The Amy Virus

  STAGE II:

  Symptoms become more seriously felt, begin to impede daily functioning. Often this stage is when diagnosis is confirmed with further testing.

  DAYS 36-49

  The rest of the first quarter passes by, and as I get better at music, I get worse at everything else—sleeping, digesting food quietly and painlessly, concentrating in class, coherent speech with everyone who isn’t Renate. I know this happens to young musicians a lot, they get the music bug and everything else goes into the round wet file. But something about this is different. The difference is Amy.

  Yes, I know teenagers get obsessed with bands and musicians and all that. But you know what normal teenagers who get obsessed with bands and musicians do? They plaster their walls with posters of those musicians. They wear t-shirts with those musicians’ images on them. They doodle these musicians’ names in their notebooks. I have zero stigmata of my “Amy thing” anywhere in my room, anywhere on my clothing, anywhere on my phone, anywhere period. Amy Zander t-shirts don’t exist, and there’s a reason for that: I’m the only one on earth who’d buy one. And then not wear it. Because I don’t want to have to defend the fact that I like her. People make you do that, you know, justify your tastes. Like there’s a wrong way to like music.

  A t-shirt with my picture on it? Spectral Amy says, hovering next to my bed at night two weeks after my first time in Renate’s music shed. Just the idea makes me shudder.

  I know what she means. I’m trying to imagine people at school wearing Cyan Beaut t-shirts. I just can’t picture it. I try to talk to other musicians in my school, who are in bands. They are too cool for me and they don’t hesitate to let me know it. I haven’t heard of any of their favorite songs, let alone heard them. Maybe some people can fake knowledge of (and enthusiasm for) cultural things, but that gene passed me by.

  I read music Web sites and it just depresses me, knowing that I will never be accepted into the club because I just can’t do what other people apparently do: figure out what they’re supposed to like, and what they’re supposed to hate (the second part is just as important as the first), and put out signals that their tastes are “correct.” The music world makes noises about accepting freaks, but they can’t be my kind of freaky.

  So your kind of music doesn’t have teen appeal, big deal, Spectral Amy says. It doesn’t have to. There’s such a thing as music for adults.

  Right, I say, like classical music. That’s all my parents listen to now, on those rare occasions when they bother listening to anything at all. As long as the musicians and composers are long dead and from other countries, it’s safe for them to express appreciation.

  Your parents aren’t everybody, Spectral Amy reminds me.

  You need to go to sleep now, I tell her. Because I need to go to sleep now. I have six hours left to sleep. Sleep. Sleeeeeeep. Please please please.

  The hours in the dark drip by, without my ever losing consciousness. Every night, I ask myself: how can you be completely exhausted and not be able to sleep? Is it like watering a plant that’s totally dried out, where the water just runs right off the top because the soil is so dry it rejects moisture? If so, how long can I do it without dying? What if I never fall asleep again? Ever? Then I do fall asleep. Finally. And an hour or so later, my alarm begins its gradual rise in volume, which is supposed to be more soothing than being jolted awake, but instead, I hear that first trickle of NPR noise as an oh-so-subtle reminder that I have again failed, at one of the most basic bodily functions there is.

  Again.

  DAY 50

  “All you guys are doing is reading from the textbook,” I complain to Dad and Tam, as the two of them double-team me the second Sunday night in October, trying to explain geometry to me. We’re sitting at the dining table, with my three quizzes with B minus to D plus grades spread out before us, like murder trial evidence. “I actually do know how to read. That’s not the issue here. The issue is that those words are just words. I can’t…connect them with meaning.”

  “Your grades should mean something to you,” Dad says, tapping the side of his coffee mug with his nails.

  “That’s not what I meant.” I try with all my might to come up with a more Dad-friendly explanation, and can’t. Because in a way, he’s right. My grade only means something to me because it means something to him. I have no personal interest in this subject. None. And no ability to fake any. That’s all people do in this world. Fake, fake, fake, fake, fake. (That’s a song lyric, right?) Could I be the only one in the world who finds this incredibly disturbing?

  “Do you take notes in class?” Dad asks me. “Because Ms. Prathipati says she sees you staring at the light fixtures a lot.”

  I gnaw on my left thumb cuticle. “She told you that?”

  I don’t even want to go to fracking medical school. Who even gets into med school if they don’t want it badly? How many people start out as premeds in college and wind up getting in, like two percent? And that’s not even counting all the people who get weeded out in high school. The other day, Spectral Amy dared me to say it out loud in front of my own mirror: I am not going to medical school. Ever. I am a musician. An autistic artiste. Like it or lump it, folks. I couldn’t even say it to the mirror. How am I going to say it to my parents?

  Caltech doesn’t do legacy admissions, at least not officially. If you have a parent who went there and did well, it helps, but it’s not a slam-dunk. They can still reject me for premed (or anything else) if I don’t regularly pull B plus or higher in math and science, even if I manage to get perfect SAT scores.

  Okay, I won’t get any F’s on my report card, that much I know. But almost nobody ever gets an F around here anyway. You’d pretty much have to light your desk on fire and then pull your pants down and take a dump on the floor on a daily basis, without apology, to get an F.

  This school year, I have shown up every day, except for one day when I was contagious with a cold. I do not eliminate on the floor or engage in pyrotechnics or stick gum in anyone’s hair or interfere with anyone else’s learning experience in any way. I haven’t even so much as burped audibly. But you might as well park a wire-mesh dummy with a curly brown wig in my desk chair, for all anything they say actually gets through. Exception: Language Arts, in which my parody of “Desiderata” (“You are a child of Eisenhower High/a mess of broken TVs and guitars/you have a right to drink beer”) made Ms. Samman laugh so hard that I got an A plus for it. But Caltech doesn’t give a crap about my being able to parody poetry. Or even write lyrics.

  “Dad, I think she needs a real tutor,” Tam says. “If she doesn’t understand what’s in the book, she needs more help than we can give her.”

  “I can read,” I say. “I just…I can’t…”

  “You can’t what?” Dad says. I can tell this is seriously annoying him. His two older daughters never needed any help acing their classes. Why do I have to be so difficult?

  “I…I don’t know how to explain it. I just don’t connect it—what’s in the book--to anything the teacher says. It’s like I lose parts of her sentences or something, and then I get lost. And once I get lost, I can’t catch up. And it’s not like I’m busy passing notes in class.”

  “They said you didn’t have ADHD,” Dad says.

  Here is my opening. I can say it here. They can probably hear my heart thump from where they’re sitting. “Maybe I don’t have that,” I manage to say, slowly. “But…I…I must have something.” I pause to notice a muscle twitch on my left palm. “And I’m not on drugs either. If I was on drugs, probably I’d have more than one friend and maybe get the occasional party invitation, even.”

  That’s about as close to coherent speech as I’ve gotten with Dad—with almost anyone—lately. Even though it probably took me three times as long to finish those sentences as it would have taken a normal person.

  “Even a tutor isn’t going to help if you don’t pay attention, Cind—Cynthia,” Dad corrects himself.

  “Maybe...maybe I
just don’t have it in me to do this.” That little tendon on my palm feels like someone is twanging on it like a guitar string. “I’m not…I swear I don’t do anything but listen to the teacher. But there has to be…something else. Other people are sitting there passing notes and giggling and they get better grades than I do. And if someone else is making noise while the teacher is talking, I can’t hear her. Even if it’s three rows behind me, it throws me off.”

  “That’s why you need a tutor,” Tam says. “You can tell them where you’re getting lost and they can figure out how to get you un-lost. That’s their job.”

  Dad takes a sip of his decaf. “If Cynthia can’t get through a tenth-grade geometry course without needing a tutor, how is she going to get through college-level science and math?” Then he looks at me with high-beam eyes. I flinch instinctively. “You can do better than this. You’re just as smart as your sisters are. This is a basic course, Cynthia. There’s no reason you can’t maybe consult with Ms. Prathipati after school and catch up.”

  Yes there is, my brain is practically shouting. Dad, you’re not paying attention. Can’t you see I’m not like them? And I can’t be?

  No, he can’t see it, and there’s no point in saying it. Because he doesn’t want to know how bad it’s about to get.

  Any more than I do.

  DAY 51

  “I have something I think you should read,” Renate says to me in homeroom the next morning. She hands me her phone. “This is someone I used to be friends with at SCH. We knew each other in chamber ensemble. It’s her Tumblr.”

  Free to B3…You and Me?

  By Eroica Witt

  Imagine the scene. She has finally, finally, finally, after all these months, realized that I am the woman for her, and once I have parked my 1969 Maverick that I have just lovingly restored (not easy to make one of those panzers driveable in 2016, lemme tell you), and a torrid makeout scene commences in the front seat after we park two blocks away from her house. At least that’s what I think it is.

  Condensation forms on the insides of the windows as she keeps kissing me, and I know this is entirely the wrong time to start thinking about whether I have gapped the spark plugs on it correctly. But I live for spark plugs. She knows that, and yet would be completely appalled if, just as things are heating up between us and she is starting to lick my lips, I couldn’t put those thoughts aside and just concentrate on her. It is not her. She is beautiful and brilliant and everything I could want, and she wants me. Me!

  “Is something wrong?” she murmurs, in a voice as sweet and pretty as windchimes, as her lovely long hair tickles my cheek.

  “Of course not,” I say, as I’m simultaneously mentally calculating whether .032 or .036 was the correct gapping choice for a 302 Ford Engine originally built in 1968. It is kind of a hard starter, that could be a warning sign that I did it wrong. I want to tell her she’s perfect and the problem is that I’m not. But that’s not the right thing to say either.

  The above is a work of fiction; you can relax, Dad! I have never had a torrid makeout session with anyone. But I know—I just know—that if I did meet the girl of my dreams, my B3 would become a divider between us. Spark plugs are my B3.

  So what is a B3, you ask? If you look at the DSM diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorders, there are category A traits and category B traits, and you have to have all three A traits and two out of four possible B traits. The third B trait (B3) is “highly restricted, fixated interests that are abnormal in intensity or focus.” It cheeses me off just to type that, because somebody has to care passionately about spark plugs, damn it! The world runs on spark plugs, and has for at least a century. Surely there are people without (official) ASDs who have encyclopedic knowledge of spark plugs. How do they do it, just forget about that stuff and be in the moment with other people?

  The reason I know my B3 would present a problem with girls is that it already does. Recently I had my first Skype date with a girl in Austin, Texas who’s my age and fixes up old cars. We met on a message board for girls who fix vintage cars, and she showed me the 1966 Mustang she just finished. It’s pretty, red with white leather upholstery. But I kept asking her questions about the spark plugs, and after the fourth spark plug inquiry, she suddenly remembered needing to wash her feet before dinner or something and logged off. Permanently.

  I should have known; girls can’t get away with going on for half an hour breathlessly about whatever it is we’re stuck on, not even with other queer girls. And I already have one strike against me, being autistic. If I was in a big city where there were lots of queer autistic girls that would be one thing, but in Steens Center I am a freakity-freak in more ways than one. Here, it’s allistic girls or nobody, pretty much.

  Only three other junior or senior girls in my school are autie and they identify as hetero. One of them is a fiend for old issues of Rolling Stone magazine; she can name everyone who’s been on the cover going back to the first issue in 1967. Another one has staggering knowledge of cat genetics, and can look at a cat and tell you what its DNA looks like just from its markings. And number three is a baseball freak, a Dodgers fan who quotes Vin Scully (their announcer for over 50 years) at the drop of a hat.

  Like me, they let this out only in little drips and drabs, knowing that they will narcotize whoever is listening to them if they don’t. All of them say the same thing: “Good luck finding a boyfriend when I’m this into (whatever their B3 is).”

  Sigh.

  I hand Renate’s phone back to her, not knowing what to say. Did she show me this because she thinks (knows) I’m hiding a “B3” of my own and wants to know what it is? Or because she thinks I might be into girls and she’s using my reaction to this to find out? “Wow,” I say. “She’s a really good writer. But what’s ‘allistic’?”

  “It means not on the autism spectrum,” Renate says, turning the phone screen off. “She likes that term better than neurotypical, because there are people who have nonstandard brains who aren’t autistic.”

  “Does she really talk about spark plugs all the time?”

  “No. She’ll only do that if you say you’re really interested in auto repair. That’s kind of what she’s saying here, that autistic girls kind of have this secret internal monologue that they won’t let anyone in on even though it’s harmless.”

  I nod, as casually as possible. “But you said you’re not friends with her anymore?”

  “She’s pissed at me for getting myself expelled.” Renate sticks her phone back into her purse without checking to see which pocket it’s going into. “I mean, at first I thought she was being supportive, but over the summer there was more and more of, ‘How can reciting some bizarre scatological poetry by some perpetually stoned five-hundred-year-old black dude who’ll never remember your name be more important than staying in school with me?’”

  “Ouch,” I say.

  “Exactly,” Renate says. “She’s a year ahead of me. Would I ask her to get left back a year so I don’t ever have to go to school without her? And besides, he’s not perpetually stoned anymore.”

  “So why’d you show me this, if you think she’s a jerk?”

  Renate heaves a dramatic sigh. “I hate to admit it, but she’s so frigging talented that even though she annoys the crap out of me, I thought you should read her stuff.”

  Just because I think someone’s a jerk

  Doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate their work

  That just pops into my head, while I’m standing at Renate’s desk.

  Maybe you could talk to your parents in rhymes, Spectral Amy says. Then maybe they’d get it.

  DAYS 75-76

  My finals are the first Thursday and Friday in November. On Thursday I get my two easiest ones, language arts and history. These are mostly essay questions. I usually do fine with those, thanks to my ability to write a comprehensible sentence and spell things correctly, even the big Scrabble words, and the fact that they’re based on reading rather than lecture materia
l. I figure those for maybe somewhere in the B range, even though I have a vague sensation that I’m skating by on what I already knew how to do.

  But those aren’t the grades my parents care about. They also don’t care what grades I get in my studio art class or freestyle basketball gym elective. Everyone here gets A’s in that stuff just for showing up; colleges don’t even pay attention to it. The next day, the bomb hits right on schedule: Spanish, geometry, and biology. Despite all my cramming, I can only guess at the multiple choices and calculations and translations. How could I show up every single day except one, try my damnedest to pay attention, pay attention, pay fracking attention, and know less than diddly squat? My parents are wrong about me being as smart as my sisters. Having a kid who has the brains of a fencepost wasn’t in their life plans, I’m sure, but that’s who they’re stuck with.

  DAY 86

  “Bal-LOON!”

  This has become Renate’s usual and customary greeting to me when she first sees me, because now, in mid-November, after two months of being friends, we have a musical inside joke. She told me about this song that she and her father and grandmother did at a talent show at her grandmother’s church when she was eight years old, called “Up, Up and Away,” and it’s about a hot-air balloon ride. There’s this part that goes “Bal-LOON!” with the second syllable being a jump between a third and a full octave depending on which part you’re singing, so we’ve been trying the jumps at higher and higher notes to see how far we can go. Carefully, of course. Vocal cords are persnickety little things, but I’ve been stretching mine out gradually in the shower, practicing the bel canto exercises where you lift your soft palate to hit the highest notes. So when she “Bal-LOON”s me, I do it right back even higher: “Bal-LOON!” People turn around to see who hit that ridiculous high note. I think a few are actually smiling. I know Spectral Amy is.

  Yes, she’s still with me, and no, Renate still doesn’t know. I’m working on it. I am.

  “Whoa, dude,” Renate says. “That’s an A5. Remember when you had trouble hitting a D5? Nicely done!”

  And then I remember what day it is, and how completely screwed I will be by the time I get home today, after managing to push it out of my mind for a few blissful minutes. I slump against the locker next to hers and mumble into the air, “At least I can do one thing right.”

  Renate takes off her winter coat and hangs it up in her locker. “You know I hate it when you say things like that.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize to me, apologize to you.” She closes her locker and looks squarely at me. “Come on. It’s a freaking report card. You didn’t knock over a gas station.”

  “Yeah, like my parents know the difference.”

  “Maybe they don’t know the difference, but you should. In fact, you have to. Or you die.”

  I can feel that sharp pain in my stomach that reminds me something horrible is around the corner. “Thanks for the pep talk.”

  “Seriously, C., I’d come home with you and defend you, but I have to go to therapy. But this is your chance. You have to tell them. What they have in mind for you is not going to happen.”

  My stomach makes a snarling noise, which I’m sure Renate hears even over the noisy hallway.

  “You know what?” Renate says. “It’s kind of like singing. I’m a mezzo-soprano. You’re a coloratura soprano, or at least you would be if you got formal training. You have the vocal capacity to go way higher than I do and sound all fluttery like a bird. But I can belt a lot louder than you because that’s how I’m constructed. We’d both lose our voices if we tried to sing like each other instead of like ourselves.”

  “Understood,” I say. “But today is still going to suck.”

  She nods. Nothing she can say to that.

  The report cards are scheduled to hit everyone’s email (students’ and parents’) between 2 and 3 pm today. Before leaving school at 2:45, I look at my email, with my stomach curdling worse than ever, and it isn’t there yet. Not that I’d want to look at it if it was. I got my final exams back today, and there were no surprises: B plus for language arts, B for history, C for Spanish, C minus for biology, and a whopping D plus for the geometry final. I wish I had the nerve to take a lighter to them, but even if I did that, the teachers keep copies. The final counts for half my grade and we get marked a half grade up for no unexcused absences, of which I’ve had none. So figuring in quizzes, I’m getting a C in bio and a C minus in geometry. C as in Cindy. Cynthia. Cyan. Whoever I am.

  Crap.

  I walk home as slowly as possible. I have very few places I can hide right now. The town library is closed on Mondays. I could have hung out in the school library, I suppose, but the amalgamated odor of Sharpies, Ajax, barf, and coleslaw that permeates the air at school makes me want to evacuate as soon as possible, even considering the alternative. And there’s only so much dawdling I can do in the convenience store, especially since I can’t consume anything they sell. The only thing left is Safeway, which is Screaming Kid Central in the afternoons. My cat-like hearing will make this a no-go also.

  Renate is right. Spectral Amy is right. Dr. Ngo is right. All of this is a symptom of something a lot bigger than a damn report card. I have to tell them. Because there are no brain transplants, they will have to deal with the brain I have. To anyone who is the slightest bit rational, it makes perfect sense.

  But these are my parents we’re talking about. These are people who are in massive denial and will go to their graves that way. So now the music accompanying me home is Chopin’s Funeral March, something my parents might actually recognize, because as soon as those report cards hit, I am the deadest of meat. Even if I get a smile as I walk in the door, they will not be smiling by dinnertime. They will not be smiling during tomorrow’s dinner, either. They may never smile at me again.

  I wish this was the old days, when everyone got paper report cards at school and you could just shred them on the way home. Or doctor them, if you were clever enough and/or your parents weren’t very savvy. Not that I would have gotten away with it, because I get away with almost nothing. But it was a thing, once. For somebody. Maybe for Amy?

  Barely breathing, I unlock the front door and walk in, expecting to see the firing squad. I don’t. Maybe I still have a few minutes to prepare for this.

  But when I get to my room, I know instantly that something isn't right. First I notice that my crates of vinyl are gone. My record player is gone. Laptop: gone. Fearing the worst, I check the closet for my pandeiro.

  It's gone too. Along with the bongos, and the spiral notebook I had with “LYRICS” written on the cover.

  But nothing else is. Not even the peridot-and-titanium earrings I got for my middle-school graduation present. Only my music stuff.

  Heart thudding, I shut my bedroom door and look under my bed, where I hid my Amy album in a bag of yarn I obtained when I foolishly thought I could learn how to knit. It's still there. I quickly stuff the record back in my yarn bag and stick the bag back under the bed, as if I’m being monitored on some kind of spycam. Which, who knows, I might be.

  Thank God I never mentioned her to anyone.

  For a split second, I don’t make the connection. Then it finally sinks in. I knew they’d punish me, but this is way over the top.

  I didn’t even get a warning that they were thinking about doing all this. I knew there’d be yelling and screaming that I didn’t apply myself, and I was thoroughly prepared for there to be some sort of grounding or “no TV” thing or some other suspension of privilege. But as shocked as I am that they went this far, this just proves what I suspected: telling my parents that I’m not who they insist I am will just result in them doubling down on me, over and over again, to make me be that person, until I can find a way to get the hell out of here. They will never respect me. Unless I score a big hit record, of course. Then they’d brag about it all over the place, I’m sure.

  I hear a knock on my door and practically jump off my b
ed. Here it comes. With a ragged exhale, I open the door to find my red-faced mother standing there, smartphone in hand, saying, "How could you do this to us?"

  Any well-reasoned arguments I had in favor of taking a different academic and life path have evaporated, since there’s clearly no use for them here, and all I have left is pure petulant outrage. "Newsflash, Mom," I say, "if what you want is for me to be a completely normal kid, normal kids are allowed to be happily imperfect. That means the occasional dud report card." Now that I’m aflame with outrage, my sentence-forming ability has returned with a vengeance.

  She pushes her way past me to stand inside my room. "But it doesn't mean lying to your parents about not having a problem in school."

  "I didn't lie. I tried to tell you a whole bunch of times." I know I'm not going to win this one, but right now any guilt I was feeling before has been canceled out by the severity of the punishment I'm getting. "Really, Mom. Taking my record player? My computer? How am I supposed to get my homework done?"

  "If you need to look up something for an assignment you can ask one of us. You’ll be given AB's old laptop for any typing you need to do."

  Of course. That prehistoric Macbook whose OS was last updated before I was born, so nothing on it works except the word processor, and that just barely. They kept it to use as a weapon against me in case they ever needed it. There aren’t even printer drivers made for it anymore; I’ll have to burn all my work on to a CD and give it to them to print. ''That piece of garbage is older than she is. I can't believe you even still have it."

  "Which reminds me," Mom says, with an icy cool that would no doubt shock most of her readership, "I'll also need your phone."

  "No."

  "What do you mean, 'no'? You don't get a vote here, Cynthia."

  My phone is in my purse, which is hanging on the back of the door. I move to block Mom's path to the doorknob. "You will have to physically fight me for my phone. You've taken away too much already." I glance at her face, for the split second I can stand to, and notice that she has lip liner on, but her lipstick is all worn away. She’s still really pretty on the outside, but I know the ugly in her all too well.

  "You’ll use the prepaid phone until you pull your grades up."

  "Oh my God," I hear Tam saying from out in the hallway. "You're giving her the stupid-phone? What for?"

  "For not being a perfect clone of you, that’s what!" I yell.

  "Cynthia!" Mom says.

  "You can't have it both ways, Mom. Normal teenagers get bad report cards. Normal teenagers don't give their parents a running laundry list of every single thing that's on their minds. Normal teenagers are passionate about music. You want normal? This is it." I crane my neck to try to see Tam, and then give up and talk to her through the door. "Tam, she took away all my music, including the pandeiro."

  Now Tam is standing in the doorway, her jaw slack. "Mom, you didn't sell that thing, did you?"

  "No," I hear Dad's voice saying from behond Tam. "We won't sell it unless Cindy brings home another bad report card next quarter."

  "My name is not Cindy!" I scream. "Never ever call me that again!"

  Sometime between when I first started ranting and now, Mom has grabbed my purse and fished the phone out, and without missing a beat, she and Dad perform a perfect relay: she hands him my real phone, he hands me the stupid-phone.

  “This is draconian,” I say, looking at the stupid-phone in my hand like it’s rubber vomit. Except rubber vomit has more features. “This is like cutting my hands off for stealing a slice of pizza. But you wouldn’t even let me buy a slice of pizza, because pizza causes autism, and autism is the Worst. Thing. Ever. Right?”

  “Ever since you started hanging out with that Renate,” Dad says, “you haven’t been yourself. Is she on something?”

  “Yeah, she’s on me, to actually make something of the talent you don’t take seriously.” I throw the stupid-phone down on the bed. “I suppose I’m also barred from seeing her?”

  “She can come over here,” Mom says. “In fact, I think we should see a little more of Renate, to see what kind of influence she’s having on you. We’d also like to meet her parents. But you’re not to go with her anywhere else.”

  “Not until we get a negative result back from this eight weeks in a row,” Dad adds, handing me a little plastic vial. For pee. This means that until I pass eight consecutive urine tests, I can’t even sing with Renate at her place, or hold Renate’s cat Sedona in my lap. Sedona is a giant orange purring beanbag; I feel more loved by him than I do by my parents right now. I can’t believe I have to go eight weeks without even getting to pet him. And that’s if there’s no false positive; if there is one, I might never get to see him--or Renate, other than at school--again.

  “This can’t be happening,” I say. “You guys have joined some kind of religious cult or something. What’s that organization called, ‘Kill Autistics Dead’ or something like that?”

  “Don’t use that word,” Mom warns me.

  “What word? ‘Autistics’? That’s what they call themselves, Mom.” I almost say “what we call ourselves,” but stop it in time. “I know, it’s called ‘Stop Autism Dead,’ but what’s the fracking difference? You’re killing me here. You don’t want me to be me, you want some Frankenstein overhaul so I can be someone else, someone you actually like.”

  My face must be about twenty shades of puce, because everyone backs away from me a little bit, like my skin might burn them.

  “See,” I say. “You admit it. You don’t like me at all. You never did. You don’t even deny that you think I’m not a real musician, that I don’t have the talent.”

  “Cindy, stop,” Dad says. “Talent has nothing to do with anything, But there’s no money in music for anyone but a few huge stars. And you’ve proven to us that you can’t handle your studies and playing that pandeiro at the same time.” Note that he doesn’t deny disliking me or thinking I have no talent. I know some shrink told him not to take the bait from me, but it’s not just that; he knows I wouldn’t believe him. And he’s calling me Cindy again.

  “And there is guaranteed money in what, exactly? You think doctors don’t burn out and have to leave the profession? Neither of you ever went to med school, you don’t have any idea what you’re asking of me.”

  “You still haven’t apologized,” Mom says.

  “Oh, okay.” I try to think of a good one. “I’m sorry I didn’t realize that there was only room in this house for one scam artist, and it can’t be me.”

  Mom smacks me in the face. She has never done that before.

  And I have never slapped anyone before. So when I slap her back, I don’t realize how hard I’m doing it, and she careens backwards, hits her head on the side of the door, and collapses. Tam shrieks. I gasp. Mom didn’t injure me when she hit me, but I can still feel the sting on my face, the shock, the imprint of her hand.

  “I didn’t mean to hit her back that hard,” I whisper to Dad. “You can kill me now if you want to.”

  But he’s not paying attention to me. He’s pulling out his phone, while Mom sits up and groans. Tam leans over her and asks her, “Mom! Are you okay? Can you talk?”

  I’m supposed to be asking her that, right? Since I injured her? Or would that just sound hypocritical, if I said something now?

  “Hello,” he says into the phone, with his voice shaking, “I..I think my wife is unconscious.”

  “No, I’m not,” Mom says, a little faintly but not slurring her words. “I never lost consciousness. Let me talk to them.” Dad hands her the phone while she’s sitting there on the floor, and there’s a lot of “uh-huh” and “no” from Mom, this time at her normal volume, but I don’t know what they’re asking her. Then she says, “I tripped and fell. I think it was over a mechanical pencil or something like that. My daughters leave pencils on the floor all the time.” She laughs a lilting laugh, the way you’d expect “Shelley Kelly” to do.

  Dad starts to say something, but
Mom waves him off, shaking her head rapidly. “I think I just got a little woozy for a second, but I’m okay. If you want to send EMTs over to check me out, that’s fine, but I was never unconscious. I might have a little bit of a headache, but that’s all.”

  Dad’s jaw is (figuratively) on the floor. I glance over at Tam, and she just raises her eyebrows noncommittally. Maybe she knows what Mom is doing, but I don’t, and Dad sure doesn’t.

  When Mom is done talking to the 911 operator, she punches the off button and tucks Dad’s phone under her, like she thinks he’s going to grab it away from her and call them again. “Dan, before you say anything,” Mom says, “the last thing we need is for Cynthia to get in trouble over this.”

  “I think…it’s a little late for that,” I say, very quietly. My face doesn’t sting any more, but head is still sloshing. That’s not an injury, right? That’s just me being rattled. That’s what my head feels like. A rattle. Built-in percussion.

  “She means legal trouble,” Tam says. “If Mom says you injured her, then there’s going to be some social worker investigation and we could both wind up in foster care while they sort it out.”

  I try hard to access the left side of my brain, the logic side. I’m still hearing that smack in my ear, over and over. “So…so what happens if I say she slapped me, even if I’m not injured? I mean physically? Isn’t it state law that it’s only abuse if there’s an injury, physically?” I did manage to remember something from last year’s Civics class, yay me.

  “We could still wind up in foster care, considering that Mom just hit her head, and it wouldn’t take them long to connect the dots.”

  “At least we’d have each other.”

  “No, they’d put us in separate homes. And believe me, a foster home is probably your worst nightmare. It’s like 24/7 screaming kids, constant drama, not to mention food you wouldn’t be able to digest. You’d have a headache all the time and never get any sleep.”

  “You mean it would be just like now,” I say. My words sound a little slurry. Tam looks away from me.

  I glance over at Mom. She doesn’t have any outward signs of being injured at the moment, but she hasn’t tried to stand up yet. “I’m not going to ask you to lie for me,” she says. “I know I’m the one who started it, and I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have slapped you.”

  “Technically you’re not asking me to lie,” I say, very slowly and deliberately. “But the message I’m getting here is that you’d all prefer it if I did.”

  Mom takes a deep breath. “You do what you think is right, Cynthia.”

  I look at Dad, and he nods in agreement, as Mom helps herself to her feet.

  “Are you okay?” I ask Mom.

  She doesn’t answer me.

  As the paramedics examine Mom in our living room, I ask myself: so what’s “right?” Through the sloshing in my brain, I manage to determine that I don’t give half a gerbil doodle what happens to my parents, other than not wanting anything medically wrong with Mom because of what I did. If they want me to lie, or at least not bring up the subject, to make them look good, the hell with that.

  But should I do it for me? And Tam? She knows what foster homes are like; her friend Ruby lives in one, and they never go to Ruby’s place unless they have to. As bad as my current situation is, a foster home might be even worse. A true sensory dystopia.

  The devil you know, etcetera.

  After the EMTs do some tests on Mom, they say she has a “very mild concussion.” She doesn’t need to be taken to the hospital, but she does need to rest as much as possible for the rest of the week and stop whatever she’s doing if she gets dizzy. They tell Dad to stay by her side for the next twenty-four hours to make sure her symptoms don’t get worse.

  Right after that, the cops show up—both female, one about a size 2 and the other about a size 22. They take us each into the bedroom one at a time for questioning—first Mom, then Dad, then Tam, and then me. Mechanical pencils. Remember that, C. The narrative is mechanical pencils.

  They’d all pass a polygraph test easily, I’m sure. They’re all smooth as spandex. They take an extra long time with Dad. Tam says they’re trying to figure out if he hit her, though I can’t imagine how they’d think a guy his size could beat up someone Mom’s size. Then again, I got her pretty good without even trying, and I don’t weigh any more than he does.

  Then it’s my turn. I am the kind of person who would flunk a polygraph even if she was telling the truth. Polygraphs measure how nervous you are, not how honest you are.

  I could get out of here, right now, if I wanted to. I could light that match. I’ve never had that kind of power in my hands. But I could destroy myself with it, too, not just them.

  I have no idea what’s going to come out of my mouth, until it does.

  First I fake a coughing fit, to stall a few seconds for time. Then I take a sip from my sippy cup of distilled water, to gain a few more seconds.

  Then I say it.

  “Yeah…I left this mechanical pencil on the floor and Mom tripped over it and hit her head on the door. I’m always dropping those on the floor. She’s tripped on them before, but she’s never hit her head. I feel terrible about it.”

  I don’t sound remotely believable to my own ears, but my ears are not standard issue.

  I look at the two cops, who are standing in front of me as I’m sitting on my parents’ bed. At least, as much as I can manage to. Do they believe me, or do they just not want to borrow trouble?

  Then the cops look at each other and nod, and the skinny cop addresses me. “Thank you, Cynthia. Your testimony is a big help.” Then I follow them out to the living room.

  “Okay,” the skinny cop says to all of us, “I think we have what we need here. Belinda, you get as much rest and sleep as you can. If you need anything, you can call us.”

  The fat cop smooths out her uniform pants as she’s walking toward the front door with the skinny cop. Then she looks at me and grins. “And Cynthia, keep those pencils off the ground, okay? Those can be dangerous.”

  I nod and smile with my lips only.

  Once the cops are gone, the enormity of everything that just happened hits me like a brick on the head. I’m still here. Still without my music. I just lied to the cops, along with my entire family. Who all hate me right now anyway. Even Tam probably hates me, she won’t even look at me. Why didn’t I tell the truth? At least the people in a foster home wouldn’t hate me, they’d just find me inconvenient and annoying. I’m used to that.

  “I have to go lie down,” Mom says.

  “Do you need anything?” Tam asks her.

  “Nothing right now,” Mom says. “But thanks for asking.” She goes into the master bedroom, and Dad pads along after her, and they close and lock the bedroom door.

  “I have to lie down, also,” Tam says, and goes off to her bedroom before we can talk about any of it. I’ve probably alienated her, too. I at least hope she knows I didn’t mean to give Mom a concussion. I am not a fists person, I am a words person. If anything, I know that now more than ever.

  And now I have my own bedroom, stripped of any evidence of musicianship, stripped of even an Internet connection, stripped of everything that was the real me, to retreat into, with only my rattly head for company.

  You have your vocal cords, your hands, a pen, and blank paper, Spectral Amy whispers in my inner ear. You can still make music. Clap, snap, pat your lap and sing.

  I can’t believe I wrote “lyrics” on the cover of that notebook, I answer her in my head. How can I be a musician when I’m that fracking incompetent? I might as well have written “steal me and burn me” on that notebook.

  The whole reason songs rhyme is so people can remember them without writing them down, Spectral Amy intones. Songs existed before paper did.

  I go to my room, grab the stupid-phone, and realize that they didn’t give me the charger for it. Fortunately, it takes the same charger my real phone does. When it has enough juice to start, I send R
enate a text:

  Hi Ren, it’s Cynthia, parents took my phone and gave me this stupid-phone b/c report card. Punishments out wazoo. Have to pay big $$ for every text + call minute, so could you meet me 15 mins early at school tomorrow and I’ll tell you everything in person?

  I wait a couple of minutes for an answer and don’t get one. Probably because she’s not hearing my assigned ringtone.

  Then I grab the phone, a pile of blank paper, and yes, a mechanical pencil (I’ll never look at those the same way again), slip into the closet where I have a blanket duct-taped to the door, turn on the light, and try as hard as I can to remember the words I wrote to “Emancipated Minor,” which was about two-thirds finished when my notebook was snatched. If this song is worth remembering, I should be able to remember it. I pat my lap, snap, clap, in the rhythm I created for it, and hum the opening nylon-string guitar riff that someone else will have to play because I don’t know how.

  Here it comes:

  How will I ever get out of this place if I don’t live to tell about it

  Too many people want that to happen, I won’t give them the satisfaction

  Someone could come and rescue me but somehow I highly doubt it

  I can’t wait until it’s too late and I’m stuck in a tiny round hole

  For the rest of my life, that can’t be right, I’ve got to free my soul

  Emancipated Minor

  I’ve got to be an Emancipated Minor

  Jump on an ocean liner and set out on the sea

  To discover me

  Spectral Amy bursts into applause and delighted shrieks. Yeah. I got this. They can’t take everything, no matter how hard they try.

  Now all I need is a second verse. But first I have to do my homework. Oh God. My fracking homework. How?

  The stupid-phone buzzes. Only one person has the number. I grab it eagerly and read Renate’s text:

  I wouldn’t get up earlier for just anyone, but for you I will.

  DAY 87

  At 7:45 the next morning, I meet Renate in front of the school. We go over to the grandstands and I tell her everything that went down yesterday, and she punctuates every other sentence I utter with a “holy crap” or similar exclamation.

  “So let me see if I understand this,” Renate says. “Your parents did all this because you allegedly lied to them about how you were doing in school, even though you tried to tell them and they stuck their fingers in their ears. And then, after this…altercation that your mom started with you…they pressured you to literally lie to law enforcement?”

  I let my jaw hang for a second, then shake out my head to get going again. I never would have thought about it that way. Until right now, I’ve been thinking that I’m the one who did the terrible thing, the thing that required Mom to have medical attention and police at the house. “I thought they did that to protect me.”

  “They did it to protect themselves,” Renate corrects me. “If you wind up in juvie, or some foster home, there’s a good chance they get canned by Dr. Nansi. She comes by like twice a year for an inspection, right? Plus, you never would have hit your mom if she hadn’t hit you first. You don’t even like to swat mosquitoes.”

  Of course Renate is right. None of this ever would have happened if they had just told me I couldn’t watch TV for a month, or something like that. Now I’m getting mad all over again. “Oh, and guess what. I asked them if I was barred from seeing you, and they said no, as long as it’s at our house. In fact, they want you to come over more often so they can see how you’re influencing me. Like I’m some blank notepad with no ideas of my own.”

  “Oh, really?” Renate’s face lights up with an evil grin. “They should be careful what they wish for.”

  “Don’t make any more trouble for me, Ren,” I beg her. “I know you want to strangle them and I don’t blame you, but I’m on thin enough ice already.”

  Renate pulls the fake-fur-trimmed hood of her parka over her head. The hood is so big that it covers her eyes. “I think you have a lot more power here than you realize.”

  “You want me to expose them? If I expose them, I expose me, too. I can’t win this one.” I haven’t actually acknowledged officially that I’m not “off the spectrum,” even to Renate--but at this point, at least, I’m not actively disputing it.

  “You’re going to get exposed anyway,” Renate says. “It’s inevitable. Your teachers are already calling your parents and telling them about your sudden fascination with light fixtures. You’re not going to reverse that process. It only goes in one direction.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because people get worse at covering things up over time, not better.” She fishes a Chapstick out of her purse and goes over her lips with it. “Believe me, I know. All it took was one girl at school noticing that my feet were facing the wrong way when I was in the toilet stall, and before I knew it, I was whisked off to an eating disorder clinic.”

  “That’s different,” I say. “If you hadn’t gotten treated for that, you could have died. Autism isn’t like that.”

  “But you’re acting like it is. You think that if you get exposed, your whole family will starve to death and you’ll be homeless. It doesn’t have to be like that.”

  I feel myself welling up with tears. How do I even begin to tell Renate what’s really going on? A couple of weeks ago, she made some snide remark about girls who created this whole fantasy life around actors and musicians and what airheads they were. Her George Clinton thing was different, she said. She actually did meet him once, at some book signing for his memoir, and he signed her vinyl copy of Maggot Brain and smiled. But she didn’t have fantasies about him as a person, she insisted. She just really, really respected him as a musician and songwriter. I don’t know whether I totally believe her or not, but it’s made me a little more afraid to tell her about Amy. It seems so juvenile compared to her purely-musical appreciation of P-Funk, even if her appreciation expressed itself in walking down the halls at school chanting about dookies until they hit the eject button.

  The other piece of it is, I actually have a real, in-the-flesh friend now, who encourages me to do music. So why do I even need Spectral Amy, if I have Renate? Because real Amy is a percussionist? And made records when she was my age? Is that really why? There has to be some other reason Spectral Amy keeps showing up, even now. And I have no idea what that reason is. Not yet. How can I explain what I can’t even understand?

  I will have to try to sneak up on it. Like Spectral Amy says, Renate doesn’t need to be told everything all at once. But Amy is such a big part of me that I almost feel like if she doesn’t know Amy, or the Cyan Beaut thing, she doesn’t know me. Telling Renate will probably just cement in her mind that I’m a nutjob, and maybe even an airhead. Maybe if she gets it in small enough bites, it’ll go down easier. But the more I think about it, the more I want to cry.

  Renate rubs my arm gently. “Do you want a hug?”

  I nod. But having her arms around me just makes me cry harder. I really am a nutjob.

  At lunch that day, which we’re eating outdoors although it’s a little too cold out, Renate buys a cup of yogurt and a half pint of milk, even though she hates milk unless it’s in cereal. When I ask her about it, she says, “We’re going to use these things to make you some percussion instruments. We’re going to empty them, wash them out, collect pebbles and acorns and pinecone pieces, and you will have a pair of shakers, cleverly disguised as food.”

  “Food I can’t eat,” I remind her.

  “Oh, that’s right,” she says. “Okay. So once we get the stuff that goes inside the shakers, we cover the shakers with duct tape.” She reaches into her purse and pulls out a roll of light purple duct tape and holds it up. “Ta-da.”

  “You keep purple duct tape in your purse?”

  “We were learning how to make duct tape wallets in art class, so it’s your lucky day. I just happened to bring my favorite color duct tape from home today.”

  I laug
h. “You are such a freak.”

  “Takes one to know one.”

  “No argument here.” I stare at the yogurt cup. All of a sudden, I’m thinking that my chia seed mush with sunflower seed butter and desiccated lamb intestines isn’t going to cut it for lunch. “I want to eat that yogurt.”

  Renate looks around us to see if anyone is listening in. Once she determines that the coast is clear, a conspiratorial smile creeps across her face. “Are you serious?”

  “I am so sick of this un-food I could puke. So who cares if I puke from eating yogurt?”

  “How do you know you’ll like it?”

  “Do you not want me to do it?”

  “No, I’m just playing devil’s advocate to make sure it’s what you really want.”

  “It has blueberries in it, right? How bad could it be?”

  She nods and hands me the yogurt and a spork. “Okay, you passed the test. You are wicked, Cynner Woman.” That’s what she’s been calling me lately sometimes, Cyn (sounds like sin) or some variation of it like Cynner. I kind of like it. Cyn is almost Cyan; all it’s missing is the A, which is what I need earn this next quarter in geometry and biology so I can get my notebook back. And a little extra calcium couldn’t hurt my chances, right?

  I unwrap the spork, pull the top and the inner seal off the yogurt, and dip the spork into it. “So the fruit is already mixed in?”

  “Uh huh.”

  I tentatively bring a tiny sporkful of yogurt to my lips, stick out my tongue, and lick it off. Two seconds later, I’m grabbing a napkin and spitting into it, like I just accidentally ate tile grout.

  “Uccch! That is so disgusting!” I say, as Renate throws her head back and roars with laughter. “Why didn’t you tell me it tastes like mashed green bananas?”

  “Everyone’s tastes are different,” Renate says, still giggling. “I happen to really like yogurt, but a lot of people hate it. But of all the things to break your lifelong diet with…why didn’t you go for something like chocolate? You know, something that’s not an acquired taste?”

  “The yogurt was there. Do you want the rest of it?”

  “Yes. Please.” I hand my future percussion instrument over to her, and she licks off her own spork and uses it on the yogurt, making yummy noises when the spork goes into her mouth. “Nectar of the gods.”

  I shake my head in dismay.

  As Renate is slurping up the last of the yogurt, the first bell rings. “So I’m going to wash these things out in the bathroom, and put the duct tape on them,” Renate says, indicating the yogurt cup and the milk container. “After school, we can walk over to your house, and on the way there, we’ll collect the noisemaking stuff, and put one more piece of duct tape on to seal them. I’ll keep them in my bag until it’s time for me to go home, and then I’ll pass them on to you.”

  “You think we’ll get away with this?”

  “Did they say you couldn’t make percussion instruments of your own from other people’s dairy containers?”

  “No,” I say. “But they also didn’t say they were taking all my music away, until they did it.”

  “This will be different,” she insists. “This time, they’ll have to answer to me, too.”

  One and TWO and three AND four AND…one and TWO and three AND four AND…

  We walk to my place as slowly as possible, picking up little pebbles (they have to be the size of half a thumbnail or smaller), shredding pinecones, stomping broken acorns, and putting them into the purple dairy containers. With each clunk of a noisemaking object hitting the bottom of the container, my pulse thumps too. My parents didn’t say that walking home slower and collecting pebbles was going to get me more punished, although yesterday I discovered just how big they were on the ex post facto stuff, so who knows what fresh hell they’ll put me through for it. But I don’t care. I tried to be good, and look where it got me.

  Once we have about a dozen little bits in each container, I shake them to see what kind of noise they make, at a nice steady 110 beats per minute. One and TWO and three AND four AND…one and TWO and three AND four AND…

  “Not quite shakery enough,” I say. “Maybe three or four more things in each of them?”

  We find a few more things, then I shake them again. I like that the yogurt container has kind of a deep, clunky sound and the milk carton is higher-pitched and more rattly because we put tinier objects into it. One and TWO and three AND four AND…

  Renate starts doing a little slinky dance along with my rhythm. “I made you dance,” I say. “I think we can tape these up now.”

  She takes the duct tape and a pair of sewing scissors (the three-inch blunt kind that we’re allowed to bring to school) out of her purse and tapes up the containers for me. “So what were you playing?”

  “Just a basic bossa nova rhythm. But it’s actually something I’ve been working on myself. My parents snatched my lyrics notebook, but I managed to remember how it goes, so I guess it’s—“

  Renate recoils in horror. “They took your notebook? You didn’t tell me that.”

  “Well, yeah. They pretty much ransacked my entire room.” I am almost at the point where I can tell her about the one music-related thing in my room they didn’t steal. Almost. So, so close.

  “They left your fine jewelry,” Renate says. “They did this to send you a message, and the message is, you’re making music over our dead bodies. This isn’t about your grades. This is about them being on a power trip to get you to conform, and the grades are just an excuse. Cynner, we have to stop them.”

  “How?”

  “Play me your song. Right here. If anyone happens to hear it, tough titmouse. People have to know you’re serious about this. Everyone should know. You want to make music so bad that you’ll collect dirty pebbles and get pinecone splinters for it. Right? Isn’t that true?”

  I inhale in a series of tiny little gasps. “I…”

  “Am I wrong?”

  I let out my breath, then start breathing more or less normally again. “No. No, you’re not. Not wrong. It’s true.” I take a few deep breaths from my diaphragm, the way the singing lesson videos said to do. “But…but I’m not warmed up.”

  “Ahhh-aaaaaaahhhh-aaaaaah,” Renate sings, starting at middle C and sliding up a fifth (the first five notes of a scale) to G, then back down to middle C. “You know how to do that, right?”

  “Ahhh-aaaaaahhh-aaaaah,” I repeat after her.

  “Good. Just keep doing that until you’re two notes, or four half tones, above the highest note in your song, and then reverse it until you’re two notes below the lowest note.”

  Turns out the song doesn’t cover that many notes, probably less than an octave, so it only takes me a minute or two to warm up. People pass us on the sidewalk and give us funny looks, or laugh. But they’ve always done that to me, so I might as well do something I like while they snicker.

  “Okay,” Renate says, when we’re about a block away from my house, on the opposite side of the street. “Stop walking. Sing your song here.” She looks at me intently. “Unless you really, really don’t want to. I don’t want to pressure you into doing something you—“

  “No,” I say, my pulse beginning to ascend, my mouth drying out. “I…I do want to. It’s just…you know, scary, to sing something I wrote where people can hear me.”

  “Well, remember when I said it was your lucky day? Because here comes about the most nonthreatening audience you could have.” She nods in the direction of a group of little girls, about ten of them, in sky-blue and brown uniforms and beanies with matching winter jackets, coming down the sidewalk towards us, accompanied by a young-looking, willowy woman with light brown shoulder-length curly hair tied at the side of her head in a sky-blue scrunchie. “Brownies. They’re between seven and nine years old. And that troop leader barely looks old enough to drink. They’re gonna love you, even if the girls don’t understand a word you sing.”

  “Really? How do we—“

  “You just sing,
when I give you the signal. I’ll take care of the rest of it.” Then she hesitates. “Wait a second, there’s no PG-13 language in this, is there? I guess I should have asked that first.”

  I flash back to the Amy video from Your Generation, and all those fantastically perplexed little kids getting an unforgettable crash course in music. I don’t know if I’m going to blow their minds like Amy did on that show, but I’m starting to get excited by the idea of getting a chance to try. “No, it’s clean.”

  Oh, Spectral Amy sighs, I can’t wait to see this.

  “Okay, good,” Renate says.

  “But I don’t have a second verse yet.”

  “Just sing the first one twice. Who’s gonna know?” As soon as the Brownie troop is about to pass us, Renate says, “Hey, you guys, Cynthia’s about to sing a song she just wrote, you want to hang out and watch?”

  “Oh, wow,” the troop leader says. “Live music. Sound good, girls?”

  They all nod and say yes, and Renate says, “Excellent. You all know how to snap your fingers?”

  Apparently girls between seven and nine years old love to show off the fact that they can snap their fingers, because they all get these big smiles on their faces as they demonstrate that particular skill for us. I wonder if there’s a Brownie proficiency badge for finger-snapping now.

  “Rock,” Renate says. “Okay, let’s wait until Cynthia gets her shaker rhythm started, and then when I snap my fingers, y’all follow along with me.” She looks at me and counts off. “One, two, a one, two, three, four…”

  As I begin to shake my new shakers, I count out loud, “One and TWO and three AND four AND, one and TWO and three AND four AND,” and on the third bar, Renate snaps her fingers on two and four and the Brownies all join in. Most of them aren’t landing straight on two and four, or following my rhythm either, but they’re close enough that they won’t mess me up. The delayed syncopation feels nice, actually. Really nice. They’re speeding me up to maybe 120 BPM, and the song actually sounds better faster. So then I start singing to my jazzy-bluesy melody:

  How will I ever get out of this place

  If I don’t live to tell about it…

  “Louder!” Renate yells.

  “Too many people want that to happen,” I sing at a louder volume, feeling my pitch wobble a little. But nobody cares. They’re snapping, they’re playing patty-cake in time with me, they’re dancing, they’re whooping…I don’t think I’ve ever felt this good.

  “I won’t give them the satisfaction!” I shout, and Renate shouts back, “You tell ‘em, Cyn! Woo hoo!”

  Once I’ve gone through the whole thing once, I repeat it over again like Renate says, this time getting louder and louder as I approach the end of the verse.

  “Someone could come and rescue me,” I belt out at the top of my lungs, going for an octave jump on that last word, and hitting it dead-on. “But somehow I highly doubt—“

  “Cynthia?”

  I turn around and see Mom standing there in her sweats and slippers, with the mailbox key in one hand and what looks like a bunch of bills in the other. For a second, I almost don’t recognize her, because she never leaves the house looking as ratty as she does now, with her hair sticking out, no makeup, and scuffed slippers. This is a woman who primps for an hour a day in the bathroom even if she’s not leaving the house. She also looks seriously irked, and I instantly freeze. Song over. How much of it did she hear before she said something?

  “Hello, Renate,” Mom says, like she’s saying hi to some kid who egged her car once.

  “Hi,” Renate says, with an equal lack of enthusiasm.

  “Wait a minute,” the troop leader says. “You’re that Cynthia and Renate?”

  “You mean there’s more than one?” Renate says. It’s such a preposterous thing to say that an involuntary snort-laugh punches its way out of me.

  The troop leader laughs, too. “No, no, but…I’m Ellie Shunsberg. My husband is your homeroom teacher. He talks about you two all the time.”

  Renate and I glance at each other like we’re on one of those TV shows where someone comes out with a hidden camera and tells you the last twenty minutes of your life were all a joke. “Oh, God,” Renate moans, palming her forehead. “I forgot this town has about seven people in it. I’m so—“

  “He doesn’t say anything bad about you,” Ellie Shunsberg says. “In fact, it’s really the opposite. He says the two of you are a breath of fresh air. But I don’t think he knew Cynthia could sing like that, or he would have told me.” She glances over at Mom. “Are you Cynthia’s mom?”

  Mom is standing there looking like she just got the hidden camera trick pulled on her, too. “Yyy…yes,” she manages to say. “Yes, I am.”

  “Your daughter and her friend are my husband’s favorite things about his job,” Ellie says. “I’m serious. They make his day. They’re so funny, so smart, so musical…”

  “Thanks,” I say, feeling a little flushed. Other than from Dr. Ngo, this is more praise than I’ve gotten from an adult since I was Brownie age. I actually had no idea Mr. S. thought of me so highly. I take a look at Mom, who looks like you could knock her over by coughing two feet from her ear. “I guess homeroom teachers don’t bother calling your parents to tell them everything’s going great.”

  “He probably should,” Ellie says. “But he’s new at this. He’s just getting the hang of it.”

  “Before him, most of my homeroom teachers barely knew my name,” I say. “He actually wants to know us.”

  “Is she going to finish singing?” one of the little girls asks. “Because I really have to pee.”

  I laugh. “Go pee. We can finish this up some other time.” If Mom wasn’t standing right here, I’d keep singing. But she’s heard enough already.

  Wise move, Spectral Amy tells me. You don’t need anyone killing your art now, you’re just getting started.

  “Cynthia does have a wonderful voice,” Mom says to Ellie. “We don’t get to hear enough of it.” My God. What a fracking hypocrite. How does she even stand herself?

  I’m not the greatest at reading subtle facial expressions—okay, I flat-out suck at it—but I know an oh-really? eyebrow raise when I see one, and just for a second, I see one from Ellie Shunsberg. I wonder what she’ll say to Mr. S. when she gets home. I think I’d pay to watch that conversation. “Well, it was great to meet you all,” she says. “But I’ve gotta get you girls back home so I can relieve Brian from baby duty.”

  “She said doody,” one of the Brownies says, and they all giggle, Ellie included.

  “D-U-T-Y, Mikaela. Not D-O-O-D-Y,” Ellie says, patting Mikaela on top of her beanie.

  “I knew that,” Mikaela says. “It was a joke.”

  “Your song is awesome,” one of the bigger (probably older) girls says to me. “I hope you sing a lot more. I’m Cat. I like to sing too.”

  “Thanks, Cat,” I say. “You have my favorite name.”

  As soon as they leave, I fold my arms and look smugly at Mom. “So Mom, what do you have to say for yourself now, huh?”

  “This doesn’t change anything,” Mom says. “Your homeroom teacher doesn’t grade you.”

  “He grades me,” Renate says. “I have him for geography. He gave me an A. And he made me work for it, too.”

  “Mom, did you not hear anything she said? My homeroom teacher shows up at his job because of me. Because of us. Why do you not want me to be that person?”

  Mom stumbles backwards a little bit, and I don’t think it’s because of what I just said. She’s obviously not over the concussion.

  “Crap,” I say to Renate. “We have to get her into the house and call the advice nurse, like now.”

  “I’m fine,” Mom says.

  “You shouldn’t be on your feet,” I tell her.

  We get Mom back to the house and Dad calls the advice nurse, who tells him over the phone speaker what I just told Mom: she shouldn’t be on her feet now. In fact, she probably shouldn’t even be sit
ting up. After he hangs up, he looks at us and says in a monotone voice, “I’m going to take care of blog moderation tonight and close comments when we’re ready for bed. We have dinner ready to go, Tam can just put it in the oven.” Then they both go into the bedroom and close the door, without another word, and we go out again and sit on to the lawn to talk. Mom still hasn’t said a word directly to me about my song, or my singing.

  “They are so cold,” Renate whispers. “Especially him. I mean, I thought my dad was an ice cube. He has nothing on yours.”

  “It’s probably from fishing in Alaska,” I joke. “My dad doesn’t have that excuse.”

  “Seriously, though, you should have slapped both of them. I know that’s a bad thing to say, but—“

  “Yeah, it is. Let’s not go there, okay?”

  “Sorry.” Renate shows me the shakers in her bag, which miraculously weren’t confiscated. “But I am keeping these as a memento for a momentous occasion. That song is a killer, and I’m not just saying that.”

  “But it’s not exactly commercial, and it doesn’t even have a second verse yet. You want to write one?” Then I remember I didn’t thank her for the compliment, but she starts talking again before I can thank her. I suppose she’s used to that sort of thing from me by now.

  “I can’t write rhyming verse to save my life. But as a concept…I think your second verse should be about what you’re going to do to emancipate.” She cocks her head and looks at me quizzically. “So are you actually serious about wanting to emancipate, or is that like a metaphor or something?”

  “I’ve been looking into it,” I tell her. “But the standards are really strict. I can’t even apply until I’m sixteen, and you have to be working at least twenty-five hours a week and making enough money to pay for all your own living expenses, plus covering your own health insurance. I don’t know how I’d ever do that.”

  “So when does Tam turn eighteen?”

  “April. Why?”

  “I don’t know. I was just thinking that if she’s going to be eighteen soon, she wouldn’t have to worry about being put into a foster home if you rat them out.”

  I pick up a stray pinecone and start picking at it. “No such luck. And even five more months of this feels like forever.”

  She thinks for a minute. “I know what you can do. You can write an exposé of them and of Dr. Catherine Nansi. You’d get a book deal in like six seconds if you did that.”

  “How’s that going to work?” I say. “I mean, it’s not like someone would give me a check with five figures on it for writing an exposé, and I could move out before they ever found out about it. Besides, they’re not all that famous. People whose kids are on the spectrum know about them, and disability rights people know about them and complain about them and stuff, but nobody else would know about them.”

  “Maybe you could live with us,” Renate says.

  “You guys can’t afford that.”

  “How do you know that? Did you hack into our bank accounts or something?”

  “Not so loud,” I whisper. “They can probably hear you.”

  Renate claps a hand over her mouth. “Sorry,” she says at a much lower volume. “But I really think you need to watch out for your dad. I just get an intensely bad vibe from him.”

  “Worse than my mom?”

  “She’s more obvious about it, but your mom at least has some feeling in her voice when she talks to you. Your dad…brrrrr. I don’t know if he can love anyone.”

  “What makes you—“

  “Oh my God,” Renate interrupts me. “Your finger is totally bleeding, Cynner.”

  I look down at the finger that was toying with the pinecone, and sure enough, there’s a big old gash in the fingertip, like a huge paper cut. I am such an expert at slicing myself open without looking. Renate hands me a tissue for me to press down on the cut, and then hands me a second tissue to use as a spare. I stand up, preparing to run into the house to cleanse my wound, and stick my hand in the air to get the bleeding to stop, like I always do when I gash myself.

  “You’d better go,” I tell Renate. “Before they accuse you of cutting me.”

  Renate left—at my request--before I could tell her about Amy. Did I do that on purpose, cut myself so I could delay telling her for one more day?

  Don’t do that to yourself, Spectral Amy coos, while I’m sitting on my bed, looking at my Band-Aid-wrapped finger. I hate Band-Aids so much. I especially think they’re disgusting when I see them around a swimming pool, I have actually (on three occasions) held in my nausea until I got out of the pool and then went to the bathroom and gave up my lunch, without telling anyone. I hate that I have to have one on my finger now. I pick at it mindlessly.

  Don’t do what to myself? I ask Spectral Amy. Cut myself, or accuse myself of doing it intentionally when I didn’t?

  The second thing, Spectral Amy says.

  I actually tried cutting myself once on purpose, I confess to Spectral Amy. It didn’t make me feel any better, and I should have known it wouldn’t. I am a pain wimp.

  Are you worried that Renate is going to be jealous of me or something? Spectral Amy murmurs.

  Now that is something I never even thought of before. Of course not. I know you don’t really exist.

  I might not physically exist in this form, Spectral Amy says. But what you love about my voice came out of the real me. And maybe it would bother Renate if you liked my voice more than hers? Or if she thought you liked me better than her?

  Renate knows better than that, I say to Amy, yanking the blasted Band-Aid off my finger and attempting to pitch it in the trash. I miss and have to get up and place it straight into the can. I don’t believe that at all.

  But maybe she’s right. Maybe I do.

  Even if I know it’s irrational. I know. I know. I know.

  As the minutes before dinnertime tick by, I think of my little performance out in the street. For about ninety exhilerating seconds, I got a taste of what it would be like to be Cyan, beating out a catchy rhythm that makes people want to move in time to it, have people identify with what I’m saying, hearing myself make those incredible noises, all of it. So what if it was a bunch of Brownies and my homeroom teacher’s wife? I still saw them move. I moved them. I did. And I moved me, too. And Renate, let’s not forget her.

  And my parents will take any chance they can get to make sure it never happens again.

  After dinner, Tam calls me into her room and tells me to shut the door behind me. I know I’m not allowed to close my own door as part of my punishment, but they didn’t say anything about Tam’s door. After I close the door, she hands me her tablet, with a big canary-eating grin on her face.

  “You have to read this, Cyn,” Tam says. She’s starting to pick up on the Cyn thing too, which is kind of cool. “Read what Mom wrote about you.”

  “Are you serious?” I say. “You know I’m not allowed to touch the Internet until—“

  “I think they’ll make an exception for this,” Tam says. “I really do.” She shoves the tablet at me, and reluctantly, I begin reading.

  I HEARD HER VOICE

  Today I have a headache. A bad one, the kind that requires quiet to make it go away. But while I was lying down, in my room, I heard something from out in the street that I had never heard before.

  Haley singing. And playing what sounded like some kind of percussion instrument, handmade out of her friend’s milk carton. And I heard the sound of something else: other people. Other fingers, other palms, snapping, clapping, making those rhythmic sounds only a group could make. Even the parade of feet stomping through the fall leaves seemed to sync up with Haley’s beat.

  Haley was leading a group in song. Her song.

  I could tell she wrote it. It was teenage-girl verse about how she wants more from life than just being in our little town and being the baby in the family. But she put her heart, her soul, and her lungs into it. She hit clear, bell-like high notes and dark rumbling low notes and every
thing in between. This is a voice I had never heard before, and yet I knew it was her. I felt her in between every note. There is a timbre that your own child produces, which a parent can hear no matter how well that child bends and shapes and disguises her voice.

  So why had I never heard that powerful voice before? Why would she sing to a group of little girls she just met, and not to us, her parents? Well, because she’s fifteen, that’s why. Moms of normal girls are always the last to know anything they’re up to. In our world, this is the happiest of developments.

  So I went outside and watched as she and her BFF put on this impromptu show for a Brownie-scout troop. Girls who still suffer from autism don’t do this. They don’t make up songs with their friends, they don’t invite others to hear them right out on the street. They face a future with no one hearing their voices, and in some cases maybe not much caring if anyone ever does. But this will not be Haley’s fate.

  If you feed your children well, this is what can happen.

  This can’t be real. The woman I just saw out there on the sidewalk, dripping with disapproval of me--so full of it even sweet, wholesome Ellie Shunsberg could see right through her--could not possibly have written this. No way.

  I read it again.

  Then a third time. This sequence of events still doesn’t pass earth logic standard, by my interpretation.

  I hand the tablet back to Tam. I plunk myself down in a beanbag chair and force myself to breathe from my diaphragm. I can feel resentment start to build in me, just the first tiny flickers, and I shake my head. “The only things in that essay that aren’t total BS are the punctuation marks.”

  “So none of that happened…at all?” Tam asks.

  “The big picture stuff did,” I say. “I did write a song. I did sing it to a bunch of Brownies who were walking by. Mom did hear me do it. But everything else is cheap plastic crap. She hated my song, Tam. She hated me for singing out in public when she and Dad did everything they could to get me to stop making music.”

  I’m becoming aware that my voice is probably carrying and that my parents might be able to hear me. But I can’t shut myself up. My mouth has a mind of its own.

  “And my song had nothing to do with small towns and baby of the family stuff. You know what the name of that song is? ‘Emancipated Minor.’ She heard me sing the exact words, ‘How am I ever gonna get out of here if I don’t live to tell about it?’ She heard me, and then she wrote that.” I feel the corner of my eye twitch, and press it with my finger. “Oh, and you missed the best part of all. That Brownie troop leader was my homeroom teacher’s wife. And she told Mom that he thought I was great, and Mom barely cracked a smile. She simpered something about what a wonderful voice I had and that she didn’t get to hear enough of it, and this lady actually gave her the eyebrow.” I do my best to mimic Ellie Shunsberg’s subtle-but-observable eyebrow raise. “She just met Mom like ten seconds before, and even she wasn’t buying it.”

  Tam sighs and shakes her head. “And I thought she was doing something nice for you. I had no idea it went down like that. I’m so sorry.”

  “And that stuff about girls with autism having no friends and no voice and no creativity, that’s crap too. Maybe some autistic girls don’t have those things, but some non-autistic girls don’t, either. If that’s the standard she’s using to prove that I’m quote-unquote in remission, then who knows, maybe I am still autistic.”

  There. I said it. It’s out. This is the first time I’ve said it out loud, to anyone. If Mom and Dad could actually hear me, this is when they would storm out of that bedroom and give me what-for. If that doesn’t piss them off, maybe Renate is right. Maybe they are walking ice cubes who can’t love anyone, although for some reason Renate thinks that only applies to Dad.

  But I hear no activity coming from that direction. And all Tam does is nod her head, almost like she knew it was coming. “Our parents are normal in name only,” Tam says. “I know a lot of people at school and online with brothers and sisters on the spectrum. Their parents aren’t like this.”

  “So you believe me.”

  Tam bites her lip.”I don’t want to believe you. But…that story does sound very Mom.”

  “Can’t you say something to them? Like, about the pandeiro, at least? From you, it might mean something.”

  She shakes her head. “I don’t think I’m their favorite person right now either. The other day I said something about how I was thinking about—just thinking about—applying to Rhode Island School of Design just to see if I could get into the industrial design program, and they about stroked out.”

  “Was that before report cards?”

  “Yep.”

  I let out a whew. “Maybe that’s why they went off on me, I was the last straw. But you are really good at drawing. You’d probably get into RISD, no sweat.”

  “I’m actually thinking of applying and not telling them.”

  “Can you do that?”

  “I can apply,” Tam says. “I just can’t get financial aid without their help. But there’s no guarantee that Caltech will take me anyway, so why put all my eggs in that basket?”

  “Because artists are all doooooomed to starve to death and dieeeee,” I deadpan.

  She picks up a felt-tip pen and starts scribbling angrily on the blotter on her desk. “I can’t believe she actually had the nerve to write an essay to make money off you singing, when she doesn’t support it at all. I mean, that’s just…shameless.” She puts the cap back on her pen and tosses it on her desk in disgust. “Let me see if I can get them to back away from the pandeiro, okay?”

  “Thanks.” I stand up from the beanbag chair and go to open the bedroom door to leave. Before I exit, I turn to her and say, “Normal in name only. NINO. That’s perfect.”

  After dinner and supplements, I get back to my room and that twenty-pound dinosaur laptop is sitting where my real laptop should be, staring at me and laughing. And then, for the first time today, it hits me that I have no Net connection. I can’t listen to any digital music (even digital versions of analog recordings are better than nothing), can’t check Amy’s Wikipedia page or browse the Net looking for stuff about her. Amy could die, and her obituary could be hitting the wires right now and I’d never know. This is torture.

  I’m still here, Spectral Amy says from under the bed, slightly muffled by the skeins of snarled yarn surrounding her album. Which I can’t even take out to look at, for fear of being busted.

  How can they do this to me? I wail at Spectral Amy, being careful to keep my physical mouth shut. I’m in jail. I am in fracking jail.

  Get your homework done and study for your tests, Spectral Amy says. I’m not going anywhere. When we’re done, you can change into your jammies, hit the lights, and you’ll remember every sound I ever made, like it’s right in your ear.

  I am dubious, but I attempt to do what she says. I push the on button for the Macbook, and hear it buzz and whirr. Last night I tried booting it up and it took fifteen minutes (I timed it), and then froze over and over again when I was trying (despite all the, ahem, distractions) to work. Now five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes go by, and the laptop still isn’t usable yet; all I get is the endless twirly ball of death. Then it conks out entirely. No picture, nothing. Well, now they pretty much have to give me my old machine back, if they want me to get anything done.

  I leave my room and see Dad in the kitchen, fixing himself a snack. Pickled garlic, it looks like. “Um, guess what?” I say. I don’t know what he’s going to say. Did he hear me ranting before?

  “What?” Dad says, barely glancing at me.

  “That old Macbook finally bit it. Doesn’t run at all. If you want to try to fix it be my guest, but in the meantime I have to get my work done.”

  “Hmmmm.” He takes a spoon and a fork out of the silverware drawer.

  “If you give me my old laptop back, I won’t have to bug you guys every time I need to look something up or print something,” I say, then practi
cally duck in anticipation of what he might throw at me, verbally or otherwise. “Last night I probably drove you up the wall, asking you to run my stuff through the Spanish translator about seventy-five-thousand times. And believe me, I didn’t want to ask you for anything, after all that happened.”

  He nods. “Yeah, that’s a good point. Fewer interruptions now might be better.” He stops what he’s doing and goes into the bedroom for a second, then emerges with my laptop and the power supply. “Just leave the old machine on the dining table and we’ll deal with it. Either I’ll fix it, or…”

  “Or not fix it?” I say, hoping to add a little levity to the proceedings.

  He laughs, but very mildly. “Right, or not fix it. But your laptop needs to be back on the dining table by eleven every night, and if we see any abuse of your time because of it—“

  “Oh, you won’t.” I debate telling him I read Mom’s blog post already. He’s not bringing it up. So for now I’m going to assume that he didn’t hear me before. Let the dormant flea eggs stay dormant, unless I start itching. “Thanks, Dad.”

  I go back to my room and plug in the laptop and boot it up. It’s up and ready to work on in less than two minutes. And when I get a browser window, the first thing I do, with my heart clanging away, is look up Amy’s Wikipedia page. It’s not there anymore.

  You failed their notoriety test, I tell Spectral Amy. But that’s their loss.

  I stick in my earphones and play her “Look Around” video twice, then clear out all my browsing history and cookies. I have to put up a new page for her. If they erase it, I’ll put it up again. But not now. Not now. I crack open my Spanish workbook. This is one of those take-home quizzes where they give you the questions in Spanish and the answers in English, and you have to tell them in Spanish if the answer is true or false, and why. That should be a slam-dunk. Que es la diferencia antes esta con accente y esta sin accente?

  Just look around…emancipate minor...ocean liner, discover me…

  I drum on my lap for a minute, then put the question through the translator, which I’m going to have to keep using until I stop confusing my Spanish and my Portuguese, and it comes out, “What is the difference between is without an accent and is with an accent?”, which doesn’t make any sense. If I knew how to input esta with an accent, I’d probably get a different answer, but I don’t know how to do accents on this keyboard.

  O-baaa, o-baaaa, o-baaaa…one-and-TWO-and-three-AND-four-AND…

  The test answer (in English) is: With an accent, it means is, without an accent it means are. Is that true or false? I think it’s true, but is it the entire truth? Doesn’t esta have another meaning? Or multiple other meanings? And if it does, does it make the statement false, or just incomplete? God. I hate questions like this.

  While chewing furiously on my thumb cuticle, I play the Amy video again two more times. I know I need to stop. If I spend eight minutes watching her for every five minutes studying, I’ll get nothing done for the rest of my life.

  But I can’t stop.

  But I have to stop.

  I really, really, really do.

  At 10:55 pm, I shut the laptop down and get it to the dining table by eleven sharp, my homework still incomplete.

  This is not going to work.

  “Why are you doing this to me?” I say out loud to Spectral Amy, once I’m back in my bedroom. “Why? Why do you want to own my entire brain?”

  A second later, I hear a soft knock on my door. I open it and Tam is standing there bleary-eyed in her nightgown. Before she can say anything, I whisper, “I was just having a bad dream, sorry, I’ll be okay,” and close the door quickly before she can see that I’m not in my pajamas yet.

  I never do get an answer from Spectral Amy. I take out a piece of paper and start writing out text for a new Wikipedia page for her, only to realize how ridiculous it is to write a Wikipedia page on fracking paper. I crumple up the paper and pitch it in the trash can next to the bed.

  I get into my pajamas and hit the lights. I’ve barely slept the last two nights, and I feel like I’m about to pass out, but her video is on autoplay in my mind. All night. When I’m not thinking about shakers and Brownies and my homeroom teacher’s wife, and bouncing up and down in my squeaky little bed, one-and-SQUEAK-and-three-SQUEAK-four-SQUEAK, one-and-SQUEAK-and-three-SQUEAK-four-SQUEAK…

  DAY 88

  “Your wife is awesome sauce, Mr. S.,” Renate says as she walks into homeroom about two seconds after I plop down in my seat, completely out of it. I think I had about ninety minutes of unconsciousness all of last night, after getting maybe four hours total for the prior two nights; it’s caught up to me, big time. “You must have done something right.”

  Mr. S. beams. “Or she did.” Then he turns to me and says, “She told me about that little concert the two of you gave out there on the sidewalk. She was very impressed.”

  “I didn’t do anything but direct traffic,” Renate says.

  I am so tired that I can’t even form a sentence, but I try. “You did more than that. You helped me percussion…er, make my percusssion. Instrument. Instruments. I’m tired.” I make snoring noises.

  “It was exciting, wasn’t it?” Renate says, winking at me. “Hard to come down after a performance.”

  “Did you read that pile of…”--I think for a second, remembering that I’m not supposed to make a habit out of cursing in here—“…of excrement my mom wrote about it?” A three-syllable word, wowsers. Didn’t think I had it in me.

  “Uh oh,” Renate says. “No, but I can only imagine. She did a total whitewash, right?”

  “I read it,” Mr. Shunsberg says. “And I have to say, her account of what happened differs from my wife’s pretty significantly.”

  “Believe your wife,” I say. “Always.” I lay my head down on my desk. I haven’t even had to try to take in information today, and already I’m out of brain space.

  “I didn’t know you played an instrument, Cynthia,” Shaina says.

  I raise my head off the desk, then put a fist down on the desk, pinky side down, and rest my chin on it. “I play an instrument?”

  “Yes,” Renate says. “You’re a percussionist. And you sing. And write your own songs. Why are you trying to hide that?”

  I close my eyes. “Because it’s nothing. Chick singers are a dime a dozen.” My feet start tapping rapidly on the floor, two bars of 6/8 time followed by a single bar of 2/2, then repeating over and over again. It’s the same rhythm as the opening to “Carpet Man,” a Jimmy Webb song on Amy’s album: RIGHT-right-right LEFT-left-left RIGHT-right-right LEFT-left-left RIGHT RIGHT. Jimmy Webb also wrote “Up, Up and Away,” the “bal-LOON” thing, which makes it even weirder than I haven’t said anything to Renate about it. RIGHT-right-right LEFT-left-left RIGHT-right-right LEFT-left-left RIGHT RIGHT…

  “Says your dad,” Renate says. “Who, I want everyone to know, is a brass-plated flying doucheplane.” She then addresses the rest of the room. “People, they took away her professional-grade Brazilian drum from her, which she had just mastered playing, because of a bad report card. They are evil. And the report card wasn’t even that bad. It was just unworthy of California flipping Institute of Technology.”

  My feet continue working away at the floor. “Ren, stop.”

  “Did they really?” Mr. Shunsberg says. With my feet still tapping, I open my eyes to look at him. He looks genuinely freaked out. So do some of the kids in the room, even some of the ones who have laughed at me before. “Seriously, Cynthia, is that true?”

  “Cyn, there’s nothing to be embarrassed about,” Renate said. “You did nothing wrong. Well, okay, you got a couple of C’s, but the punishment here doesn’t fit the crime.”

  RIGHT-right-right LEFT-left-left RIGHT-right-right LEFT-left-left RIGHT RIGHT, RIGHT-right-right LEFT-left-left RIGHT-right-right LEFT-left-left RIGHT RIGHT…

  “I…” I try to process everything that’s going on here. My homeroom teacher, who actually does something bes
ides take roll, now knows that my family’s blog is, at the very least, factually questionable. And he has seen me lose my speech and do all this stuff with my feet, which I want to stop doing but can’t. That means he’ll probably figure out in short order that I’m not “in remission,” if he hasn’t already. And the other kids in the class know about my ex-pandeiro and that I sing. That should be a net plus socially, especially if they also know my evil parents are trying to stop me. But that’s just one step away from them finding out about the rest of it, Spectral Amy included. “I…I…”

  “Remember what Pauline Kael said once,” Renate says to me. “’A good-girl artist is a contradiction in terms.’”

  In the blur that occurs in my head over the next ninety-ish seconds, someone asks Renate who Pauline Kael is, she tells them Pauline Kael was an influential film critic from the 1960s and 1970s, someone else asks me if I’m okay, and I don’t answer, they ask me again and I don’t answer, Renate says to Mr. Shunsberg, “Can you write us a note?”, and Renate picks up my arm and says, “Come on, we need to get you some air,” and leads me out of the classroom, grabbing my jacket off the chair on the way out.

  Once we’re in the hallway, Renate says to me, “Dude, what the hell? What did they do to you now—I mean, other than publish some bogus blog post, which they always do anyway?”

  “I miss Sedona,” I answer in a slurred murmur, even as I realize how ludicrous that must sound.

  I expect her to recoil and say, “What, this is about missing my cat?”, but instead, she asks me, “Does that stupid-phone of yours have GPS tracking on it that your parents can follow from home?”

  I shake my head. “It barely makes phone calls,” I manage to squeak out.

  “Then we’re going to my house,” Renate says. “I know your parents told you that you couldn’t be there, but screw them. Screw them to the wall. You’ll go home at your usual time and they won’t know anything. We have a note. Mr. S. is going to tell the office that we’re doing an independent study project and we’ll be excused from class. You won’t get reported. Come on.”

  I follow her down the hall towards the front door, wondering about the contents of this magic note Renate has in her possession that will allow us to do this without my parents’ knowledge, but knowing I don’t have a choice but to believe her, because I can’t be here and there’s nowhere else to go. “What about your parents?”

  “Dad’s still sleeping off Alaska. He probably won’t come out of his room the whole time you’re there. But I just texted Mom about it. I don’t think she’ll object, it’s not like I make a habit out of this.” She pauses. “In fact, I’ve never done it.”

  “Then why are you doing it for me?”

  “No one else ever let me before.”

  Spectral Amy hasn’t put in an appearance today. That might be because I yelled at her last night.

  “The world is a toll-free toilet.”

  My eyes flutter open and I see Renate, standing there over her bed, which she has let me have a nap in, with Sedona, her fur-coated white noise machine, purring away next to my head. I have no idea how long I’ve been asleep for. I don’t even want to know yet.

  “The world is a Toll House cookie,” I sleep-mumble.

  “Our mouths neurological assholes,” Renate recites.

  “Our mouths neuro...what you said.”

  “Talking shit a mile a minute.”

  “Talking fertilizer seven thousand billion kilometers a micro-nano-nanosecond. Thing. Stuff. Blues.” Sounding a little more with-it now. But geez, what an alarm clock. At least once a week she wants me to recite “PE Squad” with her, so she won’t be tempted to do it at school. Usually I do it straight, so she knows I know the real words and that I’m just messing with her now.

  “Good. You’re awake and making jokes. It’s two o’clock, you have to start thinking about getting up. And maybe eating your lunch so you don’t go home ravenous.”

  I sit up, nudging Sedona from his snooze zone and on to the floor, where he lands on all fours and scampers away. “I guess I can sleep for real after all.”

  “How do you feel?”

  “Halfway human again.” I pick up my glasses from the side table and put them on, and notice that Renate isn’t wearing her beret or her cloak; this is the first time I’ve seen her without either one. “Thanks for letting me do that. My homework last night was a nightmare.” As I wake up, it starts occurring to me that I can’t have a repeat of the last few nights again tonight, and nothing has changed in order to prevent it, and my upper trapezius, right under the base of my skull, starts barking at me. I wince and rub it.

  Renate sits on the bed across from me. “Feel up to helping me with a boy problem?”

  “There’s a boy?”

  “Not here. In Kissimmee, Florida. I was chatting with him online while you were sleeping.”

  I reach for my lunch sack and start digging food-like things out of it. “I was gonna say, I didn’t think there was anyone here you’d want to touch with a ten-mile light sabre.” I open my bag of raw almonds, the only vaguely appetizing thing in there, and start crunching away. “But what’s in Kissimmee, Florida? Is that where Disney World is?”

  “Close.” All of a sudden, Renate has been transformed into a giddy, love-struck girly-girl. “But I met him on the Funkateer Friends board.”

  “So what’s the problem, other than geographic undesirability?”

  “He’s nineteen,” she sighs.

  “Illegal.”

  “Not for long.” Renate flicks back a piece of her shoe-polished hair. “Florida and Oregon both have close-in-age consent starting at age sixteen. I’ll be sixteen in five weeks.”

  “Well, you seem to have that figured out,” I say. “So…is there another problem?”

  “The other problem is, he hasn’t asked me how old I am. So either he assumes I’m an adult or he doesn’t have that kind of interest. It’s so hard to tell these things online. And I could get him in trouble if I ask if he’s interested. At least before December thirtieth.”

  “So isn’t it better if he doesn’t ask, since that could get him in even more trouble than if you do it? Or am I missing something here?”

  She thinks for a second, then nods. “No, that’s a good point. Besides, for all I know he could be lying about his age.”

  “That does happen.” I shrug, palms up. “Sorry to be a wet blankie. But if you’re still talking to him in five weeks, then you can ask, or tell him you just turned sixteen and see what he says. It’s a time limited problem. You’re just getting to know him, so for all you know now, by then there’ll be someone else you like even better.”

  Renate flops on her back and groans. “I hate to say it, but you’re right.” Then she turns her head towards me and smiles. “But I haven’t heard you talk about your love life, ever.”

  “That’s because there hasn’t been anyone I thought was worth it.” I take a sip of my vinegar water, and dribble some of it on the bed, then wipe it off with my napkin. “I’m starting to wonder if there ever will be. Aren’t I supposed to be fantastically horny by now?”

  “There’s no ‘supposed-to.’ Some people don’t have those feelings until they’re adults. Some people never have them at all.”

  “Oh, I have those feelings,” I say. “I just don’t have them…about physical contact.” Okay, this is my test for Renate. If I tell her about what turns me on and she doesn’t make a big deal about it, maybe I can tell her about Amy.

  You sure you want to tell her this first? Spectral Amy asks me.

  No, but I’m doing it anyway, because I’m chicken, I reply.

  Oh, Spectral Amy says. Carry on, then.

  “Um…okay,” Renate says. “Then what do you have them about?

  I take a deep breath and let it out all at once. “I know this is going to sound kind of bizarre,” I begin. “But…I have them about performing in front of a big audience. You know, I go onstage, like an opening act or something…they h
ave no idea who I am or what this weird-looking girl is doing on stage…and then I start making these amazing sounds, these irresistible rhythms that they get totally caught up in…and then when I’m done, I leave the stage and I hear them stomp and chant for me to come back for an encore…”

  “So basically,” Renate says slowly, “you don’t have any desire to get busy with an individual person…but you want to get laid by, like, Carnegie Hall.”

  I hide my face in my hands. “I knew I shouldn’t have told you.”

  “No, I think that’s tremendous.” I hear Renate sit up, and I pull my face up out of my hands. “I love that. That is the mark of a true performer.”

  “You really think so?”

  “What else could it be? Shy and retiring shrinking violets don’t have fantasies like that. You’ve only been like that because this town is full of narrow-minded jerks and your parents are music-hating sociopaths. If we can get you to Portland, or even, what the hell, Las Vegas or something, where there are performers everywhere you look…the real you will come flying out.”

  “I don’t think my parents hate music, as such,” I say. “They just hate it coming from me.”

  “Then they can get some frigging soundproofing, like I have,” Renate says. “But they won’t, because they have their heads lodged in their small intestines.” She gets up from the bed. “How about a little ‘Maggot Brain’ before you go?”

  “Sure,” I say.

  Renate grabs her laptop and starts up the song, then lies down on the floor while I lie on the bed looking up at her cottage-cheese ceiling. I’ve listened to it with her before. I don’t think I’ll ever feel the same way about it she does, but it’s kind of cool, this ten-minute-long, droning, slow-ooze instrumental in 6/8 time featuring a long, intense, psychedelic-sounding guitar solo. Renate says some of the stoners she’s talked to like to get high and listen to this, but she gets high just listening to it, without any chemical help. I can see why, I get some of the same kind of floaty feeling from it. She told me once that supposedly George Clinton told Eddie Hazel, the guitar player, to play as though someone told him his mother was dead, but then he found out it wasn’t true.

  I guess musicians who aren’t autistic know exactly what that means. As I’m lying there listening, I’m trying to imagine how I would play drums or percussion if someone told me Mom was dead but then I found out it wasn’t true. Would I be mad at that person and just beat the living tar out of my instrument to show that? Would I be relieved that they were wrong and make happy noises? Would it be different if the person who told me just had wrong information, as opposed to deliberately lying to me? Would it be different depending on what they told me she died of, whether it was all of a sudden or whether she’d been sick a long time? Or whether we were on good terms or not when she died? Would it all make more sense if I was on recreational drugs? Or would I just be even more confused? I’m fairly certain I would drive George Clinton straight up the wall if I was in one of his bands.

  When the song ends, I look at the bedside clock. It’s two-thirty. That gives me fifteen minutes before I leave. As the floaty feeling starts to wear off, it hits me again that last night can’t keep happening. It just can’t. And Amy will be waiting for me, in that computer, the minute I get home. Maybe if I do this now, it’ll break the cycle. At least it would be one less thing for me to stress about. Renate has shared her special favorite music with me, why shouldn’t I do the same?

  So while I’m putting my shoes on, I blunder ahead. “So speaking of interesting discoveries,” I say, “I just found out that back in 1969 there was a singer our age who sang bossa nova music and put out an album on a major label.”

  “Is that right?” Renate says.

  “Yeah, her name’s Amy Zander. You ever heard of her?”

  Renate shakes her head no. So now I have a snap decision to make. Do I tell her how much Amy has meant to me, or do I show her Amy’s video first and see how she reacts to it? Because if she hates it, there’s no point telling her that it’s my favorite thing ever.

  Just open your mouth and see what comes out, Spectral Amy says.

  “Okay,” I say, my voice trembling a little, “so I found, like, one video of her, and the sound quality is awful because it’s a zillion years old and it’s a total accident that anyone has film of it at all, but it’s something to see. You want to see it?”

  “Sure, we have a few minutes.”

  Renate hands me her laptop, and I pull up the Amy video and put the laptop on the bed in between us, with the screen where both of us can see it. I clamp down on my lower lip with my teeth and don’t look at Renate or say anything while she watches. When it’s done, I look at her, and she nods thoughtfully. Here it comes.

  “Well,” Renate says, “there’s one thing I know now that I didn’t four minutes ago.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I now know exactly who Jim Henson used as the prototype for Animal the Muppet.” She laughs at her own joke, then looks at me like she’s expecting me to laugh too. But I’m not laughing. Is that her only response to this, the most important thing in the world to me? Some inane Muppets joke? Right away she can tell something is off with me. “Wait a minute,” she says. “This isn’t some random singer you happened to just find out about. This is someone you really like, isn’t it?”

  I start hyperventilating. My mouth wants to say something. But it has nothing.

  “Damn it, Cynner.” Renate closes her laptop, too hard. “Why didn’t you tell me that before we watched this thing?”

  All the blood in me seems to be on a pipeline straight to my face. Then I finally manage a few words. “Why, so you could make fun of me over it?” I reach for the bedside tissue box and pull out a tissue, expecting the gusher of tears to start, but it doesn’t. “Or so you could say something like, ‘hmm, that was interesting,’ when you’re secretly like, ‘wow, Cynthia’s a nutbag if she’s into this’?”

  “I don’t think you’re a nutbag. I just don’t understand. She’s nowhere near on pitch.”

  “She bends notes.”

  “She’s off key. There’s bending notes, and there’s stomping them flat like she’s doing. And her timing on the drums…I can’t even. To be honest with you, I’m kind of shocked that you’d go for this.”

  “So you do think I’m a nutbag.”

  “Don’t put words in my mouth.”

  “I don’t have to. They’re already on your face.” I crumple up the tissue and toss it on the bed. “I’m so stupid. I thought you might be the one person on earth who’d understand. But I guess that’s impossible, right?”

  Renate doesn’t say anything. She has her mouth open like she wants to, but for once she has no slick answers for me. She’s already told me why she thinks Amy sucks, in more detail than in my worst nightmares. I don’t see any way to fix this.

  “I’m sorry I’m not the hipster-in-training you thought I was,” I mutter, and then jump off the bed and grab my stuff—except for the rest of my ludicrous lunch, which she can dispose of after I’m gone. “You never knew me at all.”

  “Come on, don’t do that,” Renate says, then gets up and follows me out the door to her bedroom and into the foyer. I pause before the front door and whirl around to face her.

  “Don’t do what?” My voice sounds so shrill, at least in my own head, I feel like I could crack mirrors with it. “Don’t like anything that you don’t think is hip and cool enough?”

  As I’m pulling my jacket on, Renate closes her eyes and lets out an impatient sigh. “Just tell me what you like about her, okay? Because I just don’t get this at all, other than her being our age and making a record, which she obviously wasn’t ready for. They put her up on that stage to be a freak show, not a musician. Is that who you want for a role model? Seriously?”

  “Do I have to defend my taste in music like I’m being cross-examined in court? Is everybody in the whole fracking world going to make me do that for the rest of my life?”


  I stare her down for a few seconds, focusing on her nose so I don’t have to look at her eyes. When she doesn’t say anything, I zip and button my jacket as hastily as I can. “Yeah,” I say, as I open her front door to leave. “That’s about what I thought.”

  Once I’m out of her house and down the street, and no longer have anything to wipe my face with, then I start crying. Naturally.

  I thought she was like me, at least a little. But nobody is like me. At all. Nobody. Now I know, and I will never forget.

  No, I didn’t defend Amy on the basis of any kind of logic, or musical historical significance, or whatever. I didn’t have the cleverest argument ever. But why do I have to? Why do other people have such a bone up them about everyone not being their exact Xeroxes? I don’t do that to people. I can’t. If I only talk to people exactly like me, I might as well never have learned to talk at all.

  And maybe I shouldn’t have. Who knows. If I hadn’t learned to talk, then stuff like this would never happen. People wouldn’t expect me to be cool, so they’d never be disappointed when they found out I wasn’t.

  When I get home at my usual time, Tam is already there, and she sees that my eyes and face are red and soaking wet. “What happened to you?” she asks me.

  “Ren and I had a fight,” I say.

  “Really? About what?”

  “Perfect pitch,” I say, and walk away before she can ask me anything more.

  I go into my room and lie down on my bed, and I say to Spectral Amy, it’s just us now. You’re all I have.