Page 5 of The Amy Virus

STAGE IV:

  Patient is now considered terminal, in the absence of a miracle cure. At this point, palliative therapy is advised to mitigate the worst of the symptoms, but otherwise, patient is advised to get affairs in order in preparation for end of life.

  DAY 137

  On Tuesday, January 3, the first day back at school from winter break, Renate puts a note in my locker after second period telling me she just got a text from her mom saying the drum heads and cymbals we ordered have arrived. Today she has voice lessons, but tomorrow I can come home with her and we can start digging into them. Yesterday Renate came over after dinner, wearing the leopardskin jasper necklace I made her, and I slipped her the snare drum and the cymbal mounts, which she put in her gigantoid backpack. With every part of the drum set that disappears from my freezing cold garage and turns up in her nice warm shed, I feel closer and closer to being home free. All we have to do is figure out a way to get the honking huge bass drum out.

  I have a bigger problem than that, though. Those pages from the female drummers book about Amy, plus the mesh heads and cymbals that I won’t get to see until tomorrow, are already taking up mental real estate that I need to pay attention in class and get my homework done. I meet with a geometry tutor at lunch today; her name is Melody (nice name) Quan, she’s a senior and a Mathlete, and very well put together, down to the serious-but-hip black-frame emo glasses, the kind of person my parents would trust. She also has a lingering case of profuse late-teen acne, which I find kind of endearing. She tries to be patient with me, but I have to ask her to repeat everything three times because every time she talks, Amy’s words overdub themselves on to hers; only a desire not to make her run out of the room screaming prevents me from asking her to repeat herself a fourth time.

  No tutor is going to get me to wipe out the Amyfied parts of my brain. She’s talking about theorems and postulates and surface areas and volumes, and my brain is going, she had a Trixon kit too! Curtis Mayfield wrote “Gypsy Woman” when he was thirteen years old, and it sounded more mature than the song they wanted Amy to record! In 1971 the Gypsies officially changed their name to Roma, or is it Romani? So if the song was written in 1971 would it have been called “Roma Woman”? Is Roma a type of Romani or is it the other way around? Or is it spelled Romany? Why do I even care right now?

  All day long, and all the next day, I try to trying to get myself to stop. But when the teachers start talking, this is what I hear:

  In History: Laura Nyro with St. Vitus’s dance. Laura Nyro was a pioneer, one of the first female singer-songwriters. She did a lot of speeding up and slowing down and swooping and wailing, just like Amy. St. Vitus’s dance is now called…argh, what’s it called? Something chorea…Synden-something? It’s associated with rheumatic fever. Slam, wail, whooooaaaa…

  In Language Arts: It wasn’t my favorite music but I developed a taste for it as I played it more. But I was always playing and singing too loud for the style and he had to keep telling me to dial it back! That was hard. Just look around, just look around, wham, bam…too loud too loud too loud…come on Amy, please shut up for a few hours, I’m in enough trouble already…

  In Life Science: I quickly got the idea that I was a novelty act and that nobody really took me seriously. Pop-soul for grownups… Amy, why did you give up music? How could you give up music? I want to stop thinking about music for the next forty-five minutes, and I can’t, I can’t, how did you turn your back on it all? I have to pay attention pay attention pay attention, is there some kind of off switch in pill form that will help me get through the rest of high school?

  I walk down the halls, bumping into locker doors and bulletin-board plastic tacks and other kids, thinking, I am so screwed, so screwed, so so so so screwed…

  Spectral Amy says, I couldn’t concentrate in school either. Thinking about music all the time isn’t bad, you know.

  What did you do, cheat on all your tests? I wail mentally. You don’t understand. I don’t think about music all day. I think about YOUR MUSIC (and the music you talked about in that interview) all day. Do you not know the difference? You probably don’t. You aren’t wired like I am. And I am going to flunk. Can you please, please, please, PLEASE leave me alone for the next, oh, I don’t know, seven years? So I don’t become a bag lady or wind up in some horrible institution?

  But you still have to make a living after that, Spectral Amy reminds me. So a seven-year reprieve isn’t going to cut it. If I leave you, I have to leave forever. Do you want me to leave forever? Never think of me again? Forget you ever heard of me?

  That’s exactly what I want, I tell her. Okay, I don’t want that to happen, but I need it to happen.

  No, you don’t, Spectral Amy whispers. There’s a reason I’m in your head all the time. A good reason. Someday, you’ll know why.

  Emancipated minor…I have to go, I have to get gone, my folks treat me like demon spawn, my mental account is overdrawn…it can’t happen here…

  Crash. Bang. Bonk. All day long.

  DAY 138

  I go home with Renate on Wednesday, and as we start pulling the mesh heads and cymbals out of the box and unwrapping them, I can tell they’re going to be perfect. I will get a nice, responsive drum sound, but a quieter one. Renate even managed to squeeze a pair of sticks into the order, the kind with retractable brushes, which she didn’t tell me about before because she wanted to surprise me. Maybe this is what Spectral Amy meant. Without Spectral Amy, I wouldn’t have these things, this kit, this friend…so why don’t I feel good? I should be overjoyed, but all I can think of is, I am going to flunk out and none of this will matter…

  Renate notices. “Is there something wrong with any of this stuff?” she asks me. “Do we need to return it? I’m not the drum expert you are, so—“

  “Those pages you sent me,” I say, rocking back and forth. “Those pages. It’s like, it’s like, it’s like I was starving for fifteen years and I finally got food, and now I can’t stop eating.”

  “I don’t understand,” Renate says. “Is that bad?”

  “Ren, I can’t think about anything else. At all.” I tap on one of the mesh cymbals with a fingernail. “Seriously. It’s really, really bad. Can you find a way to get me to stop?”

  “I already told you the way,” Renate says. “And contrary to what you think, you won’t be some toxic stalker type. Celebrity stalkers do what they do because their image of the person they’re stalking is totally out of proportion. If you get it in proportion, you’ll have less in common with stalker types than you do right now.”

  “But will she know that?” I hug the crash cymbal to my chest. It’s made of a super-lightweight brass-colored metal and is full of little tiny holes, to make it less noisy when struck with a stick. “I mean, you know I’m always the one who gets caught.”

  “You didn’t get caught with the drums,” Renate reminds me. “The only way out is through, Cyan. And be careful with that cymbal, you don’t want to warp it.” Renate unwraps the last of the heads, and starts gathering up the packing materials and putting them back in the shipping box. “And yes, I said Cyan. Because that’s another reason you have this neurosis about Amy, you don’t think you’re worthy of the name you chose for yourself. And you have it backwards. Start being Cyan, think of yourself as Cyan, and you’ll become that person. You have to break the cycle.”

  I bite my lip and close my eyes.

  “You know I’m right,” Renate goes on. “I mean, honestly, I don’t think you’re as universally hated as you think you are. There’s a lot of gray area between being homecoming queen and being a walking staph infection. I’ve actually talked to some people who have made fun of your name and stuff like that, like Ryan Crousse…and not one of them dislikes you, as a person, at all. It’s more like they don’t know you, and in a lot of cases, I think you scare them. They make fun of your name because that’s really all they have over you, and even most of those people, if you ask them one on one, will admit that they wore out the joke
a while ago. Have you noticed it hasn’t been happening as much lately?”

  I open my eyes. “You mean you actually surveyed people about it? And they told you all that?”

  “One way or another.” Renate stands up and picks up the box with the packing materials in it, and I put the crash cymbal on the pile with the other stuff and stand up too. “Also, Eroica thinks you’re amazing and she’d love to hang out with you, but she thinks you hate her.”

  “Really? Why? I mean, why would she think I hate her?”

  “To be honest with you,” Renate says, “I would have thought the same thing if you hadn’t approached me. You just give off that, ‘don’t screw with me, I’ve had enough’ kind of vibe. And I know exactly why. It’s your parents. They gaslight you, Cyan.”

  I follow Renate out to her garage, where they store the trash and recycling until trash day. “What do you mean, they ‘gaslight’ me?”

  Renate starts putting packing materials in the trash can. “Gaslighting is a particularly evil form of mental abuse, where people try to get you to think you can’t trust yourself to know what’s going on. It comes from an old movie called Gaslight, where a guy who wanted to marry a rich girl and steal her inheritance convinced her that her mind was playing tricks on her.”

  “Ew,” I say, shivering both from the cold of the garage and from what a nasty piece of work someone would have to be to do that. “But what would my parents want to steal from me?”

  “Everything.” Renate starts pulling the packing tape off the bottom of the box. “Your entire identity. The real you. They’ve convinced you that the real you isn’t acceptable.” She folds up the box and puts it in the recycling, and we go back in the house. “You have to start fighting back. You have to. Starting tonight.”

  “Tonight?” I feel like a parrot.

  “Yes. Tonight, my parents are going to get in touch with yours, since your parents have been begging them to come over for dinner since God was in diapers. They’ll offer to bring over some chinook that’s been in our freezer for four months and really needs to be eaten. Mom will gag if she has to even look at chinook one more time unless she’s feeding it to someone else, but your parents don’t have to know that part. That way, we can all eat something resembling a real dinner, and your parents will get a nice big hunk of fish they couldn’t afford to buy themselves. And that night, we’re getting your bass drum out. Sound good?”

  Bass drum is the sound I’m beginning to hear in my ears, right now, a baion rhythm, boom de BOOM, boom de BOOM.

  Say yes, Spectral Amy says. You are a drummer. A drummer’s drums should be where they’re safe. They’re not safe where you live.

  “I am a drummer,” I echo, although Renate doesn’t know who said what I’m echoing.

  “Hells yes you’re a drummer,” Renate says. “You didn’t get all this stuff for nothing.”

  “I am a drummer. I am a drummer. I am a drummer.” I start stomping along with myself, stomp stomp stomp, stomp stomp stomp. “I am a drummer. I am a drummer.”

  “And that’s exactly what you’ll say if you’re caught. You’ll say it and say it and say it until they finally break down.”

  “But what if the real me isn’t acceptable?”

  “Why wouldn’t it be? What did you ever do that was so bad that you actually deserve to have people hate you? The people who deserve to be hated never ask that question, Cyan. They don’t think they’ve done anything wrong.”

  “Can you do me a favor?” I ask. “I don’t mind if you call me Cyan in private, but could you not do it at school or in front of my parents? I’m not quite ready for that yet.”

  Spectral Amy says, yes you are, you have never been readier for anything than you are for this drum set.

  Renate smiles that mischievous smile of hers. “I bet you will be once we get those drums fixed up and you start playing them. In just a few days, that bass drum will be liberated from prison, and we can get started on our glorious resurrection.”

  Renate just told me that I’m on the verge of being safely ignored at school, I growl at Spectral Amy. Don’t screw that up for me, please.

  Wouldn’t you rather people were in awe of your talent, instead of just ignoring you? Spectral Amy says. They should be. You are ridiculously gifted.

  “Or I’ll have my hands cut off and not be able to play again,” I say.

  Renate rolls her eyes. “Then you can strap the sticks to your arms or legs. Or hold them in your mouth. Or play with your feet. Or your head. Or your ass cheeks. You’d have to be dead not to be able to play at all.”

  Before we go back to my place, I put the mesh head on the small tom and tune it. As I tighten each lug, I tap it with one of my new sticks until I get the tone I want. Just like a real drummer. I am a drummer. I am a fracking drummer.

  Once the head is on, I pick up both sticks and play what I have so far of “Dear Redacted.” Renate loves it, and starts picking out chords for it on the piano.

  DAY 140

  Be careful who you ask to dinner, because they might say yes. Obviously Renate’s parents weren’t going to come over to eat the grody bits they feed me, and my parents know better than to serve those things to guests. So when Renate’s dad offered to come over with eight pounds of chinook salmon, which probably would have cost a hundred bucks if they’d bought it retail, my parents were beside themselves with joy. I’m pretty happy too, because I get to eat something that doesn’t taste like mud for a change, even if my own personal side dishes have to be infused with grody bits. And best of all, the evening will end with my bass drum escaping from my home.

  Kevin, Renate’s dad, is a lot younger than the other adults here; he’s thirty-five, and everyone else is a few miles north of forty. And Kevin, unlike the others, looks young for his age; if I didn’t know he was Renate’s dad and he told me he was in his late twenties, I’d buy it. I can’t believe he was only nineteen when Renate was born, which means he could have been eighteen when she was conceived, right? I can’t imagine myself pregnant three years from now. Dad’s antennae wiggle a little when he hears me call Kevin by his first name, but when he questions Kevin about it, Kevin says, “I told Rennie that her friends can start calling me ‘sir’ when I’m forty. I got another five years to go, and by then they’ll almost be done with college.”

  College. After the big blowout with Mr. S., maybe the wrong word to use around my dad, much less remind him that Kevin wasn’t even born when Dad started third grade. Renate warned me before that while her mom could probably get along with almost anyone who didn’t have a swastika tattoo, our dads were going to be like gasoline and sugar. “Your dad is Pearl Jam,” she said, “and mine’s Nirvana.” Since I knew almost nothing about music from the early nineties, Renate had to explain to me that they played a similar kind of “grunge rock,” but according to the hipsters of that era, Nirvana was “pure” artistic expression and Pearl Jam was “corporate” music made to please audiences. But she played me both bands, and I’m damned if I could tell the difference between them. I’ll bet anything there were a million people who bought both Pearl Jam and Nirvana CDs and then hid one or the other, depending on who came over.

  My parents look kind of appalled when Kevin unwraps the fish and they see that Ren’s parents brought over two whole fish instead of cutting them into fillets at home, but then Renate offers to demonstrate her filleting skills for us. Using the filleting knife they brought over, she gets that fish off the bones in less than two minutes. “And this way you can use the head and the bones to make stock,” Renate says. “That’s GBD legal, right?”

  “GBD,” Kitty (Renate’s mom) repeats out loud. Renate explains that those are the initials for the Good Brain Diet, which gives Mom and Dad an opening to give their sales pitch about the diet, how it stops opiates from leaking out of my digestive tract and making me stoned. Kitty nods but doesn’t say anything. I am sure that Renate has already given her chapter and verse about my parents’ bizarre beliefs about food, but
Kitty’s not the kind of person who’d ever say anything about it to their faces. She’s very demure. Like, well, a kitty.

  Kevin is another story. Kevin is who Renate obviously got most of her genes from; he’s tall, hefty, loud, the kind of person who doesn’t fade easily into the background. He’s missing the tips of his left first and right fifth fingers from fishing accidents. And unlike Kitty, he’s not afraid to stir it up a little with my parents. “So what happens if Cynthia eats a tiny bit of starch by accident? Did she really have not even one little crumb for ten years?”

  “We would know if it happened,” Mom tells him. “Cynthia is very chemically sensitive. When the opiates hit her brain, she would have extra trouble with her speech, her motor coordination, everything would be off.” There’s something a little funny about Mom’s delivery, though, almost like she’s trying to convince herself it’s true. Up until about a month ago, she talked about this stuff like she believed it to her soul.

  “So it’s happened before,” Kevin says.

  I look at Renate, who’s slicing up the fish into eight equal portions (although there are only seven of us eating, including Tam), and she bites her lip to keep from smirking.

  “I don’t remember it ever happening,” I say, dripping innocence. “But then again, I guess I was maybe… stoned on internal opiates then? You forget everything that happens when you’re stoned, right?”

  Dad shoots me a filthy look. He says shut up with his eyes so well, I don’t know why he ever bothers to say it in words. Renate bites her lip harder. She’s going to bust up any second now.

  “So you don’t ever cheat?” Kevin asks me. Renate’s parents weren’t in the room when I tasted Renate’s pizza and cake at her party.

  “Like I told Renate, I don’t have the digestive enzymes to handle the stuff I’m not allowed to eat. If I did get slipped something, I’d probably--” I pause, trying to think of a more mature way to put it than puke—“give it right back up.”

  “Uh huh,” Kevin says, with his eyebrows slightly arched, like he knows about the pizza and cake. Maybe Ren told him, I don’t know.

  “What kind of wine goes with chinook salmon?” Mom wonders out loud.

  “Beer,” Kevin jokes.

  “He has beer with everything,” Kitty says.

  “Including in his cereal,” Renate adds. When my parents look at her side-eyed, she says, “What, you think I’m joking?”

  “She is joking,” Kevin reassures my parents, who are beginning to look genuinely terrified by who they’ve invited into their home. “And actually, I was too. I’ll take whatever you’ve got. I’m not that picky. I don’t even care if it has a screw top.”

  “We have wine without screw tops,” Dad says, smiling stiffly, as if the very idea of wine with screw tops offends his delicate sensibilities.

  “So I guess that’s some kind of, I don’t know…marker, whether you drink wine that you have to open with a corkscrew or not, that’s supposed to say a lot about what kind of person you are, right?” I say. “But I’m not sure what; don’t rich people sometimes drink cheap beer and wine just to be ‘ironic,’ or not identify themselves as having a lot of money in public?”

  “The fillets are ready,” Renate says, obviously knowing much better than I do when it’s time for a subject change. “How did you guys want to make these? We usually slow roast it, with a little bit of oil and dijon mustard and honey, but it doesn’t have to have honey mustard, it can be whatever Cyn’s allowed to have. It goes twenty-five minutes at 200 degrees, and the texture is amazing, it’s almost like sushi or salmon tartare. It doesn’t have that gummy thing that makes your teeth stick together that you get cooking it at a higher temp.”

  Dad shrugs. “We can try it that way.” Then he turns to me. “You’d better have some salad first.”

  It’s a GBD rule that if I have fish I have to have four cups of salad first, without dressing of course, and the salad has to have wilted arugula, gelatin made with lemon juice, pits, and pulp, but no sweetener, plus fermented turkey gizzards. I reach into the fridge for the bowl of it, and tell our guests, “Don’t worry, you guys are getting normal salad. I have to eat freak salad.”

  “Does it have real freaks in it?” Renate says.

  “That might be an improvement.” I open the silverware drawer for a fork. This is probably the first time I’ve ever mouthed off to them in front of other people about the hell on a plate they feed me multiple times daily. But then, I don’t usually have such an appreciative audience. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m speechless and in awe of the sacrifices they’ve made to keep me on this diet. But I know nobody would ever choose to eat this stuff if it didn’t have such…impressive medical utility. I won’t even tell you what’s in here. You guys still have a meal to eat.”

  I glance over at my parents, thinking that maybe Mom might have a different reaction to my rantlet than Dad, since she sounded a little off her game when she was talking about the GBD a few minutes ago and she’s been showing signs lately of not agreeing with Dad on everything. But right now they both appear seriously irked; neither one of them will look at me.

  I rake through the salad with my fork. Truth be known, even I’m not sure what else in this bowl other the ingredients I already mentioned. I know some of the green stuff is kelp. I know some of those orange bits are orange pulp. The little white things are the infamous serrano pepper seeds. But I don’t know what the pink-yellow stuff is. Or the purple-blue stuff. I don’t even bother to ask anymore. I barely even bother to chew. Just get it all down, somehow. And dream of drums.

  All during dinner, my brain is playing those drums, while my limbs try not to show it.

  I am Cyan. I am a drummer.

  Meanwhile, Dad is poking at his slow roasted salmon like he’s afraid it’ll jump off the plate and eat him. “Is this done enough?”

  “If it comes right off the skin, which it did, it’s done,” Renate says. “I’ve made it this way at least fifty times and no one has ever gotten sick.”

  “It’s so good,” Tam says. “It’s almost like sashimi. That’s probably why Dad doesn’t like it.”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t like it,” Dad says. “I haven’t even tasted it yet. It’s just different from what I’m used to.” Then he looks at me. “Cindy, please don’t rattle the table.”

  I am a drummer. I am a drummer. Just say it say it say it say it…why can’t I say it to him?

  “Sorry,” is what I say.

  Demon spawn, getting gone, gotta go to bed at dawn…

  “By the way,” I add, after everyone has poured themselves beverages, “I think I left one of my workbooks at Ren’s the other day. Her dad’s going to take me over there after we’re done so I can look for it, and then he’ll bring me back here.”

  “Can’t they look for it and then tell you if they found it?” Dad asks.

  “They already did, and they didn’t find anything.” Now that’s an outright fib; not by omission, not truth by technicality, but a neon-orange, star-studded lie. “But I’m pretty sure it’s there. If I retrace my steps, I’ll probably find it.” God. I am the worst actress ever. I wouldn’t believe me, if I (improbably) were them.

  “I think he needs new glasses,” Renate chimes in, nodding towards her dad. “He doesn’t want to get bifocals because that would officially mean he’s old, but he’s getting to the point where he has to.” Now here’s someone who can act. Oscar material, Renate is.

  “Sound familiar, Dad?” Tam says.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Dad says, then hastily takes a sip of his pinot gris.

  “Me either,” Kevin says, a lot more jovially than Dad.

  Dinner conversation commences between two sets of parents who have zero rapport two-on-two but feel like they have to try. I drift in and out of earshot, with my drum dreams taking over my inner ear.

  I am Cyan. I am a drummer.

  “…really like this tablecloth,” Kitty says. “Microsuede, rig
ht?”

  Hi y’all…thanks so much for coming out and watching the Cyan Band this evening. I’d like to bring out a very special guest now who was my biggest musical inspiration…

  “…and you know what?” Kevin says. “Rennie’s doing a million times better since she changed schools and started her therapy, her grades have gone up, and they’re talking about putting her in AP classes next year.”

  “That’s nice,” Mom says, the way she’d say it to a little kid who was talking about his best friend the purple dragon. Humor the silly man who thinks his loser daughter will make AP.

  …I am so thrilled that she agreed to join us here. This woman was a drumming pioneer who made an amazing record called Just Looking at the age of fifteen, and hearing her made me realize that I wanted to sing and play drums too…

  Nod nod nod.

  I am a drummer. I am a drummer. I am a drummer.

  Nod nod nod.

  “…just binge-watched the last three seasons,” Kitty says, then asks my parents, “So what do you two like to do for fun?”

  Tam practically chokes on her food. Like my parents could ever enjoy anything more than screwing with people’s heads all day. For once, she gets the death stare from them instead of me, although they should be grateful she spared them the need to answer the unanswerable.

  “Sorry,” Tam says. “I think I ate too fast. So, um…can I try some of the wine? I’ll be eighteen in three months.”

  …this is her first stage appearance in almost fifty years. But she still has it. Ladies and gentlemen, Ms. Amy Zander!

  Applause applause. I am Cyan. I am a drummer.

  Clap hands under table lightly five times, eighth note intervals. Nod nod nod.

  Pick up fork and attempt to eat. Fork slips out of my hand, falls on rug. “One-second rule,” I say, and scoop up the fork.

  “Cindy, give me the fork,” Dad says, trying not to visibly seethe. “Here, I’ll get you another one.”

  I hand him the doomed fork, and Dad gets up to exchange it for a clean one.

  “So do you prefer to be called Cindy or Cynthia?” Kitty asks me, as Dad is coming back to the table and handing me the new fork. At least I think she’s asking me and not taking an indirect poke at Dad for using my baby name.

  Renate shoots me a look like she’s expecting me to say it. I am Cyan. I am a drummer. Really. I should. What do I have to lose?

  “I don’t care,” I say, and immediately stuff my mouth with chinook salmon. Which really is delicious.

  …Seventy-something Amy, wearing sleeveless sparkly red dress, looking positively luminous, speaking in captivating low-pitched whisper: Thank you all so much. When I met Cyan, she had so much creative energy, so much color, so much fire, she got me to pick up my sticks again, and it all just came back to me. So if you’ll indulge us, we’re going to do a song together that was the single from my first album. It’s called “Look Around.”

  Hand over pounding heart. Deep breath.

  “…all time favorite TV show is Nashville,” Tam says. “That’s the show that got me into country music.”

  “Oh man,” Kevin says. “I love me some Hank Williams.” He starts singing, and Tam joins in: “My hair is still curly and my eyes are still blue/Why don’t you love me like you used to do?”

  I think Mom might be ready to disappear under her dining chair, if she can make room for Dad down there with her.

  “I know I can’t sing as good as you, Cyn,” Tam says.

  “Actually, that was pretty good,” I say, making a mental note that until a few months ago, Tam held her ears when I sang.

  …Amy and I playing twin Trixons. No wait, first I start out with the pandeiro. I start playing solo, and Amy puts the drum sticks in the holder and claps on two-four, and everybody claps on two-four, and then the piano riff starts, and gets repeated a few times while I improvise…

  Bite lip. Try to eat food. Nod head side to side, swivel hips in chair. I don’t even know who’s saying what at the table anymore.

  “…yeah, I heard that got pretty good reviews…”

  “…in my knitting group…”

  …then I step back and let Amy play solo while I clap one-two-three-four, and the audience follows my lead and shifts its rhythm to one-TWO-three-FOUR. Amy grabs the sticks and plays a hot riff on timbales and cowbells, and everyone whoops and applauds, then goes back to clapping in rhythm as I grab my sticks and join her on my own Trixon…

  Can’t look at anyone. Can’t look at anyone. This is my moment. Our moment. Hundreds of people, I feel all their hands on me.

  “…pass the salad…”

  “…no, we’ve never been to Europe either…”

  …we look at each other, glowing. Some people start double-clapping on two and four with the rest of the audience single-clapping one-TWO-three-FOUR, which creates a clap-clap-clap rhythm so gorgeous I think I’m going to cry. How long has it been since she’s heard people clapping along with her like this, in such rapturous polyrthythmic ecstasy, building and building in volume, like they missed her as much as I did?

  “…Dr. Nansi…”

  “…(burp)…”

  Electric current running through body. Quick. Drink cider vinegar infused iced tea. Do not dribble on shirt. Yeah. That’s it.

  ...then we sing. “All the secrets of the skies in a drop of rain,” her dark harmony laced with my light one. Age has given her voice a deep, warm, raspy bottom, it’s more haunting than ever…

  Drums. Drums. Drums drums drums. Nothing matters but drums drums drums drums drums drums--

  “Ahem!” my dad says.

  I freeze. Has he heard what’s in my head? Has everyone? They all look like Sasquatch just came in and sat down to eat and crushed one of our chairs. Except for Renate. She already knows what this is.

  “You said don’t rattle the table,” I mutter. “And I didn’t.”

  At seven-thirty, as casually as we possibly can, Renate and I say our goodbyes and go out to the garage, while her parents go out to their pickup truck and wait for us.

  “Did you hear me say anything out loud at the table?” I whisper to Renate.

  “No. I’ve never heard you do that,” she whispers back. But she smiles slyly, to let me know she felt my secret rhythms.

  We quietly pick up the trash-bag-covered bass drum--and as soon as we do, the bass drum pedal falls out of the bag and makes a loud clanking sound on the ground.

  “Crap!” I stage-whisper, and stuff the pedal back in the bag.

  Then the garage entrance to the house opens, and Dad sticks his head out. I gasp, with my mouth shut, thank God. “What are you girls doing?”

  I am a drummer. I am a drummer. Say it say it say it say it…

  “I’m…I’m just giving Renate a bag of my junk I’m not using anymore,” I say, with my voice quivering. “She thinks…she might have some use for it.” I feel like I’m in a Flintstones episode, that’s how artificial I sound. But before Dad can answer me, I am running down the driveway with the bag in my hand, Renate running after me, and I dump the bass drum in the back of the pickup and leap into the rear cab of the truck, with Renate getting in on the other side.

  A few minutes later, we get to Renate’s house, get the truck into the garage and close the door, and take the bass drum into the shed to be with its brothers and sisters. I remove it from the bag (which still has Renate’s letters in it) and stand back to behold its rusty loveliness. The drums are here. All of them. They’re here. I feel misty.

  “Thank you so much,” I whisper to Kevin and Kitty.

  “Glad we could help,” Kevin says. We enter the house through the garage and start unbuttoning our coats. “So where do you think your workbook is?”

  I glance at Renate. She eyebrows me. I guess she didn’t tell him about the part where the “workbook” was just an excuse to get me and my bass drum here. But I actually did have Renate plant one in her room, so I wouldn’t come home empty-handed. “It has to be in Ren’s
room,” I say. “I know you guys all looked there, but that’s the last place I remember seeing it.”

  We go to Renate’s room. Her house has more individual rooms than ours but is smaller than ours in square footage, so we have to make sure we’re gone for enough time and make enough drawer-opening noises to make the “search” seem realistic. Then we return to the living room, where Kevin and Kitty are sitting. I hold the workbook up triumphantly, and Kevin and Kitty nod and smile. Then I hear my stupid-phone vibrating from inside my purse, which is sitting on the coffee table. It’s supposed to be for emergency-only use, so for a second I wonder if my parents are calling to tell me there’s an emergency. But when I pick up the phone, all I see are two text notifications. Both from my dad.

  The first one: Tell Renate’s parents they don’t need to take you home. I will be coming to get you in a few minutes.

  And then the second one: And I want to know what was in that bag you brought over there.

  I read both texts out loud to everyone, expecting Kevin and Kitty to give me an uh-oh look, but instead they act confused.

  “Um...” Renate turns to her parents. “I kind of have a confession to make. Cynthia’s parents…kind of don’t know about this drum set. At all.”

  Kevin winces and palms his forehead. Kitty’s jaw drops.

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” Kitty says.

  “You mean me?” I say. “Or Ren?”

  “Renate,” Kitty says. “Why didn’t you tell us we were doing this without her parents’ knowledge?”

  “I am so sorry,” I say. “I thought she told you.”

  “Rennie, do you know how bad this makes us look?” Kevin says. “What were you thinking?”

  “I don’t know,” Renate mumbles at the floor. “I thought maybe you’d think it was kind of badass or something.”

  “If you really thought that, you’d have told us!” Kevin stands up and starts pacing back and forth.

  “What would you have said if I’d told you?”

  Kevin starts rubbing the back of his neck while he paces. “We could at least have discussed it and tried to figure something out.”

  “Dad, her drums weren’t safe in her house. You saw how they were. They think they can cut music out of her head like it’s a malignant tumor. You can’t reason with them.”

  Kitty shakes her head and sighs. I can feel myself flushing. I don’t know why it never occurred to me that they might not know, or that it might upset them if they found out. Renate always makes them sound so chill. But even chill parents are still parents, I suppose.

  Then I hear yowling noises coming from one of the rescue cat rooms. Kitty stands up. “I’d better take care of that. Excuse me a minute.”

  “Mom, wait a second,” Renate says, and Kitty pauses on her way out of the living room. “You did tell him about the cats, right? Because he’s supposed to be quote-unquote killer allergic.”

  “I know I told him at some point.”

  “Don’t remind him.” Renate glances around at all of us. “If he is killer allergic, the minute he gets a whiff of our place he’ll start sneezing and wheezing like whoa. But let’s see how allergic he really is.”

  I never would have thought it was possible for him to be lying about the cat allergy, but when I think about it, why not? He has no problem with other kinds of BS.

  When Kitty is out of the room, Kevin stops pacing and addresses me. “Cynthia, look. I do sympathize with what you’re going through. I went through it myself—I mean, not with autism, but you know, the music. That’s why I built that shed for Rennie and got her those lessons, I didn’t want her to watch her talents go to waste like mine did.”

  “You’re not dead yet,” I offer.

  Kevin lets a hint of a wry smile soften his face. “But you do know you guys are putting me in a seriously awkward position here, right?”

  “I do now.”

  “Dad, I’ll handle him, okay?” Renate says. “I’m not going to leave you holding the bag…so to speak. I’ll make sure he knows you and Mom had no idea what we were up to, and I’ll take total responsibility for it.”

  “No,” I say. “I’ll handle it. He’s my dad, and those are my drums. It’s about time I stopped apologizing for them. You guys don’t have to say a word.”

  The doorbell rings, and despite my declaration of cool, I practically jump a mile in the air. Showtime. It must go on, ready or not.

  Kevin opens the door, and Dad steps into the foyer. I wait to see if he sneezes or has anything resembling an allergic reaction. Nope. Renate gives me an I-told-you look, and I nod as subtly as possible.

  “Cynthia,” Dad says, walking over to me in the living room, “what was in that bag you brought over here?”

  I suck in air through my mouth and into my diaphragm, then huff it out. “Well, obviously it’s a kilo of heroin. I mean, Ren’s parents are such dope fiends, they just had to have it.” I know I probably shouldn’t be making jokes at a time like this, but Kevin laughs in spite of himself.

  Dad sneers. “I’m glad all of this is so amusing to you.”

  “You want to see what it is, Dad? Come on, I’ll show you.” The four of us file out to the garage, and enter the shed.

  “Et voila.” I sweep my hand over the yet-to-be-repaired drum set. “We’re rehabbing an old Trixon cocktail drum kit that was left for dead at the side of the road.” I don’t tell him I paid for the privilege. “That thing in the bag was the bass drum. These are the mesh heads and cymbals, which we’re putting on it so it will make less noise. And yes, I snuck around behind your back to do it, because you’re so far off your hinges now that you won’t even let me touch a musical instrument, lest I blow my early admission to Caltech. Hah. Like they’d ever want me.”

  Dad looks at me, and I can see the index cards fluttering in his head: I’m going to kill her. No, Kevin’s going to kill me, look at the size of him…

  “Yeah,” I say, nodding my head. “That’s about what I thought you’d say. Don’t you realize that the more you try to stop me from playing, the more I want to do it?”

  “For whatever it’s worth,” Kevin says, “my orthopedist went to Stanford, and he plays drums in a band in his spare time. You don’t think people can do both?”

  “For Cynthia, it’s all or nothing,” Dad says. “If she plays, she won’t do her schoolwork. She got that pandeiro for her birthday, and she was banging and rattling that thing all day and night, and then came home with the worst report card of her life.”

  “Post hoc, ergo propter hoc,” I say. Everyone turns to look at me, and I explain, “That’s a Latin phrase for the false assumption that because thing B followed thing A, thing A must have caused thing B. ‘Following, therefore because of.’”

  “I know what post hoc, ergo propter hoc means,” Dad says.

  “I didn’t,” Kevin says, a little sheepishly.

  At that moment, I see Sedona come out from behind the piano, then stretch his front legs out in front of him and yawn. I catch Renate’s attention and nod towards him, and she nods back. Right now Sedona is about three feet behind Dad, and Kevin is facing Dad; if Kevin sees the cat, he’s not letting on.

  “And just so you know, my parents weren’t in on this at all,” Renate says to Dad. “They had no idea you didn’t know. You can hang that on me. But those drums are going to be gorgeous, and I wanted to make sure they had a home, even if it couldn’t be yours.”

  I’m keeping an eye on Sedona, who has commenced giving his ginger mackerel stripes a tongue bath, including the fur between his hind legs. I start coughing so I won’t give myself away. Renate takes a look at him and grits her teeth to try to keep quiet. I pray that Sedona doesn’t meow or start horking up a hairball.

  “Did you know music lessons saved my life?” Renate goes on. “Seriously. Didn’t they, Dad? Didn’t it cure my bulimia?”

  Kevin nods. “Yeah, I’d say so. You were in a pretty bad way before that.”

  “Also, Renate was smoking
cigarettes then,” Kitty says from behind us, and we turn around to look at her as she walks over to the shed. “She said she wasn’t, but we smelled it on her.”

  I give Renate the fish-eye. “You used to smoke? I thought you hated smoking.”

  Renate lets her gaze drift downward. “It’s not my favorite thing to admit, but yes, I did smoke for about three months in eighth grade, to try to get my weight down. You don’t have to tell me how stupid that was.” Then she looks up and fixes her glance squarely on Dad. “But you know what made me quit smoking and puking? Voice lessons. My first voice lesson, my teacher figured it out right away, and she told me that if I quit doing that stuff now, I could have a four-octave range. That’s more than half a piano. But if I kept it up, I’d be lucky to get even two octaves. And that’s all she had to say. It took me a month to stop smoking and two months for the puking, but I did it.”

  “Voice lessons sound pretty good to me,” I say. “I’d love half a piano. Or half a pandeiro. Anything.”

  Sedona continues slurping away at himself, with Dad still completely oblivious. He doesn’t even have watery eyes. Plastic Man.

  “This is the kind of daughter you raise,” Dad says to Kevin and Kitty. “Maybe you didn’t know we didn’t want those drums, but she did”—he gestures towards Renate---“and she pulled this, just to screw us over. And now she’s turned Cynthia against us. Is that how you taught her to be?”

  “The hell?” Kevin says. I think he’s starting to get the picture of what Renate was talking about. He and Kitty both look like they’re about to implode from shock. “What is your damage, dude?”

  Dad shakes his head. “Come on, Cynthia, let’s go. You have to get your homework done.”

  Once we’re in the car, he says, “You’re not ever going back there again. Ever. We gave you more latitude and you repaid us by sneaking around and lying.”

  He starts the car, and once we’re on the road, I say, “Dad, right now, all I’m going to say is that while you were ratchet-jawing in that shed for the last ten minutes, Sedona, their feline familiar, was sitting less than four feet away from you cleaning his fuzzy orange nether regions. And you didn’t even sniffle. Not once. In fact, there are eight other cats living in that house right now, in their rescue rooms. So you don’t have a high horse, or even a low horse, to sit on, when it comes to lecturing me about honesty.”

  No response from Dad, not even about the fuzzy orange nether regions comment, other than clenching his jaw and the steering wheel. He knows I’m right.

  So I did it. I fought back. And I lost my drum set.

  For now.

  Maybe forever.

  When we get home, Dad demands that I hand over the stupid-phone, and tells me how it’s going to be from now on.

  They will hand the phone to me each morning when I leave the house and hand it back to them the minute I get home. I am not to have it in my possession at any other time.

  I am not to call or send texts to anyone except family members, or 911, and then only in emergencies. No exceptions, not for any amount of money.

  Renate can, in theory, still come to our house. But they are going to drive me to and from school, and Renate can’t come over unless she rides with us. Which effectively means she won’t come over, because she’s not going to want them hovering over us constantly, especially not after Dad’s little outburst in her shed. And I can’t go to her house ever.

  Renate and I are not to have a conversation outside the earshot of Mom or Dad. Any plans we make to get together must be overheard and approved by at least one of them.

  They are going to apply to have me transferred to a different homeroom so my one chance to see Renate in class will be eliminated.

  I am not allowed to read or send any email other than to teachers about school-related matters. I am not allowed any Web access other than for school-related research. Dad (or so he says) does know how to hack a private browser window. Because of course he does.

  All my lunch hours will be taken up by tutoring.

  However, he says nothing about my LYRICS notebook, which probably means Mom didn’t tell him that she gave it back to me. Thank you, Mom.

  Some of these rules are just hilarious. He thinks he can stop me and Renate from communicating in school? Just because we’re in different homerooms doesn’t mean we won’t see each other at all. I suppose he thinks that without close proximity, our friendship will just wither away and die.

  My father also reminds me that my sister still goes to the same high school that I do and that she will be encouraged to snitch if she sees us together. But Tam isn’t on the best terms with them either, and I can’t see her volunteering to be a stool pigeon. Though I suppose she could be blackmailed into it, somehow. We’ll let you go to RISD if you agree to spy on Cindy! No, really, we will!

  So that’s where we end things. Congratulations, you’ve now been placed in shackles for the rest of your life. Now, go do your homework, and be sure you get all A’s.

  Spectral Amy says, the hell with that. We have a song to finish.

  “We” have a song to finish? I say. I mean, not that it isn’t my dream to write a song with you for real, but…

  Well, here I am, Spectral Amy says. By the way, that fantasy of being on stage with seventy-something me was amazing. It brought tears to my eyes.

  Does that mean you’re alive? I ask.

  You’ll find out a lot of things about me very soon, she says. In the meantime, I think we know the ending to “Emancipated Minor” now, right?

  We do? I say.

  Those lines about demon spawn, your mental account being overdrawn, that can be your bridge, Spectral Amy says. And then the second verse is kind of a reprise of the first verse, only now you know you have to get out, by any means necessary. Get out your notebook and look at it…

  Now? I say.

  Yes, she says, now. If a song is coming on you have to be ready.

  I do what she says. Fortunately my only homework tonight is geometry, but I already know it’s going to be twenty kinds of wrong. Because I can’t “hear” Melody over Amy. I even tried recording our sessions on the phone, but the cafeteria was so noisy and the microphone on the phone so crappy I can’t make anything out. We’re trying to find a quieter place to do it, but the study rooms in the library are always full, and the main library room isn’t a whole lot quieter than the cafeteria. At least it doesn’t seem like it to me.

  But I just finished my first song. I wish I could turn that in as my homework. On second thought, that’s probably the last thing I want. But it’s done, it’s done! If I was being treated like a normal girl, I could call or text Renate and tell her and we could celebrate.

  Before I get ready for bed and return the laptop to the dining table, I can’t help it, I have to steal one look at Amy’s video. Just one. It’s not enough, but I don’t know if there’s any such thing as “enough” when it comes to Amy. I don’t even care if Dad finds out, at least not enough to stop my fingers from typing the URL. I shut down the computer before I can play it again.

  Don’t sweat it, Spectral Amy whispers. Before you know it, you’ll have your own video and you won’t even think about mine.

  Sure. That’ll happen.

  Tomorrow I have to tell Renate what went down, without being seen doing it.

  When I lie down and close my eyes, my mind is a swirling, blurry collage of images of my drum set that I’m not allowed to see ever again, the cat I’ll never get to pet again, seventy-something Amy on stage with me, the “Look Around” video, Kevin harmonizing with my sister, Kevin asking Dad what his damage is, Renate and me sneaking into the bathroom at school to talk tomorrow, and me standing and playing “Emancipated Minor” for my parents and letting every word whack them in the face like a boomerang.

  I’m not going to get any sleep for the next two years, am I?

  DAY 141

  Emancipated Minor, completed 1/7/17 (after midnight)

  Verse: How will I eve
r get out of this place if I don’t live to tell about it

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

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

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

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

  Chorus: Emancipated Minor

  I’ve got to be an Emancipated Minor

  Jump on an ocean liner and set out on the sea

  To discover me

  Bridge melody, two bars of 6/8 followed by a bar of 2/2 pandeiro slaps:

  I gotta get gone, gotta get gone (slap slap)

  My daddy says I’m demon spawn (slap slap)

  My mental accounts are overdrawn (slap slap)

  What will I live on, what will I live on, what will I live on…

  (Pandeiro slaps on the last will and live, then back to 4/4)

  Verse: I have got to get out of this place, my home is a toxic waste dump

  I’m gonna take the first chance I get, and I don’t know how just yet

  But nobody’s ever gonna rescue me so I’ll hold my nose and jump

  There’s a town five hundred miles down full of people who don’t belong

  They’ve broken free just like me

  They will die to sing their song

  Repeat chorus: Emancipated Minor

  I’ve got to be an Emancipated Minor

  Jump on an ocean liner and set out on the open sea

  To discover me

  Outro: Gotta get gone, gotta get gone, gotta get gone (slap slap)

  (Repeat outro x2, then one more repeat slowing down to end)

  DAY 143

  “He can’t do that,” Renate informs me at school the following Monday, when I tell her my dad is applying to have me change homerooms. “The student has to be the one to apply for a class change. And there has to be a good reason for it, especially if it’s homeroom where the reason would have nothing to do with academics.”

  “She’s right,” Mr. Shunsberg says. “He’s not getting anywhere with that. He’s just blowing a bunch of hot air at you. Parents have been trying to separate their kids from their friends since time immemorial. And they almost never succeed without moving to another country, especially now when it’s so easy to keep up with your old friends online.”

  “For someone who went to Caltech,” Renate says, “I can’t believe how provincial your dad is. Does he really think he can monitor you out of this?”

  “What I can’t believe is that story about the cat,” Mr. S. says. “You can’t make stuff like that up.”

  Renate holds up her spiral notebook. “Caltech or no Caltech, we still have pen and paper. And lockers.”

  “Paper airplanes,” I say. “How do you like that for a song title?”

  Mr. S. laughs. “It’s perfect. My mom used to love this old song called ‘Paper Roses,’ but I won’t sing it for you, because then ‘Paper Airplanes’ will get stuck to it and you won’t be able to come up with your own melody.”

  “You’ve written songs, obviously,” I say.

  “Eh, one or two when I was a kid. I used to have a band with some friends of mine from Hebrew school, called The Mezuzahs. You probably don’t know what that is.”

  “I know what a mezuzah is,” Renate says. “It’s that horn thing, right?”

  “No, that’s a shofar.”

  The end-of-homeroom bell rings. “We’ll look up what a mezuzah is later,” Renate says, gathering up her books. We get to my locker, and she drops her voice to a near whisper. “In the meanwhile, your parents have no control over anything I do on my own time, so I am going to be doing Amy research for you. I won’t bother you with all the dead ends, but if I turn up anything of interest, look for a paper airplane with your name on it.”

  I suck in my breath. “I don’t know, Ren. I still think we’re kind of in Mel the stalker territory here.”

  “Cynner, I don’t know if you realize how serious this is.”

  “I don’t?”

  Renate gets up and looks me right in the face, her eyeballs burning mine. I flinch and back right into my locker door, bumping my head. I yelp in pain, but Renate ignores it and moves in closer to talk to me. “Right now,” she says, her voice low and menacing, “you are at stage IV of the Amy Virus, and there is no stage V; stage V means dead. I just know that one day soon, I’m going to get some anguished phone call from you at two am saying that you just found out Amy Zander killed herself and that her suicide note said she did it because she thought no one liked her music. And then you’ll either do the same thing or never leave your house again.”

  “Stop that,” I hiss. “That is so morbid, Ren.”

  “I’m doing this for entirely selfish reasons, Cyan.” She mouths the name Cyan instead of saying it out loud. “Namely, that if I lose you to this brain-eating disease that has taken over your life, I’ll never forgive myself for not turning over every possible rock to find a cure.”

  “I finished ‘Emancipated Minor’ last night,” I say, forcing a little smile. “With a little help from quote-unquote Amy.”

  Renate shakes a trimphant fist out in front of her. “That’s awesome. I can’t wait to hear it. But let me guess, the bad news is that you mulched your homework again to do it.”

  I nod miserably. “But what can you do about that?”

  “A lot more than you think,” Renate says.

  DAY 145

  “So I decided my parents can never know about you,” I tell Dr. Ngo when I see him two days later, during what would normally be homeroom. Mr. S. already knows about the appointment. “You’re gone after this year anyway, right? I can’t do after-school appointments because they’re picking me up right after school every single day, and I can’t do lunch appointments because those are for tutoring. And if I tell them about you they’ll accuse you of putting ideas in my head. I almost wish they’d beat me up instead, other than my being a pain wimp.”

  “So nothing like that has happened at home?” Dr. Ngo asks.

  I breathe. Not too loud. This is as close as I’ve come, as close as I can come, to telling him.

  “There was a close call, put it that way,” I say. “Mom managed to stop herself in time.” Lying to him turns my stomach. Lying to anyone gives me tension headaches (Dad has no idea what it took out of me to sneak around with that drum set), but especially Dr. Ngo. He of all people doesn’t deserve a wool job from me. “Threatening doesn’t count, right?”

  “Not for legal purposes, no,” Dr. Ngo says. “But that had to feel pretty awful.”

  “You got that right.” I peel away at the already-shredded green vinyl on my chair. If I keep working on it, I might be able to get it all off by the end of the school year, or before he gets transferred to a school with real furniture, whichever comes first. “So what if she does slap me? What would I do?”

  Dr. Ngo scratches his nose. “If she or anyone else in your house does that, please tell me. I want to make sure you’re safe, at least physically.” He shakes his head. “I wish there was a way to remove kids from a mentally abusive house, but right now there isn’t one.”

  “Sometimes I almost wish she’d do it so I could do it back to her, really hard,” I say. “Isn’t that horrible? I mean, I probably couldn’t actually bring myself to do it, but I think about it.”

  He nods, almost like he knows there’s something I haven’t told him. “I think a lot of people have those fantasies. We just want to make sure you don’t act on them.”

  “I’d probably get in worse trouble than her, right?”

  “That’s debatable,” Dr. Ngo says. “If you were acting in self-defense, possibly not. But at the very least there would be an investigation. Nobody’s word about the incident would be taken at face value. And of course, if there was an injury involved, then that would complicate things even more. There’d be doctors and lawyers involved then.”

  “Y
eah, I know,” I say. The idea that doctors and lawyers and social workers would believe I acted in self-defense over either of my parents just seems ludicrous to me, given how easily the two lady cops bought the “mechanical pencil” story we all told them and the fact that I can’t even manage to hide a drum set in my friend’s garage without getting busted, let alone make words come out of me in a way that would make sense to scary-ass authority figures. Besides, I’m not sure I did act in self-defense; it wasn’t like she kept attacking me. “Like I said, it hasn’t come to that. I just want to know what to do if it does.”

  “Tell me,” Dr. Ngo says. “You won’t have to handle it all alone.”

  At this time, my well-documented lack of ability to make eye contact is probably helping me, because if I look at him now, I’ll break.

  Sic transit gloria mundi

  Post hoc ergo propter hoc

  Quod erat demonstrandum

  Bis dat qui cito dat

  Spectral Amy translates: Thus passes away worldly glory, following therefore because of, that which was to be demonstrated, he who gives quickly gives twice…yeah, the English translation needs work.

  Me: How about “give quickly and you give love”? “Give fast, you give it all up”? Or maybe drop the “of,” and just say, “following therefore because”? What rhymes with “because”?

  Latin phrases, set to Latin rhythm. Why not?

  “Cynthia?” Melody says to me. Yeah, I’m supposed to be studying geometry now, that’s why not. My parents are paying her what, twenty dollars an hour to try to penetrate my Amy membrane and fill my brain full of theorems and postulates and formulas? That’s why I have to wonder about this “accommodations” business. How do you accommodate a brain like mine? Make every test question and problem on the board be Amy-related? Let me write all my papers about Amy? Give me extra credit for writing songs? Or perfecting my paradiddles? Or singing a note above D5? Or watching Amy’s video at least a hundred times straight? That takes some stamina, right? Or maybe they can just give me twenty years to get through high school instead of four. That might do it.

  “I feel like I’m wasting your time,” I say to Melody. “I mean, you’re so nice about this, and my brain is like a million miles away.”

  Melody pushes her straight, shiny black hair behind her ear. “If it was that easy to teach you, you wouldn’t need my services,” she reminds me. “There has to be a way I can help you. What kinds of things do you think about the most?”

  Amy. I think about Amy. “Music. Drums. Percussion.”

  “Okay. So do you think it would it be easier to try to figure out, let’s say, the surface area of a tambourine?”

  “Why would I need to know the surface area of a tambourine?”

  Melody shrugs and reaches for a goldfish cracker in the baggie she brought with her. “I don’t know. Maybe someday you’ll make custom tambourines for a living, and you’ll want to know how much skin, or whatever, you need to order? Or what size jingles or frame make a certain sound? Music is really about geometry, when you think about it. If something’s a little thinner, a little thicker, a little larger, a little smaller, squarer, rounder, whatever it is…it’ll make a different sound on impact. Right?”

  I nod. “Yeah, that’s true. People do spend a lot of time trying to figure all that out.”

  “And they’re paid very well for it too. People will pay a lot for an instrument that sounds just right to them.”

  “You’d better not tell my parents we’re having this conversation.” I take a sip of my vinegar water. “My dad is convinced that if I touch a musical instrument ever again, or even think about music, I’ll flunk out and never earn a dime.”

  Melody smiles and picks up her purse, then roots around in it and pulls out a familiar-looking object. “I just happen to have an egg shaker in my purse today,” she says. She rattles it and hands it to me. It’s pink and made out of the cheapest plastic possible, kind of like the egg shakers Renate had at her party. “So before they manufacture these things, they have to figure out a formula for how much volume it holds, how much of that volume the rice grains should take up, how wide it should be at its biggest dimension, how narrow at its smallest…and if you wanted to make one of your own, you’d have to know the same thing. Especially if someone came up to you and said, ‘I want to buy one exactly like the one you have.’ Then you’d know exactly what to do to re-create it.”

  I think of my pandeiro, the one I’ll probably never get to touch again. Built by hand, by a carioca luthier with decades of experience building them for pro musicians. Chosen just for me by my sisters, who knew that it was meant for my hands, even if they knew nothing about Latin percussion; they (or at least, Tam) knew I would love the feel of the synthskin head, the sound of the brass jingles, the tunability, all of it.

  But most of all, that pandeiro was my connection to Amy. I was going to master that thing, and then I could become Cyan Beaut, the wonderfully creative and inspirational person worthy of meeting her.

  But if I find out Amy is dead, or a monster, that fantasy dies. Will I stop wanting to play if that’s what I discover about her? Will I stop writing songs?

  The fantasy is eating me.

  And feeding me.

  I don’t know how long I’ve been sitting here with my jaw slack with those thoughts keeping a stranglehold on my muscle movement, other than my blinking eyes and rhythmically nodding head. But it’s long enough that Melody waves a hand in front of my face. “Cynthia? Are you okay?”

  I startle at the sight of her waving hand. “I…I don’t…I…”

  “Come on,” Melody says, jumping to her feet and gathering her stuff. “We have to get you to the nurse.” She picks up my purse and throws the strap over her shoulder, and then offers me her arm to pull me up. I take it, and I can feel my schoolmates’ eyes clamped on me as I wander out and down the hall, holding on to Melody’s arm, unable to speak. “Good. You can hear what I say and follow instructions. That’s a good sign. I think.”

  We get to the nurse’s office, and when Tuesdy the nurse (I always wondered whether her parents didn’t know how to spell “Tuesday” or were just trying to be cute with the spelling), asks us what the problem is, Melody turns to me, like she’s expecting me to explain it to Tuesdy. But I just shake my head, because I don’t really know why I’m here. So Melody tells her that she was sitting with me and all of a sudden I couldn’t talk and just stared out in front of me until she waved a hand in front of my face, and she’s worried I had a seizure or a stroke or something.

  Tuesdy—a large, dark-skinned woman with an ex-smoker’s baritone voice who favors Bugs Bunny scrubs that say WHAT’S UP, NURSE?—tells Melody, “If she responded immediately to her name and a hand waved in front of her face, it wasn’t a seizure.” Then she turns to me and says, “Cynthia, can you tell me anything about what just happened? Do you recall the event Melody is talking about?”

  “I…I….”

  Then Renate enters the nurse’s office. “I saw you coming in here and I got here as fast as I could,” Renate says. “What’s going on?”

  “Um…ah…uh…” So many sentences. No way to form them. My tongue has gone on strike.

  “Okay, Cyn,” Renate says, “it looks like you’re having a problem with speech right now, but if we ask you questions, can you write?” She makes a writing-on-paper motion with her hands. “Can you write out your answers?”

  I nod. Renate hands me her spiral notebook and a pen, then turns to Tuesdy and Melody and explains, “Sometimes Cynthia can write more easily than she can talk, so I thought I’d try this.” Renate has never witnessed me completely losing speech before, but she does know that I can write a lot of things more coherently than I can say them. And true to form, she manages to tell them that without using the A word.

  “I didn’t know that,” Melody says.

  “How much did her parents tell you about her?” Renate asks her.

  “Hardly anything.”

&n
bsp; “That figures. When did she lose her speech?”

  “About five or ten minutes ago.”

  Renate turns back to me. “Okay, Cyn. Can you write out everything you remember about the last ten minutes? Don’t worry if it’s out of sequence, just write out everything you remember.”

  While Tuesdy dispenses meds to a couple of kids who came in after me, I spend the next few minutes scribbling in Renate’s notebook: Melody tried to get me to understand geometry by talking about percussion instruments, like trying to figure out the volume of an egg shaker so you would know how big it would have to be and how far up to fill it to get the right sound. And then I started getting all choked up thinking about my pandeiro (Brazilian drum) and the Trixon drum set Renate has at her house, and how I’ll never get to play again because my parents hate me.

  I feel myself starting to sniffle as I write. Tuesdy pushes a box of tissues at me. I dab at my eyes and continue. They really do. They hate, hate, hate me. They always will. I can’t think of any other explanation for not letting me play. It has to be to spite me. I won’t ever get to be the person I want to be if they won’t let me play, and that seems to be exactly how they want it.

  I am about 99% sure I am still on the autism spectrum, and my parents don’t want to hear that I’m not “in remission” from it like they claim. And I’m actually the middle “severity” level, not the lowest, because I had speech delay. But their (our) entire life is built upon my not being autistic. Literally, every dime we have depends on my not being autistic. I am letting them down. I don’t know how not to.

  I couldn’t talk just now because I had too many sentences trying to grab my tongue at the same time, and none of them won. I just sat there blinking and nodding. I remember Melody waving a hand in front of my face and when I didn’t talk, her grabbing our stuff and bringing me down here.

  I think that’s everything. Then I write at the top of the page: Please read this silently and not out loud, I don’t need this broadcast to the whole school. And shred it when you’re done.

  I hand Renate her notebook back and blow my nose, and she rubs me on the shoulder, then reads what I wrote. “It looks to me like she remembers everything,” she says to Tuesdy and Melody. Then she looks at me. “Are you sure you want to show this to them?”

  I nod yes. Renate hands Tuesdy the notebook, and Melody looks over her shoulder to read it. Melody’s jaw almost hits the floor. When they’re done, Tuesdy shakes her head. “Wow,” she says to me. “I’m so sorry.” Then she lowers her voice. “You didn’t have any stroke or seizure, then, it sounds like you had yourself a big old panic attack. And no wonder.” She hands the notebook back to me. “That’s a terrible situation you’re in.”

  “Oh my God,” Melody whispers. “I had no idea they treated you like that. That’s horrible.” Then she turns to the others. “What are we going to do? We can’t just leave her like this. And I don’t know if we want to tell her parents, that might make her situation even worse.”

  I then hand the notebook back to Renate, who pulls my pages out and shreds them into confetti like I asked her to.

  “Honestly, what you’re going through sounds more like an issue for a family counselor than a medical issue,” Tuesdy says. “Unless there’s something you haven’t told me yet.”

  I suck in my breath silently. I could do it. I could tell Tuesdy, right here about Mom slapping me and me slapping her back and Mom’s concussion and the fact that they buried it all in the ice cold ground and got me to do the same. But after what Dr. Ngo said, I can’t help thinking that I’ll get in bigger trouble for that than anyone else will. I look at Renate and shake my head, as if to say, please don’t say anything about that. “N…no, I…I think you…got it all,” I hear myself say, and then feel myself sigh with relief that words are coming out of my mouth.

  “Oh, thank God,” Melody says. “You can talk again.”

  I look around and see that a few more kids are in line waiting to see the nurse. I wonder how much of this they saw. “Could…could I lie down for a few minutes?” I ask Tuesdy.

  “You know the way,” says Tuesdy, who has seen me through multiple episodes of killer cramps and migraines. Renate and Melody follow me back to the cot room farthest to the rear of the nurse’s office, and I draw the curtain.

  “I’m so sorry, Cynthia,” Melody says. “I want to help you, but I feel oogy taking money from your parents after what you told me. Right now I just feel like screaming at them, but I don’t want to make things worse for you. I have to think about what I’m going to do here, okay? But meanwhile, if you have any questions or problems, you can always email me.”

  “Be careful,” Renate tells her. “They monitor her email.”

  Melody furrows her brow. “They do know they can’t do that forever, right?”

  “No,” Renate says. “They don’t. That’s the scary part.”

  “Are you going to be okay?” Melody asks me. “You’re not going to hurt yourself or anything, are you?”

  I shake my head. “A lot of people want that to happen. I won’t give them the satisfaction.” I don’t mention that I’m quoting from my own lyrics. “Seriously, though, I used to think I might, but now I’m starting to think that if I kill myself, that’s the easy way out for them. They don’t deserve to have other people feel sorry for them.”

  “That’s never the easy way out,” Melody says. The final bell rings for fifth period. “Seriously, though, if you need anything, just ask. I care about what happens to you.”

  “Thanks,” I say. “I appreciate it.”

  Once she’s out of earshot, I lie down on the cot, and Renate sits down in the chair next to the bed. “So I have an Amy-related question for you,” she whispers.

  “Have at it.”

  “Is there any chance that Amy could have married someone named Marty Nicosia?”

  I take my glasses off and place them on my chest, then drape my arm over my eyes. “She could have married someone named Daniel Butt for all I know, although I think I’d have known that by now.” I put my arm down and turn my head to look at her. “Why?”

  “I think you might want to put your glasses back on and have a look at this. I might have evidence that Amy is alive.”

  I put my glasses back on in a hurry. “Are you serious?” I sit up, and Renate hands me her phone. It’s opened to a video posted by someone named Marty Nicosia that just has the title “Look Around, Sergio Mendes cover at party 1/1/17.” The subheader says, “Me and the mizzuz, well lubricated on NYE, L. finds her teenage drummer girl self!”

  “I found it by searching on ‘Look Around Sergio Mendes Cover,’” Renate says. “It was just posted like two days ago. Watch the lady sitting on the floor playing the—what is that, a djembe? I can’t deal with most of the audio on this because they’re totally out of tune and screechy, plus the piano’s way out of tune too, but listen and tell me if you think that might not be Amy’s voice in the background.”

  “Who’s ‘L’?”

  “They call someone ‘Laurette’ in the video. I looked at IMDB and found out that someone updated Amy’s page just yesterday. There’s another Amy Zander listed in there now, some actress in her twenties who had a couple of one-off roles on soaps, so they updated Amy (I)’s page with her middle initial, which is L. But they didn’t add anything else. And there’s a singer in the background with a very low, heavy voice with a lot of tight vibrato like hers. Amy’s voice was already kind of gravelly when she was our age, so she could definitely have that kind of voice if she’s in her sixties now. But I can’t tell who this ‘Marty’ person is. They’re probably the one holding the camera.”

  I’m afraid to look. But I can’t not look.

  Renate hands me the ear buds and I listen and watch. The woman Renate is talking about is almost completely blocked by the drum she’s playing, and the lighting is too dark to get a good look at her face or at most of the room, but I can see her head. It looks like she has gray-streaked black curl
y hair clipped on top of her head with a banana clip. Someone plays piano, and they all sing “Look Around”; like Renate says, they all sound wasted, and they garble the lyrics and bust up laughing about every third line, but I catch my breath when I hear the deep vibrato that Renate’s talking about, and this “Laurette” person is shredding on that djembe, in a way that looks eerily familiar.

  “Holy crap.” I put a hand to my mouth for a second. “But I’m so bad with faces, I can’t tell if it’s really her or not. What if it isn’t?”

  “Okay. So then I started trying to find out more stuff about this Marty Nicosia. Whoever it is doesn’t have a big social media presence, so it could be someone who’s pretty old. The few other people I could make out in this video do look early to mid baby boomer age, for whatever that’s worth. And the only other videos Marty has up are some silly dog videos, and they closed comments. The account looks like it’s brand new, created as maybe some New Year’s resolution to finally have a social media outlet, such as it is.”

  Tuesdy pokes her head through the curtains. “Renate, you need to leave Cynthia alone now and let her rest, okay?”

  Yeah. Like I’m ever getting any rest after this.

  “Sorry,” Renate says. She stands up and puts her phone in her backpack, then says to me, “That’s all I have right now, but I’m sure more will be revealed.”

  Once Renate is gone, my head starts pounding. My neck starts pounding. Everything is pounding.

  I try to summon Spectral Amy. Is that you? Are you really alive? Alive and having happy New Years’ parties with roomfuls of friends and a spouse who loves you and wants to hear your shivery voice and mad drumming skills? Because that would be wonderful.

  But she doesn’t talk back to me. Spectral Amy, no matter how desperate my plea, never answers questions about real Amy.

  After spending fifth period in the nurse’s office, I go to my locker and see that someone has written the word SPAZ on it vertically in huge black letters. Is there something wrong with me that immediately my mind converts those four letters into Superhero Princess Amy Zander? I’m half tempted to write that on my locker, but realistically I have to notify maintenance to paint it over again. The paint on my locker is getting pretty thick.

  When I open my locker, two folded pieces of paper fall out. I unfold the first one. It’s a page printed off the net of some small business registry for Oregon, and the names NICOSIA, M. AND L., listed next to the business name D/B/A BANG ON THIS, and an address in southeast Portland, all highlighted in orange.

  The second piece of paper is a copy of a page from one of the alt-weeklies in Portland listing activities in town--and one of them, also highlighted in orange, is a Saturday night drum circle at Bang on This in southeast Portland, hosted by one Laurette Nicosia. In Renate’s inimitable swirling cursive, she has written:

  Bang on This is a drum store that’s been around since 2003, but the “Nicosia family” took possession of it last November, according to the store’s sketchy-ass Web page. No pic of them on the site, alas, and no other details about the new owners. Still digging. – R.

  So if Laurette=Amy…then Amy is in Portland.

  Amy is in Portland.

  AMY IS IN FRACKING PORTLAND!!!

  And Portland is less than four hundred miles northwest of here. But it might as well be Jupiter, if you live in Steens Center and don’t have a car. Or anyone to drive you there. Or parents who would give you permission to go.

  Also, I’m not Cyan yet.

  Yes, you are, breathes Spectral Amy. I bet if you went into that store right now and picked up a pandeiro and started playing it and singing your songs, you’d get applause.

  Never mind that, I say. Are you Laurette Nicosia? Are you?

  Predictable radio silence.

  Two more agonizing periods to go until I finally get released from one prison to go to another. I stagger down the hallways to Biology 2, abuzz with new and probably useless but also possibly life-changing information.

  But the more I think about it--which is a lot, obviously--the more I think this Laurette Nicosia person can’t possibly be Amy. Salt-and-pepper-haired women who were once “teenage drummer girls” aren’t that rare, are they? Especially not in Portland, the home of Chicks with Sticks, the girls’ and women’s drumming school whose Percussion University summer session I dream of attending one day when I am finally sprung from the Butt Correctional Facility. And someone at CWS must know about her; there’s no way someone from that school wouldn’t recognize Amy if they saw her, even under a different name, and their faculty and students must go in there all the time, if that store has been around almost fifteen years. And then the secret would have been out by now. Right?

  Right?

  Because if she is Laurette, that’s just too much awesomeness. That means she not only lives in my state, but she changed her name just like I want to, so she’d understand. I imagine the following conversation taking place in the drum practice room at Bang on This, where I see her go in and follow her back there, heart pounding, to introduce myself. (I don’t even know if Bang on This has a drum practice room, but my fantasy has to start somewhere.)

  Me: Hi, my name is, uh, Cynthia Butt…but (ha ha) not much longer. I’m changing it first chance I get.

  Laurette/Amy: I can relate to that! What are you going to change it to?

  Me: Cyan Beaut.

  Laurette/Amy: Ooh, that’s a great name! Why won’t your parents let you change it now?

  Me: They won’t even let me play my pandeiro now. If I want something, that means I have to be deprived of it, because I’m bad and I must be punished.

  Laurette/Amy: Why are you bad?

  Me: I don’t think I’m bad. I mean, I used to think I was bad, but now I’m starting to think I’m not the bad one. But they think I’m bad. I neglected my homework to play my instrument. But they took my instrument away, and my records, and my record player and my phone, and I still neglect my homework. My grades this next quarter are going to be even worse than last time.

  Laurette/Amy: Why do you neglect your homework?

  Me: Uh…I’m not sure I should tell you…

  Yeah, the fantasy kind of crashes into a wall there. Even if Laurette is Amy—and I remain unconvinced--I’m certainly not about to tell Laurette/Amy I think about her all day long, and play one song of hers over and over, and that a spectral version of her fifteen-year-old self is my constant companion. She should know I appreciate her, but not so much that the rest of my life has gone down the tubes because of it. That’s the fastest way to get marked down as a bridge troll. And once that happens, you don’t get unmarked, ever.

  Plus what happens if I tell her about the autism? What if she thinks people like me are automatically dangerous?

  I like her too much to meet her. That’s the bottom line. I must reach the point where she doesn’t intimidate me at all, where there’s no question that I could form a non-bridge-troll series of sentences in her presence. Cyan Beaut wouldn’t be intimidated by her. A little nervous, sure; who wouldn’t be nervous meeting her idol? And she might do some “we are not woooortthy” kind of bowing down, sort of tongue-in-cheeky. But she would know, deep down, that she deserved to occupy the same space as Amy, breathe the same air, follow the same set of footsteps to success and creativity. She wouldn’t make a braying mule out of herself just talking to Amy.

  And I would. No ifs, ands, or Butts about it.

  Also, that’s an insipid-ass fantasy. It’s not like she’d tell me that she was really Amy within seconds of meeting her, and wouldn’t I confirm that she was really Amy before I went through all of that? And if she’s not really Amy, or she is but doesn’t want anyone to know, she wouldn’t have told me she could relate to wanting to change her name, et cetera.

  Plus that’s not her. Come on. It’s not.

  My day concludes in Language Arts, where my average this term is a B; I get A’s on my papers, thanks to my innate ability to spell and punctuate, and
C’s on my quizzes (there’s no midterm exam, only a final). I shouldn’t be getting C’s on my quizzes in this class. But that’s what happens when the twelve-ring circus in your head drowns out the teacher and borks your reading comp. The last thing Ms. Samman says before we break for the day is that there’s going to be a weekend field trip to Ashland the last weekend of February for all the sophomore LA classes to see productions of Othello and Lysistrata put on by their Shakespeare Festival, and hands out the registration and parent volunteer slips.

  Feh. Like I’d ever be allowed to go to Ashland, especially after the next set of report cards comes out. I’ll be lucky if they let me live. Plus it’s an expensive trip for us, what with hotel rooms and play tickets and all that. Even if I wasn’t on my parents’ no-fly list, they’d probably tell me we couldn’t afford it. I fold up the papers and stick them in my notebook, expecting that I’ll probably have to return them tomorrow with the NO boxes checked off, perhaps with an “I didn’t realize you people were doing jokes now” scribbled in the margin.

  Today my parents have come to school for a meeting about my situation. Right before I go out the front door of the school to wait for my parents to pick me up, I see Dad talking to Mr. Shunsberg, standing off to the side of the walkway, under the awning to avoid getting pelted by the freezing rain. For a second, I tense up, thinking that a fight could break out between them, but they seem to be chatting amicably. I put my gloves on more slowly than usual and watch them for a few seconds, until Mr. S. nods and gives him kind of a half smile, then puts his hood up and walks away with his hands jammed in his coat pockets. Then I go out to meet Dad, and we make a run for the Escalade, where Mom is already behind the wheel with the engine running.

  “So no Renate today?” Dad asks me, as soon as we’re inside the car.

  “Today’s her therapy day. She still has to see the ED therapist once a month to make sure she doesn’t have a relapse.” I don’t add that Renate told me earlier today that if she spends even one second in the presence of my dad right now, he could get his nose broken, and she’d rather spend her energy fixing up the drum set and stalking researching Amy for me, anyway.

  Dad fastens his seat belt. “Well, it’s good she hasn’t.”

  “Nope. Going on two years now.” I try putting on my seat belt, but it pops out of the fastener a few times before I realize I’m putting it in the wrong fastener. “So how was the meeting?”

  “There really wasn’t anything new to report,” Mom says. “Just what Mr. Shunsberg said about you needing some extra help with some of your classwork, which we got for you.”

  Hmm. If that’s the take-home they got from Mr. S., maybe I should avoid this subject for now.

  Mom pulls out of the parking lot and into the street. “So did you learn anything new in school today?” Dad asks me.

  It’s all I can do not to cackle madly at that question, after everything that’s happened today. But I know that an honest answer is the last thing he wants. “You’re not going to be able to keep me away from drums forever, you know,” I say.

  “It doesn’t have to be forever,” Dad says. “It just has to be long enough for you to get some work done.”

  Rather than go there yet again, I open up the notebook that has the Ashland forms in it. “So the big news today is the Ashland field trip. It’s the weekend of February 24. I know I can’t go, but you still have to check the no boxes and sign the forms.”

  “You mean for the Shakespeare Festival?” Mom says.

  “Yeah, although one of the plays isn’t Shakespeare.”

  “Which plays?” Dad asks.

  I tell him, although I have to wonder why he even makes a show of caring about it.

  “Lysistrata, huh?” We wait at a traffic light, while some pedestrians run against the don’t-walk signal. Usually he’d grumble about that, but this time he doesn’t.

  “Yeah. Why? Are you a closet Aristophanes fan or something?”

  Mom puts her foot on the gas again, driving slower than usual because of the icy streets.

  “You know what Lysistrata is about, right?” Dad says. “All the women going on strike against their husbands? It’s pretty funny.”

  “But also true,” Mom says mischievously.

  Hmmm. Someone has taken my dad and replaced him with a lookalike pod--apparently, one who secretly enjoys the theatre--but I think I like the pod a lot better. “Yeah, they go on strike to make the men stop the war. And it works.”

  Dad looks over at Mom. “They give a pretty good group discount for the play tickets and the hotel, right? And they provide transportation?”

  “I think so,” Mom says.

  “Well, we’ve always wanted to go, right?” Dad says. “And when Tam went two years ago, we had already planned months earlier to go to that Autism Society conference.”

  “I don’t think they’d let you go without me,” I say.

  “Of course you’d go,” Dad says. “It’s classical theatre, so it’s educational. And if at least one of us was there—“

  I finish his sentence in my head: we could keep an eye on you. Leave it to Dad to make a weekend trip to Ashland with Renate (assuming her parents say yes, and they probably will) sound like no fun at all.

  The conversation dies there, and then, in my mind, I hear the sounds of a pandeiro, and timbales, and cowbells, and polyrhythmic clapping, and sweet high and velvety low female harmony.

  And then, after thirty seconds of luxuriating in the sounds of the unbearably beautiful music in my head, the only music I am allowed to play, I get this wild hair up my Cindy-butt.

  DAYS 146-147

  The ice storm turns out to be a doozie. It’s so much bigger than expected that they announce the next morning that school is going to be closed on Thursday and Friday, although teachers and admins might have to report later in the day on Friday if the roads are passable. That gives me an extra day for this wild hair to keep nagging at me, and by the time I’m done with lunch on Friday, I can’t stand it any more. I tell my parents I’m grabbing the computer to catch up on homework, and when I get it back to my room, I open up a private browsing window while my parents are tied up on the phone. Since Dad said nothing to me about hitting Amy’s video online the other night, I seriously doubt Dad has the advanced level private-browser-hacking skills he claims. And there are some things I need to know. Now.

  About Ashland.

  Such as: is there a Greyhound stop there, for a bus that goes to Portland?

  No. The closest Greyhound stop en route to Portland is in Medford. That’s about thirty miles away from Ashland.

  The closest Amtrak stop to Ashland is Klamath Falls, which isn’t exactly around the corner from there, and I can’t go on Amtrak alone without my parents’ permission until I’m sixteen anyway.

  Medford also has an airport, but no way would they let someone my age buy her own ticket to Portland and fly alone. Not to mention it would cost beaucoup bucks to fly there.

  The buses from Ashland to Medford don’t run on weekends or evenings. But there is an intercity bike trail between the two cities.

  I know how to ride a bike. But I don’t do it much any more because I got tired of falling off so often my limbs looked like dumpster bananas.

  It would be a twenty-five mile ride.

  In February.

  And I’d have to buy a bike while I’m there. And a helmet. And somehow sneak away from my hawkish parent(s) to do it. With all my stuff strapped to my back.

  Ha. Ha ha ha ha ha.

  Nice try.

  Not that it matters anyway. Laurette isn’t Amy. No. No no no no no.

  But I feel like if I could just get to Portland, things would happen. I just picture zipping all over town on the MAX light rail and the streetcar, seeing those people drumming on the street on those five-gallon plastic buckets, and grabbing a drum of my own and jamming with them. Oh, just to be out of the stagnant air in Steens Center for a few days, going to all the instrument shops, telling ev
eryone my name is Cyan and I am a drummer, I am a drummer, I am a drummer. Saying hi to the chill ladies at Chicks with Sticks, and maybe getting to see a few minutes of a class in action. Eating a slice of big city pizza and liking it, and going back for another one. Seeing Amy would just be icing on the cake, if it was to happen.

  Which it wouldn’t.

  And I’d run out of money.

  And have to call my parents.

  Who at that point might be mad enough just to leave me there.

  But no such luck. They’d drag me home and tie me to the bed, and that’s when they’d admit to everyone that I have a disability, because then they’d be allowed to tie me to a bed. That’s what happens to a lot of kids with disabilities. Dogs have more freedom than they do.

  Even so, it might be worth it. Even getting a taste right now of what it would be like not to be in jail might be worth doing extra time.

  Our Civics teacher last year had us read a book called Stumbling on Happiness, a book about how people think that if they get thing X they’ll be ecstatic (or miserable), and turn out to be wrong, over and over again. His point was that if even adults guess wrong about what they want all the time, how can we teens be expected to guess any better? Which prompted a lot of jokes about how adults get more clueless with age so we teens should get exactly what we want now, before we become fossilized and forget everything. But the truth is, even though I’m in a place where almost anything sounds better than what I have, this might be the worst possible time to make that decision.

  And I would have to be bat guano goofy to even think about making a run for it when I’m in Ashland. I know what happens to teenage runaways. A lot of them are treated even worse than I am at home, and still, the street is sometimes more horrible than that.

  But maybe I am that kind of crazy.

  DAY 150

  “There’s no way,” Renate says the following Monday morning in homeroom, when I ask her if there’s any way her parents would sneak me out of the house, throw me in their trunk, and take me (us) to Portland to check out maybe-Amy. (“Maybe Amy,” now there’s a song title.) “Not unless your parents would give permission. They might not be the biggest fans of your dad, but they’re not going to chance getting busted for kidnapping.”

  I sigh. “That’s about what I figured. So what’s even the point of finding out where she is, if I can never go there?”

  “Maybe we can get her to come down here,” Renate suggests.

  “Now you’re being silly.” I glance up at the teacher’s desk. Mr. S. still hasn’t arrived, which is unusual for him.

  “Do your parents know anything about Amy? Or either of your sisters?”

  “You mean that I like her?” I feel my left eyelid start to twitch again, and press it with my finger, even though that never works. “God, no. If Dad ever found out, he’d block her videos. So I’m starting to think my only hope is if I make a run for it. There’s a bike path from Ashland to Medford, and then a Greyhound bus from—“

  Renate scoffs. “A bike trail? Are you serious? I thought you said you fell off bikes all the time and didn’t want to ride ever again. That bike trail’s something like thirty miles, and it’ll probably be raining. And you’re not exactly the outdoor type.”

  “I know, but—“

  “Besides, your parents will probably literally have you on a leash while we’re in Ashland.”

  I nod, making a frowny face. “All true. So basically, all we’re doing now is collecting information for when I can go places without my parents’ permission, which will be two and a half years from now, if I’m still alive then.”

  “Hey, don’t give up. We’ll think of something. Maybe I could go there and take some video for you. Or go there and explain your dilemma and see if she won’t at least say hi over Skype or something.”

  “Do you think George Clinton would do that for you?” I say, although I know the answer to that already.

  “George Clinton is in the Rock Hall of Fame,” she says, exactly as I predicted. “Amy Zander is the very definition of ‘has-been that never really was.’ I mean, look…if that is her, then she changed her entire name to get away from the spotlight. She wants to be a regular person, who co-owns a store where people a million times more famous than she is probably come in to shop and have no clue who she is, or was.”

  “Which is exactly why she doesn’t need some nutbag fan, whose parents weren’t even born when she made her only record, gibbering in her face.”

  “Which is exactly why she would want to be nice to a young musician who might buy stuff from her for the next thirty years, as long as that person wasn’t abusive,” Renate corrects me.

  “And that’s not her anyway,” I say. “And even if it was, she wouldn’t admit it.”

  “You know, you’re beginning to drive me up the wall.”

  At that moment, a gray-and-pink woman who looks even older than grandma age enters the room and goes over to the teacher’s desk and puts her stuff down. A sub, obviously. After she takes her coat off and hangs it up, she writes the name MRS. GAUFF on the whiteboard, then gets the class’s attention and introduces herself. Someone asks her if Mr. Shunsberg is out sick, and she says, “I would assume so. There’s a terrible flu-slash-cold thing going around, quite a few teachers are absent today.”

  And I don’t give it a second thought.

  Until he misses the entire week. And the beginning of the next week.

  DAYS 151-159

  With every day he’s been absent, I’ve felt this sick headache building up on me, thinking something bad has happened to him. Really bad. Bad enough that I won’t ever see him again. I try to talk myself out of it. Teachers get sick all the time. Even for multiple days, or even weeks. You’re being completely weird about this. It’s no use. Something is wrong, every cell in my body knows it.

  The second Monday he’s out, I write in the margins of my class notebooks:

  Amy.

  Save me.

  Maybe

  There’s no one who can save me

  But Amy

  What you gave me

  Yay you

  Yay me

  Amy

  You slay me

  So may we

  Do something that will save me…

  I feel Spectral Amy looking over my shoulder while I write this stuff. Oh wow, girl, you’re really going off the deep end, she says.

  I’m sorry, I tell her. I know I’m probably scaring the crap out of you. But don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone.

  He’s just out sick, Spectral Amy says.

  But what if he isn’t? I say. What am I going to do? What? What? You aren’t real, and Renate is getting seriously annoyed with me now. And Dr. Ngo is only here on a one-year assignment, so he’ll be gone soon too. Who do I have left?

  Then she goes silent.

  Lather, rinse, regurgitate.

  Over the course of the next two weeks, I talk less and less. To anyone. I can barely even mutter a few words to Renate; mostly I nod while she talks, and she carefully keeps the subject matter away from anything to do with Amy. Or Mr. S. Or playing music. Yes, there are other things going on in the world for her and other allistics. Best not to get in their way.

  I manage one-word answers to my parents’ questions, and they don’t press me for any more than that. They’re probably relieved not to have to hear my voice that much.

  More and more frequently I shake my head when teachers call on me. Now and then I try to talk. Kids make fun of my “I…I…I’s,” teachers tell them to shut up, but I know they wish they were allowed to bag on me too.

  Amy

  Save me

  I write in the margins and cross it out, scribble scribble, again and again. I drum with my pencils. Get funny looks. Stop. Start again. Get yelled at my teachers. Stop. Sit on my hands. Don’t touch a pen or pencil. It’ll just keep happening.

  Something has to give, Spectral Amy tells me. You can’t go on like this.

  Tell me w
hat to do, I beg her. Please tell me what to do.

  You’ll know when the time comes, she says.

  “Amy,” Ryan Crousse breathes at me in homeroom that Wednesday as I walk by his desk. In my mind, I jump about a mile in the air. I know Renate hasn’t said anything, because she wouldn’t. Especially not to Mr. Crappy Joke Machine. So I must have said her name, or at least mouthed it clearly, without realizing it. “Aaaaaaamy. Who’s Aaaaaaamy?”

  Of course, I say nothing. I wouldn’t, even if my mouth hadn’t closed up shop days ago. I make sure my breathing is silent, even if it takes all the diaphragmatic control I have.

  “Aaaaaamy,” Ryan’s cult following says, in perfect imitation of his inflections. “Aaaaamy.”

  There is no one in this school named Amy. As far as I know. I’d better check.

  DAY 160

  By the time Mr. S. has been out for nine school days, the rumors start to fly in homeroom about what happened to him. He had an affair with a student, and some parent got him strung up by the thumbs. Sure. Has to be that. Couldn’t possibly not be that.

  As ridiculous as that sounds—I can’t think of anyone less likely to come on to a student than him--I think they might be half right. About him caring too much about a student, and a parent stringing him up by the thumbs.

  And I know which one.

  I know.

  I can prove nothing.

  But Dad disappeared him. I know he did. Maybe Mr. S. isn’t dead, but he might as well be.

  You know what to do, Spectral Amy intones. Extreme situations call for extreme measures. Go.

  In the midst of all the flying gossip, I silently pick up my stuff, put my coat on, and walk out of the room. Only one person notices I’ve left until I’m halfway down the hall.

  When Renate reaches me, I open my notebook, pick up a pen, and write, in caps, I CAN’T BE HERE NOW. GOING HOME. MAYBE FOREVER. Her jaw drops when I show it to her.

  “Cynner, will you wait for me?” Renate says. “Please? I have to talk to the sub and get my things, but you shouldn’t be going home alone now.”

  I shake my head and keep walking. I keep waiting for someone else to stop me. But they don’t. It’s like they’re finally rid of me and they’re not going to stand in my way.

  Eventually, Renate catches up to me on the frigid 8 am sidewalk. It’s really strange, walking in this direction at this hour, with the sun barely up yet. “You’re really serious, aren’t you?

  I look at her and nod.

  “Those people in homeroom have brains the size of Milk Duds,” Renate says. “And hearts even smaller than that. You can’t take them seriously.”

  I stop right there on the sidewalk, look at her, try to say something. Can’t. I take out my notebook again, with snot dripping from my nose all over it, wipe my nose on the glove, and remove my glove to write. The glove somehow manages to entangle itself with my dangling black enamel cat earring. I have no idea how I manage to get things stuck together like that. I try to separate them, but it’s like they’re eternally married. I leave it hanging there and take out my pen, and write in the notebook, in capital letters, I KNOW WHO DID IT.

  “Here, let me get that glove off your ear.” Renate picks up the glove and the earring with separate hands, and after one twist, gets them apart and hands the glove to me. “If you keep that hanging, you’ll get a huge hole in your ear.” I nod my thanks, and she takes the notebook from me and reads it. “’Did it’? You mean, got Shunsberg fired?”

  I nod again and wipe my leaky nose on my glove.

  “He might just have a really bad flu,” Renate says. “Or some other thing. I refuse to believe anyone is that evil, that they’d make up something just to get rid of him.”

  I write on the notebook, again in caps, NOT EVEN MY DAD?

  “No. Not even your dad. I can’t. I can’t go there. If I found out he actually did that, I’d light him on fire. I really would. I mean, maybe not literally, but close to it. And then I wouldn’t be allowed in your house ever again.”

  I resume walking, and she follows me and keeps talking. “And Ryan has no clue who Amy is. He doesn’t even know anyone named Amy he can pin it on. He’ll forget about it in a day or two, you know him and his fruit fly attention span.”

  I shake my head as I walk. All I can think of is being warm again, even if I have to share a roof with two of the coldest people in Western civilization. I don’t ever want to be cold. I hate cold.

  “You haven’t told me to leave,” Renate says. “If you do, I’ll go. Do you want me to leave, Cyan?”

  Cyan, Spectral Amy says. Do what Cyan would do.

  The sound of that name still startles me. I turn my head sharply to look at her, then shake my head no. She keeps following me until we get to my house. I unlock the door with my house key and the two of us step inside. Mom is standing there in the foyer. “Cynthia, what are you doing home?” she asks me.

  As I stare at Mom, trying to get my mouth around my thoughts, Renate tells her, “Cynthia doesn’t have speech right now. She basically stopped talking almost two weeks ago. Or haven’t you noticed?”

  Renate has a booming, dramatic voice, and the sound of it brings Dad out of the office immediately. “What’s going on?” Dad says.

  “I brought her home,” Renate says. “She’s not feeling well. At all.”

  I sniffle, melted nasal discharge from the cold. Mom hands me a box of tissues, and as I blow my nose, she feels my forehead with the back of her hand. “You might be a little warm,” Mom says. “I mean, it’s freezing out there, and your face isn’t cold at all.”

  “That’s not all of it,” Renate says. I catch my breath, and she looks at me. “Do you want me to tell them?”

  I nod.

  “Cynthia hasn’t said a word to anyone at school in over a week,” Renate says. “And it’s totally unlike her not to talk to me unless we’ve had a fight, and she’s been talking less and less since school started up again. She can write out her thoughts, but when she tries to say them, she can’t. And right now she’s seriously upset about Mr. Shunsberg not being there the last two weeks. Supposedly he’s out sick, but there are rumors that he’s not coming back.”

  Mom gives me a horrified look. “Cynthia, is all of this true?”

  I take out my notebook again and write on one of the pages, if she says anything that isn’t true, I will let you know. So far she’s got it right. I hold it up and show it to them.

  “And you came home because of that?” Dad says. So far, he hasn’t done anything to convince me he wasn’t involved.

  I shake my head, and write on the page, that was just the last straw for me. I can’t do this anymore. I can’t. I’m sorry.

  Spectral Amy is looking over my shoulder. Save your own life, she says, save your life, Cyan.

  I take a deep breath, and let it out tremulously. What I write next could make them turn against me forever. But I must.

  I need you to stop writing about me like I’m some autism recovery success story. It’s not true. And it’s only a matter of time before Dr. Nansi and all your followers find out that I’ve always been autistic, diet or no diet. If you cop to it now, you might have a chance of salvaging your readership, maybe getting a book published. Maybe I could even write some of it, did you ever think of that? But if you get caught, we all go under.

  Renate is looking over my shoulder as I write, and she nods her head in affirmation. I hold my breath and pass the notebook on to my parents. Dad reads it (or pretends to) in what must be five seconds, and his eyes narrow. “You know how to talk,” he says. “A teenage girl doesn’t just unlearn how to talk.”

  “That is so not true,” Renate says.

  “Get out,” Dad says. Mom is just holding her fingers over her eyes.

  “Okay, I will,” Renate says. “But you are going to deeply regret this. You don’t even express any sympathy towards her. For me, that’s the dead giveaway.” Then she turns to me and says, “I will always be here for you. So
mebody has to be.” Dad looks like he’s about to leap all over her, but she backs quickly over to the front door and opens it. “You don’t know squat about autism. This is 2017, people. Get with it.” Then she disappears out the door.

  As soon as Renate is gone, Dad says, “’This is 2017, people, get with it’? What the hell does that mean?”

  Mom just keeps shaking her head, silently.

  Then Dad’s phone starts buzzing in his pocket. He takes it out of his pocket, taps the screen a few times and then stares at it, and I wonder for a second if it’s the school reporting my truancy. But then he lets loose with a string of not-ready-for-prime-time cusswords, which tells me it’s probably not that, since I’m standing here in front of him.

  “What?” Mom says to him.

  “She’s coming tomorrow,” Dad says. Then he glares at me. “You’d better snap out of it before she gets here.”

  “She” is Dr. Nansi. It’s inspection time.

  I don’t say anything. I just shuffle off towards my bedroom, with my winter coat still on. I’m still cold.