Page 4 of The Amy Virus

STAGE III:

  Illness begins to spread to other parts of the body; by now, the patient is aware of the disease and has likely tried multiple modalities to attain remission, with only intermittent success at best.

  DAY 89

  "How about schizotypal personality disorder? Do you think maybe I might have that?"

  I'm meeting with Dr. Ngo after school, a week after the fight with Ren. She and I still haven't spoken since then. She can't even look at me. I stopped trying to look at her after the first day. I take solace only in the fact that she's not the gossipy type, so I don't have to worry about her spreading lies about me or telling people (truthfully) that I only get aroused by the thought of being on stage. And since she doesn't know the entire truth about Amy and never will, the worst she can say about it is that I have bad taste, and that's just an opinion. But still. I finally make a fracking friend, at age fifteen, and lose her within two months over this Amy-shaped phantom object that sits between us. I need help.

  Dr. Ngo chuckles. "I'm not sure why you're so eager to diagnose yourself with things that aren't autism."

  "I'm not." My foot itches. I remove my sneaker and sock, scratch the bottom of my foot, and put my sock back on. I don't put the sneaker back on yet; I am waiting to see if it will itch again. It does. I scratch again. Geez, my heels are so rough, I could sand drywall with them, even though I put lotion on them every day. Itchy and scratchy feet as such are not part of the autism diagnostic criteria, but sensory hypersensitivity in general is. I think I might be allergic to my own skin. "I was just reading about it, and there was something in there about pseudo-hallucinations, things people know aren't real but they feel real. Isn't that what this Amy thing is?"

  "Personality disorders are generally not diagnosed in people under eighteen." Dr. Ngo is holding a pencil in his hand, but there's no paper on his desk. "If you still have this 'Amy thing' three years from now you can revisit the issue. But I don't think that will happen."

  "Right, because I'm not going to live that long." I laugh, to try to let him know I'm kidding, but he doesn't react. "I'm joking. You know that, right?"

  "Are you?"

  "Yes. If I thought I was a danger to myself, like life and death danger, I would tell you." Not that I've been completely honest with him, though. I haven't told him about coming to blows with Mom, because if I told him he'd have to report it, and I can't go there yet. I tell myself I'm holding it back because of Tam, because she wouldn't want to go to a foster home, and it doesn't sound like a barrel of laughs to me either. And also, I don't think Mom would ever slap me again, not after what we went through. That's what I'm telling myself.

  He nods thoughtfully. "Also, a lot of people, even completely neurotypical people, have mental cheering sections like yours that they know aren't real. It's not a bad thing. In fact, right now it might be saving your life."

  "And costing me friends." Now that my foot hasn't itched for a full minute, I put my shoe back on and tie it. "What makes you so sure I'm going to outgrow it?"

  "Because Amy--or this spectre of Amy, as you like to call it--is a symptom of an exogenous problem. You know what that means, exogenous?"

  I shake my head no. I actually kind of like the fact that he’s using words I don’t know, he probably doesn’t do that with just anyone.

  "It means it's related to external circumstances, rather than internal ones like a mental health issue or personality disorder. And those circumstances existed before you met Renate."

  "You mean my family."

  "It's very hard living in a household with people who don't accept you. Maybe your sister does, but you still feel separate from her in a lot of ways, right?"

  "Well, yeah. She actually gets party invitations." The foot itch starts up again. Argh. I decide to ignore it as long as I can stand to. "But don't all people my age have conflicts with their parents?"

  "Yours is different." Dr. Ngo turns the pencil in his hand eraser side down, and taps the eraser a few times on his desk. "Your conflict isn't about the usual things parents and teenagers fight about. Neurotypical adolescents, for the most part, fight with their parents over being not allowed to do what their peers are doing. You fight with yours about not wanting to do what your peers are doing, or not being able to do it."

  I swallow hard. "But why Amy? Why did I have to pick someone so completely obscure that nobody but me understands her appeal?"

  "Well, think about it. Don't you identify with her because she was misunderstood and overlooked?"

  My eyebrows go up. I don't know why I never thought of that before. And I can't come up with an argument against it. "Well, maybe that's part of it. But why do you think it's going to go away in three years?"

  "Three years from now, you'll be living a very different life, Cynthia," Dr. Ngo says, smiling that little I-know-something-you-don't half-smile of his. "Bank on it."

  "How do you figure that?"

  "Because three years from now, you're going to know exactly what you have to offer, and who you want to offer it to, and who you have to stay away from. And you'll have the legal rights to do exactly that. You’ll have the name you want, you’ll be writing your songs, recording them on your computer and posting them to the Internet, maybe even going out there and performing live, and they won’t be able to stop you. You might always like Amy's music, but this spectre of her that you experience is a temporary thing."

  I take a couple of pencils out of the cup on his desk, and start drumming on my lap with them. I don't know why I can't stop doing that, because obviously I'm not really a drummer. The only person who thought that was Renate, and how can I believe anything she said after what happened with her? It was all a lie, her little fantasy that I was her cool percussionist friend. Now that she knows I'm a complete dweeb, and not cool at all, even she probably doesn't think I have talent. Why would Dr. Ngo think I could change all that in three years?

  "Penny for your thoughts?" Dr. Ngo asks me. "Or are thoughts more expensive these days?"

  I let out an uneasy laugh and stop my drumming. "Sorry." I clasp the pencils together in one hand. "I just can't believe I lost my only friend ever to all this Amy crap. If I could stop liking Amy, I would. That's just not an option, and I'm not good at pretending."

  "You and Renate didn't split up because of Amy. I know it looks that way on the surface, but lots of people, especially young people, have strong feelings about music. But that doesn't mean they avoid everyone who doesn't agree with them a hundred percent. You and Renate split up because you think there's something wrong with you for liking Amy, that you're so out-there and so bizarre that nobody could possibly understand you. If you didn't feel that way, you'd have laughed and said something like, 'Oh, get over it, Amy is awesome, one day you'll see,' or, 'Hey, more for me, then.' But you have that sore spot, and she kicked it pretty hard. Probably not on purpose, because she didn't know. You were only friends for two months."

  "Only two months?" That fracking foot of mine just won't stop itching. I grunt and put the pencils back in the cup, and prepare for a serious scratch attack. This time I take off both shoes and both socks, because if I have only one foot uncovered for more than a couple of seconds, it feels freakishly imbalanced, and I don't trust my itchy foot to ever be satisfied with what I do to it. As I'm scratching away, I say, without looking up, "Two months sounds like a really long time to me, especially if you see each other almost every day."

  "It's not, though. It takes years to really know another person. Most people don't know that, because they think if you know a bunch of facts of someone's outer life, you know what their inner life is like."

  I continue to scratch, and he peers out over his desk to get a closer view of Cynthia Versus the Itch, Part Eleventy. "Be careful you don't draw blood, okay?"

  "I won't." I stop scratching and put my socks and shoes back on, hoping this finally does the trick. "But I'm not a real musician."

  "Cynthia, you were using your lap for a drum set five minutes ago. Of
course you're a real musician. Do you still sing?"

  "Sometimes."

  He looks at me intently.

  Then I confess, "Okay, it's more than sometimes. I worked hard to develop my range, I have to keep testing it to make sure it still works."

  "And where do you do this?"

  "Closet. Shower. Anywhere they won't hear me."

  “But your mother has heard you sing already.”

  “Once. I’m not going to risk it a second time.”

  Dr. Ngo looks at the clock, then back at me. "We only have a few minutes left, but I want to ask you, how long do you think you can keep all this from your family? Do you really think you're going to magically pull it together and be what they want?"

  I bite my lip and shake my head no.

  "I can help you with this, Cynthia," Dr. Ngo says. "You don't have to do it all by yourself. But I can't do it without you, either."

  "Do what?" I say. "Tell them I'm autistic, or that I'm a quote-unquote musician? Because you know they won't buy either one. Not even if the school shrink backs me up. Their entire lives depend on me not being autistic and on me achieving financial independence at a young age. They're just going to hold their ears. You know that."

  "We can try. Otherwise, what else are you going to do? You have to make the break sooner or later.”

  "There has to be another way." I close my eyes tightly. "There has to be another way. There has to. They can't find out about Amy."

  "Why not? What is so shameful about it? What have you done that is so wrong?"

  "School is important," I intone. "I have to be well educated. You know what they call musicians who don't have an education and don't make it? Homeless."

  "You need an IEP, Cynthia. An Individualized Education Plan. That's what students with disabilities have to get them accommodations in the classroom. For example, you say you understand written instructions better than verbal instructions? That’s one of the things you could get accommodated for. But not if you keep trying to cover it up. You know you're a lot smarter than your grades would indicate."

  Since we're out of time now, I don't press the argument. If I get an IEP, that means I'm officially still autistic, and my parents lose their jobs. The entire house of cards comes down. But maybe I should say that's their problem, not mine. They're the adults. It's up to them to keep the household afloat. I shouldn't have to do it. Of course I shouldn't, I'm a fracking high school sophomore. So why the hell am I still protecting their sorry asses? Why?

  "I'll...I'll think about it," I tell Dr. Ngo.

  I have to tell them. I have to tell them. I have to tell them.

  At dinner that night, my family picks over this awful offal that they eat only because of me and acts like we’re a perfectly normal family sharing a bucket of fried chicken or something. Mom compliments Dad on how good the veal brains taste. (He prepares the offal, which Dr. Nansi sends them a shipment of every week, because she can’t stand the sight of it uncooked.) This new recipe he has, where he mixes the brains with freeze-dried beets and ground watermelon pits (seeds?) and steams them in a sausage casing, hardly even tastes like brains at all, she says.

  Tam doesn’t try this delicacy for herself; she plans, as usual, to eat pizza or some other form of teen cuisine with her friends after dinner. But she doesn’t make faces or noises or anything to express any sort of disgust. It isn’t done here. No one is to make me feel bad because I don’t get to eat regular food. They do this for me. Mom can make all the fake yummy noises she wants, but I know they wouldn’t go near any of these braaaaaains, or any of this other crud, if not for me. I am The Thing That Ruined Dinner Forever. Or at least until they get me out of the house and earning a living for myself, so they can get to some semblance of a life again.

  Hey Mom, Dad? I’m still autistic, so you can quit feeding me and yourselves this horrible slop. It doesn’t fracking work, okay? You know you want to go get a bucket of chicken and some mashed potatoes and gravy for dinner like everyone else, so fracking do it already. You might as well.

  Dad keeps the comments on file that he deletes from or moderates out of the blog, all the stuff about how they’re full of BS and that kids can pick up skills that make them look less autistic over time, regardless of what diet they eat. Or that I was misdiagnosed in the first place. Or that I might still fit the criteria for autism even if I don’t fit the obvious stereotypes. He’s collected thousands of them over the years. Thousands of people have told them this whole thing is a crock. He and Mom laugh at those people. Laugh. They’re not going to listen to Dr. Ngo or anyone else who says they’re wasting their time. Plenty of people with Doctor or some other title have called them out. They don’t care. They don’t care. They don’t care.

  Dr. Nansi has this system in which her “network families” (who have blogs like my parents’ that sell the diet) are graded on inspections, and get either a red (very bad), yellow (not great), or green (keep up the good work!). They send the report a month after the inspection. If you get a red, or two yellows in a row, you’re on probation until your next inspection; two reds in a two-year period, or a red following three yellows in a four-year period, mean you’re fired. I got a red back in fourth grade when I made the mistake of admitting to Dr. Nansi that I got picked on in school, which this diet is supposed to prevent. (Really? Eating lettuce wraps with ground chicken toenails buried in them every day is supposed to charm your classmates?) You can’t even imagine the drama and the accusations. They demanded to know if I’d traded lunches with anyone else. Dude. I couldn’t have paid anyone to eat my lunch for me, even if they didn’t have to trade me theirs.

  But my parents are gagged from ever telling their readers, or anyone else, about any of this. On our last inspection, which was back in June right after school let out, we got a yellow, because Dr. Nansi, all six feet of her, quizzed me in her thick Hungarian accent about Caroleena moving away, and I wasn’t sufficiently broken up about it for her tastes. A normal girl who was totally in remission would have been crying about her best friend moving away, she said. This time, though, my parents actually defended me to her, saying Caroleena wasn’t really my best friend, she was just some girl I used to hang around with in elementary and middle school and we’d just drifted apart. That happens, Catherine! I remember my mom saying to her That’s perfectly normal! But still, we got a yellow. Our fifth in eleven years. That’s not enough for probation, but it is enough for some testy phone calls to have taken place between them and Dr. Nansi in the last few months.

  But my parents have been surprisingly stoic about it all; evidently they are now convinced that nobody else on earth would want to eat my food and that I wouldn’t take the chance of eating anyone else’s after all this time. All they have to do is get themselves through a few more years of this until I can live on my own, and they will be free. It will be their turn to party. Oh, and write books. Lots of books. They’ve been offered book deals and turned them down because the care and feeding of me keeps them soooo busy. Once I’m out of the house, making a living, they can ride that nonstop rocket to the New York Times bestseller lists. Want to make sure you don’t have to take care of a disabled child for the rest of your life? We’ll show you the way.

  I just look at them and see a slippery wall made of titanium bricks. There is nothing I or anyone else can say or do that will get them off this train, this gravy train where actual gravy is not allowed because of the opiate-generating starch it contains.

  I sit there looking at my half-eaten, cold plate of brain sausage, knowing that this will be all I get to eat for the next twelve hours, and make myself swallow as much of it as possible without tasting it, lest I gag. I “listen” (in my head) to Amy’s music while I eat, try to imagine her voice singing other songs. Singing my songs, even. Cyan Beaut songs of the future. When I have made enough of a dent in my pile of grub, I push my chair away from the table and hastily get up, and promptly stub my stocking-footed toe on the chair.

  “OWWWWW!
OW OW OW OW OWWWWWWWWW!”

  My scream of pain is so loud it scares even me. Am I really in that much physical pain, or is it everything just piling up on me?

  “I think I broke it,” I moan. “I think it’s broken.” I don’t know if I really think it’s broken, or whether it just feels like it is, but I really crushed it.

  “Sit down,” Tam commands me. I do what she says. “Can you wiggle all your toes on that foot?”

  I wiggle my toes, which surprisingly decreases the pain in my foot, then tell her yes.

  “Then it’s not broken,” Tam says, looking a little irritated with me. I don’t blame her, after the cold-blooded shriek I just let out.

  “From now on, please wear shoes to dinner,” Dad says, then stands up and starts piling up all the dinner dishes to take to the kitchen.

  They put up with so much from me.

  After dinner, I sit down at the computer and attempt once again to do what I’ve been trying to get myself to do for the last week: block all the sites containing Amy’s video.

  Something feels so final about doing that, like it’s an irrevocable decision. It feels like saying goodbye forever. I know it’s not forever. Just maybe for the next, I don’t know, three years maybe? Not counting summer vacations? Maybe Dr. Ngo is right and I’ll have a life then and looking at her video won’t do anything much for me. But I can’t get there from here.

  Change scares the bejeebus out of you, doesn’t it? Spectral Amy says, as my fingers hover over the keyboard, about to type the site info into the blocking window. That’s why you won’t rock the boat.

  I like change just fine as long as it’s good change, I retort. And you know what good change would be? You leaving me alone while I’m trying to get an education.

  My music is in your head all day, even when you’re not at a computer, Spectral Amy says. You’re trying to hold back high tide with your palms here, Cyan.

  Dr. Ngo thinks that my problem isn’t liking Amy, it’s thinking there’s something wrong with me for liking Amy. But the problem isn’t that I like Amy; the problem is that for me, almost nothing else exists now. If I cared about anything else as much as Amy, then liking her would just be a cute little harmless quirk at most. I’d be like one of those people who does podcasts or Web pages about obscure music from the sixties, and Amy would be just one of the unheralded artists I support. But I’m stuck on her. And only her. For no good reason.

  I type in the video site URLs on the screen, but don’t click the OK button yet. You know, I tell her, Renate isn’t necessarily wrong about you technically not being a very good singer.

  Is that right? Spectral Amy says, sounding more amused than insulted.

  Yeah, I say, reaching for the water bottle on my desk. Now that I’m paying attention I’m starting to see what she was talking about. You reach for notes you can’t quite hit. Back then they didn’t have Auto-Tune and Pro Tools, so they couldn’t fix that. And your vibrato is so tight that if it was on a CD it would sound like the CD was skipping.

  That’s probably true, Spectral Amy admits.

  I then knock over the water bottle, which is supposed to have an airtight seal on it, but not if I forget to close it all the way, which I apparently did last time I took a sip. It gets all over my laptop keyboard and all over my clothes. I yelp in frustration and run to the kitchen for the super-absorbent microfiber spill sheets, hoping no one sees me and asks what I need them for. Fortunately, the coast is clear. But now my keyboard is wet. I blot it up as much as I can, then try typing something. No dice.

  I start removing the snap-off letters from the keyboard so I can dry in between them. This isn’t my first time with a saturated keyboard, but at least this time it’s only water and not some kelp-and-tripe-tapioca gunkfest, so I don’t have to summon Dad and risk his ire. While I’m removing keys, wiping the keyboard bed, and replacing them, I continue my smackdown. Yeah, so you admit it. You’re flat, you’re sharp. Snap off, wipe, snap on again. You’re ahead of the beat, you’re behind behind the beat, circling around the beat like you’re a plane that hasn’t been given permission to land yet. Wipe, wipe, wipe. I don’t even know why I like you. Snap off, snap off, snap off. Careful careful careful. Don’t want to damage them.

  Yes, you do, Spectral Amy says, smiling as if I just complimented her.

  No, I say, continuing my snapping and wiping, I actually don’t.

  It’s because I go places nobody else does, she says. And that’s what you want to do. You want to make the kind of music no one has ever heard before, make people walk away with a whole new experience of music. You want to innovate. Influence. Inspire. And not just inspire because nobody expected an autistic girl to do anything right, but inspire because you’re completely amazing. You want to be Cyan Beaut, the person you really are. And come on, I’m not that far off. Renate just hears it more because of her perfect pitch. It doesn’t really bother you, does it?

  I test the keys to see if they’re working better now. Bingo. I put the keyboard cover back on and snap it back into place. If it bothered me that much, I tell Spectral Amy, I’d never have kept listening to you. But maybe it should bother me.

  You really think you’re going to talk yourself out of this, girl? Spectral Amy says. People love what they love.

  I don’t know, I say. But for now, you’re blocked. I take a deep breath and click the OK button on the site blocking window, and her sound and image instantly vanish in my mind.

  DAYS 90-91

  I didn’t think about Amy or her music the entire rest of last night. I actually managed to get an entire history paper done, about the differences between the Korean, Vietnam, and Gulf Wars, which makes sense and everything. And get to sleep by eleven, too, and stay asleep. I can’t remember the last time that happened.

  The next morning, I don’t wake up with her on my mind either. I don’t even think about her the entire day and night, or the following morning. Wow. Maybe I should have done this months ago. Maybe my parents didn’t go far enough; they should have blocked all my Net access and made me look stuff up in the library. Or stuck with their original plan to have me ask them to look up stuff for school. I don’t know why they didn’t. It’s easier for them this way, maybe?

  For the first time in months, when I walk the halls at school and sit in class, I have no one’s voice in my head, and no one’s voice in my ear, at least not directly. I am free. Right? That’s what this means? I can try and make other friends, then, because now I don’t have to worry about Amy getting in between us. She’s gonzo. Even my hand and foot hyperactivity seems to have stopped, for the time being. Could it be, I might be turning into someone who could be liked? By someone, at least? Was it really this easy, all this time, to become someone who isn’t unbearably tedious, and I just never knew that the secret was blocking the right Web pages?

  By seventh period language arts, on the second day of my Amy-free interlude, I’m feeling good enough about myself that I have the nerve to say to Danya Cregg, who just moved here last month and sits right behind me, “I love your poem,” after she has recited “Shineys,” which she wrote for our assignment to write a poem about something we like to wear. Danya has an artsy look, always wearing at least five beaded necklaces that look handmade, and maybe eight pairs of earrings. I always wonder if her neck and ears hurt, but she looks great.

  “Thanks,” Danya whispers. “Don’t tell Samman, but I wrote it a year ago.”

  Hmm. Someone who writes poetry on her own time. I smile and say, “She’d never believe me anyway,” and Danya laughs.

  After class, I turn around and ask Danya, “So do you use, like, a rhyming dictionary and a thesaurus and stuff like that when you write your poems?”

  She looks a little surprised that I would ask her that, but also maybe a little flattered. “Actually, I do,” she says. “I have apps on my phone for rhymes, synonyms, antonyms, and thesaurus. You never know when an idea’s going to hit you.”

  “I know how that is,?
?? I say.

  She raises her eyebrows and smiles, in sort of a conspiratorial way. “Oh, do you? You write poetry?”

  “Songs,” I say. “Or at least, I’m trying to.”

  “Do you play an instrument?”

  “I sing,” I tell her. “I had a pretty cool percussion instrument, but my parents confiscated it.”

  “Sorry to hear that,” Danya says, putting her books into her backpack.

  There’s a brief lull, and I rack my brain for what to say next. “So this might sounds like a weird question,” I say, in a more warbly voice than I mean to. “But…how do you manage not to let your art get in the way of your schoolwork? I mean, do you…do you get ideas when you’re supposed to be studying that you just have to follow, right that very second?”

  Danya furrows her brow. Boy, I really am sucking my toes here, aren’t I?

  “Sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean to sound like a buttinsky or anything.”

  “No, that’s okay.” She zips up her backpack, then stands up. I stand up along with her. “But no, I’ve never had that happen to me. It doesn’t even occur to me to try writing poems at the same time I’m doing homework. That’s a totally different side of my brain.” She slips the straps of her pack over her shoulders. “I mean, William Carlos Williams was a pediatrician, you know? He wrote poems when he got home, not when he was seeing his patients.”

  I nod. “Well, thanks.” I walk out of the room at the same time she does, wondering if we’re done. I kind of want us not to be done. This is a rare event for me, being able to sustain a back-and-forth conversation--about creativity, no less. But as soon as we get out in the hall, and five seconds have passed between us without any more words, she says, “See you later,” and strides quickly to get ahead of me.

  Five seconds is apparently too much time for someone to wait for me to talk. So much for my not becoming tedious.

  I head for my locker, open it, and have just gotten my coat out and started putting it on when a familiar voice echoes in my head.

  Not everybody can compartmentalize. Don’t be too hard on yourself.

  Oh, crap. She couldn’t have given me even forty-eight hours, could she?

  On my way home, I stumble my way down the sidewalk, intoxicated by Amy. Her singing voice drowns out other voices, cars, rustling leaves, anything that isn’t her, no matter how many times I ask her to stop. The depth and texture of her voice gives me a sort of physical pleasure that makes me feel sick in other parts of my body, knowing that other people must wonder what I’m on as they see me tripping by. I only wish it was something as socially acceptable as alcohol or drugs. After an absence of less than two days, she has returned with a vengeance.

  The temperature has dropped precipitously in the last twenty-four hours, and the sidewalks have patches of ice on them. When I’m halfway home, I slip on one of the ice patches and fall, landing on my Cindy-Butt.

  “Would you like a hand up, bossa nova girl?”

  I look up and see Hippie Geezer Man, who I haven’t seen since I bought the Amy album from him, salting the ice on his driveway, wearing a dirty fleece jacket. It’s been six months since he had his yard sale, and in my Amyfied state I didn’t notice that I was on the street where he lives. He holds out his arm, and I grab on to it and get up, then let go as soon as I’m stable. “Thanks,” I say. “That was…embarrassing.”

  “Nothing I haven’t done,” he says. Until right this second, I don’t make the mental connection that—as far as I can tell--he’s the only other person in Steens Center besides me (and Renate, if she counts) who remembers that Amy ever existed. “So how’d you like that record you bought from me?”

  Oh God, am I ever not up to answering that question honestly. “It skips all over the place,” I tell him. “But she has a really interesting voice. Thanks for telling me about her.”

  “You’re welcome.” He nods in the direction of his house. “So as long as you’re here, I think I might have something else you’d like to see.”

  “Uh…” This isn’t what I think it is. Is it? No. It can’t be. He’s about the same age as my grandfather.

  I must look completely bugged out, because he bursts out laughing. “Sorry, that was a bad way to state that. What I mean to say is, I have an object in my garage I think might be of interest to you, as a fan of bossa nova music. If you want, I’ll open up the garage door and show it to you.”

  “Um…okay.” I don’t even know his name. Should I ask?

  “Oh, by the way, I’m Graham,” he says, when I approach the garage door. Thank you, Graham, for making that easy for me.

  “I’m Cyan.”

  Oh my badgerfracking God. Did I really say that? Is Graham What’s-His-Nose, ancient moldering hippie, the very first person on the face of the earth to whom I have introduced myself by my future name? What made me do that?

  “Pleasure to meet you, Cyan,” he says. “That’s a nice name. Did you pick it out yourself, or did your parents name your sisters Magenta and Yellow?”

  “Ha ha,” I say, as he reaches down and opens up the door of his garage. For once, I don’t mind getting kidded about my name. Because I picked it.

  When it’s open, I almost keel over from what I see. It’s a cocktail drum set. Yes, the kind Amy played. And in her color, red sparkle.

  “Holy Toledo,” I say. “Where did you get that?” I go over to it and examine it. To say it’s in bad shape is like saying I’m not likely to be elected prom queen. The cymbals are cracked, the heads are bashed in, and the bass drum stand is missing one of the rubber feet, so it stands up crooked. The shells and the frame are in one piece, but the frame has dents and rust spots, and at least half the lugs (fasteners) are missing. I start laughing about how beaten-up this poor drum set looks. “Did this thing sit out in the rain for three months or something and then get mauled by coyotes?”

  “Very possibly,” Graham says. “My, uh, lady friend found it by the side of the road on her way back from a trip to Reno last week. Probably fell off the back of someone’s truck on the highway. You should have seen it before I hosed it off.”

  I can feel my eyebrows scrunch together in disbelief. If I have to guess, he’s telling me some fish story about someone finding it by the side of the road, when it’s more likely that someone traded it to him for drugs or something. But I am so not going to pry into that. “But your lady friend thought you’d like it anyway.”

  “How often do you see a cocktail drum set by the side of the road? Besides, she doesn’t really know anything about drums. She thought I’d be able to fix it up and sell it.”

  I finger the cracked crash cymbal mounted in between the snare and the tom. Then I examine the hi-hat cymbals; they’re a mess, too, cracked and warped. A two-inch chunk of the bottom one is missing. There’s no pedal for them; on a cocktail set, they stay closed. I’m amazed that the bass pedal even managed to stay attached with that much abuse, though it’s way off hinge. “Good luck with that. I mean, I’m not a drum expert, but I know you can’t really fix these things once they crack, and cymbals are spendy. So are pedals.”

  “That they are,” Graham says. “But I was going to put it on Craig’s List to see if any collectors might have a use for it.”

  “How much?”

  Graham shrugs. “Oh, I don’t know. I looked up some pictures, and I’m pretty sure it’s a Trixon; that’s a brand that was around in the fifties and sixties and got revived about fifteen or twenty years ago. I know that a set like this one sells for about four or five hundred new, but I’d probably be lucky to get fifty bucks for it, in the shape it’s in.”

  My mind instantly recalls two things: one, that Mom has a gyno appointment this afternoon; and two, that I have two twenty-dollar bills folded up in my wallet, left over from my grandparents’ birthday presents.

  “I want it,” I hear myself say.

  You still love me, Spectral Amy breathes in my ear.

  Shut up, I snap at her. She smiles indulgently at m
e, as if it’s cute.

  Graham smiles and nods. “Okay. So would your folks come by to pick it up?”

  “Are you kidding? They’d kill me if they knew I was here. But I need this drum set. I don’t know how to explain it. But I do.” I take my wallet out of my purse and peek inside it to make sure the twenties are still there. Yes. “I have forty dollars on me. Will that be enough?”

  “Teenage rebellion, man,” Graham says. “I completely approve. But just so you know, all sales are final. I’ll give you a dolly to wheel it home on, and you can keep that, it’s old…but I don’t ever want to see this thing again once you haul it out of here, and I don’t want you to tell your parents where you got it, either.”

  “If we take the cymbals and the heads off and cover it with trash bags, they won’t ever know it’s there. I’d have to throw that stuff out anyway. You got a drum key?”

  “It’s hanging from the side.” He points to a red cord tied to the side of the bass drum, with a butterfly-shaped mini-wrench about four inches wide hanging from it. It’s a different shape from the pandeiro key, but the bottom of the key, where the lug would fit in, looks about the same, maybe a little bigger. “You know how to use that to get the lugs off?”

  “They’re all the same size, right? If they’re fastened tighty-righty lefty-loosey, it shouldn’t be too hard to get them off.” I have no idea whether this is true or not; maybe some of them are stuck in place or put on a different way or something. But I have to try. “I just need a little baggie or something to put them all in.”

  “That I can get you.” He turns to his workbench and grabs a quart-sized Ziploc bag and hands it to me. Then he folds his arms and smiles. “Now, this I have to see. If you know how to change a drum head, you’re one up on me. I’m a bass player, myself, or at least I was back in the day. Drums always seemed like too many tiny little parts for me.”

  “I know how to get them off, I think,” I say. “Putting the new ones on is another story. The tuning and all that can be kind of a pain, from what I’ve read.”

  “You know, they have these mesh heads and cymbals now that hardly make any noise. They’re not cheap, but if you want to practice without bothering anyone, you might want to save some of your holiday cash for that.”

  “Interesting.” I start unscrewing lugs, like I’ve done it all my life. Because actually, Spectral Amy is instructing me: Turn it to the left. No, no, your other left, ha ha. That’s it. Ooh, ow, that one’s got some dirt stuck in there, maybe come back to that one later, you don’t want to hurt yourself…there. Yeah. That’s it. Girl, you’re a pro.

  Fifteen minutes later, I’ve gotten all the thrashed heads and cymbals off the kit, and I put the Ziploc with the lugs in it in my purse, and hand Graham his forty dollars. He helps me bag up the drums and tie them to the dolly. Before I leave, he says, “May you one day drum your way out of Steens Center.”

  “That would be nice,” I say.

  I have no idea what is going to happen to me between now and the time I step inside my house. Icy winds, the kind we don’t usually get two weeks before Thanksgiving, lash my face; as I start pulling the dolly down the sidewalk I’m starting to feel like a sled dog, only I’m the one whipping myself. I can’t believe I hung on to forty dollars for three months and then blew it all on this hopelessly borked drum set just because it looks like Amy’s. Also, I have to be ready with some kind of cheeseball excuse for having it if I’m caught bringing it in. I can access the garage from outside, but if both cars are the garage (which they shouldn’t be if Mom is at the doctor, but you never know), either I have to put it somewhere along the side or back of the house, or—if I dare—drag it inside and put it in my closet. I can just picture it now:

  I’m not telling you what this is, it’s an early Christmas secret!

  You didn’t say I couldn’t have drum shells with no heads or cymbals. It’s only for decoration.

  Someone was throwing it away and I just had to have it. Oh, the dolly? Yeah, I found that in the giveaway pile too. No, really.

  How do people hide things? How do they have these double lives that nobody ever finds out about, for years? Me, I feel like I’m committing suicide by cocktail drum kit, because I’ll be shot by my parents if they see this thing and find out I spent real money on it. But since I can’t buy junk food or eat in restaurants like normal kids do, and I don’t give a rip about clothes, and most of my records and books were acquired at garage sales, and the only digital downloads I ever bought were obtained via gift card, what else did I have to spend the money on?

  So here will be my excuse, should I need one: Mom, Dad, these empty drum shells are a symbol—that’s s-y-m-b-o-l, not c-y-m-b-a-l, ha ha. When I look at these, I will be motivated to do homework and get the A minus or higher in math and science you require of me in order to get my pandeiro and my bongos and my albums and my record player back.

  You love me, Spectral Amy says. You bought it because I told you to.

  Would you stop? I groan internally.

  “Ow.” I feel a stabbing pain in my upper back. This thing isn’t hugely heavy--maybe thirty pounds, since the cymbals are off--but I’m not used to pulling things behind me on a rope, and somehow I manage to dislodge something which makes the whole thing tip over. I bend over to try to straighten it up and the stabbing pain happens again. I can’t get it to stand up again, so I wind up laying the drum set on its side on the dolly. As I do so I manage to mash my finger in between the drum set and the dolly. More “ow.” I want to say it out loud, but I just mouth it this time. Then I get behind it and push it the rest of the way, instead of pulling it.

  As I approach our house, my heart starts pounding like I’m about to go on stage. Which I sort of am. I have a line to deliver, and I’d better do it right.

  But when I get to the house, both cars are gone, which means either Tam’s boyfriend finally got that clunker she bought to run, or she gave up and had it junked. Whew. That means I have a nonzero chance of stashing this thing without being noticed, as long as Dad doesn’t hear me. I push, pull, shove, yank to get it up the driveway and finally—back hurting, finger hurting, panting, sweating even on this penguin-weather day—wheel it as quietly as I can into the corner where we store all our stuff that we can’t bear to get rid of but can’t bear to have in the house. I bury it as best I can behind some boxes with old clothes in them, with Graham’s impossibly tight knots still intact.

  Yow. This must be a taste of what it’s like for normal kids, for whom it wouldn’t be a day ending in Y if they weren’t pulling a fast one on their parents. I can’t believe I’m actually getting away with it. Well, at least until I take it out of the bag to look at it, which I know I won’t be able to resist doing. But I’ll jump off that bridge when I get to it.

  You know you’re going to fix that up and play it, Spectral Amy says. And buy brush sticks. Brush work on drums is sooooo satisfying.

  I enter the house through the garage, and when I walk into the house, the door to my parents’ office is closed and the BUSY sign is hanging from the door. My dad has no idea what I just smuggled on to his property. It probably wouldn’t even occur to him that it would be possible for me to do it. A cocktail drum set? What the hell’s that?

  DAY 92

  It’s something I can’t stop thinking about for the next week and a half, that’s what. The fact that I have a red sparkle drum set in my garage, or at least the shells of one, makes my hands and feet want to move again, even when sitting. In my head, Amys of various ages and I are having constant jam sessions together on matching Trixon kits. The Friday night before Thanksgiving break, on eyeball stew night, my limbs are especially hyper at dinner.

  Keep still, Cindy. Hold your hands still, Cindy. Breathe nice and deeply for me.

  I have vague memories of a therapist named Jessica or Jasmine, I forget which, who used to work with me to get rid of the “last traces of autism habits” when I was about six years old.

  Sssshhhh. Keep
your hands quiet.

  To this day, I cannot stand to be shushed or told to “relax.” Who finds it relaxing to be ordered to relax, anyway?

  We’re going to do this hand over hand.

  I picture Jessica/Jasmine reaching for my hand as I grab an imaginary drum stick, reaching for my foot as I tap the imaginary pedal, pulling me away to stillness. Look at me, Cindy. Look at me. Look at me. Let me see your eyes…I’m so sorry, Belinda. She doesn’t want to do eye contact yet, but we’ll keep working at it.

  If they had to work that hard to stop me from acting autistic, how could I not have been autistic all along? Who retains “autism habits” without actually being on the spectrum?

  Cindy. That’s one reason I need to be rid of that name. Cindy, we can’t send you to school with the other kids unless you cooperate. In retrospect, I should have refused to cooperate altogether. I don’t know whether I literally pooped in my pants the first day of first grade or not, but it became part of my legend that I did, and it could have happened. Easily.

  Hold your feet still. No kicking.

  Say hello, how are you? I’m fine, how are you?

  It doesn’t matter if you’re not really fine. Nobody needs to know that…

  “Cindy!” I hear my dad bark at me from across the table. It’s just me and him and Mom for dinner, Tam has gone out with her significant other. Will I ever have one of those? Ever? “Can I get your attention for a minute?”

  “I…did you say something before? I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you.”

  “Obviously,” Dad says. “But we got an interesting phone call today from your homeroom teacher.”

  I flinch, remembering that Mr. S. knows more about me than most teachers do, even though I only have him for homeroom. I’ve never had a homeroom teacher who asked about my life before and actually cared about the answers. Even though he hasn’t had the Cynthia and Renate Show to entertain him lately, he still asks me how I’m doing, asks if I’m still singing, asks when I’m going to let him hear me sing, tells me to keep writing, no matter what. “Interesting how?”

  “He wanted to know why you didn’t have an IEP.” Dad cuts hard into his stewed eyeball with a steak knife, as if it’s still alive and he has to stab it to death. “He’s only your homeroom teacher, why would you even be discussing that with him?”

  “You mean IEPs? I’m not even sure what that is, exactly.” I keep my eyes fixated on my plate. If they tell me to look at them, I’ll tell them to look at this, and flip the bird.

  “It’s an Individualized Education Plan,” Mom says. “For students with disabilities.”

  “I know what it stands for,” I say. “I just don’t know what exactly goes on there.”

  “He said today he saw you bopping in your chair—those were the words he used,” Dad says. “He was sure you must have had one of those tiny wireless headphones on or something listening to music. And then he checked around your head and didn’t see anything. And that you were completely oblivious to him doing it.”

  “I must have been. I don’t remember that at all.”

  “And it wasn’t the first time he saw you moving your hands and feet in a rhythm pattern when there was no music playing. He’s spoken to some of your other teachers and they say you’re doing it quite a bit now. And I just saw you do it under the table, just now.”

  “Is that a disability?”

  “Mr. Shunsburg thinks it’s consistent with the B1 trait of autism, the stereotypic motor movements. He says that he’s not convinced your autism ever went away.”

  I inhale and exhale quickly through my nose. “And what did you tell him?”

  “That it’s probably acting out since we took your drums away from you.”

  “Acting out,” I repeat. “I’m a perfectly normal person acting out. With imaginary drumsticks. With imaginary foot pedals. To play my imaginary music. All alone. All day. Even when I tell myself to stop, I can’t stop. Maybe I even do it in my sleep for all I know.”

  “Cynthia, please,” Mom says.

  “It would really suck if you did all this for nothing,” I say in a hushed monotone. “You don’t want to be eating eyeballs on a Friday night. Nobody wants to be eating eyeballs on a Friday night, unless there was no other food for five hundred miles. Eyeballs. I mean, my God. Ten years—no, make it eleven now—years of Friday…night…eyeballs. How do you even stand it?”

  At that moment, I look up and see Mom stiffen in her chair. I have hit a nerve with her. Is she going to yell at me? No. Not this time. I see her look at Dad, as if to say, What are you going to say to her? You have to say something, Dan.

  But he has nothing, either. Not this time.

  DAY 101

  When I get to homeroom on Monday after Thanksgiving, I catch Renate looking at me for the first time since the fight. I look back. Neither of us looks away for two entire seconds. Then we look away at the same time.

  It’s taking me every bit of willpower I have not to break down and go over there to tell her about the drum kit. Even if she doesn’t think much of Amy, the fact that I snuck a cocktail drum set into the garage would tickle her pink. But the fact that Spectral Amy “told” me to do it, and I listened to her—and that really, all I’ve done since the last time we talked is listen to Amy, in one way or another--she wouldn’t be so amused by. If she thinks I’m out of my tree for even liking her, I don’t even want to think about thinking about what she’d say about the rest of it.

  On my way out of homeroom, I stop at Mr. S’s desk and say to him, “Look, I appreciate you sticking up for me and everything. I really do. But…”

  “But what?” he says.

  “You’re just getting me into more trouble,” I whisper. “My dad…was pretty steamed about the whole thing.”

  “How about your mom?”

  “Well…” I flash back on her freezing at the dinner table after my eyeball rant. “I assume she feels the same way.”

  Mr. S. looks up at me with the same kind of eyebrow raise I saw from Mrs. S. that time she talked to Mom. Maybe they practice eyebrows together. “But she hasn’t said anything herself?”

  I flip through my mental video clip file trying to come up with something. But now that I think about it, she actually hasn’t said anything about it. And it’s her name on that blog, her words, her reputation. “No,” I admit. “But that doesn’t mean she isn’t thinking it.”

  “Parents aren’t always a monolith,” Mr. Shunsberg says. “And they can fool you pretty hard about what they’re really thinking.”

  “Monolith,” I repeat. “You mean, like a united front?”

  “Yes, exactly.” The first period warning bell rings, and he stands up, as his first period geography students start filling up the room. “In a few years, when you’re an adult, it’s possible that you’ll find out some things that would shock you if they told you now.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know what’s going on with them, Cynthia.” He picks up a notepad and a pen from his desk, then comes around to where I’m standing so that he can talk to me without being overheard. “But I have to say, I haven’t ever seen a situation like yours, where the parents had a kid who was entitled to accommodations and they refused them. If anything, I have to deal with the reverse, parents trying to get extra test time or whatever, claiming their kid has this or that, when there’s no evidence anywhere. Or parents whose kids do have disabilities getting stonewalled by the school district over getting an IEP or getting the school to implement it.”

  “You haven’t been teaching that long,” I remind him.

  Mr. S. scribbles out a note on the notepad, then pulls the note off the pad and hands it to me. “I know a lot of teachers who have been doing this for a long, long time, who go back to before kids with disabilities were being mainstreamed. Including my mom, by the way. It’s very uncommon for parents to act like this, Cynthia. Trust me on that.”

  I glance at the illegible tardy note in my hand. If anything, his h
andwriting has gotten even worse in the last three months. “So it’s not just me,” I say. “They really are that whacked.”

  “You said that, I didn’t,” Mr. S. says, with a wry smile.

  I thank him for the note and leave.

  DAY 105

  “The world is a toll-free toilet.”

  Four days after our two-second glance, I hear Renate’s voice from behind me, as I’m standing outside freezing my watatas off after lunch, trying to clear the din of cafeteria clanking and yakking and shrieking out of my head before my next class.

  So this is how it happens. You don’t talk to someone for a month, and then your first words to her are from an inside joke—and if she continues the joke, you take up where you left off. Right? I ask, I do not know from experience.

  But this moment, I know, is crucial. If I repeat her line back to her, it leads to her coming back into my life and finding out more Amy stuff that might disturb her even more. If I don’t, I might never have a conversation of substance with anyone my age ever again.

  “The world is a toll-free toilet,” my lips say. I hope my lips know what they’re doing.

  “Our mouths neurological—“

  “Teacher,” I hiss at her, nodding my head towards my geometry teacher, Ms. Prathipati, who just came outside to throw some stuff in the trash. “If they kick you out of this dump, they have nowhere else to put you.”

  Renate nods her acknowledgment of this fact. “So if they did kick me out, would you miss me?”

  “What do you think?”

  Five seconds go by, and then Renate says, “That’s, like…the worst question ever.”

  And then we bust up laughing, in spite of ourselves.

  “I don’t want you to make me laugh,” I say. “I don’t think we’re ready for that yet.”

  Renate sits down at one of the picnic tables nearby and nods. “I can understand that.”

  I sit down across from her and blow on my cold hands. While I’m trying to think of what to say to her, she beats me to it. “So what I was trying to say that time,” Renate says, “but obviously failed at, was that friends don’t have to agree on everything. But if someone’s your friend, and there’s something she loves and you have a bad reaction to it, you at least owe it to her to find out her side of it. Maybe there’s something about that thing that you didn’t think of, and you can learn something from her. You know what I mean? I wasn’t going to make fun of you. You should have known me better than that.”

  “Ren,” I say, “the exact words you used were, quote, ‘Frankly, I’m shocked that you would go for something like this,’ unquote. How is that any better than making fun of me?” Damn, it’s frigid out here. I know you can’t get a cold without being exposed to the virus, but I start having a sneezing fit to beat all sneezing fits. Five in a row. I think it’s called vasomotor rhinitis.

  “Salud times five,” Renate says. “Consider yourself blessed for all eternity. But can we finish talking about this inside before we get frostbite?”

  We go inside the cafeteria, and then, realizing it’s going to be too noisy to really talk in there, we go out into the hallway just outside of it. “So I watched that video a few more times, just so you know,” Renate says. “And I think I get it. You think of Amy as being subversive, as being someone who kind of deconstructs bossa nova and lounge music because instead of singing it all cool like those other singers do, she goes at it with this wildfire intensity. Right?”

  “Exactly.”

  “So the first time I watched her, I didn’t see that. What I saw was someone with killer stage fright who was panicking because the cameras were on. I’ve had that kind of stage fright, where all that stuff you practiced goes out the window because you didn’t practice it in a roomful of people. Even with perfect pitch, you can go totally flat if you’re nervous enough. I think it kind of triggered me or something, seeing her up there.”

  “Really?” I say. “I didn’t think you were afraid of anything.”

  She lets out a rueful laugh. “Oh, dude. You really don’t know me, do you?”

  One point for Dr. Ngo. I suppose two months isn’t enough time to know someone after all.

  As the hallways start to fill up with people, we start walking in the direction of our lockers. “But can’t you be subversive and nervous on stage?” I say.

  “Sure. And after a couple more plays, I got that. You identify with her because she’s a fish out of water. She wanted to be playing rock and roll, but it was 1969 and rock and roll female drummers weren’t happening. So she brought rock and roll to bossa nova, almost without realizing it.”

  “That’s it!” I squeeze her arm while walking down the hall. “I have to remember what you just said, because I’m trying to get her Wikipedia page back up. They keep flagging me for ‘lack of objectivity’ and ‘original research,’ and of course the ever popular ‘lack of notoriety.’”

  Renate smirks. “Lack of objectivity. Like anyone would bother writing someone’s biography for free if they didn’t feel strongly about them?”

  “Right, and original research…I know, links or it didn’t happen, but what if there just aren’t any links, and you know it did happen?”

  All of a sudden, I feel fantastic. There’s a real person in my life again, not just a spectre, talking to me about things that matter.

  DAY 112

  A week later, Renate walks home with me after school, and on the way over there I tell her the story of how I bought the cocktail drum set and snuck it in the house. Just as I expected, she eats it up. “Can I see it?” she asks me.

  “It’s all tied up in leaf bags and twine. So my parents don’t spot it.”

  “Well, then what the hell did you buy it for?”

  I take a deep breath. “I know this is going to sound freaky…but I almost want to say Amy made me do it.” I make quote signs with my fingers over the last four words. “I mean, I know she didn’t, I’m not delusional, but…it just kind of feels that way. Like her spirit was with me or something. Does that make any sense…at all?”

  “That does sound freaky,” Renate says. “But given what I know about you, not shocking.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.” Renate stops walking and looks at me with her head cocked thoughtfully to the side. “Cynner, believe it or not, I’ve been worried about you. I only see you in homeroom lately, but you look so stressed out and you’re always tapping your feet, slapping the desk, humming, mouthing words to yourself…if you’re escaping into a world of Amy because your world is shit, there are worse ways you could be dealing with it. But the fact that it is shit is what worries me.”

  I look down at the ground. “Shunsberg called my parents a few weeks ago and demanded to know why I didn’t have an IEP. Guess what they said?”

  “’Why does Cynthia need an IEP? IEPs are for—‘”

  “’Kids with disabilities.’” I finish the sentence with her. “But I don’t even know what ‘accommodations’ means for someone like me. I know Dr. Ngo mentioned something about instructions in writing, but what else? Not getting marked off in class for foot-tapping?”

  “That would be a start.”

  I reach into my purse and fish out my house keys, and we start walking again. My exhales produce vapor clouds, the only good thing about winter as far as I’m concerned. “So I don’t know if I ever asked you this…but what did your parents do when you got expelled from SCH?”

  Renate laughs. “What do you think they did? They crapped their drawers. They grounded my ass for twenty lifetimes. Then they got me a shrink. The shrink brought them in to a couple of our sessions, and told them I had a splash of oppositional defiant disorder and a skosh of obsessive-compulsive disorder—I mean, he didn’t say ‘splash’ and ‘skosh,’ but, you know—so anyway, he also said both of those were exacerbated by a hostile school environment, and referred me to a psychiatrist to help with the anxiety stuff. The psych helped get me readmitted to a new school, and put me on Klono
pin, which is a tranq. I still take it. It actually does help.”

  “How did I not know you were on tranqs?”

  “You didn’t ask.”

  I let out a vapor-producing snort. “Yeah, I guess I had that coming, right?”

  We arrive at the house and I see what looks like a rental car parked in front of it, with a Hertz license plate bracket. That means Annabeth is home for winter break.

  “So…does George Clinton ever egg you on to do things?” I ask Renate.

  “George Clinton has more important things to bother with than me. Like, you know, his next album?”

  “I don’t even know if Amy is still alive.”

  “Well, whether she is or not, she quote-unquote ‘made you’ blow forty bucks on a busted drum set, so let’s unbag that thing and have a look at it. What do you have to lose, really, if they catch you?”

  “I don’t know,” I say, feeling my pulse accelerate slightly as I fixate on the rental car. I don’t know what anyone has told AB about the last few months of life with me; since the big fight, she hasn’t even responded to my texts. “Access to you, maybe?”

  “I don’t think they’d go there, Cynner. I really don’t. They know you still see me at school. If I come over, they can keep better tabs on us than if I don’t.”

  “My sister is here,” I say, pointing at the rental car. “I mean, my other sister.”

  “Perfect,” Renate says. “They’ll be distracted. Unless you’re just dying to see her right this second.”

  “Should I be? I mean, she is my sister, even if she’s pretty much blocked me.”

  “She’ll be here for almost a month. You’ll have plenty of time to get sick of each other. And I need to see those drums, like, yesterday.”

  We make our way up the driveway, extra quiet, tiptoe up to the bagged drum set, yank away at the twine until it loosens, and then—after checking around to make sure no one is coming—I pull off the trash bags, first the one on top, then the one on the bottom.

  “Ta da,” I stage-whisper.

  Renate gasps. “That is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.”

  “Well, it would be if it were new. It’s a pretty color.”

  “It’s more than that.” She runs a finger over a rust spot on the side of the bass drum frame. “Cynner, you are this drum set. Someone left it for dead, but it refused to die. You got it so you could bring it back to life. And bring yourself back to life at the same time. Don’t you get it? This is so much better than a new set of drums. They were meant for only you.”

  I feel myself begin to shake. “It needs all new heads, top and bottom. It needs new cymbals. I don’t even know if that rust will come off. I’d need to get some timbales and a cowbell, too. Maybe a woodblock.” But even as I’m saying all that, I know she’s right. I am these drums. And neither of us is going to get fixed overnight. But we will get fixed—by people who respect who we really are--and be more than anyone ever thought we’d be.

  “The rust is cosmetic,” Renate says. “It should be removable. We might have to cover this thing up for now, but it’s not going to stay that way. One piece at a time, it’s going to be revived. Bank on it.”

  Since Renate and I have no privacy here, I have to cough up a huge chunk of my allowance to text her, it’s freezing cold both outside and in the garage, and there’s too much to tell her just over lunch break or walking to my house, I tell Renate before she heads home that I’m going to write her a series of letters—with a pen, on paper—giving her more details about the Amy stuff and mail it to her house. The first one will arrive on the first Saturday of winter break, two days before Christmas. I write better than I talk, anyway, so this will be easier. And during break, I can be sure I’ll be the first one to the mailbox every day.

  I will put CB on top of the return address so she’ll know it’s from me. And if she wants to send me a letter back, she will put RS on top of the return address so I know it’s her. I don’t want to take any chances of getting hacked—my father has a degree from Caltech, after all—or of getting a note snatched at school. I don’t think there’s any chance her family would tell mine, since they have nothing in common short of being carbon-based, so I tell her it’s fine if she tells them about it. But I’m not telling my parents squat. I will grab the mail the minute it comes, every day of winter break; by the time we go back to school in January, our letters will cease. I will stash her letters in the same bag the drum set is in. Even as control-fiendish as my parents are, they’d never suspect I was getting snail mail from my best/only friend at school, during the school year. I don’t think that was a thing even when they were my age. If they do figure it out and grab the letters, so be it; I will have done what I could. But they won’t figure it out.

  “Wow, a letter,” Renate says. “Handwritten, on paper. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten one of those in the mail.”

  “I print,” I say. “My cursive is more illegible than Shunsberg’s. But it will be in ink, on paper. An epistolary correspondence. And no, I’ve never done it before, either.”

  She nods. “’Epistolary.’ For a minute, I thought it had something to do with pistols, but I know you better than that.”

  “E-pistols. No, it just means an exchange of letters. The old school way.”

  “Excellent,” Renate says, “And when we’re both famous, they’ll frame our letters and put them on display at Experience Music Project. You ever been to EMP?” I shake my head. “It’s in Seattle. It’s a museum that has a lot of Jimi Hendrix stuff, but it also has all kinds of music displays in it, including drums. You’d love it.”

  I smile weakly. “I’m not sure that what I’m going to tell you is suitable for a mass audience.” When Renate shoots me an alarmed look, I back up and add, “Don’t worry, there’s nothing really dangerous in it, but people don’t always know different from dangerous.”

  “Don’t I know that,” Renate groans.

  When I enter the house, mentally psyching myself up to face the future Dr. Annabeth, I feel an odd sense of pride, that I hatched a plan like this to communicate with Renate. AB should like me, right? And not just because we’re related, either. I have original ideas and execute them. I’m not just some giggle-puss sophomore. But she might wind up being the only Butt sister who fulfills my parents’ doctor fantasies, so they fracking worship her, and the feeling is probably mutual. So original thinking probably isn’t part of her value system. On the other hand, she did help obtain my much-missed pandeiro, so I’m completely confused and have no idea what to expect when she sees me.

  When I get to the living room, my parents are shooting video of AB, wearing a Dodgers baseball cap and huge, dorky-looking sunglasses---probably in preparation for our annual Christmas video. Not that it matters all that much how the video turns out; they disguise our voices and colorize it and have us wear things we don’t usually wear (I don’t think I’ve ever seen AB in a baseball cap in my life), so they might as well sculpt figures of us in Plasticene and shoot it with stop-motion animation. I instinctively pause before entering the room, but AB notices me and her face lights up. “Yo, Haley, come over here,” she says, using my blog name. This means I’m now going to be on camera. She gets up and gives me a big hug, like there’s no tension between us at all. I get bonked in the forehead with the bill of her cap.

  “Camera’s off,” Dad says. “You can use your real names now.”

  “Good,” I say. “Because I can’t remember her fake name anymore. It’s been too long.” Annabeth laughs. I’m still really nervous around her. I don’t know why. Or maybe I do. When Mom and Dad leave the room, I ask her, “So how come you didn’t answer my texts?”

  AB takes off her sunglasses and hat and puts them on the coffee table. “You texted me? When?”

  “Like three times, about a month ago.”

  She rolls her eyes and sighs. “I swear, I’m going to switch carriers. I’ve had all kinds of people tell me I missed texts from them. I’m really sorry.?
??

  She looks and sounds like she means it. There’s no reason not to believe her, right? If someone has a bone to pick with me they can just pick it. I shouldn’t have to guess what it is. So I jump right into how-was-your-flight-how-is-your-job small talk. She tells me she’s exhausted, but she looks like she just had ten hours of sleep, fresh as a daisy. I wonder if she even knows what happened here last month, and with Mom and Dad in the next room I’m not going to risk bringing it up. Once she’s been here a few days, I should talk to her about it, maybe ask her if she can help rescue my pandeiro for me. They might actually listen to her. But I have to be careful with timing. I always wind up bringing things up at the wrong time.

  DAYS 113-120

  Writing my first letter to Renate, which I brainstorm about all day long at school, costs me something like three days (in between frantically studying for midterms on Friday) and five trees’ worth of paper. I am very jiggly all week, even more than usual; I’m wondering how I can quiet my daily drum-dance long enough to take my exams. But there’s a different feel to it now. Yeah, it’s scary about telling Renate all this, but I’m also kind of thrilled that it’s going to be a real thing, in ink, at last.

  At first, I try to write it on unlined paper, but I can’t write straight on unlined paper to save my life, and after going through all my nice stationery (shredding each failed attempt as small as possible), I give up and write it on lined looseleaf paper. And then, after about twenty godzillion cross-outs and corrections, I copy it over again for my final draft. My hand is killing me.

  December 21, 2016

  Ms. Renate Silverdick

  77 Brooker Avenue

  Steens Center, OR 97915

  Dear Renate,

  Here, as promised, is the first of my letters explaining to you my fascination (I refuse to call it an “obsession,” that sounds so creepy and stalkery) with AZ.

  I found her album at a yard sale over the summer; and although the album was too scratched up to really let me hear the entire thing, I heard enough to know that she was a true original and shouldn’t have fallen into obscurity. (That album was the one music-related thing they didn’t commandeer, because it was hidden in a bag of old yarn under my bed.)

  But it was more than that. When I saw that video of her on Your Generation, I wanted to go back in time and be one of the kids in that audience. I would have explained to them afterwards that they were in the presence of greatness. Or maybe I would have just been too stunned to move my mouth or anything else afterwards. It’s hard to say which.

  Of course I know that if AZ is alive (which I still can’t confirm), she is going to be in her sixties. I have no idea what she did with her life after that album, and as far as I can tell, neither does anyone else. Her father, who probably would have known the most about her, died in 1992. He had a co-producer credit on her album and co-writer credit with Amy on four of the songs. The other credited producer on the album is deceased also. One of the songs, “On a Horse,” is especially gorgeous; that’s one of the few things on the album that played all the way through without skipping, and it’s about rescuing yourself instead of waiting for someone else to do it for you. It goes:

  Got an invitation to get everything I need

  Got transportation that will follow where I lead

  I waited for that dark haired prince

  Or that white knight on a steed

  They promised they’d come, but they didn’t show

  And I had places I had to go

  So I bought a saddle and my own set of reins

  And it hurt a little, charley horses, growing pains

  But that’s okay, because now I can ride

  Without a dark prince or white knight at my side

  On a horse I can jump up into the sky

  On a horse I know what it feels like to fly

  Down on the ground I hear the sound

  Of rain in people’s eyes

  And here I am, riding above the clouds

  Staying dry

  Nice, huh? Of course the know-it-alls on the bossa nova boards insist that Amy couldn’t possibly have written anything that good at the age of 14 or 15 and that her father probably wrote most if not all of those songs. As far as her drumming goes, all the percussion on the album that I was able to hear sounds great. But again, both she and her dad were credited with drums and percussion and it’s impossible to tell who played what. On that video she played live, that wasn’t lip-synching like they did on most music shows back then.

  Okay, that’s all the dry factual stuff. But what you probably want to know is what AZ is like in my head. Hooboy. But you (and only you) deserve to know the entire truth.

  The AZ in my head is forever my age. She gets all my jokes. (Even you don’t get all my jokes.) She keeps a running commentary going in my mind about my nauseating lunches, the witless writing on the walls in the girls’ bathroom, and my yet-to-exist love life, and how I could write songs about all of it. She “guided” me on what to say to you when we had our first conversation, and how to remove the lugs on that blasted drum set. She dances with me to the rhythms in my head. She didn’t even get mad when I told her you were probably right about her singing off key. She never gets mad. Of course she doesn’t. She isn’t real.

  But what is she? And why won’t she go away even though I know she’s not real? I feel like Sedona chasing after the laser pointer, thinking he’s finally going to catch the dot, as if the dot was a living creature. You see him acting all blasé about it, like, ‘Eh, it’s just a dot, I’m not falling for that again,’ but five minutes later, there he is trying to catch it for the 45,975th time. AZ is my laser pointer dot, and unlike your cat, I have enough sense to be embarrassed about it, but not enough to quit running after it.

  Please advise.

  Very unbelievably truly yours,

  CB

  P.S. I watched “Look Around,” on average, twenty times a day for three months, then tried to block all access to video sites. But you could block Internet access to me for life, and I’d still watch it. In my head. Constantly.

  On Friday morning, on the way to school, I drop it in the mailbox three blocks away. As soon as I hear the clunk of the mailbox slamming shut, sending my letter down into the pile, I suck in a lung-freezing amount of winter air in one big gasp. I can’t believe I did it. I told her. She now has something she can use against me if it ever comes down to that.

  She’s not going to do that, Spectral Amy insists. You did the right thing telling her.

  You’re not exactly an objective party here, I rejoinder. She nods in grudging agreement.

  When I get to homeroom and see Renate sitting there, I just smile at her and raise my eyebrows, as if to say, It’s coming. She returns my smile. We don’t talk otherwise.

  That same day, I take a bunch of midterms and turn in a paper for Language Arts on Tess of the d’Urbervilles, a book I think I almost understood well enough to fake a ten-dollar-word-laden paper about. About the tests, I am stumped about how well or poorly I did. I don’t have the answers to anything anymore.

  When I get home, I see my laptop sitting on the dining table, instead of being put away like I expected, even though it’s now winter break and they know I don’t have any homework. No one is watching, so I pick up the laptop and take it to my room. They can snatch it back from me if they want, but I’m going to get it while I can. Once I’m in my room, I open a private browser window, unblock my access to the video sites that have Amy’s video on it, and watch it over and over and over again, with only one earbud in so my other ear can listen for approaching footsteps. We eat dinner, and nobody asks for the laptop back. I retreat into the bedroom again and keep watching the video on continuous loop for hours, until I start falling asleep. But before I do, I make sure to clear out my cache, just in case Dad knows how to hack a private browser window history.

  Nobody says a word about any of it. It’s almost like I’m not here.

  DAY 121

&nb
sp; The next day, Saturday, I hear the notification beep on my stupid-phone when I wake up. I fish the phone out of my purse, and notice that it’s almost out of juice, and also that there are two texts from Renate.

  The first one reads: I don’t xpect u to answer this bc I know u get charged 4 sends, but all imma say for now is: WOW. Longer letter coming, will include it in back of xmas card when I come over Monday.

  The second one reads: p.s. there will be crappy decoy gift with your xmas card but your real prez is a cowbell with a mounting bracket, which I will keep at my place until your progens chill the hell out. DELETE THIS AS SOON AS U READ IT.

  I delete both texts immediately, then hook my phone up to the charger. And I start getting tingles about the idea that there’s now a mountable cowbell with my name on it, then pissed off that I have to hide the damn thing, then grateful that there is someone who cares enough to do it for me. And then I grab a pencil off my desk and start tapping the eraser part on my side table, imagining the tonk-tonk-tonk-a-tonk I would be hearing if I was allowed to play the real deal. So sweet.

  You see? Spectral Amy says. If you weren’t meant to be a musician, you wouldn’t have something like that happen to you. All you have to do is get out of this house for good, and life will start happening to you.

  But I can’t get out now, I tell her, still playing my imaginary cowbell. And by the time I do, my parents will probably kill any musical impulses I have.

  You might have to take a big risk, Spectral Amy says. You might have to do something drastic. But listen to you. All you have is a pencil and you can still hear the other things your hands could do, if they were allowed to.

  Something drastic.

  A big risk.

  Then it hits me. If Renate is willing to store a mountable cowbell at her place, then she’d probably be willing to store the rest of the drum set over there. And maybe I could even have the replacement parts sent to her house, and resurrect that drum set there. The idea makes me feel deliciously wicked. And I know she’d love it.

  Now you’re talking, Spectral Amy says.

  But I lucked out by getting it into the garage in the first place; how am I going to get it out?

  That’s easy, Spectral Amy says. One piece at a time.

  One piece at a time. That’s what Renate said.

  Of course. I can take the tom and snare off, break down the stands and brackets, stuff the bass drum pedal into a backpack. The only thing that might be a challenge to smuggle out would be the bass drum, which is over two feet high and has a non-detachable mount which makes it come up to my waist. But once we get everything else over to her place, we can figure out that last part. And we can have the replacement parts sent to her house, too.

  You really are a genius, I tell Spectral Amy. And one day, everyone will know.

  Then I text Renate, although I will have to pay for the privilege: You rule so hard. I’ll see you Monday. Right after that, she texts me a smiley, and then I erase the entire exchange.

  DAYS 122-123

  I spend the next two days, when I’m not furtively getting my hourly Amy fix in, surfing the Net for gear, including mesh cymbals and heads, that would fit a Trixon cocktail kit. My two sets of grandparents, if they stay true to pattern, will probably send me a hundred bucks each for Christmas, along with a savings bond for the same amount (I don’t get to open their cards until Christmas morning). But I’m going to have to save my pocket change for the rest of it.

  If I had four hundred simoleons to blow all at once, I could just buy a new set, I complain to Spectral Amy.

  Maybe, Spectral Amy says, but this is a much better story. Besides, you want those mesh heads and cymbals. I wish I’d had those, I probably wouldn’t have driven my mom so crazy!

  At least your mom let you play, I say.

  She did what my dad told her to, Spectral Amy says. It was the 1960s. She wasn’t going to overrule him.

  At least she had one parent who got it. Sigh. Now I’m really depressed.

  DAY 127

  Annabeth fascinates me. How is it that this perfect creature, almost a decade my senior, actually came out of the same birth canal that I did? I know I make her feel weird, the way I watch her like she’s some anthropology project; she never seems to spend more than thirty seconds in the same room with me alone, what with all the people in town who are dying for a few minutes of her time. How do I even talk to her? It sounds absurd that I should be asking that question about my own sister. But obviously, Tam has no problem with it. They go to Tam’s room and talk and giggle for hours at a time. I can’t ever picture AB doing that with me.

  On Christmas Eve, through the wall that connects my bedroom to Tam’s, I can hear her and AB watching some TV singing contest and cackling about the contestants. Unlike me, Tam has a TV in her room; she bought it with her own money. The TV is loud enough that I can hear one of the contestants tell her back story. She’s fifteen, my age, and her parents agreed to move to Nashville so she could pursue her dream of being a singer, and they built a state-of-the-art recording studio in their new house. Her parents talk about how wonderful and special she is, how talented, how deserving. I am trying to imagine what I would say if I was on one of those shows. My parents think I suck in every possible way; they did everything to stop me short of surgically removing my vocal cords, but here I am anyway. Screw you, Mom and Dad. For my audition song I’m singing Ray Charles’ “You Don’t Know Me,”and dedicating it to them. The woman who wrote it even has the same first name I used to have, ha ha!

  I swallow the lump in my throat and shove a pair of drummers’ earplugs in my ears so I don’t have to hear any more.

  Two entire days. I have to wait two entire days to get Renate’s letter. How did people not explode out of their own skins and get stuck to the ceiling, waiting to hear back from people through the mail, in the days before communication went electronic? I sit at family meals that weekend forcing my hands and my head to stay still and quiet, while I move my feet around rhythmically, glancing under the table to make sure I’m not in danger of kicking anyone. I bite at the insides of my lips, pick my cuticles, unravel a thread at the bottom of my shirt, hiccup loudly, hiccup again, hiccup again. The hiccups keep going until I drink water upside down, holding my glass, bending over it, and tipping the glass into my mouth. It’s the only hiccup remedy that ever works for me. When I’m done, gas comes out of both ends of me simultaneously, and my sisters crack up laughing, as my parents sit there stone-faced.

  My parents ask me if I`’m feeling okay. Since I know they don’t want the real answer to that question, I just say yes. But I can see AB and Tam exchanging glances, like they know what’s really happening.

  How long can this go on?

  DAY 128

  On Christmas morning, we open our gifts. I get a couple of David Sedaris books from AB. (Isn’t his stuff supposed to be kind of racy? My parents don’t comment.) I get a hundred-dollar gift card for Powell’s Books from my parents that I can use for mail ordering books and nothing else, and a hand-crocheted Dr. Who-like scarf—twice my height, in multiple colors of microfiber yarn--from Tam. No return of my pandeiro, alas.

  I give everyone handmade ceramics that I made in art class; they seem mildly appreciative. I have a ceramic cat for Renate, for when she arrives at noon, painted in Sedona’s red-rock colors. Since no one else knows about the cowbell, whatever she gives me will probably seem like weak tea to everyone else, compared to a handmade ceramic piece. No one else knows about the letter, either. I get so tingly thinking about it that I turn around and bump into the tree and knock some ornaments off it.

  Finally we get to open the cards from our grandparents. At which time I find out that my mom’s parents have bumped up their gift for each of us from the usual hundred dollars to a hundred and fifty. My paternal grandparents give me their usual hundred. But still…that puts me fifty dollars closer to my goal of getting the drums restored. I try really, really hard not to shriek with joy. “It’s f
ifty extra dollars,” Tam says. “I mean, it’s nice, but don’t, like, rupture yourself over it. Fifty bucks buys like what, two pairs of pants if they’re on sale?”

  Oh, how I wish I could tell Tamarlyn about this. Of all my family members, I think she’d be the most supportive. But once she knows, the others will bleed it out of her somehow. I can take no chances.

  I start playing bongos on my knees, going faster and faster and faster. “Hey,” AB says, “have you guys noticed that ever since you took away her pandeiro and her bongos, she plays drums on everything now? I mean, she even drums with her feet. It’s bizarre. You might as well just give that stuff back to her.”

  So she knows about them seizing the pandeiro. Which means she probably knows why. I don’t know why I didn’t (couldn’t) talk to her about it myself, other than sheer cowardice. A girl who was anything close to neurologically normal would have brought it up in the first twenty-four hours AB was home. But if she knew all this time, why didn’t she bring it up in my presence until now? I do not understand this species the rest of my household belongs to.

  I drum even faster. My parents don't comment on what AB just said, and make a point of turning their backs to me as I drum. I glance at Tam. She makes a wry face in their direction.

  When eleven-thirty rolls around, I go to my room and retrieve a small notebook from my purse, stick it in my pocket, and slip off to the frigid garage, the only place in this house I can write anything with no chance of being seen. I write a note for Renate asking her if we can get the drums to her place and if she’ll order the replacement parts for me if I give her the money. Then I pull the pages out and fold them, and write NOT MY NEXT LETTER, SOMETHING EXTRA on them and put them in my pocket, along with the notepad. I’ll hand her the note when she’s about to leave. I look at my watch, which is something I do approximately every forty-five seconds between now and noon, with my heart going tonk-tonk-tonk-a-tonk the entire time.

  Renate finally arrives at twelve minutes after noon. “She’s here!” I shout, like I haven’t seen her in months. Even Renate seems surprised by my display of ecstasy over her arrival, although she might just be playing along to keep my parents pre-clue. She hands me her holiday card, and when I open the envelope, I see some folded stationery behind the card, and I carefully remove the card from the envelope without taking out the letter behind it. I’m so excited I think I might throw up. I wonder if I look green. I bet I do.

  I take out the card, which is one of those I Can Haz Cheezburger?-type of cat pictures, with the caption EX MUSS KITTEH SEZ, I CAN EATZ YER RIBBEN?, over a photo of a black and white kitten chewing on a red ribbon tied to a wrapped present. “Aww, cute,” I say, and then open the card. Attached is a gift card for Unscentedly Yours, a local store that sells fragrance-free beauty products. The inside of the card says, NAH, KITTEH TUMMEH NO LIKEH, U CAN HAZ BACK, with a picture of what looks like cat vomit on a rug with pieces of red ribbon in it. I laugh and show it to everyone. “Eww,” everyone else says, although Tam giggles when she says it. I read aloud what she wrote inside the card: Thank you for rocking my world. Please keep doing that. Xo, renate. I give her a hug, then present her with her ceramic Sedona. She loves it. “It does look like Sedona,” Renate says. “You have a great visual memory.”

  It’s all I can do not to race into the garage and read her letter right away. But Renate doesn’t stay long, only two hours, probably because she knows I’m dying to read what she wrote, and also, my parents (as usual) are staring at her like she’s a sewer rat I found and asked if I could keep as a pet. But this time I’m sort of grateful for it. The sooner she leaves, the sooner I can read the letter. Isn’t that weird? I practically fell off my hinges waiting for her to get here, and now I’m more interested in what she has to say than I am in her physical presence.

  But if it bothers Renate, she doesn’t show it on her face. She just tells everyone cheerfully that she has to go to her grandma’s this afternoon and texts her parents to come pick her up. When their car pulls up, I go with Renate out to the car, under the pretense that I’m saying hi to her mom and dad, and when Renate gets into the car, I pull the note I wrote for her out of my pocket and hand it to her. She reads what I scribbled on top of it, and smiles, then tucks the note in her coat pocket. “Merry Christmas, Cynner Woman,” Renate says, and her parents crack up laughing, like they’ve never heard her use that name around them before.

  Her parents seem amazingly chill, considering everything she’s put them through. I don’t know what my parents would have done if I did the stuff she did at her last school. Fed me to a snake, probably.

  I then go to the garage (which is open from the outside) and take out Renate’s letter, which is on what looks like hand-designed stationery, with a sketch of her likeness wearing her trademark beret and cloak. It might even be the one I saw her doing on notebook paper in the beginning of the year. She can write in a straight line on unlined paper; in fact, she writes in calligraphy. Why does that not surprise me?

  December 24, 2016

  Ms. Cynthia Butt

  1105 Noe Street

  Steens Center, OR 97915

  Dear Cynner,

  First thing I’m going to say is, wow, you can really write, girlie. I doff my beret in your general direction.

  Second thing is, it’s totally, totally (and I mean totally totally) understandable that you would “hear” AZ saying nice things to you and being supportive. I mean, my gods, you have to be starved for it considering who you live with. I cried when I read that stuff, I really did. And now I actually want to murder your parents. How could they do that to you?

  Seriously, how? I know kids whose parents insist that they go to med school or get science degrees or whatever, and are really hard-nosed about it, but they don’t insist that their kids flail around with no help, and then punish them for not being able to tough it out, extremely harshly with NO WARNING and forbid them to even LISTEN to their favorite music.I checked to see if any of this is illegal in Oregon. Unfortunately, no. But one day, very soon, they will get theirs. And it will be magnificent.

  Meanwhile, though, about the AZ stuff: I was thinking, “If this girl did all that, there’s no way in the world she doesn’t have other fans.” Couldn’t you form some kind of online fan group and put a comment on one of her videos advertising it? Couldn’t you blog about her for some site that has community blogging open to anyone? Someone at one of the feminist blogs has to remember her, especially one of the older women. If you don’t know how to do that stuff, I can help you figure it out. If you’re paranoid about your parents finding out,you can use a fake name and get a separate email address, and we can read everything you get on my phone at school.

  Also, are there other musicians, engineers, etc. credited on her album? There have to be a few people who aren’t dead or in hiding or too senile or drug-damaged to remember anything. Maybe there’s someone who used to work for her record label when she was signed there? I also saw a book on the interlibrary loan list, called Rhythm Methods: An Oral History of Female Drummers and Percussionists, 1960-1990. I took the liberty of ordering it myself, knowing the wicked witch puddle your parents would turn into if they saw it in your room; if the authors did their homework, there has to be something in that book about AZ. I should have it by the time we have to go back to school again.

  Between all those people, there has to be someone who can at least tell you if Amy is alive or not, and if she is, whatever happened to her. And you could help get her the credit she deserves for breaking new ground. I can’t understand why there would be, like, zero information or discussion about her, anywhere, unless she went through the Net with some big old eraser and just deleted everything ever written about her. I don’t even know if it’s possible to do that, but it’s the only explanation I can think of.

  Sedona says meowy Xmas.

  Xo, renate

  I understand what Renate is trying to do here. She’s trying to get me hooked up with other Amy fans s
o I don’t feel like I’m the only freak who likes her. And she’s right, I can’t possibly be her only fan, but it feels that way. A few years ago, there was this sitcom called Flight of the Conchords, about a band so pathetic that they had only one fan in the entire known universe and she was this obsessive stalkery ladycreep. I used to think that show was funny. Now that I feel like I could be living it, with me in the role of Mel the ladycreep, I’m not laughing. Not that I would ever do the stuff she did, or even close to it, but I feel like I’m mentally glommed on to Amy in that way, like I have no other life. And if Amy ever found out about me, she’d think I was a “Mel,” even if I never said a word to her.

  If I actually did the things Renate suggests, like try to get in touch with someone who played on her album, I would probably trip them out with Mel-like vibes, too. Like attracts like, unlike repels unlike. It’s as natural as magnets turned the wrong way. And I am a magnet turned the wrong way. What Renate is suggesting are things I could only get away with if I was a normie.

  But I do love her for trying.

  When I’m done reading the letter, I hear the notification beep on my phone, and there’s a text from her. It says, Oh hells yes, tell me what u want and put yr $ on a prepaid credit card and give it to me, and I will order it 4u. I told my parents we have to do it here because we have soundproofing and u don’t. They bought it.

  Oh my fracking God. This is the best Christmas ever.

  DAY 129

  The day after Christmas, which is Monday, while my parents are sequestered in their office, I leave them a note (which they probably won’t get around to reading anyway) and take a walk over to Safeway, shopping list in hand. There, I pick up the raw almonds and cider vinegar and organic unripened avocados and bananas on the shopping list, then buy a prepaid credit card with my Christmas money. My intent is to sit in the café and write to Renate, without buying anything else. But on the way over there, I spot the coffee bar. Normally I wouldn’t even look at it because everything there is forbidden to me, but this time I pause and stare at the menu, a menu that normal people order from all the time without another thought. It might be technically junk food, but it’s food, not fracking poison, regardless of what my parents and Dr. Nansi think.

  “Would you like to order something?” the barista asks me. She’s probably about college age, and very smiley and cheerful. Obviously, she knows nothing about me, or she wouldn’t be asking me that question.

  “Actually…yeah,” I hear myself say. “I’ll go for a small hot chocolate.”

  “Whipped cream?”

  Whipped cream. Oh boy. Chocolate. Sugar. Dairy. I feel like I’m buying crystal meth. “Um…yes, please.”

  “You got it.”

  Sixty seconds later I’m handing her two dollars and she’s handing me a hot cup, and my hands are shaking so hard that I’m scared I’ll drop it. “Thanks so much,” I say, hoping my voice isn’t shaking as badly as my hands are. She looks at me a little funny, like she wants to ask me if I’m okay, but she just says, “Enjoy it.”

  I sit down in the café and open the lid to my liquid meth equivalent. I dip my fingertip into the white stuff on top, and, with my pulse pounding out sixteenth notes at 170 beats a minute, I flick my tongue at my fingertip and taste it. It’s super sweet, a lot sweeter than unripe bananas, not at all sour like the yogurt I tasted at school. Then I dip my tongue in the cup and get a little more of the whipped cream on my tongue. I take in the taste of it, letting the sensation wash over me of a mouthful of milk product going down my gullet for the first time since I was four, which might as well have been never, because I don’t remember it. I wait ten seconds to see if I change into a werewolf or start having projectile vomiting or something, and when it doesn’t happen, I take a sip at the brown liquid lurking beneath it. It’s so hot it burns my tongue, and I leave the cup on the table with the top off, waiting for it to cool off.

  Then I take out my blank paper and a pen, and sit down and write to Renate. I know I have to make it snappy and get this done before my parents get suspicious. Will chocolate and whipped cream show up on my breath? Maybe I should have thought of that before I took a sip.

  December 26, 2016

  Ms. Renate Silverdick

  77 Brooker Avenue

  Steens Center, OR 97915

  Dear Renate,

  You don’t know how much I appreciate your being willing to help me out restoring those drums. Enclosed is a prepaid MC and a list of what I can afford to get right now. Keep the change.

  About getting me help, I did ask, but they farted in my face (not literally). That would mean I wasn’t smart enough to pass “basic” math and science. Can’t have that around here.

  I can’t wait to see that book you ordered. But here’s the problem. I don’t know if I want to meet other fans of AZ, or even AZ herself. I don’t know if I even want to know if she’s alive or not, or find out more details about her life. I used to think I wanted that, but now it feels like I’m not good enough to meet her yet. I feel like I have to actually have a reason she would want to know me, other than my appreciating her, I have to be a much cooler and more accomplished and attractive person in order to deserve that. If she is alive, I don’t want to do anything to disrupt the life she’s built, and I don’t want her to know me as “Cindy Butt, loser.” I need a new name, a real identity as an artist and a person, before I reveal myself to her.

  And if she does have other fans, they’d either be freaked out about how much I like her, or they’d be even worse than I am, like John Hinckley types. Same with the pros who knew her or might know her now. Why would they volunteer information to someone who pushed their creep buttons?

  Even worse, what if I found out she was dead? Or that she was a terrible person? Then I’d feel like a dead-fish-for-brains that I wasted all this energy on her. There’s a lot at stake here. Too much. I know this all sounds really irrational, but it’s how I feel. I don’t expect you to solve this for me. I don’t think anyone can.

  Meow back to Sedona. I can’t wait to pet him again.

  Xo, CB

  P.S. I’m here in Safeway alone, drinking my first ever hot chocolate. Haven’t grown fangs or forgotten my name yet. Aren’t I the naughtiest?

  P.P.S. What do you think of Cyan for a stage name for me? It’s a mashup of CYnthia ANn.

  Once I’m done with the letter and have sealed it all up, I take a sip of my now-lukewarm hot chocolate. Whoa. I know that it’s supposed to be a lot better hot, but I can’t even believe anything could taste this good, or bring such joy to my nerve centers. Chocolate. This stuff is actually legal? I’m screwed now. I’m going to want it every day of my life and twice on Sundays, but for now, I’m just going to sit here and savor every illicit-for-Cynthia (but not illicit-for-Cyan!) mouthful for as long as I can get away with it.

  I stick the letter and the prepaid credit card in the mailbox on the way home. I know there’s no mail pickup the day after Christmas because it was on a Sunday this year, so she won’t get it until Wednesday, which gives me a whole other day to obsess about it. The clank of the mailbox closing and the letter sliding down the chute makes my stomach seize up. Or maybe it’s the hot chocolate. I hope not. On the walk home, it starts snowing. I let a snowflake (God knows what’s in those) land on my tongue and cleanse my palate before I walk into the house with an illegal chocolate smile on my face.

  DAY 130

  The next night, after dinner, Mom and Dad go into their office, and as soon as they do, the phone rings. From outside, I hear the caller ID voice say, “Mr. Shunsberg.”

  I immediately snap to attention. Mr. S. is calling our house, the Tuesday after Christmas? Mom and Dad look at each other like they’re hesitating on answering it, but after another ring, Dad punches the speaker phone button and talks, as I hover in the doorway.

  “Brian,” Dad says, wrinkling his brow. “This is a surprise. How has your holiday been?”

  “Late Hanukkah this year,” Mr. S. says. “Thi
s year, we get to celebrate when you guys do. Listen, I’m sorry to bother you during the holidays like this, but I need to talk to you guys about Cynthia’s grades. The school is probably going to set a formal meeting about it after the holidays, but I thought you should know now.”

  “Cynthia,” Dad says, and points his thumb outwards, as if to say he wants me to leave.

  “I want Cynthia to be present for what we’re discussing,” Mr. S. says. “This is really important.”

  “If it’s about her grades, she should be here, Dan,” Mom tells Dad.

  I look at Dad, and he nods. I enter the office and quietly push the door closed, then lean against the door for support.

  “Why are you calling us about her grades?” Dad says. “I mean, you’re kind of going above and beyond the job description of a homeroom teacher here, aren’t you?”

  “I was a student teacher at a high school where homeroom teachers functioned in an advisory role,” Mr. S. says. “I want to make myself available for my students the same way, especially since we’re down to only one guidance counselor and one part-time temporary school psychologist.” He clears his throat. “And…I hate to be the bearer of bad news here, but if you were hoping that depriving Cynthia of her rhythm instruments would improve her grades, it’s not happening. I’ve been in touch with Cynthia’s other teachers. Cynthia, you failed every single midterm you took before the break. I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, God,” I whisper. I can’t even look at my parents. “I…I know I was having some problems remembering stuff I was reading, but I didn’t think it was that bad. I really flunked all four?”

  “I wish I had better news for you,” Mr. S. says. “But this can’t go on. Cynthia is at a point where she’s going to fall off the college track entirely unless you acknowledge her disability and get her the supports she needs.”

  “It’s that damn Renate,” Dad grumbles. “I knew we should have tried to separate them.”

  “Renate has nothing to do with this. Kids like Cynthia just reach a point where they can’t pass for standard issue anymore no matter how hard they try.”

  “Did you go off your diet, Cynthia?” Mom asks me.

  “No,” I answer, too quickly. Obviously that’s a lie in absolute terms, but the real question she’s asking is, did going off the diet make me flunk those tests? So in that sense, it’s not a lie, because the hot chocolate was later. What will they say if my grades improve after drinking it?

  “And speaking of that diet,” Mr. S. says, “can Cynthia really be getting proper nutrition on such a limited regime?”

  “Kids who have seizures have diets a lot more limited than that if their meds don’t work,” Dad rejoinders.

  “Does Cynthia have epilepsy?”

  “No, but—“

  “Because epilepsy is an illness that can kill you instantly if it’s not effectively treated. In other words, it’s not autism.”

  “People with autism do die of it,” Mom says. “They can’t take care of themselves and nobody is there to do it for them, because they have no family left, and that’s it for them.”

  “Oh, please,” I mutter.

  “If Cynthia gets the right kinds of accommodations, her life can be as good and as long as anyone else’s. But not if you’re going to keep ignoring the evidence in front of you.” I hear Mr. S. pause for breath. “I realize that could pose a problem to you in terms of finances, but—“

  “You know what, Brian? Fuck you,” Dad barks at him. “Who the hell do you think you are?”

  “Dan…” Mom looks freaked out by how intense Dad’s reaction is. Even I’m a little shocked. I never thought Dad would ever drop an F-bomb on a teacher.

  Dad starts pacing back and forth, but only a few feet in each direction, like he’s a tiger in a cage. “No,” he says to Mom. “I’m not going to have Doogie Howser here sit there in the privacy of his living room, without enough guts to even say it to our faces, and call us frauds.”

  “Who’s Doogie Howser?” I ask.

  “He’s referring to an old TV show about a teenage doctor,” Mr. S. says. “What he’s saying is that I don’t look like an adult, so I have no right to question him.” He pauses for breath again. “Dan, I’m not calling you frauds. Fraud would imply that you actually know Cynthia has…that she’s on the spectrum and you’re lying and telling people otherwise, and I don’t believe that about you at all.”

  “This couldn’t wait until school was in session again?” Mom says.

  “I don’t think so,” Mr. S. says. “If you handle this right now, Cynthia has a good chance of salvaging her GPA for the year and doing a lot better after that. If you don’t, then don’t expect miracles from doing the same thing and expecting the results to be different. There’s no reason she has to be struggling like this. Do you really think she’s slacking off to punish you?”

  “That’s exactly what they think,” I say. “Like I’m just some cruel, sadistic person who likes to make people suffer. I hate making people suffer! I hate it! I hate it, I hate it, I hate it!” I slap my hand on the wall with every “hate,” generating way more hand pain than I expected. “And I passed all your damn drug tests, and you still won’t let me go to Renate’s house.”

  “You passed the first five weeks,” Dad says. “You have three more to go.”

  “Do I have this right?” Mr. S. says. “Cynthia has to pass eight drug tests in a row before she can go to her best friend’s house?”

  “Our friends all do the same thing,” Mom says.

  “Bull…pucky,” I say. “I have never, in the history of forever, heard of someone who’s never been caught with drugs ever having to take that many pee tests to be let off house arrest. Do you really think I’m that good at scrubbing my own urine? Or that Renate, of all people, is an expert in it? Renate doesn’t even drink.” With Mr. S. on the line, I am starting to rev into high gear with this. “Your friends’ kids got busted for dealing, or driving while they were high as kites. They had to be bailed out of fracking jail, Mom. You didn’t catch me doing anything but playing my pandeiro.”

  “We can’t afford to support you after you get out of college,” Dad says. “I know that’s the trend now, you go get your degree in shoelace tying or whatever, and then you go live at home and apply for a bunch of retail jobs and wait to see if Burger King will hire you, if you’re lucky. We can’t have that. You have to get a degree that’s going to make you hireable for a living wage after you graduate.”

  I chew furiously at my cuticle. Very professional looking, I am.

  “Dan,” Mr. Shunsberg says, “that’s not going to happen if all you do is punish Cynthia instead of—“

  “Even if we were to treat Cynthia as though she had autism, do you know what the unemployment rate of people with autism is, Brian?” Dad stops pacing and drops into his desk chair, right behind the phone. “Seventy-five to eighty percent. With no jobs, or only extremely part time jobs. Once she got that scarlet A stamped on her forehead, any gains she made academically with so-called accommodations would go right down the toilet. Employers don’t have to say why they’re not hiring you. They can just not do it.”

  “Yeah, I’m totally learning how to charm people’s socks off with the way you treat me,” I say to my own feet.

  “There is a state initiative now to help people with developmental disabilities get jobs,” Mr. S. says. “There are job developers, job coaches, people like that who she could have access to if you got her into the system.”

  “What jobs? Like pushing a mop around some office at night ten hours a week? Those programs are for people with below average IQs. No offense, but the people who run those things wouldn’t even want Cynthia. She’s too smart for them.”

  “She’d be bored out of her mind,” Mom adds. “Wouldn’t you, Cynthia?”

  I nod and look down at my macerated cuticles. “Well, there is that.”

  “Cynthia, I’m not giving up on you,” Mr. S. says. “I know there’s a way you can be
who you are and still be successful.”

  I feel my throat tighten. Because I know he’s wrong. I want so much to believe him, but as much as right now I’m so far over my parents that I’m under them, they’re right about one thing: I can’t be a fracking janitor. I can’t even clean a kitchen sink without getting water all over the floor and wasting half a bottle of dishwashing liquid, only to be told the backs of the dishes are still dirty. So here I am: too “smart” (and clumsy) to do menial work, too “stupid” (and socially inept) to do well academically. And unlike a lot of people on the spectrum, I have no mechanical or technical aptitude either. What place could there possibly be for me? Even in music, you have to get people to like you. You have to win hearts. And I can’t even win my parents’ hearts.

  Your parents have no hearts, Spectral Amy says. You can’t win something that doesn’t exist.

  I clench myself as hard as I can to keep from sobbing. Not in front of them. Please. No wonder I can’t talk to Annabeth. I’m the kind of person she’d cross the street to avoid if we weren’t related.

  Before he hangs up, Mr. Shunsberg says to my parents, “I hope you guys all sit down and have a serious discussion about this. Because this is really crucial.”

  When he’s gone, I wait for the big explosion to come from my parents. But they say nothing, and after an excruciating pause, Dad asks me, much too quietly and evenly, to leave and says we’ll all discuss this tomorrow. My stomach curdles thinking about what they’re going to do to me next.

  DAY 131

  I sleep in fits until noon the next day—and weirdly enough, no one has tried to wake me up for all that time, like they usually do.Then, as I’m putting on the last of my clothes, an envelope slides under my bedroom door. It’s Renate’s letter. She has written on the envelope: I had Dad run this over to your mailbox instead of waiting for the mail to get it to you. I didn’t want you to wait the extra day! This means she already got the mail for today and read my letter and responded to it. Holy moly. I wonder who got it out of the mailbox (I see no sign of tampering with the seal on the envelope), but before I find that out, I have to find out what she has to say that can’t wait.

  December 28, 2016

  Ms. Cynthia Butt

  1105 Noe Street

  Steens Center, OR 97915

  Dear Cynner,

  Or should I say, “Dear Cyan”? That is a PERFECT stage name for you. Do you have a last name to go with it, or are you just going to be “Cyan” with no surname?

  Okay. So about the AZ stuff…I know this is an obnoxious question but I have to ask it: Are you in love with her that way? I mean, I’m not going to judge either way, but I’d still like to know.

  Although I suspect the answer is no, because the other stuff, about not being sure you want to find out whether she’s alive or not…yikes. That’s way beyond a crush. If I’m marking my scorecard correctly, you can’t meet AZ until you become Ms. Perfect, and you can’t become Ms. Perfect because, in your mind, you have no talent or anything else to recommend you. Now that I think I can judge you for, because you have plenty to recommend you RIGHT NOW. I bet AZ would be thrilled to death to hear from someone who appreciated her music and wasn’t some Charles Manson-esque whackjob, which you aren’t by a long shot.

  So here is what I think. I think we need to move heaven and earth to find this woman—dead or (more likely) alive. You need a megadose of reality therapy here, dude. You don’t see AZ for who she really is, a person your grandma’s age who drops her phone in the toilet and burns her flapjacks and yells at the cat even if the cat hasn’t done anything to deserve it. I don’t mean that she does those things literally; she might, but that’s not the point. The point is, you think of her as some exalted being, not the regular, flawed (though maybe still talented) person she is. If she’s alive and you can just witness her living life like everyone else, even if you never speak to her, you can reduce her to human size and get on with your own life. And if, gods forbid, we find out that she’s passed, you can stop worrying about what it would be like to meet her.

  You really can’t lose either way, Cy(a)nner woman. You can only lose if you don’t take action.

  Xo, renate

  P.S. Birthday/New Year’s Day party Sunday, 4 pm, my crib. I don’t care if your parents have to chaperone you, I want you there. Please please come. The (in)famous Eroica will be there; we have kissed (not on the mouth) and made up.

  Speaking of scorecards, let’s see if I’m marking mine correctly here. So in the last thirty hours, the following has taken place: My homeroom teacher has called my parents during a holiday break and told them point blank that I have no chance at getting into college without a diagnosis and accommodations; Dad F-bombed him; I last spotted my parents getting together in their office to plot out their next act of scorched-earth warfare against me; and my only real friend thinks I should stalk my favorite singer. In other words, Nobody Listens to Cyan-slash-Cynthia™, chapter 9,780.

  I ask Spectral Amy, do you think I’m a Mel?

  She laughs her throaty laugh. You? That’s a good one. You should watch that show again, C. That girl had no shame. She even got her husband to help her stalk them! You have absolutely nothing in common with Mel. Why would you even think that?

  I do sort of look like her, I say.

  Yeah, so did the actress who played her, Spectral Amy says. That doesn’t mean she was anything like Mel in real life!

  What are you like in real life? I ask her. I mean, I know it’s physically impossible for you to be what I’m seeing in my mind right now…but are you alive? How are you at cooking flapjacks? Do you have kids? Grandkids? A whole different career? A different hair color? Are you into men, women, both, or neither? Can you give me some hints, at least?

  She doesn’t answer. I don’t know why I thought she would.

  I do have to leave my room before someone drags me out by the ear, and eat breakfast so my blood sugar won’t become a negative integer, so I tell my cramping stomach to shut up and head towards the kitchen. On my way over there, I hear Mom calling to me from her office. “Cynthia?”

  Oh God. Here it comes. “Uh huh?”

  “Can you come in here, please?”

  I take a few steps and pause in the doorway to her office. She’s alone. “Yeah, what’s up?” I say, as if my entire future doesn’t depend on what she says next.

  “Can you close the door?”

  I push the door shut. As soon as I do, Mom opens her desk drawer and hands me my LYRICS notebook. “Dad went out shopping,” she says. “But I think you can have this back now. Don’t worry, I didn’t read it.”

  I take the notebook from her and stare at it like it’s an all-access pass to Valhalla. “So you and Dad decided—“

  “No,” Mom says. “I decided. I never wanted to take your notebook in the first place. It was his idea. Just don’t leave it lying around where he can see it.”

  “And if he sees me with it…”

  “…then I will tell him I gave it back to you. But he never looks in my top drawer, because I keep it locked. He won’t know you have it unless he sees you with it.”

  Just when I think life can’t get any more upside down and backwards, it does. “Um…thanks,” I say. “That was…unexpected. In a good way. I…I missed this.”

  Mom closes her desk drawer and smiles in a way that might be forced, but I can’t tell yet. “Did you get that letter I put under your door?”

  “That was you?”

  She nods.

  “Renate invited me to her birthday party Sunday afternoon,” I say. “She said, and I quote, ‘I don’t care if your parents have to chaperone you, please, please come.’ Does that sound like someone who wants to feed me drugs?”

  She laughs, a little reluctantly. “No, it doesn’t. You can go to her party. And we don’t have to chaperone you, as long as one of her parents will be there.”

  “Really? You’re not going to discuss it with Dad?”

  “No. I don’t
think he’ll have a problem with it.”

  Hmmm. Doesn’t smell like scorched earth to me. I mean, I’ll take it, but I am still listening for the sound of the other shoe dropping. “Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.”

  Mom asks me if I have Renate’s present yet, and when I tell her I don’t, she says, “After you eat breakfast, or lunch, or whatever you call the first meal of the day at twelve-thirty, and Dad comes back with the car, I’ll take you to the mall so you can shop for her.”

  My eyebrows go up. “Mom, is your head feeling okay?”

  She smiles. “My head is fine. Go eat your breakfast, brunch, whatever.”

  So I eat, and then we get in the car to go to the Dempster Mall. Everyone here calls it the Dumpster Mall, the Death Star Mall, or most often, the Dead Store Mall because half the stores have no occupants; there used to be a Tower Records here, and a Borders, but those are long gone. What they do have, though, is a bead shop, where I pick out a container of black bugle beads and take way too long deciding whether Renate would prefer a necklace made of Picasso jasper, red sesame jasper, or leopardskin jasper, while Mom waits outside fiddling with her phone. I go with the leopardskin in three different sizes, along with a needle already prestrung with beading thread.

  Afterwards, Mom suggests we go to Tea Time, which is one of the few places in town I can get a Good Brain Diet-legal beverage. We sit under a tree-like thing that looks almost real and order a pot of Sustainable Energy, which is a blend of white tea, dried peaches, ginger, and sage. It’s not bad at all. “If this is legal for me,” I say, “how come we don’t have stuff like this at home more often?”

  Mom nods. “We should. You know, you can buy your own herbs and other things and experiment, see what you like. Get tiny amounts in the bulk bins and make one cup, and if you like it, get more.”

  “You’re being really nice to me today,” I say. “Did someone die?”

  She laughs. “Of course not. But…I wanted to get some time with you, just one on one, so we can kind of…let each other know what’s going on.”

  “Well,” I say, “you heard Mr. S. last night. I think he might be right that I’m not…you know…off the spectrum. I mean, it’s not like he’s the first one who ever said it.”

  “This is his first job out of college.” Mom pours herself another cup of tea. “What makes him some kind of expert about autism?”

  “I don’t think he’s that inexperienced. He’s in his mid-twenties. And with kids with disabilities being mainstreamed now, I’m sure they learn all about that stuff in school.”

  “You have a crush on him, don’t you?” She isn’t saying it snidely, she’s saying it like I’m her girl-pal or something, all smiley and nudgy-winky.

  “Ew, no,” I say. “I appreciate his appreciation of me. But I don’t think about him when I’m not in the same room with him. Unless he’s, like, on our speaker phone telling us I just flunked four tests.”

  Mom sighs. “We’ll work on getting you some tutors. That’s one of the things we discussed last night. We did slack off on that, and I apologize. A lot of that, and I hate to tell you this, is about finances. The tutors we spoke to were very expensive, especially if we needed tutors for multiple subjects. I know Dad has been putting a lot of pressure on you girls to be self-sufficient, but that’s not because he doesn’t want you around. I think he’s genuinely frightened that we won’t be able to bail you out financially if you get in trouble.”

  “Don’t we own the house free and clear? You said that the house was an inheritance from your Aunt Shelby, and you guys only had to pay taxes on it.”

  “We’ve had to take out a loan against it,” Mom says. “And we’ve already had one advertiser back out on us this year. It wasn’t a huge amount of money, but it created more pressure on us not to have it.”

  “If you got me into the developmental disability system before I turned eighteen, wouldn't I get all kinds of help with money stuff?” I say. “Like living expenses, housing supports, educational supports, job training…”

  “We’re not going to lie and pretend you—“

  “It’s not pretending, Mom. You won’t even try to get me help I’m actually entitled to. I don’t get it. What would be the worst thing that could happen if you did?”

  She stares at me with an intensity that makes me flinch. “Never mind,” I say. “I think I already know.”

  Then I poot. Loudly. Not intentionally, but suppression of flatulence isn’t part of my skill set. (Can people actually do that, stifle their gas? Wouldn’t it hurt?) Then for good measure, I poot again, so that there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind which Butt was responsible. Mom looks like she wants to crawl under her seat in humiliation, even though it clearly wasn’t her. “Human beings poot thirty times a day on average,” I inform everyone who’s turned around to look. “You just don’t hear most of them.”

  In the car on the way home, Mom tells me that she and Dad “have some differences” about when they’re going to let me have my music stuff (and my real phone) back. “We did agree that there wouldn’t be any more urine tests,” Mom says, “unless we actually did have concrete evidence that you were using, which we don’t right now.”

  “And you won’t,” I say. “Why would I ever need to get wasted, when I wake up that way already?”

  I think about telling Mom about Amy, and about my visits with Dr. Ngo. Maybe that would convince her, finally, that I am still autistic. But once they find out, they could find her album and destroy it; while there seems to be some sort of détente with Mom at the moment, I can’t take the chance that they’ll flip the hell out again. Also, I don’t particularly want to share Amy with them. I have to be able to keep something for myself, something that’s all me. All Cyan.

  So you’re ready to be Cyan now? Spectral Amy asks me.

  I wish, I answer her. But Cyan is a much more interesting person than I am.

  How can that be? Spectral Amy says. Cyan is you. And I’m you, too. You right now, not future you. Ten years from now, you won’t even remember my music, you’ll have moved on to something else.

  Impossible, I insist.

  “What’s impossible?” Mom asks.

  Oh God oh God oh God. I said that out loud? “I…I was just daydreaming,” I tell her. “What was the last thing you heard me say, before I said ‘impossible’?”

  “I couldn’t hear most of it over the car heater.” Mom turns the heat in the car down a few notches. “But the last thing I heard clearly was…something about waking up that way already?”

  Okay. Maybe it’s good for Mom to bear witness to this right now, because this helps me make my case. But if she heard me talking to Spectral Amy, who else has heard me? When did I cross the line from lips moving to talking out loud to her? I’d think that Renate would have brought it up if she heard me do it, but maybe I don’t do it around Renate. Or maybe Renate is used to it. Crap on a cracker. I wish I could call or text her right now and ask.

  “Well…yeah. Exhibit A, right here,” I say, pointing to myself. She rolls her eyes and shakes her head.

  December 28, 2016

  Ms. Renate Silverdick

  77 Brooker Avenue

  Steens Center, OR 97915

  Dear Renate,

  I’m thinking about “Beaut” as Cyan’s last name. Like beauty without the Y.

  No, I do not have pants feelings about AZ. In fact, I would be grossed out beyond measure if I met her and she came on to me. Or anyone her age, really, but especially her. This isn’t some cheap-ass groupie thing.

  And yes, I’m coming to your party. Without a chaperone. Maybe I’ll bring one of the drums over, so we can start smuggling them out of here?

  So last night, Mr. S. called and he told me and my parents that I failed all four of my midterms, and that if I didn’t get a diagnosis and accommodations I could forget about ever going to college. I thought for sure I was going to be dangled in front of hungry sharks after that, but you know what my parents (or m
ore specifically, my mom) did? Gave me my notebook back; told me I could go to your party and took me to shop for a gift; called off the ridiculous-ass drug tests; promised to work harder to find me tutors. Dad is mostly giving me the silent treatment. Mom said they “had some differences to resolve” and they still won’t admit I’m autistic (or apologize for anything but slacking off on the tutoring thing), but it’s an improvement over being shark food, at least. Right now I’ll take what I can get.

  But oh my fracking God, Mr. S. really did drill them new orifices. And what else can they do to punish me now, lock me in a dungeon?

  Can’t wait for Sunday.

  Xo, Cynthia (not yet Cyan)

  P.S. Thanks for delivering a day early!

  P.P.S. Do you ever hear me talking to myself out loud? Mom did today and I almost jumped out of my flesh, because I didn’t know I was doing it.

  P.P.P.S. I’m not stalking AZ, but thanks for the sage advice.

  By the time I’m done with Renate’s letter, it’s almost dark out. I walk it out to the mailbox before it gets all the way dark and they won’t let me go; it’s too late for it to be picked up today, but it will be picked up tomorrow and she will have it on Saturday. Then I sit on the bed with my notebook, back facing the door because I still don’t have permission to close it during the day, and leaf through it. Really, there’s not much in it but the beginning of “Emancipated Minor” and a bunch of rhyming lists. But it does look like I wrote something in here about Amy in code, because on one page, it says, “Need to write stuff worthy of [redacted].”

  Dear Renate…

  Dear [Redacted]…

  Holy crap there’s a new song coming on. I grab a pen and try to get it all down before it evaporates.

  Dear Redacted,

  I’m writing to you ‘cause we cannot talk…

  Hmm. Talk is a terrible word to try to rhyme. Walk, chalk, balk, caulk? Definitely not caulk. Walk is the only one vaguely appropriate, and I’m just not feeling walk. And the near-rhymes for it sound like ass.

  How about this instead:

  Dear Redacted,

  I’m writing because we can’t talk right now

  Yes. Better.

  My dear Redacted, I don’t even know if heaven will allow

  Me to ever see your face the way I need to

  Because I need you

  Dear Redacted, to tell my why I am here on earth

  Okay, rhymes for earth: worth, girth, birth, dearth. Near rhymes: dirt, hurt(s), flirt(s)…

  I need to hear you so much that it hurts

  But I can hear you in my mind

  So tell me, how much are my ears even worth?

  I’m in a bind because you’re so kind

  And I want to tell the whole world about you

  But first I have to make sure that you’re real…

  “Cynthia!” Dad calls out. “Dinner.”

  And before that I have to eat a dull disgusting meal

  (NOT AN ACTUAL RHYME, JUST A PLACE HOLDER)

  DAY 135

  On Sunday, before Mom drops me off at Renate’s, I slip out to the garage and unfasten the small tom frame and shell from the cocktail kit while keeping the yarn bag nearby, in case I need an alibi for why I’m out there. I stick the lugs in my pocket, then grab the tom and stuff it in the yarn bag to see if it will fit. It does. I breathe out relief and snap the yarn bag shut, and if Mom doesn’t notice, I will have gotten my Amy album and the first of my drums over to Renate’s house. I have no idea if I’ll get away with this.

  But I do. Mom probably just assumes the bag is for Renate’s gift, and that I got or made Renate something else besides the leopardskin jasper necklace, which is in a gift bag considerably smaller than the yarn bag. Or at least, she doesn’t question me about it. What, she’s going to ask me, “Is that a mounted tom you have in that bag?” She wouldn’t know a mounted tom if it fell on her head.

  When I get to Renate’s place, I’m greeted by her little brother, Karl, who’s eleven. Karl is such a smartass. When he sees me, the first thing he says to me is, “So they finally sprung you from your cage, huh?”

  “Yeah, Karl, but before they did they made me promise I wouldn’t bite anyone. So don’t tempt me.”

  Karl roars with laughter; he has the same laugh as Renate.

  Then I enter the living room, and Renate calls out to me. “Yo, Cyan, come over and meet the misfit toys from SCH,” Renate says.

  Cyan. She’s calling me Cyan. Didn’t I tell her at the end of my last letter that I wasn’t using that name yet? Or did I? That’s the trouble with epistolary correspondence, people don’t save copies of their work. And I know she keeps in touch with some people from her old school because I’ve seen their posts on her pages, but there are something like twenty-five of them here; I had no idea she had that many friends from her old school.

  And when I head into the living room I instantly recognize Eroica: not from her face, because I can’t do that, but from her purple crocheted cat-ear hat that she wears in the picture on her Tumblr, with a mane of frizzy blonde hair sticking out if it. She’s a lot shorter and rounder than I thought she would be, and she’s wearing what looks like a homemade t-shirt that says MIXOLYDIAN MODE CAN GO GET STUFFED. I don’t have the foggiest idea what that means. I also don’t know how much she knows about me, or my parents. Ren says she doesn’t out people, but the subject has to have come up.

  I meet up with Eroica and Renate, hand Renate the gift bag, and Renate introduces Eroica to me, and I introduce myself to Eroica as Cynthia.

  Eroica squints at me. “I thought she said your name was Cyan.” Her voice is a lot squeakier than I would have expected, and she’s a lot more giggly, too. I thought she’d be kind of a tough, hard-nosed chick. I don’t know why I thought that, but I did.

  “That’s my alternate name. I don’t typically use it in public. Speaking of which, how’d you get a name like Eroica? That’s Beethoven’s Third Symphony, right? Are your parents Beethoven freaks or something?”

  “Actually, no,” Eroica says. “I’m the Beethoven freak in question. My birth name was Erica. I added the O right before high school. Of course, that doesn’t stop some of the jackwagons at school from calling me ‘Erotica,’ but whatever. So I understand about alternate names.” She tilts her head to the side and looks at me like she’s trying to figure something out.

  “What?” I say.

  Eroica bobs her head up and down, grinning like a Muppet. “I knew it. You are totally breaking the needle on my A-dar.”

  “A-dar?”

  “Radar for other autistics.”

  I recoil. “And I…broke the needle? Doing what?”

  “Okay. So you had something that I call The Look. When autistics see a bunch of people they’ve never met, they take those extra couple of seconds to study the new people, to make sure they’re reading them halfway correctly, and you can see them trying really hard to process a whole bunch of new information at once.”

  “Speaking of new information,” I say, trying to change the subject, “what’s mix…oly…dian mode? Did I pronounce that right?”

  “Modes are categories of scales in music. It’s pronounced mix-a-LID-ee-an. The problem with it is that now it’s just a major scale with a flattened seventh, whereas when Sappho invented it back in 7 B.C., it had flattened third, fifth, and sixth. That was actually kind of interesting, but over the centuries it became like kind of this musical telephone game, where you start out whispering ‘Abraham Lincoln’ to the first person in the circle, and the last person whispers it back to you as, ‘I have a toothache.’”

  I nod as I ponder this, even though I am not quite sure who Sappho was. “Right, so what you’re saying is, why even bother calling it mixolydian mode, then? Why don’t you just give it a new name, like, I don’t know, poodle mode or something?”

  “That’s it,” Eroica says. “You got it in one.” I keep waiting for her to say something about my parents, or the blog, but she doesn’t. And
I want to tell her that she’s completely different from how I imagined her, but I don’t know how she’d take that.

  “So is that a drum in your bag,” Renate says to me, “or are you just happy to see me?”

  “Yeah, it’s the small tom. Where do you want to put it?”

  “In the shed. But first, I want you to play it for me. As a birthday request. I miss hearing you play.”

  “Awww,” I say. “But it doesn’t have a head yet, remember?”

  It has a rim, Spectral Amy says. Remember? You can play the rim with a pair of pens or chopsticks.

  “But if you have a pair of chopsticks, I can use those to play the rim,” I add hastily.

  Renate tells everyone to head out to the shed in the garage, and when I get there, Renate’s offering around a large plastic bowl that has cheap plastic egg shakers, tambourines, and castanets, and everyone picks one out of the bowl. Then she hands me a set of bamboo chopsticks, and I sit on one of the ball chairs she has scattered around the shed, take the tom out of the bag, and hold it between my knees as I test out the chopsticks. People turn to look at me.

  “You’re playing a drum with no head?” Karl says.

  Before I can answer him, Renate announces, “Okay, everybody, listen up. Here’s what’s going on. C. and I are resurrecting an old cocktail drum kit she got from her neighbor, and we’re still waiting for replacement heads to come in. Meanwhile, she’s going to lead us in a percussion jam by playing the rims. Because I made her. Birthday girl privilege.”

  “I have to say, I’m fascinated by the idea of an autistic drummer,” Eroica says. “I mean, don’t you have to coordinate all four limbs?” She doesn’t add “and I saw you tripping over your own shoelaces on the way out here”; she doesn’t have to.

  “It’s easier for me to do complicated things with my limbs than simple ones, at least when it comes to gross motor stuff,” I say. “I know that doesn’t make any sense, but—“

  “No, actually,” Eroica says, “that makes perfect sense. I can do differential equations in my head, but I can’t add and subtract in my head to save my life.” When I look at her blankly, she adds, “”Differential equations are calculus.”

  “Oh, okay.” Yeah. I think I just marked myself off as a sophomore there.

  “Okay,” I hear Renate say. “Counting off. A-one, a-two, a one, two, three, four…”

  I focus on the drum itself, not looking at anyone in the room, and start playing the ONE-and-TWO-and-three-AND-four-AND rhythm that goes with both “Emancipated Minor” and “Look Around,” and Renate starts playing a couple of chords on the piano, and everybody starts banging and rattling their plastic rhythm instruments like monkeys trapped in isolated sound-proof rooms making thwop noises at random. I mean, I’m not (or, I should say, not going to be) one of those snotty types of drummers who gets their antlers bent if the people in the audience don’t keep perfect time; in fact, those kinds of drummers irritate me tremendously, because who’s going to have rhythm as good as a professional drummer? But something in the same time zone as a steady beat would be nice. Even the Brownies I played for kept better time than this.

  After about twenty seconds of this, I put up a hand and say, “Okay, hold it, you guys…can we try something else? I think I’m getting lost here.” Everyone stops banging, and I turn to Renate. “Ren, can you set your metronome for a hundred beats a minute, eighth notes?” She does so, and I listen to it go tock-tock-tock-tock. “Actually, that might be a little too fast. Make it ninety.” After she makes the adjustment, I say, “Okay, I’m going to try something and I don’t know how it’s going to work, but…I’m going to add one person at a time, each doing a really simple rhythm I teach you. When you’re playing it, count along with the metronome, one-and-two-and-three-and-four-and, like that.”

  I turn to face Karl, who’s holding an egg shaker. I pick up an egg shaker from the bowl and say, “Okay, Karl, can you do shake-shake, shake? One-and-shake-shake-three-and shake-and…” He picks that up just fine, and then I go on to Eroica, and say, “Can you slap the tambourine on the one and the three, like, slap-and-two-and-slap-and-four-and…” Once I have her going, I then assign rhythms to the others, like shake-and-shake-and-shake-shake-shake-and, slap-and-slap-and-slap and-slap-and, and click-click-two-and-click-click-four-and, and it’s really starting to sound fantastic. “Rock!” I yell over them. “Hit it, Ren!” Renate starts to play the piano chords of “Look Around,” and before I know it, I’m whacking away at the rim with those chopsticks and…being Amy. Or maybe, Amy is being me, I can’t tell which. I start out singing softly, then I gradually start raising the volume, until I’m screaming:

  All the innocence of spring in a blade of grass

  Look around! Just look around

  Let the child within you SIIIIIIIIIIING

  When you look around, just look around…

  Then Amy’s wacky tempo changes start, starting with a couple of bars in 5/4 and 6/8 and 12/8 and, I don’t know, that one segment where there doesn’t seem to be any time sig at all, or it’s like 127.6/5.7 or something bizarre like that, and of course, as soon as I do that, everyone stops playing and stares at me. I can’t manage to look at them for more than a second, but I know all of them, except maybe Renate, are even more confused than those little kids on Your Generation. I could have skipped those parts, if I was in control of my hands. But I’m not. They’re Amy’s hands now, because her rhythms are permanently burned into them.

  What the hell are you doing? I say to Spectral Amy. I had a roomful of white people with hopelessly binary senses of rhythm playing polyrhythmic percussion, and you had to ball it up! Why are you doing this to me?

  To everyone else, I say, “Sorry, that was my fault. I just got carried away.”

  “Pizza’s here,” I hear Renate’s dad call out, and everyone except me and Renate puts their cheap percussion instruments down and eagerly makes a run for the food. Eroica stops for a second on the way out and says to me, “What was that, like free jazz punk rock lounge music or something? I never heard anything like that before.”

  Go ahead, Spectral Amy says, tell her that’s your own sound. It’s not me. I can’t make you do anything, because I am you. Remember?

  But all I can manage to say is, “Well, you’ll never have to hear it again.” My voice sounds like someone took a diamond cutter to my larynx. That’s what I get for screaming without getting voice lessons and learning the right way to do it.

  “It really wasn’t bad,” Eroica says. “I kind of wanted to hear more of it.”

  “Cynner, don’t be too hard on yourself,” Renate says. She alone knows exactly who I was channeling. “You got a great rhythm going. That’s not easy to do with this bunch.”

  “Have you ever heard of Amy Zander?” I ask Eroica, even though I know the answer.

  Eroica shakes her head no. I pull out Amy’s album from my yarn bag and hand it to her. As I do, I realize that this is the first time Renate has actually seen it. “Don’t feel bad, her album sold about six copies,” I tell Eroica.

  Eroica and Renate examine the album cover together, while I take a powder. A regular girl sharing her musical interests would never go to the bathroom at this point in the conversation, I’m sure. But it hurts my throat to talk after that screamfest. And it drives me buggy that Amy (spectral or otherwise) has made it impossible for me to play anything straight anymore.

  By the time I rejoin the party, everyone’s in the living room snarfing pizza and hot wings and salad. I go back to the shed to check and make sure the album has been returned to its yarn bag. It has. I have no idea what Renate said to Eroica about it after I left, because when they see me, they are a lot more interested in talking me into eating pizza (which they see me staring forlornly at) than discussing Amy. I tentatively try a little tiny nibble. Weirdly enough, I think Tam was right when she told me it tasted like cardboard and wax. But maybe Steens Center doesn’t have the best pizza on earth.

  When I’m getting
ready to leave, Eroica takes me aside and says, “Listen, I know how much it has to suck, living with people who want you to be someone else. If there’s ever anything I can do to help you, please tell me.”

  So she does know. Of course she does. I smile, lips-only. “How good are you at making people less irrational?”

  Eroica laughs and takes a sip of her Diet Coke. “Dude, if I knew how to do that, I’d have all the money.”

  On my way out, Renate slips me a copy of her letter. On my way back in the car with Mom, I'm feeling a bit queasy. I did try a few bites of Renate’s birthday cake--which was her favorite, carrot cake—and I liked it, but I’m not sure it liked me back. “I think I took too much ibuprofen,” I tell her. She doesn’t comment.

  When I get home and open the letter, I see two photocopied pages from a book, with a sticky-note on it that says, The interlibrary loan came faster than I thought! And yes, she’s in there!!!! Publication date of the book was 1991, FWIW.

  I look at the photocopy and it has a multi-paragraph quote from Amy, following some brief biographical info about her. Speaking of a 127.6/5.7 time sig, I think that’s about the rhythm my vascular system is banging out now.

  I guess you’re not mad at me any more, huh? Spectral Amy murmurs.

  I ignore Spectral Amy and start inhaling the first new bit of info I’ve gotten about real Amy since that dead thread on Chachaville I saw months ago.

  Bossa nova artist Amy Zander was only fifteen years old when she recorded her first and only album, Just Looking, on the now-defunct Bounce Records label in 1969. The album was quickly deleted after some devastating reviews and disastrous television television appearances, but showcased young Amy’s husky, wildly elastic alto voice (which some critics at the time compared to a cross between Melanie and Yoko Ono) and changeable, complex drumming rhythms in a way that suggested a budding original talent.

  Unfortunately, that is the last material Zander ever released publicly, and she has become quite reclusive ever since, retiring to her family’s home in southern California after receiving a degree in music education from New York University. When we reach her by telephone at the Los Angeles apartment of her father, retired session drummer Rick Zander, she tells us she can only give us ten minutes of her time, but that is enough for a glimpse into how a young girl experienced the music business in 1969-71.

  AMY ZANDER: It was all such a blur, it almost felt like it happened to someone else. I didn’t even think much about what it meant to be a girl playing drums; Dad thought it was cute when I imitated him as a little girl, but after a while, he started to see that I could really play, and he got me a deal with Bounce. Dad said I wouldn’t see any money for it; we spent the advance on the recording.

  I remember the day I first got the cocktail kit. It was my ninth birthday, and I had asked for a drum kit—but not this one! I wanted a sitdown kit like Dad had, not this thing I had to play standing up. Dad told me that the world wasn’t ready yet to accept a female rock and roll or jazz drummer (this was 1963), but if I learned to play this Trixon kit, which you played standing up, and work in the more laid-back bossa nova style that was taking off then, I could make it big. It wasn’t my favorite music but I developed a taste for it as I played it more.

  So what else? Well, I was always playing and singing too loud for the style and people had to keep telling me to dial it back! That was hard.

  I tried to sing higher than my natural range, because my voice was really low for a girl and if I didn’t go up higher, I sounded like a boy.

  Once they gave me this vinyl miniskirt to wear on TV that I thought made my butt look like a bowling ball, and I spilled my Coke on it two minutes before we were about to go on, and the producers had to find a female assistant to sponge it off for me.

  When I sang live, I would forget words that I thought I couldn’t forget if I tried, and my throat would get so dry I was barking more than I was singing.

  I got called “Laura Nyro with an attack of St. Vitus’s dance” by some critic, and I looked up St. Vitus’s dance and found out it wasn’t a compliment, even though Laura Nyro was my favorite singer and I thought everyone else loved her too. St. Vitus’s dance was some kind of neurological disorder where you lost all your coordination and jerked and twitched all the time. Ha ha. Very funny. Dad wouldn’t let me read any more reviews after that, but I quickly got the idea that I was a novelty act and that nobody really took me seriously.

  For my second album, in early 1971, Bounce wanted me to record a “hit” they picked out for me, called “Gypsy Love.” There was a big hit by Brian Hyland then called “Gypsy Woman,” which I loved; it was a Curtis Mayfield cover, and I wanted to do that kind of pop-soul music for grownups, if they were going to have me do something that wasn’t bossa nova (which was on the way out by then). I figured that if Brian Hyland’s record label managed to let him graduate from that “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini” stuff he was doing as a teenager in the early ‘60s, to “Gypsy Woman,” then Bounce could let me grow up too.

  But this song they wanted me to record was just a cheap bubblegum knockoff of “Gypsy Woman,” and I thought it was a) garbage, and b) something Curtis Mayfield could potentially sue the crap out of them for! I tried to record it because I wasn’t in a position to say no, but it never came out right, and they dropped me and had some other girl do it. It didn’t even make top two hundred, ha ha.

  And that was it. Ten minutes with Amy, and that’s all she wrote. Or all anyone else ever wrote, as far as I know.

  I sit there on the bed reading it over and over and over again, completely ignoring Renate’s actual letter until the next morning.