I clutch the cards in my hands, then fire up Amy’s video of “Look Around.” It’s the only one I have been able to find so far, and by now I have played it enough times that it’s burned into my memory and I shouldn’t ever have to play it again. But play it I do. “Just look around,” I sing along with her, over and over again, drumming the back of my desk chair as I channel her furious energy, first with one hand, and then with two, forgetting the index cards are in my hand.

  And of course, they go flying all over the room.

  I collect all the index cards but one, which I spy under my desk. I crawl under there to get it, but as I’m backing out, I forget that the top of the desk is still right over my head, and I whack my head on the drawer. Hard. “Ow!” I yelp. Then I bang my head on the wall behind the desk, deliberately, six more times, because I can’t fracking believe I keep doing that. Cyan Beaut will not whack her head on anything, deliberately or not. But Cindy Butt? Still clumsier than a five-legged giraffe. It’s gotta stop.

  I sit on the floor holding my pile of cards, and will myself to pull it together. Then I hear a girl’s voice in my head, whispering to me.

  Go get ‘em, tigress. You deserve this.

  I don’t know whose voice it is. It’s not mine, and it’s not anyone I recognize. And I know I’m alone in here.

  I use the desk chair to pull myself up, then check myself in the mirror before I go in there. I take off my glasses, picture myself with my entire head of hair dyed electric blue, and not with the spray-on stuff I’ll be using tomorrow to create a little blue streak in my unmanageable pile of ash brown, but with real hair dye. The color of Cyan. If I tilt my head at the right angle, I can see Cyan. But I don’t know if my parents will be looking at me from that angle.

  Other things not to do in their presence while I’m making my case: Pass gas of any kind; stick any of my fingers, including thumbs, into any of my orifices; scratch myself; look at the ceiling or the floor or the wall instead of at them; say “um” every other word; puke, or mention any desire to do so; trip on the rug; bump into the furniture; knock over something breakable or spillable. I get exhausted just thinking about that list. I do at least three of those things every single day, often in the presence of witnesses. How do people just hold it in all day?

  Ready or not, here I come. I look over the cards one more time, then swallow hard, and begin walking as slowly as possible across the house to their office. They are at their respective desks typing away at their respective laptops. Oh, they’re busy, I think, maybe now isn’t…

  And then, with my lips unwittingly parted, I burp. I can already scratch one of the things off my do-not-do list. That gets their attention, although not in the way I planned it. “’Scuse me,” I say, with an embarrassed chuckle. “Um…that wasn’t…anyway, am I interrupting anything?”

  Mom smiles her former-plus-size-model smile. “Nothing that can’t wait.” On the wall behind her is something I am trying desperately not to look at: a pictorial chart, in color, of what a child’s bowel movements are supposed to look like if the Good Brain Diet is being followed properly. This was designed by Dr. Catherine Nansi, who invented the diet. That’s another obstacle that I have to becoming a physician: I cannot look at things like feces and vomit and open sores and crushed human tissue, even in movies, without wanting to scream or heave. I’m pretty sure that medical professionals are supposed to be calmly neutral in the presence of such things, and I don’t see that happening for me. “So what’s up?” Mom says, closing her laptop. You excited about school starting tomorrow?”

  I recoil. “You’re kidding, right? You know school is a torture chamber for me.”

  “She’s fifteen,” Dad reminds her. Dad is one of those guys who was a pencil-necked geek in high school but grew up to be handsome enough, in a slim, goateed sort of way, that he and Mom can make infomercials hawking the GBD and not melt any camera lenses. But he’s not exactly what you’d call strapping; Mom is taller than he is, and outweighs him too. “She’s fifteen, she’s not allowed to say she’s excited about school.”

  Oh, Dad. Not allowed by whom? Does he really not know that my peers have universally and irrevocably rejected me, regardless of my stated attitude about starting school? If he does, it’s not because he hasn’t been told. “I doubt most girls my age would use the words torture chamber to describe their school.”

  “I had the time of my life in high school,” Mom says. “And I don’t know why you’re so worried that people won’t like you. You don’t have a mean bone in your body.”
br />   Yeah. This is what I’m dealing with here. These people refuse to believe there’s any such thing as a social reject, even though Dad was one when he was my age; maybe by now Mom has convinced him he just had a bad attitude about it. “If you think that mean bones are the only reason people get snubbed,” I say, glancing down at the carpet briefly before realizing I’m supposed to be talking to them and not the rug, “you really don’t live in my world, Mom. I’m telling you, my experience is nothing like yours. And that’s kind of what I wanted to talk to you guys about.”

  “Okay,” Dad says. “Shoot.”

  I make a pistol motion with my hand and let out a little bang noise. They smile indulgently but do not laugh. “So…remember when I said I wanted to change my name but didn’t know what I wanted to change it to? Well, now I do.” I hear my voice quaver during the last sentence, a sure sign that my amped nerves have taken over my breath control, and I fixate on my index cards, trying to get myself calmed down.

  “Oh, really?” Mom says. “What name do you want?”

  I take a deep breath and hold it a second, then let it out. “Well, I was just kind of playing around with the spelling…and what I came up with is Cyan Beaut. C-Y-A-N B-E-A-U-T.”

  My parents look at each other like, “isn’t this cute.” I despise that look. “Cyan?” Dad says. “You mean as in ‘cyan, magenta, and yellow’?”

  “What’s ‘cyan, magenta, and yellow’?” Mom asks him.

  “Printer ink colors,” Dad says. “Cyan is a shade of blue, magenta is a red, and yellow is…yellow.”

  “Got it,” Mom says.

  “And Cy…An is also the first two letters of my first and middle names,” I add.

  “Cindy,” Dad says, “there is nothing wrong with your given name. Your name is our name. Why do you want to reject it?”

  “I don’t know what the big deal is,” I say, feeling magenta start to creep up to my face. “You guys use pseudonyms on the blog and in interviews. If our name is so great, than why are you guys ‘Shelley and Harrison Kelly’ instead of ‘Belinda and Daniel Butt’? How come the site is called ‘Haley off the Spectrum’ and not ‘Cindy off the Spectrum’?”

  “We do that to protect everyone’s privacy,” Mom says. “Not because the family name embarrasses us.”

  “Like everyone here doesn’t know,” I mutter.

  “Everyone here might know,” Dad says, “but everyone in Dubuque, Iowa and San Antonio, Texas, and everywhere else, doesn’t know.”

  He has me there. If I’m going to be nationally famous, I don’t want it to be for the color of my droppings, or what I eat to make them that way. “I have social obstacles you guys don’t have,” I protest. “I have social obstacles my beautiful and charming sisters don’t have. All I ever hear in school is Butt, Butt, Butt, Butt. Butt Ugly. Ugly Butt. I have to do something now, or I’ll be the Ugly Butt forever. This can’t wait three years.”

  Dad picks up a pen from his desk and starts fiddling with it. “Let me tell you a story about a girl I went to middle school with,” he says. “Her name was Rivka Winokur. She was chubby and socially awkward and didn’t know how to dress. But she came back to school in eighth grade after the summer and she was out to make an impression. She had her hair streaked blonde, she wore a hot pink minidress, and she went out to the smoking court to show off her newly acquired habit of smoking cigarettes, which was the ultimate in badass in my day. You know what the kids at school did when they saw the new Rivka?”

  I feel a searing itch start to take over the bottom of my foot. I very much do not want to take off my shoe and my sock to scratch it, but it’s tormenting me. I wriggle my foot around in my shoe and say, “No, Dad, tell me. What did your peers do when they saw the new Rivka?”

  “They laughed,” Dad says. “They could not stop laughing. They laughed at her like they’d never laughed at her before. They laughed so hard that Rivka went home sick that day and didn’t come back for a month. And when she came back, her hair was back to brown, and she was wearing her usual stained sweats, and she never smoked again.”

  I lose my battle with my itching foot, and lean up against the wall to hastily remove my shoe and sock to scratch it. They do not look amused by this. Future doctors aren’t supposed to scratch their feet either. “You’re comparing my wanting a name change to taking up smoking?”

  “Cyan Beaut is a much weirder name than Cindy Butt,” Dad says. “It’s not going to do for you what you think it will.”

  See, this is what I hate about asking Dad for anything. Whatever my heart wants, he can “logic” me out of. And he’s probably right that people in school probably aren’t going to like me any better if I have a new name. I glance hastily at my index cards to see if I have a decent counter-argument written down. I don’t. Instead, I just sputter, “You know why Rivka’s big transformation failed, Dad? Because she forgot to change her name.”

  “But…Cyan Beaut?” Mom says, then bites her lip to keep from laughing. “That sounds like the name of a pole dancer or something.”

  “Or a Phish groupie,” Dad says. “Remember those girls who used to show up at their concerts dressed up like neon-colored mermaids, and they all had names like Koi Pond?”

  Mom lets a half-laugh escape from her. “Right. Or, you know, some…flaky artistic type.” Then she looks up at me, not smiling at all. “That’s not you.”

  And then it hits me, right there, that I have a much better argument to make in favor of the name change. But I can’t go there ever. Because Cyan Beaut is my music name, and my parents think pole dancers, Phish groupies, and artists (including musical artists) are exactly the same thing.

  My parents have no idea about me and music. They don’t know about my percussionist fantasies. They don’t know anything about Amy, either. I have not mentioned Amy to anyone. Tam knows I bought that album, but she thinks it’s just another bossa nova album to add to my burgeoning collection. They don’t know what any of this means to me. I should tell them. They should know right now that there is no way I can possibly be a doctor. This is a part of me that’s too big to hide.

  But if I fight them tooth and nail to get them to agree to a name change and they won’t budge, I can only imagine the nuclear meltdown that would happen if I told them I can’t be who, or what, they want me to be. I’m not refusing to be that person. I wish I could be that person, it would make my life so much easier. But with every passing day, it becomes more obvious to me that I can’t. It makes me sick.

  “If you want to change your name when you’re eighteen, we can’t stop you,” Dad says. “But I think it’s just going to get in your way.”

  I sigh. “Well, could you guys at least not call me Cindy anymore? That’s kind of a baby name.”

  My parents glance at each other, then look back at me and nod. “Okay, Cynthia,” Dad says, “you got it.”

  “Thank you,” I say, although I don’t know what I’m thanking him for. I back out of their office, close the door, turn on my heels, and clap my hands, and sing, “Just look around, stop and look around,” over and over again until I get to my room. When I get there I close my own door, and as soon as I do, I hear that girl’s voice talking to me again, all deep and echoey, from inside my head.

  You’ll be okay, she says. You’re already okay. These people aren’t going to hold you down.

  Then I get a mental picture of her. She’s about my age, with wild curly dark hair and inky-black eyes, in a black t-shirt and vinyl miniskirt. And of course, now I know who it is.

  Amy.

  Here is what I’ve managed to find out so far about Amy Zander, after countless hours of research over the last two weeks.

  If alive, Amy is now approximately sixty-two years old. The reason I say “if alive” is that her Wikipedia page, which is constantly being flagged or taken down for “lack of notoriety,” lists her as a “possibly living person” with a birth year of “c.1954.” And “lack of notoriety,” in Wikipedia terms, means your page gets zapped
if not enough people have heard of you. So we’re talking about someone who completely dropped out of sight for decades. As far as I can tell, she recorded only that one album. She has no credits on her IMDB page later than 1971, and I have yet to locate even one interview of her online.

  I haven’t even managed to find a single image anywhere of her adult self. Her parents are both deceased. Her dad was a session drummer in Los Angeles named Rick Zander, and he produced her album and co-wrote four songs on it with her. Her mom’s profession, if any, is publicly unknown. Amy’s birth place is listed as Santa Monica, California, which is a beach town on the western edge of L.A., and she went to New York University and majored in music education. I have been able to find nothing about what she did after that. Nothing about whether she got married, had a family, or anything like that. But also, no confirmation of her death. Can you really die and not have anyone find out about it?

  So with no modern-day images of Amy for me to build on, the Amy that I “see” before me now, in my room, is identical to the one on her album cover and in the video, a girl my age. Her “voice” is a teenager’s voice; deeper than the average girl’s, but clearly not the voice of a woman of grandma age, and it has that echo like it’s reverberating off the inside of my skull. She’s translucent; when she “appears” before me I can see through her. She doesn’t seem real, exactly, but as I’m sitting on my creaky, tiny bed, staring at my worn, stained powder blue carpeting, I can feel her presence, standing before me.

  Yikes. I’m too old to have imaginary friends. But will this spectre (I don’t know what else to call it) of Amy answer me if I “think” my questions to her?

  I ask Spectral Amy, without speaking out loud: Where are you now?

  What do you mean? Spectral Amy asks me. I’m right here.

  No, I mean the 2016 version of you, I tell her. What have you been doing the last almost half century? Nobody seems to know, and if they are, they aren’t telling.

  And then she vanishes. Maybe that’s a good thing. It’s not like I don’t have enough social difficulties, without having a spectral “friend” who’s sixty-two and acts fifteen.

  DAY 16

  Three months ago, when I last walked through the doors of Eisenhower High School on my way home for the summer, I had never heard of Amy Zander. Now, when I walk back in those doors on the first day of school, it seems preposterous, that a world with Amy’s music in it existed for my entire life and I never knew. What else could I possibly have been paying attention to all this time that was so important?

  Last night, before I went to bed, I willed myself not to dream about Amy. I don’t want to like her that much. So far I have not had any dreams about her, but this may be because I sleep like a cat, half awake for twelve hours, and not like a human being. It’s reached the point where I almost don’t have to physically put on her music; I already know it so well that I can conjure up every single note, every inflection, in my head.

  I know this is not normal.

  Yes, a lot of people (even adults) get stuck on certain singers or bands or whatever else they like. That’s not the abnormal part. The abnormal part is that I feel like I’m living in some parallel universe where she existed and nobody knows except me (and Hippie Geezer Man, and for all I know I dreamed him up too). When normies become fans of something, they have other fans to share their fandom with, and they share it with anyone they think might be interested. But even the bossa nova heads online seem to have forgotten all about Amy. Either that or I am terrible with search engines. So yeah, I might as well be a fan of pocket lint from the nineteenth century or something, for all I can share this with anyone else.

  Caroleena and I used to have each other as buffers on the first day of school. I could always meet up with her and walk in with her, to guard against people cornering me at random and baiting me. We never had much to say to each other, but at least we had that. So now I’m just bracing myself for what’s coming, now that I have to brave these hallways all alone, for the first time. Tam’s classes are in the junior-senior wing, so she has a separate entrance.

  As I walk through the entry doors, putting one misshapen leg in front of the other, it hits me that just three weeks ago, if you had asked me what my hopes for the school year were, they’d have been the same as they were for the nine years before that: that people would hate me a little less than they did the year before, not because they appreciated me more (fat chance of that) but because they found something more amusing to do than tell me over and over again that I need to kill myself, yesterday if possible. I still don’t know why that’s even funny to anyone.

  But now, I feel like Amy is with me in the hallways, telling me, screw those people. They’re never going to get out of this dump. They only hate you because they know you’re going to leave them in the dust.

  In my mind, I ask her, how do you know that? Couldn’t it just be that they know Cindy Butt will never amount to anything?

  And she answers: You are not Cindy Butt. That’s just a name you’ve been stuck with. It’s not who you are.

  As I walk down the hall, I watch other girls, squealing and hugging each other, so happy to be reunited. I watch boyfriends and girlfriends wrapped around each other in total, love-drugged bliss. I have no idea what that’s like, for someone to light up or want to touch me in a nice way when they see me, other than my parents, and not even them all that often lately. Am I really that bad? That evil? That toxic? But according to Mom on her blog, I’m a normal girl who just likes to read a lot, so much so that she even does that when she’s with her friends. Isn’t that precious?

  “Grab the Butt! Grab the Butt! Grab the Butt!”

  Boys. They’ve been doing that to me, running up to me in groups, miming ass-grabs in the hall and yelling my name when they think no one’s looking, since…well, I don’t even remember a year when they didn’t do it. Once, in seventh grade, they actually did grab me for real and I reported them, so now they just get as close as they’re legally allowed to, always making me wonder if they’re going to go over the line and I’m going to have to go through the hassle of reporting them all over again. That was not fun.

  You’d think it would bother them that they’ve been doing the same thing over and over again since first grade, but I get the feeling that if I don’t get the fracking hell out of Steens Center they’ll be grabbing me from the second we graduate. I can just see it now, when I’m eighty, these now-ancient bros tackling me at the bus stop and kicking my walker aside so they can do a group grope. I can only pray that they’re all in wheelchairs by then, but then they’d probably just use blow darts or something to nail me. As they form a ring around me in the hallway and wave their hands near the forbidden zone, I tighten up, waiting for it to be over.

  This time, though, a short, slightly built, young-looking, blondish man walks up to them in the hall and says, “Guys,” before they can manage to really get going. They mumble something about how they were just kidding and Cindy knows it’s a joke, blah de blah, but the man doesn’t smile, he just says, “You guys need to get better jokes, or next time I’m going to have to report you.” They all slink off with their lizard tails between their lizard legs, and I’m about to turn to the man and mouth the words thank you, when I see that he’s just about to disappear into room 4, one room down from here. That’s my homeroom. So that must be Mr. Shunsberg, who wasn’t here last year.

  At least you know your homeroom teacher might not be a douchelord, Spectral Amy whispers to me. Her deep, throaty voice feels good in my inner ear. I feel my lips curl upward, even though I have no idea what the real Amy’s speaking voice sounds (or sounded) like, and the word “douchelord” probably didn’t exist when she was my age.

  I walk into the room, and maybe I’m imagining things, but this time I’m not hearing people burst into collective snickers or chants of “Cindy Butt, Cindy Butt” the minute I enter. Tam has told me that ninth grade is usually the peak of social horror like I’ve experienced
and people gradually start to lose interest in acting like eight-year-olds after that. I’m not so sure; let’s be real, most adults act like eight-year-olds, except that they put different things in their mouths. But according to her, by later in high school, people start getting over themselves, or at least spread their douchery around a little more instead of concentrating on one person to hate out of existence. That’s something, I guess.

  On the other hand, this is a tiny school; both high schools here (Steens Center High is the other one) used to be elementary schools. (At least this school is in an actual building; in middle school, we literally went to classes in trailers. If they could have legally gotten away with using Honey Buckets for bathrooms, they probably would have.) And we don’t get a lot of new people here, because there aren’t many jobs. So I’m a little surprised to see a tall, stocky girl I don’t recognize, wearing a black sparkly beret and a red crushed velvet cape, slipping something –a note?--on to the teacher’s desk while he’s writing stuff on the whiteboard. She then comes down the aisle where I’m sitting, and when she passes by, I catch a whiff of something that takes a few seconds for me to identify. Then I glance up at her waist-length hair, which is light brown with jet black streaks in it, and realize it’s the smell of shoe polish. She has shoe polish in her hair. I have my little Cyan streak in the front of mine, but I used a product made for hair. Shoe polish. Wow.

  “What are you staring at?” she growls at me.

  Without thinking, I blurt out, “You’re a who, not a what.” As soon as the words are out of my mouth, I think, are you out of your navel-picking mind, C? You don’t know anything about this girl, she could beat the snot out of you over this. But instead she just shrugs as if to say, well, that’s different, and makes her way to her seat in the back of the room.

  The final bell rings, and now comes the time I always dread the most: roll call. See, sometimes people forget for a minute what my name is. But as soon as they hear it, out come the jokes. Again. Cindy Flat Butt. Butt Plug. Cinder Butthole. And my personal fave, Cigarette. Get it? Cigarette Butt? Yeah, I’m not exactly rolling on the floor, either. At least I’m in the beginning of the alphabet, so I get it over with early.

  But before Mr. Shunsberg can get to that, he has to introduce himself to us, because we don’t know him. Now that I’m getting a good look at him, I can see that he has a baby face that makes him look about twelve. As soon as he says his name, I hear Ryan Crousse, the class clown, mutter to no one in particular, “I thought our teachers had to be older than us.” A few kids snicker.

  “I heard that,” Mr. Shunsberg says, with a wry grin. “But just so you know, I’m twenty-five. Not only that, but I’m married and have a fourteen-month-old son.”

  “Ooooh,” Ryan coos in mock astonishment.

  “What’s the baby’s name?” Shaina Dill asks. Shaina is one of the nice ones. When I got new glasses last year, with multicolored frames, she complimented me. I don’t think she’s ever said a bad word about anyone. How do people do that?

  “Harry,” Mr. Shunsberg says. “And to answer your next question…yes, my wife is a Harry Potter junkie.” He then puts on his reading glasses, picks up the roll-call paper, and starts in. He goes through Rayne Aardsma, Jayden Allis, Lora Benitez, and Mya Brisco, and I suck on my lip and wait for what’s coming. He squints at the paper, like he can’t quite believe what he’s reading. “Cynthia…is that Butt?” Of course it gets a big laugh. My name will never stop being funny.

  I sigh. “Yes, that’s not a typo.”

  “So that’s why those –“

  “Yup.”

  He purses his lips and shakes his head, and for a second I wonder if he got picked on in school too. He’s small enough, and he doesn’t exactly strike me as hip, slick, and cool. “So do you prefer Cynthia, or—“

  I should tell him I prefer Cyan. But after what happened last night, that’s a non-starter. “Cynthia’s fine,” I murmur, eyes fixated on my notebook.

  “Cynthia Butt what?” Ryan says, to more giggles.

  “Congratulations,” I say, still looking down at my desk while I talk to him. “It took you seven years, but you finally came up with a new one.”

  Then Ryan repeats the joke, “Cynthia Butt what?”, only this time he runs “Butt” and “what” together so that the last word sounds like an incredibly vile word that I refuse to ever type or say.

  “Watch the language,” Mr. Shunsberg says to him. “Homeroom teachers don’t give out grades, but we can report you.” He then runs down the list until he gets to S, where there’s a name I’ve never heard before. This has to be the new girl. He squints hard at the paper and even holds it a little away from his face, like it smells bad. “I know I’m going to get this wrong…but is it Ren, uh—“

  “Ren-AH-tay,” the girl says. “I put a note on your desk telling you how to pronounce it. Everybody gets it wrong. I should just put an accent over the last E or something.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Mr. Shunsberg says, and makes a note on the roll-call list. “Renate…Silverdick? Is that—“

  “Yes,” Renate says through gritted teeth, while almost everyone except me and Mr. Shunsberg busts up laughing. “I didn’t pick it out, so shut up.”

  “Okay, everybody, cool it with the pointing and laughing,” Mr. Shunsberg says. Then he turns back to Renate. “You’re new here?”

  “Yeah, I’m a transfer from Steens Center.”

  Mr. Shunsberg makes another note on the list. “I thought this was Steens Center.”

  “Um, hello?” Renate says. “Steens Center High School. That’s the other high school here?”

  Now everyone is laughing at Mr. Shunsberg. He puts a hand to his forehead. “Of course. I just…well, welcome to Eisenhower.”

  Renate rolls her eyes. “Thanks bunches.”

  A transfer? People don’t usually move from one part of Steens Center to the other; either they stay in the same place forever, or they get all the way out. There hasn’t been a new house built here in over thirty years, and the closest town with more than a handful of jobs is more than a hundred miles away. And Steens Center is small enough that you can walk from one high school to the other in about forty minutes if you’re not very fast. That means Renate Silverdick probably got expelled from Steens Center High. For what, I wonder. But of course, with a name like Silverdick, she’s got the same bulls-eye painted on her that I do, and unlike me she looks like she can lay waste to almost anyone who starts up with her. I’ve mostly avoided too many physical poundings by making as quick an exit as possible and learning numerous distraction techniques.

  “Renate’s a nice name,” Shaina tells her.

  Renate’s frown softens a little. “Thanks.”

  You should talk to her, Spectral Amy says.

  Now? I say back to her in my head.

  Of course not. Between classes. But you guys probably have a lot in common.

  I need more in common with someone than an unfortunate name, I tell Spectral Amy.

  “Who are you talking to?” Lora Benitez, who’s sitting directly to my left, whispers to me. Lora seems pleasant enough. She’s Native American (Paiute) and Mexican American, one of the few students here who isn’t white, plus she has a little bit of a lisp, so she’s gotten her share of crap too. But she almost never talks, so when she says that, I recoil a little and point to myself.

  “What? You mean me?” I whisper back.

  “Yeah. Your lips are moving. Who are you talking to?”

  “Nobody. I didn’t know I was doing that.”

  Lora nods and turns back towards the teacher. I put a hand over my mouth. Have I been doing that all this time, mouthing all my thoughts? Or did it just start up now?

  Amy’s music is a constant soundtrack in my head all day long, and no less than three teachers have given me the side-eye for drumming on my desk today. I am getting very good at paradiddles, but no one is impressed. The latest is my Biology 2 teacher, Mr. Graves, and I can’t afford to get on
another science teacher’s bad side, not after the B minuses I got in Life Science last year. When I’m sitting in his class, which is sixth period, it hits me that Mr. Graves does indeed resemble an undertaker, someone who has seen so many dead bodies he’s beginning to look like one, and apropos of nothing anyone has said out loud, the thought makes me start laughing. Do not think about coffins, just don’t, just don’t… And then it starts up again. I tell him I’m sorry and it has nothing to do with him. Because it doesn’t. I just have an extra ticklish brain today. That part, I don’t tell him. But it’s the first day of school and he already thinks I’m out to lunch. Not good, C., not good.

  When I hit the restroom in between sixth period and seventh, I pull out my phone and type into my Web browser, I laugh even when no one is saying anything to me, and when I look over the search results, the first one is for something named “Ten Confessions of Someone with Depression,” but the actual phrase I typed isn’t in the excerpt, so I don’t even know why it showed up. I delete the page, then type, I have interests no one else my age has, and two of the top five results are about social anxiety disorders.

  Then I delete that page and as the warning bell sounds, I furtively type in I hear music in my head, and this time the top of the list shows auditory (sound) hallucinations and something called “musical ear syndrome,” which is a type of auditory hallucination that happens to people who are going deaf. Then I type in I can’t stop clapping and drumming, and the first three listings are about drummers and the fourth is a message board post about a ten-year-old kid who’s constantly clapping and snapping. I take a peek at that post and the replies advise that the parents get him evaluated for autism. Mom and Dad are going to love that one.

  So according to my Web browser, I might be a drummer, but I am also either mentally ill, about to lose my hearing, or not really “off the spectrum.” I knew I should have left my phone in my fracking purse.

  Don’t pay any attention to that, Spectral Amy murmurs. You can’t tell anything from a browser search on the toilet, come on. You’ll do real research later.

  I delete the browser page, put the phone away and quickly yank up my pants so I won’t be late for Language Arts, the only class I have virtually no chance of getting a bad grade in if I show up on time.

  After school, I am in my room sitting at my desk, with yard sale bongos in my lap, having my after school snack of pickled steamed chicken skin (yes, really; Dr. Nansi claims it plugs holes in the gut), and doing an “official” Net search about auditory hallucinations. Because that’s what this Amy thing is, right? I hear a voice in my head and I know it’s not mine, and my head is playing her music on a loop, so what else could it be?

  I wipe my fingers off with my napkin and tap out a paradiddle on the bongos: right-left-right-right, left-right-left-left….I manage to get in two repeats before the search page loads with the results, and I get a laundry list of psych disorders: schizophrenia, psychosis, schizoaffective disorder. Then I look up hearing voices, and believe it or not, there are a few things listed there that say hearing voices isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as long as those voices aren’t being mean to you or telling you to harm people. But no one says it’s perfectly normal, either.

  Why would you even want to be “perfectly normal”? Spectral Amy says to me. There are enough boring people in the world, why be one of them if you don’t have to?

  I’m all for not being boring, I tell her. But you know what? I really need you to be a little quieter. Once people find out about you, I’ll never live it down.

  I am the best thing that’s ever happened to you, she murmurs.

  Instead of answering her, I tap out paradiddles, right-left-right-right, left-right-left-left, at faster and faster speeds, picturing hundreds of bare feet dancing on soft grass, thousands of glow sticks bobbing up and down in the darkness in time to me…

  You see? Spectral Amy says. Would you be doing that right now if it wasn’t for me?

  No, and that’s what sucks about it, I say. How can I ever possibly explain this to anyone?

  Being influenced by other musicians is as natural as it gets, Spectral Amy says.

  I sigh and start doing more searches about psych disorders.

  DAYS 19-21

  “Dr. No, the school psychologist for the Steens Center School District, has office hours here this week on Tuesday and Thursday after—“

  The squeaky freshman-girl voice reading the morning announcements can’t get through the rest of that sentence without cracking up, and most of my homeroom class is giggling also. Dr. No? Don’t people have the most hilarious names? Out come the James Bond jokes, right on cue. The successful criminal brain is always superior; it has to be, mwahaha! My own funnybone remains untouched. I’ll bet anything that it’s a Southeast Asian name and it’s not actually spelled N-O, and that it isn’t even supposed to be pronounced that way; the urbane teen sophisticates of Steens Center apparently think Southeast Asia is a separate planet.

  I look around to see if anyone is having a similar response to mine. Renate Silverdick, sitting two seats over from me, isn’t laughing, but she isn’t looking around to see if anyone else is, either. From where I’m sitting, what she seems to be doing is drawing. Drawing a girl in a cape and a beret. A self-portrait on lined notebook paper, with a cheap ballpoint pen. Impressive. I’m careful not to stare at her, though. After only three days of exposure to Renate, I get the impression that she wants to be noticed, but doesn’t want to notice other people noticing her.

  Sure enough, once the freshman announcer girl spells out the name of the school shrink, it’s N-G-O. Dr. Peter Ngo. Which I thought was supposed to be pronounced like mango without the first two letters. But nobody here cares about doing the right thing; it’s majority rules, and if the majority is dominated by boneheads, c’est la guerre. The announcer girl says that you can email him for a confidential appointment after school and gives us his email address, as if anyone is going to be caught dead writing it down. Fortunately, Mr. Shunsberg is aware of this phenomenon and writes Dr. Ngo’s contact information on the whiteboard, and leaves it up for the rest of the week. At the end of homeroom on Friday, with Mr. Shunsberg’s attention occupied by talking to Lora Benitez and everyone else out of the room, I take a picture of the whiteboard with my phone.

  DAY 25

  I get in to see Dr. Ngo the following Tuesday after school, and it’s not a second too soon. I have just endured six full school days where I have spoken to almost no one here except for teachers, and they’re none too happy with me; I have handed in one late, incomplete, or just-plain-wrong homework assignment after another. It’s only seven days, and maybe I have time to right the ship, if Dr. Ngo can figure out what the hell’s wrong with me.

  Dr. Ngo’s office looks like a converted broom closet with a cheap metal desk and a couple of cheap chairs with discolored green vinyl seats that have probably been around since the Reagan administration. He looks almost like a Vietnamese version of Mr. Shunsberg; maybe a little older, different coloring, but the same small body and perpetually bemused facial expression. “So how do you pronounce your name?” I ask him, as soon as I sit down.

  “I usually tell everyone to just say No,” he says, smiling roguishly. He has a little bit of a foreign accent, but not much. “Most Americans aren’t going to get the pronunciation right anyway, so I might as well make it easy for them. At least I'll know who they’re talking to.” He reclines his desk chair for a second, then tilts forward again and nods. “So…Cynthia, right?”

  “Pretty much,” I say. He looks confused, so I backpedal and say, “I mean, yes.”

  “So what can I help you with?”

  I inhale slowly through my nose, and as I let out an exhale, I can feel my breath on my bare forearms. Eucchh. I hate that feeling. “I, uh…I think I might be psychotic.”

  Dr. Ngo laughs. “Well, that’s a change of pace. Usually, I have kids coming in saying, ‘I think my parents are psychotic,’ or, ‘I thin
k my girlfriend or boyfriend is psychotic.’ Of course, what they really mean is psychopathic, which is completely different.”

  “No, I do mean psychotic,” I say, squirming in the worn-out chair. My buttocks itch; am I developing a latent allergy to vinyl? That could seriously mess things up for me. “I’ve looked up psychosis and I know what it is. I think I’m having auditory hallucinations.”

  He squeezes his lips together and nods. “Okay. Can you describe in detail what you’re experiencing?”

  I notice he isn’t taking notes. That’s good, right? That means there won’t be any evidence that I was here. “I’ll try. So…so there’s this singer who was sort of popular a long time ago, as a teenager, before I was even born, and since then, they haven’t really been in the public eye.” Good. Degenderized pronouns are good here. “And I just kind of discovered their music and I love it so much that I hear it playing in my head even when I don’t have the record on.” I glance quickly up at his face to see if he’s having any reaction. He’s not, at all. “And…God, this is embarrassing, but…I hear this person talking to me all the time, this singer. It’s like, they’re with me all the time, telling me stuff. And since I don’t know what this person looks like now, decades later, my image of them is from when they were my age.”

  “So you see this person, too,” Dr. Ngo says.

  “Kind of,” I say. “I mean, she doesn’t—“ Aaargh. Two minutes in and I’ve already had pronoun slippage. “Okay, so now you know it’s a girl singer.”

  Dr. Ngo smiles and nods.

  “But anyway,” I go on, “it’s more like she’s an overlay or something, like I can see through to the other side of her. I don’t really see an actual…opaque person.”

  Dr. Ngo stretches his arms out and rotates them a few times, then puts them back down on his arms of his chair. “And when she talks to you, do you experience this as a real person speaking to you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, if you were to tell one of your other friends about her, would you say something like, ‘Tiffany told me the most hilarious joke today,’ or something like that?”

  I recoil slightly. “Tiffany?”

  Dr. Ngo laughs. “There was a teenage girl singer who was popular about thirty years ago whose name was Tiffany. When I was a little boy, I used to dream I’d grow up to marry her.”

  Now it’s my turn to laugh. “That’s very cute.”

  “But it’s not her, right?” Dr. Ngo asks.

  “Nope.”

  “And you’re not going to tell me who it is?”

  “Nope.”

  He shrugs. “Okay. So getting back to what I was saying—“

  “To answer your question,” I say, “I have no other friends. I probably never will.”

  “I don’t think that’s true,” Dr. Ngo says. “You’re what, a sophomore? You have a lot of life ahead of you to make friends if you want them.”

  “You really don’t know me.” I pick at the peeled vinyl on the arm of my chair. “But anyway, if I did have friends…no, I would not talk about this girl as if she actually existed. I know she’s a lot older than that now in real life. For all I know, she has no hair and no teeth now. There are no pictures of her as an adult anywhere.”

  “Okay,” Dr. Ngo says. “So what kinds of things do you hear her saying to you?”

  “She encourages me to play my bongo drums,” I say. “I’m actually getting fairly competent at it. But that’s bad, because my parents want me to be a medical doctor, and I have no aptitude for anything scientific or technical. And the music is just kind of sucking me in, like it has tentacles, and pulling me away from math and science. My parents think I’m one kind of person and she thinks I’m another kind.”

  “Who do you think is right?”

  I exhale, a little too loudly. “Unfortunately, I think she is.”

  “Why ‘unfortunately’?”

  “Why do you think?” I say. “Do you know what it’s like to have to live with people who will hate you if you turn out to be something they don’t want?”

  “Actually,” Dr. Ngo says, “I do know. But enough about me. Cynthia, is there any abuse happening for you at home?”

  “No, it’s nothing like that. I’m just not the same species they are, and they’re going to vomit me up like a swallowed rubber band once they realize I’m not food.”

  Dr. Ngo laughs and pounds on his metal desk with his fist. “Cynthia, you really have a way with words.”

  “Thank you,” I whisper. I find myself choking up. He’s saying nice things to me and I want to cry. This isn’t right.

  “So do you experience this girl as commanding you to do things that you wouldn’t otherwise do?”

  “Hmmm,” I say. “That’s a good question. But no, it’s more like she’s egging me on to do things she knows I want to do, but I don’t have the guts to do, or things my parents wouldn’t approve of. She never tells me to hurt anyone, or hurt myself. But she’s distracting me from my homework, big time.”

  “Have you ever thought about writing about this?” he asks me.

  “What, you mean like a song or something?”

  “Anything. You are starving for a creative outlet. It’s obvious. You’re drawn to this singer because she’s you. What you’re hearing in your head are your own thoughts and your own ideas, and you’ve assigned them to another person’s voice because you’re so hungry for people in your life who get you. These aren’t hallucinations like someone with psychosis would have.”

  “They’re not?”

  “No. What you’re describing to me sounds more like…for want of a better term, a crush.”

  I laugh incredulously. “A crush?”

  “Yes. I wish I had a more scientific term for you, but essentially…yes. It’s a crush.”

  I shake my head. “That just sounds so…shallow.” I glance up at the clock to see how we’re doing on time. Ten minutes left. “And I don’t have those kinds of feelings about her.”

  “A crush doesn’t necessarily mean you have a physical attraction. It’s just a kind of fascination that makes your heart beat a little faster when you think about them, maybe snap to attention when you hear their name.”

  “I’m hardly ever going to hear her name,” I say. “There’s so little information about her out there, it’s like everyone’s forgotten her. But yeah, a faster heartbeat. That’s for sure.”

  “Cynthia, can you look me in the eyes?” he asks me. “You haven’t made eye contact with me once since you’ve been in here.”

  “I’ll try,” I say, raising my head up and feeling lasers beaming from his eyes into mine. “It’s kind of hard for me sometimes. I used to have autism, and I think it’s kind of a vestige from that.”

  “What do you mean, you used to have autism? Autism is a developmental condition. Do you know what that means?”

  “It means you’ve always had it, right? Since you were a little kid?”

  “And that you always will.”

  Oh boy. He went there. “I guess you’re not familiar with my parents’ blog?” I tell him about the blog and the Good Brain Diet, including Dr. Nansi’s system of doing twice-per-calendar-year home inspections with only 24 hours’ notice (unless we’ve told her a month in advance we’ll be out of town) to make sure we’re doing it right and I’m still “in remission.”

  “I did remember reading something about that,” Dr. Ngo says. “I didn’t realize it was about you and your family.”

  “Really? I thought everybody here knew that.”

  “I’ve only lived here for a few months on temporary assignment. I haven’t had time to catch up with everyone.” He leans back in his chair and taps his fingers on the sides of the chair for a second. “And I don’t want to get you in trouble with your parents, but…as far as I’m concerned, there’s no such thing as ‘former autism.’ You can acquire enough skills that most people wouldn’t think ‘autism’ when they meet you, and you can learn to manage things s
o that you can function in society somewhat, but it doesn’t go away entirely.”

  “Oh, God,” I say. “You’re not going to talk to them about this, are you? Because you’ll be stepping in a landmine if you do. I can guarantee that.”

  “What you tell me is absolutely confidential,” Dr. Ngo says. “The only exceptions are reporting physical abuse or neglect, or intent to physically harm yourself or another person. But I’m a little concerned that they’re insisting you’re not on the spectrum any longer. I would really like to meet with your parents to discuss it with all three of you, if at all possible.”

  “That’s not going to be at all possible,” I say. My mouth is as dry as a flannel sheet. “Trust me on that.”

  “But if they agreed to it, would you be willing to do it?”

  “Maybe.” I can barely say the word. I have lost my voice. He can’t be right, can he? I can’t possibly still…no. I worked like a mule, learning how to make small talk, smile, meet people’s gazes, lie and say I’m fine when I’m not. They took away my toys and gave them back to me, one by one, once I could meet their demands. And still…nobody likes me. My parents think it’s because I don’t try hard enough, but if I tried any harder, my brain would explode out of my auditory canals. If I’m not fixable, my whole family goes down with me. The entire selling point of Dr. Nansi’s diet is a child who will lead a normal life and fit in. I am the match that will light us all on fire, if Dr. Ngo is right.

  I don’t know if Dr. Ngo can tell I’m thinking any of this, but I know he sees my cheeks getting wet, and he passes me a box of tissues. “Listen, Cynthia…I do have someone coming in right after you, or I’d spend more time talking with you about it. But please, make another appointment to come back as soon as you can. I don’t want to lose track of you.”

  I nod, stand up, blow my nose, take another tissue, wipe my eyes, blow my nose again. When I leave his tiny closet of an office and enter the empty hallway, my sandals slapping against the tile floors sound like trucks backfiring. I don’t know what just happened. But I don’t think I’m the same person I was half an hour ago.

  You’re drawn to this singer because she’s you.

  I walk home as slowly as possible, trying to digest everything I just heard from Dr. Ngo. I’m a singer? Really? I’m Amy? Me?

  And then Spectral Amy appears, walking alongside me. Because of course she does.

  Well, it’s not the most off the wall idea in history, is it? Spectral Amy says. Why couldn’t you be like me? I mean, not exactly like me because you’re you, but…why do you think you can’t sing? Everybody can sing.

  I test out my singing voice, after looking around to ascertain that no one is nearby, on “Agua de Beber,” a song in Portuguese by Antonio Carlos Jobim. It has like five notes in it. My voice cracks on the third line, and I clear my throat a little too hard.

  Yeah, right, I tell Spectral Amy. Everyone except me.

  You haven’t given yourself a chance, Spectral Amy says. If you practice like all get out every day, you’ll get good. I promise.

  You seem to be forgetting something here, I say to her. I’m not supposed to be a singer, or at least, not one who practices like all get out. If I practice anything like all get out, it has to be math and science.

  That’s not going to end well for you, Cyan, Spectral Amy says.

  Cyan. That’s the first time I’ve “heard” her say that name. The first time I’ve heard anyone say it besides my facetious parents. It goes through me like a blast of arctic wind.

  And the autism stuff…my God. I’m not sure what would upset my parents more, me thinking I’m really a musician or me thinking I’m still on-spectrum. Either one seems to be a one-way ticket to a frozen sidewalk from Chez Butt. I can’t have worked this hard for nothing.

  But you did work that hard for nothing, Spectral Amy says. I mean, after all these years, how often do you have a conversation with anyone besides me? You’re wasting your energy trying to convince people you’re regular, when you could be putting that energy into mastering music.

  Mastering music. Mastering music. Mastering music. First it repeats over and over in my head. And then I sing it. “Mastering mu-uu-uu-si-ii-iiiic…”

  There you go, Spectral Amy murmurs. Nice ostinatos, girl!

  It felt great to do that, while it was coming through me. But it feels really awful afterwards, once I realize what it could mean.

  When I get home, there’s a package–a pretty decent-sized box--with my name on it waiting for me on the hall table. It has the word FRAGILE stamped on it. A few seconds after I walk in, Tam emerges from her bedroom, beaming as she sees me examining the box.

  “It’s here!” she says.

  “It?” I say.

  “Remember when AB and I said we would have a birthday present for you but it had to be special ordered? This is it. Open it.”

  “Wow, thanks.” I open the box with my house key, take out lots of packing material, and underneath it all is a pandeiro—a Brazilian drum that looks a little like a tambourine, but is bigger and has extra-large brass jingles called platinelas. I take it out of the box and hold it in my hands. It looks handcrafted, with a beautiful blue and gold checkerboard pattern painted on to the side. And there’s a tuning key, a small wrench attached by a string to the side of it, which means it’s a tunable instrument. It’s professional-grade.

  See? I hear Spectral Amy say. This is a sign, girl. You know I’m right.

  “Oh, my God…really?” I say. “How did you guys even know what a pandeiro was?”

  Tam smiles. “The Internet is magic. Oh, and confidentially, I’m the one who told AB what a pandeiro was, and she found someone in East LA who builds them. At a price we could afford.”

  I turn it over and stroke the synthetic skin head, strong enough to play with a stick, responsive enough to play with my hands. It even has a mounting bracket, so I could mount it on a stand to play it if I wanted to. I thump on it softly with my fingers, and the booming, jingly sound brings Mom out of her office. She does not look happy to see this gorgeous rhythm-generating thing in my hands. I guess Dad isn’t here, or he’d be joining her in scowling unison. I don’t think either of them has ever listened to anything but classical music, composed and performed by long-dead Europeans, since college, and even that maybe once a month.

  “What is that thing?” Mom says, like it’s a live monkey or something.

  “It’s tunable!” I say. “Look, you can adjust the sound so that it’s higher or lower in pitch.” I know Mom couldn’t give less of a rat’s whiz, but I start messing with the tuning anyway, just because I need to hear it.

  “Mom, I know what you’re thinking,” Tam says. “But look at it this way. She’s been playing those crappy yard sale bongos all the time anyway. At least now she has a real instrument to play, it’ll sound a lot better.”

  I give her a hug. “Thank you thank you thank you! So I guess AB doesn’t think I’m a waste of skin after all?”

  “Nobody thinks you’re a waste of skin, Cynthia,” Mom says, with no warmth whatsoever.

  “Thanks, Mom,” I deadpan. “That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said about me.”

  You might as well be talking to a dog, Spectral Amy says. Except the dog would be friendlier. Come on, let’s go play some pandeiro.

  “Tamarlyn, can I have a word with you in my office?” Mom says, ignoring my sophomoric jape. Tam looks at me and shrugs, then follows Mom into her office, leaving me standing there with my pandeiro. Which is mine. They can’t have it. I will build a fortress around it in my room so it cannot be seized. I start thinking of what I could use to build it, as I bounce off to my bedroom thumping and jingling.

  Right before dinner, I’m in my room with the pandeiro, which hasn’t left my hands for the last two hours, although I’m trying to play it as quietly as humanly possible. Tam has flipped on her stereo, and I can hear her enormous woofers booming through our shared wall at me. It sounds like something country-ish—Mir
anda Lambert, maybe? Something about “hell on heels”—so not exactly the kind of thing I can practice Latin grooves to. However, I can pose for future album covers (my stuff will be vinyl-only releases, thank you) with my professional-grade drum. Oh yes. I plop hats on my head, tie scarves, anything I have to in order to cover up the incorrigible mess growing on my head that would require a three-hundred-dollar salon visit every two weeks to fix, if I had that kind of scratch. In the meantime, I check myself out smiling, not smiling, head down, head up, head tilted back, tapping on the pandeiro, hugging it to my chest—and then, finally, as a joke, putting the pandeiro on my head and wearing it like a hat. It would easily be the most expensive hat I own, but also the coolest. I giggle and take it off my head, and immediately hear a knock on my door. I open it and it’s Dad telling me dinner is ready.

  “So what are we having?” I ask him. “Is tonight eyeball night?” At least once a week I have to eat stewed cow’s eyes, among the various exotic animal parts Dr. Nansi has prescribed me. I know it sounds gross, but flavor-wise, I honestly don’t have a lot to compare it to. I think my taste buds are mostly dead after all these years. Tam and AB (when she’s here) don’t have to eat the offal that I am required to consume, but it’s a house rule that no one can eat GBD-illegal food in my presence or let me see or smell it. And Mom and Dad do eat offal along with me, although I know they (along with my sisters) have a locked mini-fridge and snack food stash in their bedroom in case the eyes or stomachs or whatever else we’re having doesn’t satisfy them. Don’t know why it wouldn’t.

  Dad smiles wryly. “No eyeballs tonight,” he says. “We’re only doing that on Fridays now. Tonight you get sheep’s head.”

  “Oh, excellent.” I run my finger along the outside of the pandeiro. The paint is textured. Nice. “So did you guys chew out Tam and AB for getting me this?”

  “Mom had a talk with Tamarlyn,” Dad says. “She agreed not to buy any more noisy presents without our permission.”

  “But I get to keep it, right?”

  Dad reaches out to take the pandeiro out of my hands. “Can I see?”

  I hand it over to him, swallowing hard. I don’t know what I’ll do if he doesn’t hand it back to me. He examines it and nods, as though he’s impressed with the craftsmanship. “It looks very well made,” he says. “But you’re not to play it until you’re done with all your homework.”

  He hands it back to me, and I sigh with relief, although by the time I’m done with my homework most nights, it’ll be too late in the evening to play it. “Thank you,” I say. “I want you to know that I’m actually sending Annabeth a written thank-you note.” I hold up my memo pad to show him. “She won’t know what hit her.”

  Dad smiles tightly. “Yes, I remember those,” he says. “My parents always used to make me write those when I got a gift. I hated it.”

  “And if it’s too loud I can throw a towel over it. Just let me know.” I nod towards Tam’s room and the booming bass emanating therefrom. “But I don’t think I’ll ever be louder than a Miranda Lambert concert, or whoever that is.”

  He nods. “Go wash up, we don’t want the sheep to get cold.”

  I bust up laughing at that, partly because it sounds outlandish, and partly because he has no idea it sounds outlandish. As I cackle madly, he looks at me like I’ve lost my marbles. Though that’s nothing new.

  DAY 33

  “You got a second?” Mr. Shunsberg asks me on the twelfth day of school, as I’m about to leave homeroom and go to my first class, which is Spanish. I’ve already figured out that if I wanted to understand Portuguese, which is the dominant language of bossa nova (including some songs that Amy, according to Wikipedia, recorded phonetically), the worst thing I could have done was sign up for Spanish and try to learn them both at the same time. A lot of the words look the same, but the pronunciations and meanings are totally different, so my Spanish is hosing my Portuguese badly, and I’ve already bombed a quiz because of it. So if he wants to write me a late excuse, I’ll give him all the time he wants.

  “Yeah,” I say, “and I have a third, a fourth, a fifth…”

  He gives me a lips-only smile and we confer over by the coat closet, which isn’t actually used as a coat closet here because it was built for little kids. “It’s about Renate,” he says. “I have Renate in my fourth period geography class also, and…well, I hope this isn’t out of line, but the two of you have some things in common.”

  I snort. “Like horrible names?”

  “Your names aren’t horrible,” he says. “If people want to make fun of somebody, they’ll invent a reason if they have to. That’s not on you.”

  “Doesn’t make it any easier.”

  “Tell me about it. There’s like one Jewish family in Steens Center besides us. We don’t even have a synagogue here.” He glances around to make sure nobody is listening in. “But anyway, please don’t tell Renate I said this, but I think she’d like it if you struck up a conversation with her.”

  “Based on what?”

  “Well…for starters, she has unconventional tastes in music. Her big thing is George Clinton, who was a pioneer in 1970s funk music. I’ve heard you humming those songs in Portuguese and drumming on your desk, so obviously you don’t go along with the crowd music-wise either.

  Right. Because all twentieth-century musical forms are completely interchangeable. Who else is he going to dig up for me, someone who’s into speed metal? :”I…I don’t know that Renate would like the same stuff I do,” I say, running my finger along the spaces between the concrete blocks. I look at my finger instead of at him while I’m talking.

  “Well, for whatever it’s worth, I do know that the circumstances of Renate’s leaving SCH had something to do with music.”

  “Yeah, I overheard some people talking about it, that there was some dirty song and she refused to stop singing it.” I start itching in a place I can’t scratch myself in public, especially not in front of a male teacher. I squirm a little, hoping I can get it to stop before he figures it out. “They kicked her out of school over that?”

  He laughs. “Well, this is kind of a conservative town.”

  I roll my eyes. “You think?”

  The final bell goes off for first period. Mr. Shunsberg walks over to his desk, presumably to write a late note for me, and I follow him. “Well, there could be more to the story than that,” he says, as he grabs a note pad and pen off the desk. “But she hasn’t been very forthcoming with details.”

  “You’re not expecting me to report back to you on that, are you?”

  “Of course not. But I have a feeling she’s keeping a lot bottled up so she doesn’t get in trouble again.” He scribbles something on the note pad, pulls the paper off the pad, and hands it to me. “And it might help for her to know that there are kids here who don’t think ‘different’ is bad.”

  I glance at the note, which is barely legible. I suppose Reading and Writing in Teacher Scribble is a class they all take in college. “Well, I guess that’s…a charitable way to put it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know,” I say, making myself smile as much as I can. “That sounds kind of like, ‘you’re a weirdo with no friends, so here’s another weirdo with no friends.’”

  He winces. “I’m sorry if I gave you that impression,” he says. “I don’t mean for it to be a putdown. If anything, I think both of you are much too sophisticated for this place, and that’s a compliment.”

  I nod. If nothing else, Mr. Shunsberg knows what I like to hear, and hardly anyone else does. “I’ll think about it,” I tell him before making my exit. “Thanks for the note.”

  He didn’t say I had to become BFFs with Renate. He just told me I should “strike up a conversation” with her. Sure. Piece of cake. Normal kids do it all the time. Every day, even. If I’m really totally in remission from autism, this should be like falling off a log. Except that I’m a lot better at falling off logs.

  And I’m tryin
g not to remember all the things other kids have said to me when I tried to make friends with them. Me be friends with you? Did you hear what the Butt said? Hahahahaha that’s funny. Well, that’s really nice of you to invite me to the bookstore, but I don’t really read. You’re having what for dinner at your house? Fermented veal tongue over raw zucchini “noodles”? Yeah, I think I’ll pass…

  Joining club after club, volunteering like nobody’s business, and still having no friends.

  And of course my parents didn’t see this as a sign of my having a disability, oh no no no, it’s just kids being shallow jerks and me being better and smarter than them, and maybe if I didn’t use so many big words…

  AAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

  But I’m an interesting person now. I have a pandeiro, and I’m not afraid to use it. I might even have a singing voice. Why shouldn’t I--

  “Hey, watch it, Butthead!” one of the ninth graders says to me in the hall on my way to lunch, when I accidentally veer off course and bump into her shoulder. I don’t even know her name. But that is how low I am in the pecking order: kids younger than I am know that I’m someone they can get away with bagging on.

  And I tell her I am sorry, so sorry, so sorry.

  Always sorry.

  Please don’t spit in my ear.

  I don’t say that last part, but I might as well. Pandeiro or no pandeiro, I do not and never will meet adolescent social acceptability standards in my town. Even for freshmen, who are supposed to look up to us elders.

  Yeah, even Renate Silverdick will probably die laughing contemptuously when I try to converse with her. Except that I pretty much have to do it. No, Mr. S. doesn’t give out grades for homeroom, but he’s one of the few people here who actually seems to like me, for some strange reason, and I’d kind of like to keep it that way. I can always tell him I tried. Because I always try.

  “Emancipated minor,” I hear myself sing under my breath, tapping my fingers on my purse in rhythm. “Ooooh…”

  And after I start mumble-singing, Spectral Amy shows up in the hallway alongside me. Emancipated minor? Do you actually want to do that, emancipate?

  Not really, I answer. I don’t even know how I’d do that. I just thought it sounded catchy.

  Maybe you should emancipate, Spectral Amy says. You’d have a lot more control over your life.

  Right, like I could make a living on my own now, I answer.

  I bet there’s a way, she says. I know you have real talent. I wrote some songs myself, you know.

  I tell her, Thanks, coming from you that means a lot. And you really did write those, right? I mean, with your dad, but…

  Last night, after going through about thirty pages of searches on Amy’s name, I finally found a discussion on her, on an archived message board from a defunct Latin-music Web site called Chachaville.com. They talked about the four self-written songs on Amy’s album, and the posters generally agreed that her father, who was listed as co-writer, probably wrote most if not all of them. They cited as evidence the fact that he had other credits as a songwriter and she didn’t. Like that means anything.

  I wrote poems, Spectral Amy says. He wrote the music, and we both came up with the rhythm arrangements.

  The poems are beautiful, I say. I really like “On a Horse,” that thing about wanting to be rescued and then realizing that you have to rescue yourself. That was ahead of its time!

  Spectral Amy smiles, transforming her face into something warming and radiant, like…a human fireplace? I can’t figure out what else to call it. You know, she says, you could just approach Renate about this in a humorous way. You can be really funny, you should use that.

  And then I see her. Renate, that is. She’s down the hall at her locker, trying locker combinations and then wiping them out and starting over again, cursing under her breath. I gave up on combination locks a long time ago for the same reason. Finally she gets the lock open and opens her locker, and I think, well, I might as well get this over with. Let her reject me and then I’m done.

  “So get this,” I say when I get to her locker. She turns her head and looks at me with the kind of abject horror I expected her to. “Shunsberg told me he thought you would like it if I struck up a conversation with you. So here I am. You can tell me to screw off whenever you want to, that counts as a conversation.”

  She stares at me for a second, and then something happens I didn’t expect: her face relaxes, and she chuckles, shakes her head and looks down at the ground. “Poor little Brian,” she says.

  “Brian?”

  “Shunsberg,” Renate says. “That’s his first name.”

  “He told you his first name?”

  “It’s not exactly difficult information to obtain. He’s a public employee.”

  It never would have occurred to me to try to find out my teachers’ first names. It’s not like I’d have any occasion to use them, right?

  “And guess what else,” Renate says. “He told me the same thing about you.”

  I laugh derisively. “Yeah, that figures. And of course, you didn’t try to talk to me.”

  “I was going to.” She grabs a lunch sack out of her locker, shuts the door, and locks the lock. “I just didn’t know what I was supposed to say.”

  “Well, I guess I took care of that for you.”

  “Yes, you did. Thank you.”

  So then we stand there, two dorkettes with the dreaded lunchtime staring them in the eyes. The school has a no-saving-seats policy, so there’s none of the crap I went through in middle school when I had to eat in the bathroom, but that doesn’t stop people from giving me the death stare because I dared to occupy their exclusive real estate. “You going to eat?” I ask her, as if it’s not obvious.

  “Highlight of my day,” she says.

  We walk down the hall towards the lunchroom, staring straight ahead and not talking. Should I ask her to eat with me? Should I assume she’d eat with me? What is the protocol here? “So it’s kind of nice out today,” I say, “not too hot. I was thinking about eating outside on the lawn. They let you do that here if the weather’s decent.”

  “Would you like me to come with you?”

  “Sure,” I say, “if you want.”

  “Hey, we have to report back to Shunsberg, right? And I’m not that good at making stuff up.”

  “He told me I didn’t have to report back to him. But I’m not good at making things up either.” I make a left turn down the hall where my locker is. “Just to warn you, though, I eat weird food. Not by personal choice. Or did you already know about that?”

  “Define weird food,” Renate says.

  “Oh, so you don’t know. Let me stop at my locker and I’ll give you the grand tour of my lunch sack.”

  We stop at my locker and I retrieve my lunch sack, and hold up my lettuce wrap sandwich for Renate to inspect. “This might look like an ordinary, innocuous lettuce wrap,” I say. “But within those lettuce leaves are parts of animals which, if I told you what they were, would probably cause you to lose your appetite. Although in fairness, in other countries those animal organs would probably be considered delicacies.”

  “In those countries, people don’t have much of a choice,” Renate says. “Meat is scarce there and they have to use the entire animal or they don’t eat.”

  “I don’t have much of a choice, either. But then, I don’t remember what normal food tastes like. I haven’t eaten it since I was four.” I put the lettuce wrap back in my bag. “I also have to eat a quarter cup of cold fermented chia seed pudding with a teaspoonful of serrano pepper seeds.”

  Renate winces. “Just the seeds? That must be killer spicy.”

  “It would be, if I still had taste buds.”

  We go outside and sit down, and while attempting to choke down my bad-joke lunch, I tell Renate all about HaleyOffTheSpectrum.com and the Good Brain Diet, and she sits there with her eyes bugging out of their sockets like hard-boiled eggs.

  “I can’t believe I didn’t know about this,
” Renate says.

  “Yeah, in this school most people know, but they don’t talk about it a whole lot at SCH, maybe? I guess they don’t gossip about kids in other schools.” I bite into the lettuce wrap. I’m not sure exactly what’s in it, but I’m also not sure it really matters. All my food tastes fairly sludgy to me. “Also, if you visit Dr. Nansi’s site, I don’t recommend doing that while you’re eating, because there are pictures on there of things that are even more sickening than my lunch.”

  “Wow,” Renate says. “You’re, like, a survivor. And that’s supposed to be a cure for your autism?”

  “Not cure, as such.” A bit of mystery meat falls out of my lettuce wrap and down the front of my shirt, landing straight in my cleavage—not that there’s much of that. “If I was cured, I wouldn’t have to keep eating like this. They call it remission so they can cover themselves legally. They can always claim that if their kid slips back into autism that they did the diet wrong.”

  “Do you actually think you’re in remission?”

  I take a deep breath and huff it out. “You know what? I don’t even know anymore. Seriously, I don’t.” I glance furtively down my shirt to see if I can spot the cleavage-diving bit of offal. No luck. “Why, do I not seem like I’m in remission?”

  “Dude. I’ve known you ten minutes, and I know you are so not in remission it isn’t even funny. And that diet is probably causing you serious malnutrition.”

  “That I don’t have to worry about,” I say. “They have some compounding pharmacy in Eugene put together these massive supplement capsules for me to swallow, and they make sure they have all the nutrition bases covered.” Then it hits me that she just said she knows I’m not over my autism. Sometimes I have kind of a delayed reaction to things people say to me. “So what makes you so sure I’m not in remission?”

  Renate takes a bite of a relatively-normal-looking avocado, cheese, lettuce, and tomato on multi-grain bread. “Oh, where to start,” she says, with her mouth full. Then she swallows her mouthful of food and keeps talking. “Okay, so first off, the fact that cheating on the diet has evidently never occurred to you. Even when your parents can’t see you. One of my best friends at SCH was autistic. That’s her phrase, she hates it when people say she ‘has autism.’ And she’s like that, too. You guys think you can’t hide anything, so you don’t even try to flout the rules.”

  “I can’t remember ever eating any of that stuff,” I say. “Not since I was really little, and even then it wasn’t much. I’d probably hurl, because I don’t have the digestive enzymes to handle it.”

  “But you’ve never tested it to find out,” she says. “La ley es la ley.”

  “I’m not a ‘rules are rules’ person,” I protest. “I’m an ‘I hate throwing up worse than anything’ person.”

  “You do seem to have a very sensitive gag reflex, judging from the fact that you almost heaved a couple of times from the chia seed congee.” Renate balls up her sandwich wrapper and sticks it in her lunch bag. “That’s another tipoff. Adolescents who are completely normal don’t puke up their lunches until after they’re done eating.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “I used to be bulimic,” Renate says. “I’m allowed to make that joke. But you don’t have to worry about me outing you as autistic. I don’t out people, ever. And I’m trusting you not to out me about the bulimia.”

  “That will be no problem,” I tell her. I don’t mention that that’s mostly because nobody ever talks to me. “So why are you here? I mean, how come you’re at Eisenhower?” I take my banana out of the lunch bag. It’s kind of green. They always are.

  Renate stares aghast at my fruit. “They make you eat unripened bananas too?”

  I start peeling my green banana, trying not to think about the awful chalky-slimy texture it’s going to have when I bite into it. “Don’t change the subject.”

  Renate takes a sip of her V8 juice and smiles mysteriously. “What, you haven’t heard the story of me being booted out of SCH because I kept singing this filthy, dirty song?”

  “Is that the truth?”

  “It is and it isn’t.” She reaches into her lunch bag for her squeeze-bottle yogurt. “I guess you could say it’s a dirty song, but it’s not about sex. It’s about poop.”

  “Poop?”

  “Poop.”

  I take a little tiny nibble of the banana and swallow it without tasting it. “There are songs about poop?”

  “There are songs about everything,” Renate says. “But this isn’t really a song, even. Or a rap. It’s more like a spoken word call-and-response chant where someone says a line and then a whole bunch of people repeat it. It’s on a Funkadelic album called One Nation Under a Groove, from 1978. Funkadelic is one of George Clinton’s bands from the seventies, the other band is called Parliament.”

  “What’s the name of the song?”

  She beams like she’s been waiting all her life for someone to ask her that. “’Promentalshitbackwashpsychosis Enema Squad.’ With the subtitle ‘The Doo Doo Chasers.’”

  “Unbelievable,” I say.

  “I’d play it for you, but it’s almost eleven minutes long and I don’t want to make you late for class. But maybe later.”

  “Eleven minutes.” I toss my banana peel in my lunch bag. “Did you sing, I mean recite, the whole thing?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “Sometimes? How many times did you do this?”

  “Probably twenty partial versions, maybe five reciting the entire thing. Including one on the last day of school, after which I was invited not to return.”

  “So they kept telling you not to do it, and you kept doing it anyway?”

  “I had to,” she says.

  The end-of-lunch bell rings. I stand up and brush the dirt off my pants. “I suppose you’ll tell me why you had to, some other time.”

  “If you listen to it, you’ll know why.” Renate stands up and checks the back of her red velvet cape for dirt stains. “Don’t do it now, but when you get home, just do a search for Funkadelic, spelled like it sounds, then a space, then type the letters p-r-o, it’ll pop right up.”

  “Pro…”

  “…mental. Shit. Backwash. Psychosis. Enema. Squad.”

  “I’m almost afraid to ask if you can spell it without looking.”

  “If you break it down into individual words, it’s easy.” We pause at the trash can near the front door to throw our lunch trash away before re-entering the building. “Also, it’s not literally about poop. It’s more about…people having poop in their heads, if that makes any sense.”

  “Oh, okay,” I say. “It’s metaphorical poop.” I make a mental note to inform Dr. Catherine Nansi in time for her next BM chart update.

  That night, before I go to bed, after I’ve worn my hand out banging on my pandeiro and attempting to catch up on homework, I decide to pull up “Promentalshitbackwashpsychosis Enema Squad,” to find out why Renate “had to” keep repeating it over and over again. Supposedly it’s self-explanatory, but things like this never are for me.

  I give a listen to it, and it’s like what she says, some guy (George Clinton?) reciting a line and then a whole bunch of people repeating it back, over a thudding rhythm with Jimi Hendrix-style guitar and some girl singer crooning some innocuous-sounding love song in the background. And the first lines I hear are:

  The world is a toll free toilet

  (The world is a toll free toilet)

  Our mouths neurological assholes

  (Our mouths neurological assholes)

  Talking shit a mile a minute

  (Talking shit a mile a minute)…

  And it goes on and on like that, for ten minutes and forty-five seconds, finally ending with multiple repetitions of the phrase fried ice cream is a reality until the fade-out.

  Holy Toledo. This is almost worth getting kicked out of school for. Not that I would do it. And not that it’s my kind of music, exactly. But it is ovaries-out hilarious that Renate wan
ted everyone in Steens Center High School to remember it, and remember her by it.

  Music to get your shit together by, indeed.

  DAY 34

  The next day, when I get to homeroom, Renate is already in her seat, and I walk right up to her and say, “You are a badass.”

  She nods and smiles sagely. “I told you.”

  And then, because the geniuses we go to school with cannot conceive of any kind of meeting of minds that does not involve the doffing of undergarments, we start hearing a chant of “Silverdick and Butt Face, Silverdick and Butt Face,” followed by some revolting suggestions of how a Silverdick and a Butt Face could intersect physically. I don’t even turn around to see who it is; I know who the usual suspects are. Shunsberg immediately tells them to put a sock in it or they’ll get detention. He obviously approves of our interaction.

  I tell her about the pandeiro. “Are you allowed to leave the house with it?” she asks.

  “Nobody said I couldn’t.”

  “I have a soundproof music room in our garage. And there’s a piano in there.”

  “You play?”

  “Yes. And I have perfect pitch.”

  “I don’t.”

  “You’re a percussionist. You don’t have to.”

  I am a percussionist. I am. A percussionist. What a difference a brand-new pandeiro makes. And Amy, of course. I like it.

  So…you want to jam?” Renate asks me.

  “When?”

  “Today?”

  Is this how it works? If someone wants to be friends, they ask you to do stuff? And if musicians find out you play something, they want to play with you? Who knew? ”Today works,” I say.

  “So after school, we can go to your house to get the pandeiro, and then take it over to my house.”

  “Or I could just go home and get it and then come over.” I’m kind of dreading the idea of Renate meeting my parents. Somehow I don’t think they’d like her very much, and the feeling would be mutual times a billion. Also, I might have left some Amy stuff lying around my room. Not that I should be worried about what she’d think of my “Amy thing.” This is a girl who got kicked out of school over her favorite musician’s eleven-minute ode to bowel movements. But I think I need more time to explain it than just one day.

  “If we do it my way, we don’t have to write anything down. And you don’t have to worry about getting lost on your way to my place.”

  I nod. “I would never have thought of that, but you’re right.” The hell with it, she’s going to find out all this stuff sooner or later. I’d rather be rejected over it now than drag it out. I think.

  When we get to my house after school, there’s nobody in the common areas of the house. The door to my parents’office is closed, and they’ve turned the sign around to the BUSY side, which means no interruptions unless an object or vital body organ has literally caught fire. I can hear their muffled voices arguing, likely with a third party on the phone and not each other, going by phrases like, “No, that wasn’t in the contract,” and, “You guys didn’t tell us we had to sign in both places.” And Tam isn’t home. So we just go to my room.

  My heart is doing pandeiro impersonations. Why? Because of potential Amy droppings?

  You can tell her about me without telling her everything, Spectral Amy whispers. The details can wait.

  I push the door open. “Sorry about the mess. If I’d known you were coming…”

  “You’d have baked a cake made out of calf brain flour and emu eggshells,” Renate says.

  “I would have cleaned up the clothes-splosion in here,” I correct her. “And vacuumed.”

  “Cool story.” Renate looks around the room at my bossa nova memorabilia. There is no Amy stuff lying around anywhere, including my record bins; that, I managed to hide under my bed in case of family doing random searches of my acquired intellectual property. I hope my sigh of relief isn’t too audible. Renate finds the vinyl bin and starts leafing through it. “I like vinyl,” she says.

  “We both listen to music that was made for vinyl.”

  “Exactly.” She continues leafing through the records. “I’ve never heard of any of these people.”

  “They’ve never heard of you, either.”

  “Touche.”

  “Also, half of them are dead.” If I’m going to tell her about Amy, now is the time. Now. Now. Now.

  “A lot of the P-Funk guys are dead, too,” Renate says. “Like Eddie Hazel. Probably the most underrated guitar player of all time.”

  “P-Funk?”

  “Parliament and Funkadelic.”

  “Oh, right.”

  I could still tell her about Amy now, despite the subject change. Instead I get my pandeiro out of the closet and show it to Renate. “It’s tuned to bass drum tuning now, but you can tune it a lot higher than that, if you want a snare or tom sound.” I tap on it to demonstrate the sound, then hand it to her.

  She holds it in her hand. “It’s so light. A little drum like this makes all that noise?”

  “Yeah. In fact, I got yelled at a few times last night for playing it too loud.”

  Renate hands the pandeiro back to me, and I put it in the pandeiro bag I got with it and zip it up. “Won’t be a problem at my place. I have serious soundproofing. And my mom will be occupied with all things cat. Sorry, I forgot to make sure you weren’t allergic.”

  “You have cats?”

  “My mom fosters rescues. We have rooms set aside just for them.”

  “I want a cat so bad,” I say. “But my dad is killer allergic.”

  We walk out of my room, and there’s still no one in the common areas. Good. We can deal with that some other time. We exit the house, and I follow Renate to her place.

  “Is it just you and your mom?” I ask her on the way over.

  “And my brother. He’s in sixth grade. So it’s just three of us for like half the year, when my dad’s in Alaska fishing. That’s what he does for a living.”

  “Wow,” I say. “People really do that.”

  “What, did you think all those fish just swim to Fred Meyer’s freezer case?”

  “No…I just always heard about those people who fish in Alaska for half the year and don’t work for the other half. But I never met one.”

  “He’ll be back next month after coho season’s over. Do they let you eat salmon?”

  “When we can afford it.”

  “He brings back so much we get sick of it,” Renate says. “I’m sure we could hook you up.”

  “No pun intended.”

  “I hate puns.”

  Here I am, walking down the street with a pandeiro bag. I feel like a real musician all of a sudden. Or at least I will, until Renate finds out I don’t really know how to play this thing yet.

  When we get to Renate’s house and open the door, a petite lady with long, curly gray hair comes out of one of the rooms with a handful of paper towels in one hand and a squirt bottle that says NATURE’S MIRACLE on it in the other. She looks almost shocked at the sight of Renate bringing a friend home. “Oh, hello,” she says. “Sorry to be so rude, but I’m in the middle of cleaning up an accident.”

  “There are no accidents,” Renate says.

  “I thought you hated puns,” I say.

  “That’s not a pun,” Renate says. “Mom, this is Cynthia. I warned her about the felines.”

  “Hi,” I say, waving at her.

  “I’m Kitty,” she says. “I know that sounds kind of funny, considering…”

  “Actually, that’s perfect,” I say, making sure to smile. I have a naturally downturned mouth (a.k.a Resting Bitch Face), so if I don’t make an effort to smile, I look perpetually irritated. “And I love kitties. I mean, cats. I didn’t…well, you know what I mean.” This is why I am better off just waving hi.

  “We’ll be in the garage,” Renate tells her, and mercifully shows me the way out there.

  Renate’s studio is a box-within-a-box, a hand-built wooden shed with a door and lots
of sound-deadening material nailed to the walls. An upright piano, which looks like it’s a good thirty years old, sits against the far right wall. “Don’t worry, there are vents for air to get in here,” she says. “But I’ve played piano and sung really high notes in here late at night with no complaints.”

  She takes her seat on the piano bench, and I sit down on a stool next to the piano. “So I’m trying to think of a song both of us would know and could play,” I say.

  Renate shrugs. “Play whatever you want, I’ll figure it out.”

  My back starts itching. I twist and bend to try to reach it, but I can’t. Renate hands me a wooden back scratcher sitting on top of the piano. “Try this,” she says. “If you need it again, it’s right up here.” She points to the top of the piano.

  “Thanks.” Okay. Play something.

  “Mas Que Nada,” Spectral Amy says. That’s a great piano song.

  But she’s probably never heard it, I protest silently. Maybe she knows the Black-Eyed Peas’ version from ten years ago, but that doesn’t sound anything like the original.

  So sing it for her, Spectral Amy urges me.

  I can’t, I tell her.

  Of course you can, Spectral Amy says.

  I start doing this boom, tap tap tap ta-boom, tap tap tap ta-boom thing, with Renate watching intently. Then I sing very softly, in phonetic Portuguese, being careful to softly roll the R’s:

  Oh, whoa-oh-oh-oh, ra-ee-rye-eye-oh

  O-ba, o-ba, o-ba…

  “I can barely hear you,” Renate says.

  “I’m not much of a singer.”

  “Have you ever sung on a microphone? Like, amplified?”

  “At karaoke.”

  “That doesn’t count. Everybody sounds terrible on those mics. You probably have no idea what you really sound like.”

  “My sisters always plug their ears when I sing.”

  Renate snorts. “They’re sisters. They have to do stuff like that, it’s in their contract. I have a baby brother, and they’re even worse.” She points to a mike stand in the corner, about five feet away, with a silver microphone on it that has the word BLUE on the front of it. The brand name, I guess. “Stand over there and I’ll plug you in.”

  I do what she says, and she hooks up the microphone to a little amplifier on the floor—and when I say “little,” I mean it’s the size of a bag of goldfish crackers. “We have to leave the mic where it is, or we’ll get blasted by speaker feedback,” Renate says. “But say something so I can adjust the volume.”

  “Something so I can adjust the volume,” I say.

  “Pull down the pop filter, stand a little closer and do it again.” When I give her a confused look, she amends that. “I mean…see that thing that’s clamped to the mike stand, that has a black circular thing on the end of it? That black thing is the pop filter, it prevents popping P’s if you’re standing close. Pull that right in front of the mike, stand closer to the mike, and say it again.”

  We go through this process a few times, winding up with me so close to the microphone that I could electrocute myself with one good sneeze, if not for this black thing. “Don’t worry about that,” Renate says. “A lot of singers have to practically have the mic in their mouths in order to be heard.” She sits back down at the piano. “Now sing.”

  I take a deep breath, start tapping out the same rhythm I was doing before, and then repeat the first line of the song:

  Oh, whoa-oh-oh-oh, ra-ee-rye-eye-oh

  O-ba, o-ba, o-ba…

  The first time through I miss the highest note in the song, so when the line repeats, I just hold the first, lower note a little longer. I do this a few times, and Renate doesn’t plug her ears or make a face, she just listens to me do it a few times, nodding along with me, and then starts playing some chords. They’re not quite the same chords as the record, but they sound okay with the melody and the rhythm sounds right, so I keep singing. But after about thirty seconds, Renate stops playing and gives me what looks like the evil eye.

  “What?” I say. “What did I do?”

  “You keep switching back and forth between your higher voice and your lower voice,” she says. “Why?”

  “Because I can’t hit those high notes.”

  “We’ll see about that.” She thinks for a second, then says, “Okay, let’s try something. Stand back from the mike for about a foot, because this could get loud. Now pretend that a cat-shaped spaceship just landed in your living room, and it just opened up and six adorable space kittens are flying around your living room and purring, and you’re the only one home. Let your jaw hang open and your eyebrows go up, and breathe from your belly until you fill it up, shake your head out, and now let out the highest squee you possibly can, like this.”

  She shakes her head and wiggles her hands next to her head and squeals, and I imitate her.

  And a high note comes flying out of me that even a space kitten wouldn’t be able to hear.

  “That’s way up here.” She hits a high note on the piano, a couple of octaves up from middle C. “E-flat-six, girlie. That’s way higher than the note you missed, which is like a D-flat five.” She plays that note on the piano. “You just have to practice every day, you know, scales, slides, all that boring stuff. You can look up videos on voice exercises, Roger Burnley’s are really great. But you’ll get it.”

  Practice. Just like Spectral Amy said. That means make noise. Annoy people. Neglect my schoolwork. Even more than I already have.

  Renate must be reading my mind, because she says, “If you’re worried about the noise, practice in the closet and duct-tape a blanket to the door. The clothes will help muffle the sound.”

  “How’d you know I was thinking that?”

  “Because girls are always afraid of that.” She laces her fingers together and cracks her knuckles. “You don’t sound bad, you know. Everybody has to start somewhere.”

  I really could tell her about Amy. She might actually get it. Who knows, maybe she has a Spectral George Clinton who talks to her. Maybe she’d even understand my wanting to be Cyan Beaut. But right now, it feels like I have everything to lose if I’m wrong about that. I know that the longer I wait, the harder it will be, but there has to be some midpoint where it’s easier than it would be now.

  “Fried ice cream is a reality,” I say into the microphone.

  Renate sighs with contentment and nods her assent. “Fried ice cream is a reality.”