The Amy Virus

STAGE V:

  Technically, there is no stage V; patients who have progressed to stage IV are considered terminal. However, some stage IV patients do experience some sort of “miracle cure” and survive considerably longer than initially expected.

  DAY 161

  I did not set my alarm to wake up at 6 am on inspection day, because I knew before bed I wouldn’t be going to school. Dr. Nansi comes for inspections with 24 hours’ notice, sick kid or no sick kid. She apparently has a bulletproof immune system, and besides, what I have isn’t contagious.

  But my parents don’t know that. All they know is that they could get a “red” (failed inspection) if I’m sick, or at least a “yellow” (needs improvement ASAP). This diet and the supplements are, according to the good doctor, supposed to protect against anything that could possibly go wrong in the human body, at least before the age of seventy-five. (I’ve caught a few colds over the years, not to mention suffered hideously painful periods, migraines, and digestive wonkitude, but Dr. Nansi doesn’t know that.) I’ve never been home sick on an inspection day; the idea is that I have a “typical” school day, then come home and tell her all about it, and then she has dinner with us. So by 6:30, when my parents don’t hear me getting ready for school, they come to my room to check in on me, and find me still lying in bed with my pajamas on, eyes closed, completely unconscious for all they know.

  I didn’t eat dinner last night. I tried, but after two mouthfuls of poached calf hearts, I ran to the bathroom and hurled. And then hurled again four hours later. I’ve been in bed ever since. But I haven’t slept. I don’t think.

  “Cynthia?” Mom is standing over me, nudging me. I groan and stir in bed, as if I’m just barely awake. Which is sort of true, since I never “officially” fell asleep. She turns on the light next to my bed, and I flinch. “You really don’t look well.”

  “I’ll get the thermometer,” Dad says.

  I manage to prop myself up in bed, put my glasses on, and grab for a notepad and a pad on my end table. I write out the words I HAVE BEEN IN THIS BED FOR THE LAST ALMOST 12 HOURS WITH THE LIGHTS OUT AND HAVEN’T SLEPT AT ALL, and hand her the notepad. While she’s looking at it, Dad comes back with the thermometer, and shoves it under my tongue. After a minute, it beeps and he takes it out and reads it. “Ninety-seven-point-five,” he says, his tone dripping with disdain. “You’re not sick at all.”

  I motion Mom to hand me the notepad, and I write NO FEVER =/= NOT SICK AT ALL, then hold it up to show them.

  “Something is wrong with her, Dan,” Mom says.

  “Being emotionally overwhelmed is not an illness,” Dad snaps. “Get your clothes on.”

  I sit there, stare at the wall, and don’t move.

  “Fine,” Dad says. “Then we’ll put your clothes on for you.” He grabs my arms and holds them behind my back while I kick and wail out my highest-ever note. “Belinda, go find a pair of leggings, if she has to go in pajamas she will!” he barks at Mom over my fourth-octave shriek.

  But before Mom can go get anything, there’s a knock on the bedroom door and Tam sticks her head in. “What the hell’s going on in here?” she says.

  “Cynthia is feigning illness on the day of an inspection,” Dad says.

  “She’s not feigning anything, Dad,” Tam says. “She ate two bites of dinner last night and then she threw up. Probably more than once, the bathroom still reeks from it. And what, you were going to hold her down and put clothes on her and make her go to school? What is she, five years old?”

  “She’s right, Dan,” Mom says. “We can’t do this.”

  Dad’s grip on my wrist slackens, and I pull my arms free. “Something still doesn’t smell right about this,” he says. “But we’ll discuss it further tomorrow, after Dr. Nansi is gone. In the meantime, when she comes in to talk to you later, you’d better talk. None of this writing-everything-down stuff. I know you still have a voice. We just heard it.”

  I sit there in silence, gathering my comforter around me, and a few seconds later everyone leaves the room, closing the door behind them because I still don’t have bottoms on. I thought maybe I’d have a sore throat after wailing at that sky-high pitch, but it doesn’t hurt at all.

  Was that an F6 you just hit? Spectral Amy says. Hardly anyone can do that, girl. I know I can’t.

  “Hello, Cynthia,” Dr. Nansi says, poking her head in after a soft knock on the door. I startle awake. I don’t know when I finally fell asleep, but it had to have been before she got here, because I didn’t hear the doorbell ring, or hear my parents talking to her in the living room.

  I still have my pajamas on. And my glasses. I actually fell asleep with them on. Good thing I didn’t turn over.

  And now I’m supposed to talk. Like the normal girl I never was.

  I glance at my alarm clock. It’s two-thirty, close to the time I’d be coming home from school. I suck in my breath. Come on, vocal cords, do your thing.

  Words will come out when and how they’re supposed to, Spectral Amy says. You can’t force them.

  “Ungggh,” I groan. Not a great start. I force myself to smile and wave.

  Dr. Nansi comes into my room and closes the door behind her. As her statuesque form hovers over my bed, I get a good look at her. She’s almost seventy years old, but doesn’t have a single wrinkle or gray hair. Her dark brown hair is braided in two shiny French braids, and she’s wearing a business suit that probably cost more than Great-Aunt Shelby paid for this house. “How are you feeling, Cynthia?” she asks me in her creaky but quiet, voice, with its vaguely Eastern European accent. “Your parents said you were home sick today.”

  I nod. “Mmm hmm.”

  At this point, I can see suspicion flicker across her face. I’ve had two opportunities to form words and haven’t done it yet. “Can you tell me how you’re feeling right now?”

  Do I go for the notepad to tell her? Do I?

  No. Instead, I sing. “Sic transit gloria mundi…post hoc ergo propter hoc…” I grab my notebook and pen and drum on them to keep time.

  I can sing words, yes. Singing takes up different parts of your brain from speech. I remember Renate telling me once that when this country singer who was a hardcore alcoholic (I can’t remember his name) recorded his biggest hit, he did the singing parts with no trouble, but had to go dry out in order to do the spoken-word part on the bridge because he slurred his words while he talked, but not while he sang.

  “Quod erat demonstrandum,” I go on, still drumming, as Dr. Nansi looks increasingly horrified. “Bis dat qui cito dat…”

  Then I stop singing, and in two seconds my facial muscles go completely kablooey on me, first with rapid eye blinking, then my nose wiggling, then my lower lip stretching left, then right, then left, then right, then cycling back up to my eyes and starting over again.

  Dr. Nansi opens my door and calls out to my parents. “Belinda? Dan? Can you come in here, please?”

  They appear in my doorway in a flash, and see my muscles going bonkers. By now it has spread to the fingers on my left hand, which are wiggling around with my thumb going in circles, while my right hand, still holding the “drumming pen,” makes tap-tap-tap noises on my notepad. They look completely petrified watching me, and I am as petrified as they are. I don’t know what’s making me do this.

  “Cynthia needs to go to the hospital right now,” Dr. Nansi says. “There is something seriously wrong with her.”

  They get my ass to the hospital by private car, with Dr. Nansi watching over me in the back seat, then check me into urgent care, while I continue to twitch. The intake nurse freaks out watching me. “I’ve worked in health care for twenty years,” she says, “and I’ve never seen anything like this.” Even Dad seems, for the time being, to be convinced that this isn’t an act. And it isn’t, believe me.

  Over the next few hours, they poke, prod, scan, and test me for everything they can possibly think of. They send me for a head CT scan, take blood, urine, whatever they can get out of me. They
find nothing. Which makes my parents stress out even more.

  Finally they get a neurologist, Dr. Sharma, to come in to the exam room and test me. He has a pretty thick Indian accent and my parents have to repeat a few of his commands for me. He tests my reflexes and my gaze, and they both check out as normal. Then he asks me to hold a book in my hands, then asks me to write my name on a piece of paper, to see if my fingers will stop wiggling if my hands are occupied. They do. Then he asks me to drink a cup of water, to see if the facial movements stop while I’m drinking. They do. But then the movements start back up again when my face and hands are idle.

  Dr. Sharma shakes his head. “Something is obviously going on here,” he says. “The movements do stop when her muscles have something else to do, but then they resume afterwards. And Cynthia understands and follows directions, but cannot speak. But we have found nothing on testing that explains any of it. So at least you can rest assured she doesn’t have a brain tumor, but I am not sure what else we can do here now. What this might be is some sort of extreme stress reaction.”

  And as soon as he says that, the twitching stops. Just like that.

  “As soon as I say that, it stops,” Dr. Sharma says, with a slight chuckle. “Now, Cynthia, can you say your name to me?”

  I open my mouth, make some noises with my throat. But my tongue is still not cooperating. I shake my head no.

  Dr. Nansi shakes her head no, also. I know what is going to happen. Once we all get home, they will go into my parents’ office, and the (correctly-colored) poop will fly.

  DAYS 162-177

  Two and a half more weeks go by without me talking. After the hospital visit, I went an entire week with no more twitching, and I started having thoughts about going back to school. I miss Renate so much. That’s partly because I’m prohibited from communicating with her like most girls would do, so if I don’t see her in school, we don’t get a real chance to catch up, even in writing. And I know she can’t understand why I bailed. That might be why Dad isn’t in a state of apoplectic outrage over my being home. He has me away from the people he thinks are poisoning my mind. He knows what I’m doing at all times. Which is pretty much nothing. But he has total control now. Mwahahahaha.

  So that made me start thinking that, speech or no speech, it’s time for me to get back to school. But then Renate wrote a note for Tam to slip under my door after my parents fell asleep, saying that Mr. Shunsburg still hasn’t returned, and that they’ve suspended Mr. S. “pending an investigation” (it takes a lot of red tape navigation to get a teacher fired). He’s not allowed to have any contact with his students while that’s going on. And she told me that the geniuses who are my peers at school have put two and two together and come up with twenty-two, deducing that since I disappeared from school two weeks after he did, he and I must have been Doing It. They have an entire story cooked up, that he felt sorry for me because I’d never have a boyfriend, and…

  And then the twitching started up again. I’ll go a few days without twitching, and then reading about all the crap at school that Renate tells me about, and my guilt about abandoning her, gets it all started again.

  They keep sending me for tests for everything under the sun--all negative, negative, negative. Mom is still convinced I must have something really awful, like some kind of brain cancer that escapes early detection. I have the runs no matter what I eat, I can’t stand any kind of light, and the only words anyone ever hears out of me (always sung, never spoken) are:

  Sic transit gloria mundi

  Post hoc ergo propter hoc

  Quod erat demonstrandum

  Bis dat qui cito dat

  I’ve been trying to catch up on homework while I’m home, and with the presentation of one doctor’s note after another after another, my teachers have agreed to give me incompletes instead of the subpar grades that would have been coming to me. It still takes me forever to finish my work, because I’m so weak I can barely sit up. But with all the teachers’ instructions written down, instead of my having to listen to them, I can understand what they’re trying to teach about a hundred times better. When I mentioned that to my parents, they got me to an audiologist and had my hearing checked out. Turns out my hearing is actually too good, that I’m unusually bad at screening out background and ambient noise.

  I could have told them that, but I don’t have initials after my name, and probably never will.

  I do manage to answer some of Renate’s notes, and stick them under Tam’s door in the middle of the night for her to take to Renate the next day. I tell her not to worry about me, that I’ll be back soon, that nobody can find anything physically wrong with me. I tell her it’s killing me not to be able to see her, but that it’s only for a few weeks. Once she asked me why I left, knowing it would mean we wouldn’t see each other ever. I told her that it wasn’t completely my idea, that my doctors had ordered me to stay home for a month and the school backed them up. I am scheduled to return on February 21, the day after President’s Day, unless they can find a medical reason for me to be out longer than that.

  The truth of the matter is that the small amount of time I spent with Renate wasn’t enough to make up for the six hours a day I had to be there without her. I don’t know if I can ever make her understand that.

  I never used to watch much TV before. But now I’m watching some shows that my mom and sister watch, like Stupid Restaurants and the Stupid Owners Who Stupidly Own Them. Okay, that’s not the official name of it, but it should be. These people buy restaurants with no clue of what’s involved and then, gosh oh gee, half the stuff we have in our walk-in fridge has turned poisonous and nobody wants to eat here anymore, including the cooks who are supposed to be tasting the food before they send it out. I find these shows reassuring, in an odd kind of way. At least I know there are “normal” people who screw up worse than I do.

  Everyone in the house is tranqued up now, me included. My parents were dead set against me ever using psych meds unless I was about to jump off a bridge, and maybe not even then, but then they discovered how awesome Klonopin and Ativan really are. Benzos really do keep people from killing each other, at least for a while. I feel like we’re all in that Bugs Bunny cartoon where the ether bottle breaks and everyone’s just floating around the evil scientist’s castle like, “Coooome baaaack heeeere, youuuuu raaaab-biiiiit.”

  Are we going to have to reach Elvis levels of scrip use in order for the house not to explode?

  In the ether of my mind floats Spectral Amy, who says, have you been reading some of the crap your mom is writing about you now?

  And you have? I say. I thought you were an Amy-shaped me.

  Spectral Amy laughs. You know there’s plenty of crap there without me having to tell you.

  She’s right, which is why I can’t bring myself to read any of it.

  DAY 178

  At 3 pm on Valentine’s Day, one week before I’m scheduled to go back, Tam drops by my room, where I’m sitting on the bed, and interrupts my continuous musical loop of Latin phrases with Latin rhythms by whispering, “I think somebody loves you.” She then hands me a “valentine” (a folded piece of red construction paper stapled shut on the side) that has HAPPY ANTI-VALENTINE’S DAY, YOU CREATURE YOU written on it in swirling silver gel pen. “Go ahead and open it, I’ll be the lookout.”

  Of course, only one person would make me this “card.” Renate and I both think Valentine’s Day should be abolished because all it does it make single people feel like hot garbage and millions of coupled people feel like their love isn’t real unless expensive jewelry, lobster dinners, and thrill-a-minute displays of affection are involved. I don’t know about being miserably coupled firsthand, but I’ve seen enough of girls with boyfriends acting especially grumpy on that day to get the idea. And as much as Renate loves irony, it would be just like her to make me a deliberately tacky card.

  I open the card, and taped to the inside is a photo of my cocktail drum set. Fully restored. In all its red sparkle
glory, with mesh cymbals and cowbell mounted. Renate has drawn a bunch of cheesy black-outlined hearts around the photo and written beneath it:

  Someday we’ll be together, Cyan. You know we will. And I will be here waiting, for as long as you ask me to.

  Hearts and rimclicks 4evah,

  Your Drum Set

  The drum set.

  The drum set that’s me.

  The drum set that’s Cyan Beaut.

  It loves me.

  It sure does, Spectral Amy says. I told you it was meant to be.

  All this time apart, caused by me and my itching brain, and Renate still did this for me. No matter who I fall in love with in the future, I’ll never get a better Valentine’s gift than this.

  I close the card and immediately burst into tears. Tam comes over to me and puts a hand on the back of my neck. “Cyn? Are you okay?”

  I look up at Tam. “I…I…I…” Then I press my face in my hands and wail, “I am the worst friend ever!”

  “Oh my God, you’re talking again!” Tam says, and hugs me to her while I bawl.

  When Mom and Dad come by my room, lured by the sound of my voice speaking instead of singing, I tell them, with crystal clarity, “I want to go to school tomorrow.” They’ve been so eager to hear me talk again that I probably could say anything short of, “I want to blow up the entire house tomorrow with you inside it,” and they’d be thrilled.

  “If you handle school okay in the next week,” Dad says, “then we can go on the Ashland trip.”

  “Are you sure?” Mom says.

  “We paid for it,” Dad says. “If we can use those tickets, we should.”

  Leave it to Dad not to understand the concept of sunk costs. But getting to spend extra time with Renate sounds like heaven right now, even if they have to eavesdrop. “Thanks, Dad,” I whisper. I can’t remember the last time I said that sentence.

  DAY 179

  When I walk back into homeroom (still presided over by the superannuated pink-and-gray Mrs. Gauff) the next morning, Renate lights up like the Hollywood Bowl, and says, “Cynthia’s back! Woo hoo!” She stands up and applauds, and amazingly enough, about ten other kids stand up and applaud along with her.

  I walk over to Renate and throw my arms around her. “Oh, my God, I missed you so bad,” I say. “I can’t believe you did that for me.”

  “I did it for me, too,” Renate says. “I wanted to see that thing the way it’s supposed to be.”

  “Cynthia, how nice to see you,” Mrs.Gauff says. “Are you okay now? Are you better?”

  My classmates are looking at me like they’re eager to hear the answer to that. “Yeah,” I say, “all the tests were negative. And I’m back to…well, not normal, because I was never that, but baseline. Pretty much.”

  “How’s Aaaaaaamy?” Ryan Crousse says. So much for his fruit fly attention span.

  “She’s under your mom’s desk making her smile, Ryan,” I say. Everyone busts up laughing, except Ryan and Mrs. Gauff, and I can tell Mrs. Gauff sort of wants to.

  I never twitch again.

  DAY 180-187

  Everything I look at now has a translucent photo of my drum set superimposed over it. My drum set. Mine.

  And they won’t let me play it.

  Everything I hear has Spectral Amy’s voice overlaid over it.

  Do what Cyan would do.

  They won’t even let me look at it.

  Because you are Cyan.

  Or touch it.

  Save your own life, Cyan.

  And if they found out Renate restored it for me, they’d break into her house and steal it from her. Maybe even hold her up for it with the gun they say they don’t have.

  Save your own life.

  Maybe they’d even have her killed. I don’t put anything past my parents now.

  You know what to do. You know.

  But I don’t. Every time I entertain thoughts of making a run for Portland while I’m in Ashland, I imagine buying a bike, depleting my emergency funds, biking in the rain and crashing and breaking my leg right there on the greenway. I imagine chucking the bike and walking, since it’s also a hiking trail, and realize that it would take me twelve hours to walk all the way to Medford in the slush and mud at the pace I go, and they’d hunt me down for sure. I imagine hitchhiking, and I know I’d be carted off into the night by cannibals. Every fantasy I have about it ends in tragedy even Shakespeare couldn’t have dreamed up. I just don’t see any way I could possibly get away with it.

  You have nothing left to lose, Spectral Amy purrs, sounding remarkably like Sedona. Who I still miss.

  How about my life? I fire back at her. Is there anything remotely creative about getting yourself killed?

  Again, she tells me: Save your own life.

  And I say, you’re telling me I should risk my life to go to Portland. But you won’t tell me if you’re actually living there. Are you? Once and for all, are you Laurette?

  (crickets)

  DAY 188

  The morning of the field trip to Ashland, for which we’re leaving directly from school grounds at lunchtime, Tam comes over to me at my locker and says, “I have something you need to look at and something you need to listen to. Right now. You have study hall now, right?”

  “But you don’t,” I say.

  “I don’t care if I’m late. I need to show this to you, before you get on that bus to Ashland.”

  Tam never does this. Technically, juniors and seniors aren’t supposed to be in the underclass wing without permission, though they never enforce the rule unless something bad happens.This has to be serious. I inhale slowly, let it out. “Okay.”

  “First, I want you to listen to this. I stuck my phone outside the door of their office last night to see what I could pick up. I have it cued up to the juicy part.” She hands me the phone and her earbuds, and I listen. I wince a little at the bad recording quality, but I try to stay with it.

  Mom: Are you sure about this? We can’t stall Catherine off forever.

  Dad: We put all our chips on this. We have to go all in. We don’t have a choice.

  Mom: I don’t know. I was thinking about what Cynthia said--(a few words after this are unintelligible).

  Dad: That could be an option once she turns eighteen. But meanwhile, if we have to buy tests and term papers for her, to get her through the rest of high school, that’s what we have to do.

  Mom: You’d rather have her get caught cheating than get caught having autism?

  Dad: She’s not going to get caught with either one. We’ve pulled it off this long.

  Mom: Dan, what if we get another red after this one? You think that was a fluke? It’s not working. You know it and so do--

  Dad: If we get another red, Catherine will do what she always does in cases like this. She’ll say that it’s obvious that ‘Haley’ went off the diet, that you can’t trust high school kids who aren’t being policed every second not to cheat. We’re one of her top income streams. I don’t care what she says, she’s not getting rid of us. She’s just blowing a bunch of hot air.

  Mom: I should never have let you talk me into this. I feel like throwing up.

  Dad: It’s not much longer. She’ll graduate in two years. And I’m doing most of the work now, anyway, since you can’t be bothered.

  Then the recording cuts off, as the third period warning bell rings. Tam takes the phone out of my hand, while I try to will my eyeballs back into their sockets. “They know,” I mouth at her, trying not to say anything too loudly because I have a bunch of JV cheerleaders at the locker next to me gossiping up a storm. “They know I’m not in remission. They’ve always known.”

  “I don’t know about always,” Tam says. “But they’ve known for at least as long as you and your teacher and Renate have been bringing it up.”

  “Gaslighting,” I say.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s from some old movie where a guy tries to get a girl to think she’s imagining things so he can steal
all her stuff.”

  “Oh. Well, it gets even better.” Tam pushes a couple of buttons on her phone and hands it back to me. “This is what she—or do I mean he—posted this morning. Like an hour ago.”

  I read the posting from Mom’s Web site, which I now know is written by Dad, because child care is about the only business on the face of the earth where it’s a disadvantage being male and they needed to put a woman’s face on it.

  ROAD TRIP

  When I get mail from other moms who have kids with autism, who desperately want a cure, one of the things they tell me is that they want so badly to travel with their children without fear of meltdowns, without having to make “special arrangements” to make sure that their children don’t get overwhelmed by the smallest things, without having to put diapers on an eight-year-old. They want a two-hour road trip to take two hours, not five. They want to have arguments about why they won’t buy their kids that toy they saw a TV commercial for, not about how they can’t be in the museum because the sound of shoes squeaking makes them want to scream. They want to belong. They want to fit. We all want it.

  Today we are taking Haley for a weekend trip to see two plays, both classical drama. The kinds of plays that girls her age roll their eyes at because they’re soooo laaaaaame, just like everything else they have to read and be tested on in school. The theatre is two hours away, and we will be staying at a hotel with her. But we’ve reached the point where Haley doesn’t even think about how great it is that we know she can sit in a theatre seat for three hours and not make a sound, two days in a row. She doesn’t think about how great it is that we don’t have to worry about her having a meltdown along the way. She doesn’t think about being afraid to be in a town she’s never been in before. She is treating this like a fifteen-year-old, seeing a couple of laaaaame plays with her laaaaaame parents. Afterwards, she and her friends will giggle about how boring it all was for her.

  A boring road trip. Imagine the luxury.

  That’s about how far I get before the final bell rings. Without missing a beat, the hall monitor walks by us and says, “Phones off, final bell,” and I’m happy to hand the phone back to Tam before I get the dry heaves reading any more. “I have never said laaaaaaame in my entire life,” I tell Tam.

  “Does it matter?” Tam says. “They just make up any BS they want to. I don’t even know why they bother saying we’re three young adult girls. They might as well say we’re two sets of toddler triplet boys. I hate them so much.” I guess the benzos are starting to wear off for Tam.

  “So what are you saying? That I shouldn’t go on this laaaaaaame trip with my laaaaaame parents?”

  Tam puts the phone back in her purse. “No, you totally should. I just wanted to make sure you knew, because you know someone’s going to mention the blog and they’re going to put on some big act on the bus.” Then she leans over to whisper in my ear. “And it’s going to go bad really fast, C. I mean, Dad—of all people!--is talking about buying tests for you so he doesn’t have to get you an IEP. He knows we’re going down, and he’s desperate, but he’ll never cop to it. No wonder his ass got fired.”

  “I thought he was laid off,” I say.

  “Nope. That’s another thing I found out eavesdropping. They shitcanned him for screwing up code and trying to blame someone else for it. Everything is someone else’s fault, never his.”

  I shake my head. “Okay, so here’s what I don’t get. If all this is true, why does Mom put up with it? Doesn’t she have a teaching credential? She could get out.”

  “She hasn’t worked in over ten years. Nobody’s going to hire her, except maybe as a sub, which doesn’t pay diddley. Same with him. They’re losers. And they’re trying to get us to think we’re losers, too.”

  “I used to think they liked you best,” I say.

  “No loitering,” the hall monitor says. “Even if you have study hall, you have to be at study hall.”

  Tam snort-laughs as I shut my locker. “Yeah, right. Just be careful up there, okay?”

  Before lunch, which I still have to spend on tutoring, I catch Renate in the hall and tell her what Tam showed me. She just about keels over. “Oh, my gods,” she says. “What are we going to do?”

  “We’re going to act like we know nothing,” I say. “At least for now. You know they’re not going to let me out of their sight all weekend, not even to pee.”

  Renate furrows her brow. “Can you do that? Pretend you don’t know, for three entire days?”

  “I don’t know.” I hiccup. Then I hiccup again. “Damn it, I hate getting the hiccups at school.” I stop at the drinking fountain and take a gulp of water. “But please don’t say anything until we figure something out, or I tell you otherwise. Can you do that?”

  Renate hesitates. “Well, I do have to tune up my acting skills,” she says. “They’re auditioning for Chicago next week, and I want to play Velma so bad.”

  “You would be a kick-ass Velma.” I pause at the fountain to make sure I’m not going to hiccup again. When I don’t, we start walking away from the fountain. “But I don’t want to be Roxie Hart this weekend, if you know what I mean.”

  “Yeah, actually murdering someone would be messy,” Renate agrees. “We can think of something better than that.”

  Thirty students, four teachers, and six parents are going on this trip. When I get on the bus, Renate is already at a window seat, telling the girls in front of her (I can’t remember their names, they’re in her LA class) what she told me in homeroom, that her dad decided to have dental work done this weekend because she’d be away, but this morning her mom came down with the flu. “So I’m like, you sure you want me to go?” Renate says, in words almost identical to the ones she said to me. “Because this one gorgeous calico she took in turned out to be pregnant, so now there’s six two-week-old kittens pooping it up in there. Two-week-old kittens are the cutest things ever made, but they’re total stinkbombs. And my mom’s like, ‘don’t even think about not going. Michelle and Dana can come over and help me with the kittens.’”

  While the girls in front of Renate ooh and aah over the thought of six tiny little stinky kittens and ask what colors they are, my parents, predictably, take seats right behind me and Renate. She and I exchange knowing looks but don’t say anything. During the trip, we play travel Scrabble and Master Mind; if they’re looking for dirt from us, they’re not getting it on this bus. (Oh joy, another rhyme.)

  And contrary to what Tam said, none of the other parents seem all that interested in talking to them, after the obligatory hi-how-are-yous. Mom reads Psychology Today, and Dad plays games on his phone. They don’t even talk to each other.

  When we get to Ashland, I’m surprised by how lushly pretty it is, and how happy everyone who lives there seems to be. Maybe it’s an act—and in this family, boy, do I know about putting on acts—but I get the sense that people there feel fulfilled by what they’re doing. That must be nice.

  It’s amazing, Spectral Amy says. You should try it.

  Yeah, very funny, I say to her.

  You are going to make it, Spectral Amy says. You weren’t created to go to waste.

  Oh, how I want to believe her.

  Once we get there, everyone assembles in front of the college dorm we’re staying at, and the teachers announce that we’re going to get a special “prologue” session from the Othello cast at 7 pm before the play starts at 8, and before that, we can get dinner on our own. After the teachers leave to get the group checked in, a few of the other parents suggest a group dinner at a local restaurant that has gluten free and vegan options. Of course, I can’t eat anything there, even with special menus, so my parents beg off. “You can eat with them,” I say. “I’m the only one who can’t.”

  “Well, we’re not going to leave you behind in the hotel,” Dad says.

  “It’s no problem,” I say, and pull a bag of almonds out of my purse and show everyone, then raise my eyebrows at Renate, who nods. “I’ve got my dinner, right here.
”

  Oooh, showtime, Spectral Amy says. You go, girl.

  People start exchanging uncomfortable glances. “That’s your dinner?” Shaina Dill says.

  “That’s only part of it,” Mom says. “We’ll have food with us in the room.” She points to the cooler she’s carrying.

  “But this is the fun part,” I say. I pull an almond out of the bag and toss it in the air and attempt to catch it in my mouth. Of course, I miss by a mile and it falls on the ground. “Oh, drat. Let me try that again.” I toss another almond in the air and it, too, falls to the ground as people giggle. “Shoot. I know I practiced this!”

  “Well, let’s not waste too much of those,” Dad says, as blandly as he can manage to.

  “Oh, come on, Dad. The diet doesn’t work unless I catch one in my mouth, remember?” I toss another one in the air and this one gets into my mouth. “Ah. Got one. I get to live another day.”

  Dad looks like he wants to be swallowed up by the grass.

  “She’s joking about that,” Mom says with a frozen smile, as if people really need to be told. “She doesn’t really have to catch them in her mouth.”

  “Oh, but I do,” I say. “Otherwise, I’ll once again become this total waste of skin who stares at walls sixteen hours a day and uses her own feces for Play-Doh, forever and ever. Because that’s what autism is, and that’s all it is. Right?”

  I hear a collective gasp. I did it. I hit the red button.

  Renate looks like she’s going to pee in her pants with joy. So does Spectral Amy.

  The others say their uneasy goodbyes and head off to their rooms, with Renate giving me a discreet thumbs-up as she walks away. I toss another almond in the air, and it hits the ground. “Oh, well, birds need to eat too,” I say.

  “What the hell was that, Cindy?” Dad snaps at me, his face the color of merlot.

  “I’m proving I don’t have autism by displaying a sense of humor,” I say. “Because everyone knows people with autism don’t make or understand jokes. Right?”

  “This isn’t funny,” Mom says. Her color matches his, a major achievement considering how hard it is to match reds.

  “Yeah, well, here’s something you might find knee-slapping hilarious. I know everything, Mom. I know that you know. The walls in that house have Dumbo ears. Did you really think I wouldn’t find out?”

  Mom clenches her jaw. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Yeah, well, you’d better figure it out, because as of right now, you guys are criminals. You’re actively committing fraud. I could turn your asses in right now. I could tell everyone on this trip what you did, and that’s just the beginning.”

  “They’ll never believe you,” Dad says. “You have no proof of anything.”

  “That’s the easy part,” I say. “I’m the proof. Did you know that Renate knew I was autistic even before I told her? You either meet the diagnostic criteria for autism or you don’t, and whether you like it or not, I do.”

  “We know you cheated on that diet,” Mom says. “That’s why you’re showing signs of autism again. You ate birthday cake and pizza at Renate’s party.”

  I recoil. “Who told you?” I rack my brain trying to think of who was at that party who could possibly have been moles for my parents.

  “So it’s true,” Mom says, and right then I realize that there was no mole; she just pulled it right out of her underpants, and I fell for it.

  “I only tasted it. I couldn’t possibly have had enough to cause my entire brain to change, just like that.”

  “If one taste of something wasn’t going to change everything, we would have let you taste things all along!” my dad yells. “But of course it’s going to change everything! Even one bite of sugar starts the opiate leakage from the gut. You know that.”

  All our yelling is such a bizarre contrast to the tranquil surroundings around us. I feel like we should be doing this in the New York subway. Not that I’ve ever been there, but I’ve read things. “It’s bad science,” I say, in a much quieter voice. “But I’ll tell you what. I’m willing to be classy about this and not say anything else about it all weekend. I’ll apologize to everyone for my little outburst and pretend I don’t know what you’re up to at all, and I’ll let you be the ones to come clean about it. You have a week, and then I start talking. And when I do, you’re going to wish I was still speech delayed.”

  “You don’t make the rules around here,” Dad says.

  “My body belongs to me,” I tell him. “You’re not going to use it to steal other people’s money.”

  “Have you said anything to Renate?” Mom says.

  “Yes. But she’s agreed not to say anything unless I tell her to.”

  With that, we stalk off to our rooms, eat in silence, dress up for the play in silence. I wear my nicest dress, crushed purple velvet, mid-calf length with long sleeves, and a black lace shawl to go over it. I put my hair up in a black velvet scrunchie and let a couple of tendrils out on the sides of my face. You have to wear that outfit on stage someday, girl, Spectral Amy says. You’re a knockout.

  My parents, of course, remain mum. They didn’t realize that part of the bargain of never letting me out of their sights is that they don’t get to talk behind my back.

  “Grand entertainment for a Friday night,” Renate says right before the lights go down for Othello, in a way that makes me wonder whether she’s joking or not. “Lots of people getting killed over things they didn’t do.”

  “You just summarized like every Shakespearean tragedy in“--I count on my hands—“ten words.”

  “I just summarized all of life in ten words,” Renate rejoinders.

  I lean over to her and whisper, “Speaking of which, I told them they have a week to fess up, and then we sing like birds.”

  “Nicely done,” she whispers back.

  I keep my end of the bargain. In fact, during intermission, I apologize to everyone who had to hear my “using my own feces for Play-Doh” remark. “That was seriously revolting, and I regret saying it,” I tell them. Everyone smiles indulgently and tells me it’s forgotten. A few people comment on how pretty I look in my crushed purple velvet. My parents don’t say a word all evening to me or to each other. In fact, they part only once, when I have to go to the bathroom and Mom comes with me. I’m sure it kills them to have to spend that much time apart.

  When we get back to the dorm, Dad unlocks the door, and when I go in, they stay out in the hall. “Mom and I need to discuss something,” he says. “We’ll be there in a few minutes.”

  I kneel on the floor to see if I can hear them from under the door. No such luck. I go into the bathroom and take off my dress and put on my pajamas and bathrobe, then brush my teeth. I choke on the water when I rinse my mouth, spluttering all over the mirror. I grab a towel and wipe it off. Then I take an entire Klonopin, instead of breaking it into fourths like I usually do, knowing it will probably take thirty minutes or so to fully kick in.

  What are they going to do to me?

  They can’t do anything, Spectral Amy says. All they can do is flap their jaws some more. They’ve already maxed out your punishments without physically beating you. They have nothing.

  I sit on my bed, breathing hard.

  You’ll be fine, Spectral Amy murmurs.

  A minute later, the door opens, and I gasp. My parents enter the room and sit down at the edge of their bed, on the side facing mine. I am on the opposite side of my bed. I can’t look at them.

  “Okay,” Dad says, “this is what we decided. You won’t be going back to school after this.”

  I shake my head out, then look at him. “Excuse me?”

  “In order for this diet to work, you have to adopt it rigidly,” Mom says. “That means no tasting. Ever. And you’ve shown us that we can’t trust you not to cheat. So we can’t let you leave the house without us, or be anywhere we’re not going to be.”

  If it’s possible for a series of sentences to make you less intell
igent because you heard them, I think what Mom just said qualifies. “Wh…what?”

  “We will pull you out and homeschool you,” Dad says. “Meanwhile, we will tell our readers that ‘Haley’ cheated on her diet, and as a result, had some regression back into autism. But after rigidly re-adopting the diet, your brain turned back to normal again.”

  “Have you lost your minds?” I yell. “You’re going to imprison me so you can tell people I’m normal again?”

  “Once your brain is back to normal, which should only take a few months, we will see about loosening the restrictions, gradually,” Dad says. “But if you at any time violate the privileges you’ve re-earned, we will put you in an institution.”

  I laugh incredulously. “Now I know you’re yanking my chain. You and I both know that there’s no state institution for people with disabilities any more. It closed more than fifteen years ago.”

  “There are group homes, still,” Mom says. “We can find out a way to make sure you are supervised at all times.”

  “And what happens after I turn eighteen?” I say. “You can’t control me forever. Besides, why do you need to do any of this anyway? You don’t have any compunction about lying your asses off, why don’t you just do it again and say you did all this already?”

  “This is our income stream,” Dad says. “It’s all we have. If we lose this, we lose everything. We become homeless. All of us. There are no jobs here. There’s fierce competition for even retail jobs in every city in the state. They’re not going to hire us.”

  “So you admit that this is all about you being unemployable.”

  “There are ways to get a person institutionalized after they turn eighteen,” Dad says. “It’s not easy nowadays, but it can be done. We can prove you’re dangerous enough to warrant that if we have to.”

  I collapse on the bed and say my next words to the ceiling. “This is completely illogical. If you want me in a group home, why don’t you just get me into the developmental disability system now? They can save you all this trouble.”

  Images flash before my eyes of pictures I’ve seen from some of these institutions. Kids being shocked with cattle prods, crawling around in their own waste. Now. Today. In 2017. It’s still happening, and they want to make it happen to me. Because they hate me. My trigeminal nerve throbs with searing pain.

  “Sic transit gloria fucking mundi,” I sing at the ceiling. I generally don’t use that word because fracking is actually much worse than fucking (or so I’ve heard), but I want to make sure they receive this loud and clear, in language they understand perfectly.

  “This has to work,” Dad says. “We won’t let it not work.”

  “Post hoc ergo propter fucking hoc,” I sing, drumming away at my thighs.

  “Cynthia, stop it,” Mom says.

  “QUOD ERAT DEMON-FUCKING-STRANDUM!” I wail, loud enough that you can hear the vibrations in the light fixtures, as I slap the bed on each side of me.

  Then there’s a knock on the door. Mom goes to answer it. It’s Ms. Samman, my LA teacher, who has the room to our left. “Um, I’m sorry to interrupt you,” Ms. Samman says, “but the walls are kind of thin in this place. Could you guys turn your speakers down a little?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Mom says, and closes the door.

  “Speakers,” I mutter hoarsely. “She thought I was speakers. That’s funny.”

  But I don’t laugh. And that’s the last voice heard in this room before they turn out the light.

  DAY 189

  5:30 AM

  It’s five fracking thirty am. At some point, I managed to fall asleep, thanks to the Klonopin, but was jolted awake by a dream about a cattle prod, and I’ve been tossing and turning on this ancient lumpy mattress since then. Every once in a while I’ll open my eyes, and the numbers on the digital clock will burn themselves into my brain. Two-seventeen. Three-forty-eight. Four-twenty-two. And now, five-thirty.

  The sun won’t be up for a couple more hours, but I glance over at my parents, who are sawing logs, indicating to me that they’re not feigning sleep. I pull my earplugs out of my ears and the snoring sounds become louder.

  They can’t do the stuff they say they’re going to do. Can they? Just yank me out of school and keep me under surveillance forever, or pay someone else to do it? I know that these private institutions are killer expensive. They don’t have the money.

  Or do they?

  Can I believe anything they say anymore?

  I am beginning to believe these people would murder me, if that was what it took to keep the money coming in. Murder me and claim I died in a car wreck. If I cease to be a source of income to them, I am useless, as far as they are concerned. They would kill me.

  They would.

  But first they would shackle me to my bed for a year.

  I crawl out of bed and go to the bathroom and sit on the toilet without turning on the light. I hide my face in my hands. I urinate, wipe, and don’t flush, and listen to my heart pumping blood, pumpa pumpa pumpa. I then re-enter the room, and they’re still sleeping.

  And then I hear Spectral Amy’s voice in my head.

  One-way bike rentals, she says.

  What? I say.

  You saw that sign near the greenway, remember? she says. One-way bike rentals? Rent a bike in Ashland, drop it off in Medford.

  I tiptoe over to my suitcase, which is lying on a dorm desk, and pick out the shirt and pants I was going to wear today. I look back over at my parents. Still sleeping. I grab underpants and a bra, then go back into the bathroom to put them on. If anyone wakes up and asks me what I’m doing, I’ll say I can’t sleep.

  But I can’t ride a bike to Medford, I say to Spectral Amy, even as I’m putting on my clothing. That’s impossible. I’ve never ridden more than a mile on a bike.

  This is your only chance to get away, she tells me. Your only chance. You know that, or you wouldn’t be getting dressed.

  With my basic garb on, I grab a pair of socks and take them back into the bathroom and put them on standing up. What about Renate? I say to Spectral Amy.

  Renate would try to stop you if you told her, Spectral Amy says. She’d just get into some big fight with your parents, and they’re not changing their minds for anything or anybody. If you don’t get out now, you’ll never see Renate again.

  I grab my jacket off the chair it’s sitting on and drape it over my arm. My parents still haven’t woken up yet. What? I have to leave Renate behind in order to be able to see her again? That doesn’t make any sense.

  Once you’re out, you can send for her, Spectral Amy says. But if you stay in these people’s clutches, it’s all over. Go. Now.

  I pick up my shoes and my purse and head for the door. I turn the lock slowly, sloooowly, sloooowly, so it won’t make a loud noise. But if it does, I don’t hear it over the pounding in my ears, as I slip out of the dorm room with my shoes in my hands. In stocking feet, I walk over to Renate’s door, pull out my purse notebook, and write a note that says, My parents are dangerous people, I have to get away from them now or I die. I’m sorry. I hope you can understand. I will find Net access later and write, I promise. Then I pull out the page from the notebook and stick it under her door, and head for the lobby to put on my shoes.

  5:48 am

  There’s a light rain falling as I leave. It’s also fracking freezing out, and I didn’t bring gloves. Of course I didn’t. Because I’m not really doing this.

  I am not really out on the streets of Ashland at 5:48 am, en route to a bike rental place that opens at six. With no phone. And if I am, someone will catch me. I put my hood up and jam my hands in my pockets, and pull my jacket up over my face to keep it warm.

  I do not go through the doors of the bike rental shop at six sharp, the first one there to rent a bike that day. I’m amazed at how easy it is. They just want an ID and some credit card information, and I can pay with cash for the day. They also want a phone number, and I give them the number for my real cell phone, which is bac
k in Steens Center. They’ll start charging me extra if it’s out past the time the rental place closes in Medford, which is 8 pm. If it’s gone more than one extra day, they charge me the full price of the bike, which is a few hundred bucks. I swallow hard. But evidently I don’t strike them as someone who’s running away.

  Because I’m not.

  They do not take me to pick out my bike. No. This isn’t happening. I tell them I’m going out on the greenway, like I do this all the time, and they never question me. They set me up with a women’s mountain bike, with a basket in the front to hold my purse. Since I’m under eighteen I also have to rent a helmet if I don’t have one on me. They show me how the speed changer and the lights work, and they smile and tell me to have fun. The sun isn’t quite up yet, so I turn on my front light before I leave the store.

  I mean, I don’t leave the store.

  Because I was never here.

  No. I wasn’t.

  6:07 am

  When I first get on to the greenway (where a few early birds have already set out for the day, both on foot and on bike), I feel a sense of serenity I haven’t felt since, well, the last time I had my pandeiro in my hand. It’s cold. It’s damp. It’s dark. And I am happy as a clam. Because the minute my rented bike hits the greenway, I feel myself leaving Cindy-Butt behind for good. Cynthia Ann Butt is no more. Out here, out of my parents’ clutches, I am Cyan. Cyan Beaut. With the wind at my neck. Nothing can stop me.

  Except a patch of goat head thorns.

  Which, because I’m not looking carefully enough, I ride right into, and I fall off my bike. And my purse goes flying out of my basket because I didn’t close the latch properly.

  “Hey,” a hipstery-looking guy who looks to be about twenty-five calls out to me as I hit the ground. “Are you okay?”

  I nod, and stand up to prove it.

  “You gotta watch out for those thorns out here,” he says. “They keep getting rid of ‘em, but they just keep growing back.” I stare at him blankly for a second, and then he gets back on his bike and rides away.

  My stuff is everywhere. I run around grabbing everything that’s fallen on the ground and stuff it all back in the purse. Hi, Cindy. I see you haven’t left me after all. Once I have my purse back in the basket, I check my tires to make sure the thorns haven’t punctured them. They look okay. And I’m not really hurt, other than my ego. Fortunately, at this hour there aren’t many witnesses yet. I grab a few almonds out of the baggie in my purse and munch on them, then get back on.

  As the sun comes up, more and more people are joining the trail—on bikes, on foot, on power chairs. I ride more slowly and deliberately than before, feeling Amy on my shoulder. How’d that song go? Amy on my shoulder makes me happy, Amy in my eyes can make me cry…

  You’re doing great, she says.

  I feel like there’s a magnetic charge going from Portland, through Medford, through here, pulling, pulling, pulling at me. I pedal harder. I want to go faster. Faster. Faster.

  And then I hit a giant puddle. Fall number two.

  And now it’s really raining. The entire road will be soaking wet in a minute. Riding on a dry road was hard enough, now I’m really going to have to go slow and watch it.

  10 am

  By 10 am, even on this rainy Saturday morning, the greenway is full of people biking, children skipping and laughing, they are having the time of their lives. I, on the other hand, feel like I died and went to the excremental bowels of hell.

  I’ve fallen off at least ten times. After the tenth time I stopped counting.

  I am soaking wet below the waist, where my jacket hits, and caked with mud.

  I am thirsty even in the rain, because I forgot to bring a fracking water bottle, and you need to stay hydrated on a long bike ride even if it’s cold and damp out.

  I can’t go to the bathroom, because I forgot to rent a lock for my bike and if my rental gets stolen my card will be charged out the wazoo. But I’m about to explode, so I squat behind some bushes and pull my pants down and pray it doesn’t hit my pants.

  It hits my pants.

  I don’t even know where I am. I feel like I’ve been pedaling uphill forever, and I’m not even at Talent, the first exit, yet. That’s the thirteen mile mark. So it’s taken me three hours to go not even thirteen miles on this thing. I might as well have walked.

  I wipe myself with my hand. Eeee-yuck. But after the rain hits my hand for a minute, it’s wet enough that I can shake it out. At least it’s only pee. I quickly hike my pants back up and get back on the bike. I try to pedal. My legs feel like they’re made of tree trunks, and I can only get a few more feet before I have to stop and rest again, with the bike between my legs. At the rate I’m going, I won’t even make the last bus to Portland. How could I do this to myself? How?

  “Hey theeeere,” I hear a brassy, theatrical female voice singing out from behind me. “Youuuu with the biiiiike up your aaaasssss…”

  I turn around and see Renate on a bike, paused behind me, looking at least as pissed as I deserve to have her look.

  “Oh, my God,” I say. “How did you know I—“

  Renate affixes me with a death glare. “So…at seven frigging am, I get this knock on my door, and it’s your psychopathic parental units, demanding to know where you are. Of course I don’t know, but they insist on searching my entire room, including under the frigging bed, thinking you must be hiding somewhere. Then they insist I must know where you are. They were at this for fifteen frigging minutes. I swear they were going to use a winch to pry my skull open and search my head to see what I really knew.”

  “Oh Jesus,” I whisper.

  “And at that point, I didn’t even know you’d gone anywhere. I didn’t even see your note until after they left. And then the light bulb went off, and I threw on my shit and ran. They don’t know I’m here, either.”

  I stare at Renate’s bike, which is a lot taller than mine, but has the One-Way Rental stamp on the center bar. “Did you ride all the way here from Ashland?”

  “Yes.”

  “How long did it take you?”

  “An hour and a half.”

  “I’ve been at this for three hours,” I groan.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Renate shrieks.

  “Why do you think?”

  She hesitates, thinks, then nods. “I would have tried to stop you.”

  “I wasn’t planning to do it,” I say. I tell her what my parents have told me is in store for me, then add, “They’re more than doubling down on this, they’re quadrupling down to the tenth power. I was never going to get to see you again, let alone ever get to Portland. It wasn’t even a decision. My body just did it.”

  Renate shakes her head. “Wow. Even for them, that’s…beyond scary.”

  I start sniffling. “And I don’t even know where I am. Does anyone know besides you?”

  “I had to tell Eroica,” Renate says. “She’s meeting us with her cargo van when we get out at Talent. I didn’t tell my parents, because A, they can’t drive right now anyway, and B, as far as they know, I’m still in Ashland, wiping sleep crumbs out of my eyes.”

  “How much does she know?”

  “That you ran away because you wanted to meet your musical idol and escape your mentally abusive autism-hating parents. And that you had zero experience riding on bike trails. She knows this greenway, and she says there’s no way a teenage girl should be riding through that park exit at Medford alone, because it’s tweaker central and they’d probably rob or rape you.”

  I shake my head. “I am such a tard.”

  “Don’t ever use that word,” Renate says. “Not even about yourself. That’s a very bad word.”

  “I know,” I say. “But you have no idea how sorry I am. For everything.”

  “Well, you did scare the crap out of me, but to be honest with you, I probably would have done exactly the same thing. I highly doubt they’re going to institutionalize you, but twenty-four-seven surveillance is bad
enough.”

  “But that’s what’s going to happen when you bring me back.”

  “We’ll see about that.” Renate un-straddles her bike and grasps it by the handlebars with one hand and by the seat with the other. “I don’t think we’re far from Talent, probably less than a mile. How many times did you fall off?”

  “Is it that obvious?”

  “You wouldn’t be that filthy otherwise.” She starts pushing her bike forward. “Come on, let’s just walk it.”

  I do what she says.

  10:30 am

  We get to Eroica’s van, which is parked in a lot next to the Talent exit. Her van is painted lime green, like one of those fuzzy-foot rugs from the bossa nova throwback lounge I fantasize about. Awesome. Eroica jumps out of the van and helps us load our bikes in the back. She’s wearing her trademark cat-ear hat she wore at Renate’s party. I wonder if she wears it everywhere.

  “I’ll tell you, Ren,” Eroica says, after slamming the back door shut. “If there is one place I never expected to be with you ever, it’s a bike trail in East Ja-Pip at ten-thirty on a Saturday morning.”

  “East Ja-Pip?” I say.

  “I have a Jewish grandmother, that’s one of her expressions. It means middle of nowhere, ass end of Jupiter, all that good stuff.”

  “Ah.”

  Renate and I get in the back seat of the van, after Eroica clears a bunch of crap off the seats. “Sorry I didn’t really get a chance to clean this out, but I just drove here like a mad blasted fool. Fortunately, I was already out of the house and on my way to work.”

  “You don’t know how much I appreciate this,” I say. “I mean, I hardly know you, and you skipped work to do this?”

  “This is a lot more interesting than my weekend job.” Eroica hands Renate and me each a big bottle of water. “I kind of had a hunch y’all might be a little dehydrated.”

  I thank her and slug down half the bottle in what must be record time.

  “I am ravenous,” Renate says. “I can’t believe I did that on an empty stomach. I’m just wiped. You got any grub in here, E?”

  “Nothing you’d want. Just some hideously flavored tortilla chips from the Dollar Tree.”

  “Blech,” Renate says. “So what is there to eat in good old East Ja-Pip?”

  “Subway up the road,” Eroica says. Then she looks at me and says, “I know that’s not much help to you, but—“

  “Screw bunches of that,” I say. “This might be my last chance to eat what normal people consider food for the next two and a half years. Let’s go for it.”

  When we get to Subway, we’ve just missed breakfast, but I wind up ordering a sandwich that has something like five kinds of cold cuts and six kinds of cheese, plus every veggie and condiment they have. The guy making the sandwich giggles a little when he sees how much I’m piling on. “Damn,” Eroica says. “And I thought my sandwiches were jawbreakers.”

  “I probably won’t eat it all,” I say. “I just want to taste it all.” I go to the chip rack and grab a bag of salt and vinegar potato chips. When I get my cold drink cup, I taste a little bit of each flavor, regular and diet, in the machine. People are giving me weird looks, but then I tell them, “I’ve never been allowed to have soda before in my life. I don’t know what any of this tastes like,” and they just shrug and walk away. I decide I like regular Dr. Pepper the best and fill up my cup with it.

  We sit at a table and eat. “This is wild,” I say. “I’ve never been in one of these places before.”

  “Never ever?” Eroica says.

  “Not that I can remember. They started me on the diet when I was four. I don’t remember where we ate before that.”

  “I don’t remember anything about being four,” Eroica says, before biting into a sweet onion teriyaki sandwich on honey wheat. “I must have blocked it all out.”

  “I remember everything,” Renate says. She’s having turkey breast and avocado.

  “That’s because your parents don’t suck,” Eroica says. Then she turns to me and says, “That’s kind of why I came out here for you. I mean, my mom was probably worse than yours is, she physically terrorized me. But at least she’s gone now, and my dad finally got his diagnosis, so he’s pretty cool.”

  I pick apart my sandwich, tasting little bites of everything. My first impression is that I like provolone cheese and brown mustard, that tomato seeds are kind of gross and slimy, and that turkey ham has no flavor at all. “Gone as in dead?” I say.

  “Yep. As in, never gonna touch me again. Thank cat.”

  “And your dad has no idea you’re here.”

  Eroica puts a potato chip in her mouth, chews it, and swallows. “No, but when I tell him, I think he’ll understand. He won’t be happy that I missed work, but he knows an emergency’s an emergency.”

  “I think mine would, too,” Renate says. “They’ve met her peeps. They know what a horror show she has to live with.”

  I feel my tear ducts starting to well up, and I squint and rub my eyes. “I can’t even imagine that kind of freedom,” I say softly. “Just saying, ‘oh, I’m going place x, see you later,’ and having them trust you. I don’t even want to think about what they’ll do when I go back.” I sip a little bit of my Dr. Pepper, taking in the lovely fake (vanilla?) flavor.

  “Ren told me a little bit,” Eroica says. “But what exactly did they say to you before you bolted?”

  I tell her the whole story of Tam playing me the recording, me telling them I know that they know I’m autistic, and them telling me they’re pulling me out of school and watching me like concentration camp commandants.

  “Holy kittens,” Eroica says. “If they know this diet is a sham and they’re still selling it, and there’s tangible evidence that they admitted it, they could get nailed pretty hard for that.”

  “They’re making me sell it,” I say. “That’s what’s killing me.” My stomach begins loudly protesting all the little bites of new things hitting it all at once, and I feel some reflux come up, noisily. “Icch. ’Scuse me.”

  “I’m just so mad right now,” Eroica says. “I mean, I know this is going to explode in their faces, but if it does, you’re the collateral damage.” She drinks from a twenty-ounce bottle of Diet Coke, and dribbles some down her chin, then wipes it off with her hand.

  “I don’t understand diet soda,” I say. “It has the weirdest aftertaste.”

  Eroica nods. “That it does. Unfortunately, I seem to be addicted to it.” She doesn’t seem to mind at all that I changed the subject so drastically.

  Once we’re done eating, we get back in the van. Eroica turns the ignition key and waits a few seconds. Then she shuts it off and looks at us in the back seat. “Rennie, I’m really sorry. I know I’m supposed to take Cyan here back to the temple of doom because I promised…but I just can’t do it. I mean, just knowing that they could put her in an institution gives me the willies. But even more than that…she actually looks happy being with us.” She looks at me. “Is it okay to call you Cyan?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “I can’t even think about that right now. I feel like it was all some bizarre fantasy, the idea that I was ever a musician.”

  “This Amy person,” Eroica says. “Amy Zander. You know, I looked up her video and I did some research about her, and I think she really did get short-sheeted. You identify with that, don’t you?”

  “Her father encouraged her to play,” I say, barely audible even to my own ears. “My father would cut my hands off to stop me, if he thought he could get away with it.”

  “Yeah, her royal rooking came later, from the music business,” Eroica says. “That story’s as common as lunch. But when you think about it, the same thing happened to her. She was an incredible talent, and someone treated her like such crap that she couldn’t go on. But here she is, after being in hiding for almost half a century, buying a drum store. That means her music didn’t die. It just went to sleep for a long-ass time.”

  “If that’s her,” I
say.

  “I think you know it is,” Eroica says. “Or you wouldn’t have done this. You heard her calling out to you.” Then she looks at Renate. “Ren, we have to take Cyan-slash-Cynthia here to Portland. Right now. We just have to. Otherwise, we’re just sending her back to death row.”

  “Oh, gods,” Renate says. “We’re supposed to be back in Ashland by noon, and it’s almost eleven-thirty now. We’re doing some backstage tour meet and greet thingie-whatsis. They’re going to freak if we’re gone for the entire day and then miss Lysistrata on top of it. And my parents will ground the crap out of me. And it’s what, a four and a half hour drive from here, if we don’t hit major traffic?”

  “But otherwise you don’t completely hate the idea,” Eroica says. “Do you?”

  “No,” Renate admits.

  “What, you’re not afraid of getting grounded?” I say to Eroica.

  “For smuggling you into Portland? Oh, I’ll totally get grounded for that. Probably won’t see my car keys for a month, at least. My dad’s not that lenient.” She makes a wry face. “But it’s still nothing compared to what your parents plan on doing to you.”

  “And even if that is Amy, I can’t meet her like this,” I say. I still haven’t quite absorbed the fact that we’re seriously discussing driving to Portland. “My pants have pee on them.”

  “That’s my girl,” Eroica says--sort of flirtatiously, I think. “I love how autistics are willing to share absolutely anything with absolutely anyone. But we can stop at a Target or something and get you new threads, so you won’t have to look like some neo-grunge revival when we go to Bang on This, even though half of Portland probably dresses that way.” She looks at Renate. “Is there someone safe you can text, to let them know you guys are okay, without giving away where we are? Because if you do, we can stall them off for a little bit, at least.”

  Renate nods. “Shaina. She’s in my LA class. She’s cool.”

  Eroica hands her a phone that resembles my stupid-phone. “Use this. I got it when I was between phones last week. The less ability they have to trace us, the better. As far as they’re concerned, I don’t exist, so you should power your phone down and take the battery out and we’ll only use my electronics. And take the battery out of the burner phone when you’re done, too.”

  “But you’ve never met her parents, E. They are really unhinged, now more than ever.”

  “All the more reason to avoid them as long as possible,” Eroica says. “If I had my way, Cynthia would never go back there. And if necessary, I will tell them, in person, that I dragged you guys there against your will.” Then she looks at me again. “But meanwhile, we have to bring Cinderella here to the drummers’ ball. We’ll drop the bikes off in Medford, and then head up to PDX. Sound good?”

  Good? This is surreal, off the charts fantastic, a reversal of fortune I couldn’t even have fantasized about. Are you calling out to me? I ask Spectral Amy.

  You’ll know soon, she reassures me.

  I smile for the first time in I don’t know how long. “I can’t even tell you how grateful I am.”

  12:10 pm

  The first thing Eroica does, after Renate texts Shaina and we drop the bikes off, is take me to the Harry and David store in Medford. “It’s the company flagship store, and it’s the home of Moose Munch, which is a must for you to try, unless you’re allergic to nuts.”

  “If I was allergic to nuts I’d never eat,” I say.

  “It’s only the most divine junk food ever created. Caramel corn, chocolate, almonds—“

  “And hilariously overpriced,” Renate adds.

  “That too,” Eroica admits. “But when else is she going to try it?”

  “I suppose I’m buying,” Renate says. “You can subtract what I spend out of the gas money I was going to give you.”

  So we get a couple of bags of Moose Munch in different flavors, and I try each of them out in the car as we head north. “This is so good,” I say. “No wonder they charge a fortune for it.”

  “Pro tip,” Eroica says. “You can find it deeply discounted in TJ Maxx or Marshall’s. But save room for more food. There’s so much for you to try, I hardly know where to start.”

  “We don’t want to make her sick,” Renate says.

  “No, of course not.” Eroica looks at me. “C., you tell us if there’s anything else you’ve always wanted to try, that you think you’re prepared to handle.”

  I can feel a rash happening in my nether regions. It’s really chafing me. “What I really need as soon as possible is new pants and underwear. And maybe some sort of ointment.” But it’s a funny thing. Physically, I feel pretty terrible right now, what with the rash and the beginnings of a stomachache (that sandwich was probably a mistake, and who knows what Moose Munch will do to my innards once I start digesting it), and I’m also incredibly foggy from lack of sleep. And that damp chill is still there in my bones. But mentally, I don’t think I’ve ever felt better. Is this what it’s like to finally be sprung from a war zone?

  “Next stop, Tar-zhay,” Eroica calls out. But before she can pull out of the parking lot, the wailing sirens and flashing lights of an ambulance approach us from the street off to the side, and both she and I have to hold our ears and hide our eyes until it passes.

  “What do you do if you’re out on the road and that happens?” I ask her.

  “Crank the radio and scream, and pray that it works.”

  When we get to Target, first I hit the rest room and wet down a pile of paper towels with soap, and get as much muck off myself as possible before I try anything on. While I’m in the stall, Renate waves my pants and underwear under the hand dryer to dry them off. Then I come back to the misses’ department and assess my clothing options. “A drum circle means I probably don’t want to be wearing a skirt, in case there’s anything I have to hold in between my legs,” I tell them. “Hopefully there are some plain black pants here that fit me.”

  “What, you don’t want to get dressed up for Amy?” Eroica says.

  “That’s probably the last thing I want.” I look through one rack of pants that seems to have every size on it but mine. Figures.

  “We can make you look pretty without overdressing you,” Eroica says. “I mean, not that you aren’t pretty already, but—“

  “But I’m not.”

  “Says you.” Eroica smiles at me in that raised-eyebrow, flirty sort of way again. I’m not sure how I feel about that. She’s not going to, like, expect some kind of favor from me for this, is she? Or do only guys do that?

  “I wasn’t fishing for a compliment.” I pause at another rack, while Renate and Eroica paw through the others.

  Renate holds up a batik long-sleeved tunic, light blue with black and red accents. “Is this color Cyan?” she calls out to me.

  “I think the color cyan is more of an aqua,” Eroica says. “But if what you’re asking is, is it perfect for her, the answer is yes, in my ever so humble opinion.” She looks over at me. “What do you think, C.? You think it’s you?”

  “That is nice,” I admit. “But I wasn’t going to get a top.”

  “I’ll get it for you,” Eroica says.

  “Thanks…but I don’t want to owe you anything.”

  “You won’t. I don’t do that to people. Do I, Ren?”

  “Nope,” Renate says. “Never.”

  “Okay, then.” We take a bunch of things in the dressing room, including that tunic in three different sizes, and when I get the right size tunic on, I try on six pairs of pants. God, but I hate buying pants. Hate. They never fit right. “The only ones that fit are these drawstring pajama bottoms,” I say.

  “But that tunic is so beautiful on you, nobody’s going to notice that they’re black pajama bottoms,” Renate says. “I mean, take a look.”

  She’s right. It’s the most flattering outfit I’ve ever put on my body, except for the purple velvet dress. “And,” Eroica says, “I grabbed this hat on the way over for you to try on with it.” She h
ands me a black slouchy beret, and I put it on and I almost have to stand back, that’s how much I look like one of Cinderella’s Disney mice worked their magic on me.

  “Awesome,” Eroica sighs. “You are a work of art.”

  “I don’t know about that,” I say, “but it’s an improvement over what I walked in with. I really appreciate this.”

  “Should we get you any makeup while we’re here?” Eroica says. “I mean, not that you really need it, but I don’t know if it’s something you prefer to have on.”

  I erupt in pageant-winner tears again. “On the other hand,” Eroica says, “if you’re going to be crying a lot today, maybe no makeup is better, except for the lip gloss you already have. Would you like a hug?”

  I nod, and a group hug ensues.

  After they pay at the register, I go back to the bathroom, put newly purchased ointment on my rash, and change into my outfit, including a new pair of panties. They’re high-cut briefs—boring, but I don’t plan on putting my underwear on display tonight anyway. Since you can’t try those on I had to guess my size, and they’re a little snug, but better that than falling off. Right?

  You are gorgeous, Spectral Amy murmurs as I inspect myself in the mirror after I’m dressed. It’s only a bathroom mirror, so not full-length, but from the shoulders up I think I look pretty presentable.

  I wonder what the real you will think, I say to her.

  Spectral Amy laughs. The real me is your grandmother’s age, remember? She probably thinks all young people look beautiful.

  But does she think all young people look like talented musicians who she’d want to get to know? I ask her. Also, you said “is,” does this mean that’s really you in Portland?

  Her image dissolves in my mind once again. Of course Spectral Amy doesn’t have a clue what her 2017 counterpart is doing now; she’s frozen at age fifteen. Do I have the foggiest idea of what I’ll be doing, or where I’ll be living, almost half a century from now? I can’t even picture myself living to be thirty, let alone twice that or more. And if I did, would I want anyone reminding me what I’m like today?

  I belch sonorously, then leave the bathroom.

  1:45 pm

  Once we’re on the freeway again, Renate serenades us with her audition songs for Chicago, “All That Jazz” and “I Know a Girl.” “If they don’t cast you as Velma, they’re officially on crack,” Eroica says.

  “Thanks,” Renate says. “But I still have to be able to dance and act, not just sing, and I’m not a great dancer. And I don’t exactly have a dancer’s body. I hope I don’t get dinged for that.”

  “It’s not a Broadway audition,” I remind her. “It’s for some dinky high school where maybe three girls have the right vocal range for the part, and two of them are in screamo bands and wouldn’t be caught dead trying out. You’re the slam-dunkiest.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Renate says. “You should try out for Roxie. You could do that little sexy-baby voice of hers, no problem.”

  I stare at her, like, aren’t you forgetting something? “What?” Renate says. “Look, your parents are totally bluffing on this. Remember when they tried to grab you and put clothes on you and physically drag you to school? That didn’t last long, did it?”

  “Yeah, I don’t even know them, but it sounds like they thoroughly screwed the pooch with you,” Eroica says. “I mean, they made you give your phone back, and now they can’t even call you while you’re heading to frigging Portland in a van with no back windows. They’re really, really bad at this.”

  “Not only that,” Renate says, “but if they do go through with it, I will report the living crap out of them.”

  “So will I,” Eroica says.

  “Eroica knows people,” Renate says. “There’s like this whole neurodiversity community she’s plugged into. Teenagers and adults. They will eat this story up sideways and beg for seconds.”

  “They totally will,” Eroica agrees.

  “And then what?” I begin to chew at my thumb cuticle, but stop myself before I do any major damage and sit on my hand. “I mean, I get why I’d be a spectacle, but what’s anybody going to do to stop my parents?”

  “You’re going to stop them,” Eroica says. “We, and other people when they find out about this, are going to help you. But no way, no how, are you ever going to set foot in that house ever again unless they’ve earned your trust back. And they are going to have to bust their humps to do that.”

  I try to imagine a scenario where my parents say they’re sorry and try to earn my trust back. I can no more imagine them doing that than robbing a bank.

  “The next time we’re at a rest stop, I can post something about this, and hundreds of people will snap into action,” Eroica says. “Hundreds. Instantly. I’m not kidding. You’ve already made your statement by getting on that bike this morning, C. Your body said no. They’re not doing this to you. They’re not. Once your story gets out, you are going to be no-joke famous. This is the kind of thing talk shows dream of.”

  I take a deep breath, imagining an angry mob of people descending on my parents’ house. On my parents. Maybe even killing them. I shudder; as much as I hate them, I can’t go there. “If I’m going to be famous,” I say, “I want to be famous for good music, not bad parents.”

  “What show were we just talking about?” Renate says. “Chicago? Isn’t that entire show about two chicks using murder as a springboard to fame? Not that you’re going to murder anyone, but still, they used something that had nothing to do with their talent to call attention to their talent. Whatever it takes. You want a great Wikipedia page? This is it…Cyan Beaut.”

  “Cyan Beaut,” Eroica repeats, and then the two of them start singing “Cyan Beaut, na naaaaa-na naaaaaa na-na” to the tune of “Roxie.”

  “Oh, God,” I say, and hide my face in my hands. I picture the house I’ve lived in all my life, the room I’ve lived in all my life. My parents. My sisters. The name Butt, following me around like a puppy with dysfunctional bowels, all my life. I did want to leave all that behind, didn’t I? I did dream that one day I would, but now that it’s this close… “Could you guys just do me one favor? Could you not post anything until after the drum circle? I don’t want anything to be a distraction from that.”

  “That’s a good point,” Eroica says. “That’s the whole reason you set out for Portland in the first place.”

  “No, actually, it’s not.” I take a sip from my water bottle, which now has ice crystals in it. “I left them. I didn’t leave to run to Amy. I don’t even know for sure that that’s really her.”

  “Right, but you needed a direction to run in,” Eroica says. “If you thought Amy owned a drum store in Las Vegas, or even that she might, you would have headed south instead of north. You’d probably still have to go through Medford, but same dealio.”

  I ponder this for a moment. “Vegas probably isn’t as cool as Portland.”

  “But Amy is cooler than all of Portland,” Eroica says. “Right?”

  “We don’t know that,” I say. “Maybe she’s an asshole. That’s not impossible. She also could be dead, and Laurette Nicosia could just be…Laurette Nicosia.”

  “And maybe we were never born, and we’re just imagining that we exist,” Renate says, rolling her eyes.

  “Oh, stop,” I say. “Anyway, Amy has to be a separate thing from all the rest of this. She’s kind of…sacred to me. And I don’t want you guys telling her, if that is her, that I ran away from home to meet her. That’s just going to scare the crap out of her.” I break wind, and Renate and Eroica bust up laughing. “’Scuse me.”

  “You’d better not be doing that in her store,” Eroica says.

  “Unless it’s while everyone’s drumming,” I say. “Then the noise will cover it up.”

  “So that explains your choice of instrument,” Renate says.

  After a brief lull in the conversation, Eroica speaks up. “So, here’s a silly question for you, C. How will you know if Laurette is re
ally Amy? Do you have any recent pictures of her?”

  “All I have is that New Year’s Eve video that Ren showed me with Laurette in it, and the light was so bad I couldn’t see her face.” I look at Renate. “But when was the last time you checked Marty’s page to see if there’s anything else?”

  “Ooh, good idea.” Renate grabs Eroica’s smartphone and types some things into it, then glances at it and purses her lips. “Hmm. More dog videos. They’re like thirty seconds long. Whoever this Marty character is, they’re cuckoo bananas about dogs. But maybe ‘L’ is in one of them. Let me look.”

  I look over Renate’s shoulder while she watches four short videos, each featuring a different dog “playing” a rhythm instrument with its paws—triangle, tambourine, djembe, and cabasa (a dried gourd with a beaded net over it)—while a person (head invisible, but shape looks to be female) holds the instrument up. A female voice-over (which sounds a lot younger than Amy) on each of them says, “If we can make [insert dog’s name] sound this good, imagine how good we can make you sound,” and then there’s an ad card at the end for Bang on This.

  “Oh, okay,” Renate says, “these are, like, Portland-style anti-commercials. Very cute. But even if that’s Laurette, all we can see is from her shoulders down to her knees, so it could be anyone.”

  Then, as the last one comes to a close, for just a split second before the ad card comes up, I see a brief glimpse of a female face and long salt-and-pepper hair. “Wait a minute. Can you freeze that?” We both look at it for a few seconds. “What do you think?” I ask Renate.

  “Let’s put it this way,” Renate says. “Right now, what we need is any evidence that says Laurette isn’t Amy, because we have so little to work with. Do you see anything about this Laurette person that tells you she can’t be Amy?”

  “No.” I try looking at the video without glasses on, to see if it helps. It doesn’t. “But how do you tell what a fifteen-year-old is going to look like when she’s sixty-something?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m talking about. You can’t. But if, let’s say, Amy at fifteen was tall and this person was a lot shorter, you’d know it couldn’t be her. If she had a small nose then and now she has a big one, then it can’t be her. If she had very fair skin then and has very dark skin now, that can’t be her.”

  “And if she had a deep, hoarse voice then, and she has a high, squeaky voice now, then it can’t be her,” I say.

  “Probably not, although some women do have higher voices as adults than they had in their teens.” Renate turns the phone off and holds it in her lap. “But probably she wouldn’t go up two octaves or anything.”

  “Amy was probably about five-six, had dark curly hair and olive skin,” I say. “So nothing to exclude her yet. But when Laurette talks, we should pay attention, to make sure she doesn’t sound like a squeak toy.”

  “I bet her speaking voice now is really, really low,” Renate says. “Low enough that she gets mistaken for a guy on the phone.”

  “That sounds kind of hot,” Eroica says. “I love it when women sound like men.”

  “Yeah, try not to drool on her, okay?” Renate says.

  “Oh, please,” Eroica says. “She’s like ten times my age.”

  “Okay,” I say. “So if you guys see me look at you and shake my head while we’re at the drum circle, that means I pretty much know for sure that’s not Amy. If I don’t shake my head, it means I don’t know yet. And if I nod, that means I’m pretty sure it’s her.”

  “Why don’t you just ask her if it’s her?” Eroica says. “Why all the skullduggery?”

  “Because even if she is Amy, she’d probably lie and say she isn’t,” I say. “I mean, if she wanted people to know she was Amy, why wouldn’t she use that name?”

  “But if she didn’t want anyone to know, why would she buy a drum store, of all the businesses on earth she could own?” Eroica counters. “Couldn’t this just be a way of dipping her toe in the water, to see if she thinks it’s safe to swim?”

  “Maybe buying it was Marty’s idea, not hers,” I say.

  “But she’s leading a drum circle!” Eroica says. “Leading! A drum circle! And advertising it in the alt-weeklies! Hello?”

  I lean back in my seat and sigh. “Can we find a rest stop soon?”

  3:30 pm

  “Salem,” I hear Renate’s voice say, awakening me from the nap I’ve been taking in the back seat. “Capitol Building exit in two miles. That means Portland in an hour without some kind of traffic gum-up.”

  I open my eyes. And when I do, I realize there’s classical music coming out of the speakers. Beethoven, probably. I was so wiped out, I didn’t even hear Eroica turn on the car stereo. “Unghh,” I say. “How long was I asleep?”

  “For years and years,” Eroica says. “You missed your entire life.”

  I sit up straighter. “Fine, be a wise guy.”

  “You were conked out a good two hours,” Renate says. “We decided to let you sleep, since you don’t want to be bone tired by seven.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Here,” Renate says, “have an Altoid. Your first breath mint.”

  I laugh and take one from the tin she’s offering. I look at it for a second, then put it in my mouth. “Whoa,” I say. “That is serious mint there.”

  “It’ll help settle your stomach down, too.” Renate offers the tin to Eroica and she takes one, then Renate takes one and puts the tin away.

  I look at the clock on the dashboard. It says 3:36. “Is that clock accurate?” I ask Eroica.

  “I just adjusted it an hour ago. It should be.” Eroica turns on her windshield wipers to wipe away the rain on the windshield, and they make a horrible screeching sound. “Aaaah! Sorry!” Then she turns them off. “I have to wait until the windshield is soaking wet before it stops sounding like that.”

  “I can live with it if you can see where you’re going,” I say.

  “So while you were snoozing,” Eroica says, “I formulated a theory about you. Do you want to hear it?”

  “I don’t know. Do I?” I look at Renate for guidance, but she just shrugs.

  “Yes. So here it is.” Eroica turns off the car stereo. “You dreamed for years of changing your name. You even considered becoming an emancipated minor to do it. You dreamed up this whole Cyan Beaut persona, wrote songs, learned how to sing, drum, the whole nine yards. You even wrote a song called ‘Emancipated Minor’–which I’m dying to hear, by the way—and sang it in front of a bunch of Brownie scouts on the sidewalk in front of your house. Do I have that right so far?”

  “Plus/minus.”

  “Okay. So now that you have your best opportunity yet to have your dream, leave Cindy Butt behind for good, forever, and become Cyan Beaut, right here, now, today…all of a sudden, you’re freaking out. You’re like, ‘gee, I don’t know if I really want to be Cyan.’”

  “I just want to make sure it’s the right time, that’s all.”

  “Right. Because here’s why. For you, being Cyan was an escape hatch. As long as you didn’t have to do it for real, you could dream about not having to be Cindy Butt, not having to eat ashes because they don’t give you real food, being treated like someone who actually had talent and brains and soul and all that good stuff. But you’ll never be good enough to be Cyan, by your own standards. There’s always going to be something missing, because your parents have brainwashed you so hard that you think you have no value other than what they give you.”

  I feel my face burn. “I don’t think I’m brainwashed. I know they’re full of horse hockey. I know that what they’re doing is wrong.”

  “Do you?” Eroica says. “Tell them. Pretend they’re right here in this car. Look right at their pinched little faces—you don’t have to do eye contact, but look in their direction—and say it. ‘I am not one of you. I am not Cindy. I am not Cynthia. I am Cyan. And my last name is not Butt. It’s Beaut. I am a musician. I am a singer. I am a drummer. Those will always be the most important thing
s in the world to me. And if you can’t deal with that, I am not coming home and I am not speaking to you again. Ever.’ Say it, Cyan. Say it.”

  I see my parents hovering over me. They are huge, with heads as wide as this entire car. Their eyes roast me with their fury. But they’re not here. That’s not really them. I know that. But I feel like they could eat me. “I…” I try again. “I am…I’m not even sixteen yet. How the fracking hell am I going to support myself if I never go home?”

  “If you go home, you die,” Eroica says. “You’ll be like those prisoners in those old French prisons, who were left alone day after day to lie around in their own waste, on a freezing cold floor, all alone. They didn’t even need the death penalty. That was the death penalty. Most of them didn’t last a year.”

  I bite the inside of my lower lip. “You’re using me for your own agenda, just like they are,” I say. “You’re just trying to scare me into doing what you want.”

  With that, Eroica pulls off to the side of the road, turns off the ignition, and turns on her flashers. “Dude. I’m trying to scare you into doing what you want. These are all things you have said you wanted. Repeatedly. Isn’t that true, Ren?”

  “Yes, but you’re going way over the top, E. You really need to dial that back a little. The French prison stuff is, shall we say, de trop.”

  Eroica flinches like someone just squirted her in the face with a water pistol. “I’m always doing that, aren’t I? Ren, you’re right, I got carried away. Again. Will you forgive me, C.?”

  I nod. “It never happened.”

  “Speaking of your parents,” Renate says, “according to the email Shaina just sent me, they’re now going over all of Ashland with a fine-tooth comb looking for you, while screaming insults at each other nonstop. She says she hasn’t told them anything.”

  “I kind of wish we had a hidden camera on them,” Eroica says. “That sounds like prime entertainment.”

  “But what if they figure out I went to Portland?” I say. “If they don’t find me anywhere in Ashland, wouldn’t you figure they’d go up there to look?”

  “Your parents?” Renate says. “Your parents spent fifteen minutes in my room, which was about the size of this car seat, looking for you. At the rate they’re going, they probably haven’t even finished looking under all the theatre seats yet.”

  I bust up laughing, as I picture my parents looking under theatre seats and screaming at each other. All of a sudden, they don’t look big enough to eat me. They don’t even look big enough to nibble my toes. “I am not Cindy,” I say. “And my last name is not Butt.”

  “There you go,” Eroica says. “But what is your name?”

  I look as directly at Eroica as I can. “Dude, you gotta give me some time for the rest of it, okay? I just left home. I don’t know what I’m doing yet.”

  She nods. “Okay.” She starts the car again, turns off the flashers and turns the car stereo back on, then gets us back on the freeway.

  5 pm

  At 5 pm, it’s already pitch black, and we’re getting off the freeway and going over the Ross Island Bridge into southeast Portland. “We did it,” Eroica says. “Look! Water!”

  Since there’s no window in the back of the van, my point of view is limited to what I can see through the windshield and front passenger window, but I gape at the site of the lights twinkling in the dark and shining across the river we’re crossing. They’ve seen it before, but I am some country bumpkin who’s never seen a skyscraper except in pictures, because my parents think they can’t take me anywhere.

  “Never mind water,” Renate says. “Is there any food in this town?”

  “Look up ‘cart pods Portland,’” Eroica says. “They have these pods with a whole bunch of food trucks in them scattered all over the place. Find the closest one to here. We can take the food back to the car and eat it here. Maybe get some coffee, too, how’s that for dangerous living?”

  “I hate coffee,” Renate says.

  “That’s because you’ve only had Steens Center coffee,” Eroica says. “Here we get the real deal.”

  “How about hot chocolate?” I say. As we go over the bridge, I stare at the water like a little kid. “I had that once at Safeway. It was amazing.”

  “There goes your theory out the window, E.,” Renate says. “She thought Safeway hot chocolate was amazing, and she’s never had the quote-unquote real deal yet.” Then she grabs Eroica’s phone and looks up a cart pod, and finds one about ten blocks away from where we are now.

  “Cart pods,” I murmur. “So these carts have all different kinds of food, from like all over the world?” I look out on the street and see lots of happy young people wearing what look like thrift store jeans and Gore-Tex jackets (which I guess are expensive), carrying guitar cases and gig bags and yoga mats and easels. “This place is amazing.”

  “Too bad it costs a fortune to live here now,” Eroica says. “I can’t compete with the trust fund kids.”

  “Why do you have to compete with them?” I ask.

  “Because I want to live somewhere I don’t have to hide being queer, and all of those places are expensive, expensive, expensive. All of them.”

  “It’s not like you really hide it now,” Renate says. “I mean, who doesn’t know that about you already?”

  “I can’t talk about girls the way other girls talk about their boyfriends, Ren. They might not say much to our faces, but they sure look at us like we smell bad.” Then she addresses me. “Us, meaning those of us who lean that way. I know Ren doesn’t. But you haven’t said if you do or not.”

  “That’s because I don’t know yet,” I say.

  Eroica begins scanning the streets looking for a parking spot. “Well, if you ever fall over on to the yes side of the fence, you know where to find me.”

  “Jesus, E.,” Renate says. “You really don’t have a superego.”

  “What? I have no expectations, no pressure, no strings attached, nothing. All I’m saying, C., is that if you became eligible for me to date, and you were interested, I would be too, because you’re beautiful, inside and out. But I understand and won’t hold it against you in any way, shape, or form, or even mention it again, if you don’t feel likewise.”

  “Thank you,” I say. “I think.” She’s hitting on me and trying to park a car at the same time. I can’t imagine doing either of those things, let alone both simultaneously.

  “I will say that Eroica is picky,” Renate says. “She’s never said anything like that to me.”

  “I’d never hit on you, Ren. You’re much too tall for me.” Eroica locates a parking space for us, and parallel parks the van expertly using just her side view mirrors. I don’t know if I’d ever have enough visual-spatial sense to do that right. Eroica must be hearing what I’m thinking, because she says, “I flunked parallel parking three times before I finally got my license. So I’ve practiced my tailfeathers off.”

  We each get something different at the cart pod so we can sample each others’ stuff—a small pizza, a crepe, and a fried chicken pot pie. That is, the pie is fried, not the chicken. “I think this is the best meal I’ve ever had,” I say, after I’ve had bites of each. “But please tell me it won’t be the last good meal I ever have.”

  “Of course it won’t,” Eroica says, with her mouth full of real pizza. “Takeout from the carts, eaten in a parked car in February will not be the highlight of your gastronomic existence, I promise.”

  “But I’ll always remember it,” I say. “I can’t believe my parents thought food was what was standing between me and a real life.”

  “See, that’s just it,” Renate says, spearing a piece of chicken from the pot pie with her fork. “They say they want you to be independent as young as possible, but they also want total control over everything you do.”

  “All parents want that,” Eroica says. “It’s just that most parents know that it’s not possible to have both, and they pick one or the other, or neither one.”

  From the
sliver of window I have access to, I watch the Portland sidewalk evening parade go by. Such happy, healthy, fulfilled people. So hip, so cool, always knowing the right thing to wear or say, without ever looking like they’re trying too hard to get it right. I will never be like that, no matter how hard I study their moves. “You think their parents wanted that?” I ask, pointing at the window. “These people look like nobody ever said no to them.”

  “When you have oodles of money it’s harder to say no to your kids,” Eroica says, after taking a sip of her coffee. “Our parents have the ‘we can’t afford that’ excuse. Their parents would have to say, ‘No, we don’t feel like giving it to you, because reasons.’ It’s a lot easier for them to just shut up and write the check.”

  “Now you’re depressing me,” I say.

  “Don’t worry, we’ll start our own autism-friendly, queer-friendly, different-in-general- friendly art colony somewhere affordable, and set it up the way we want to. We don’t have to shoehorn ourselves into the allistics’ world.”

  “Will the pizza be this good?” I say.

  “Oh, that’ll be top of the list,” Eroica says. “Our art colony will include people who can cook their asses off, and there will be a brick pizza oven.”

  I grab another slice. “Now you’re talking.”

  By the time we’re done eating, it’s five-thirty. That means within two hours, I will have already been in the presence of Laurette/maybe-Amy, seen her face, heard her voice. Maybe by then I’ll already know that she’s definitely Amy, or she definitely isn’t. Either way, just being here is a head rush. Could this really be my immediate future, hanging around with friends, talking about real subjects, eating delicious food, and being a musician among musicians? It almost seems too much to hope for.

  Meanwhile, Spectral Amy has been strangely quiet.

  5:45 pm

  After we eat, we drive around town for a bit, and I sing “Emancipated Minor” for Eroica. “Oh, you have to sing that for Amy,” she says. “I bet she’d love it.”

  I don’t tell her that Spectral Amy already loves it. I don’t know how she’d take the whole Spectral Amy thing. I’ve never actually described her by that name to Renate; all I said was that Amy was in my head as her fifteen-year-old self egging me on.

  Eroica asks what people do at a drum circle. “From what I understand,” I say, “if there’s a facilitator, they assign different people different rhythms on different percussion instruments, and eventually they’re all playing together to make a polyrhythm. Kind of like what I tried to do at Ren’s party, except I don’t think she’ll start randomly flailing away at her drums like I did.”

  I knew exactly what I was doing then, Spectral Amy says to me. There was nothing random about any of it.

  Oh, hi, I say. Nice of you to show up. Are you prepared to dissolve upon contact with your real self?

  If I do, she says, it’ll be because you don’t need me anymore.

  6:45 pm

  When Eroica parks the van at a quarter to seven, a block away from Bang on This, I anxiously check the mirror in my purse, but I can’t see much in the dark car. “I’m going to have to rely on you guys telling me how I look,” I say.

  “Fantastic,” Eroica says.

  “Musicianly,” Renate says.

  “But you have some pizza sauce on the left side of your mouth,” Eroica adds. “Here’s a napkin.”

  Renate passes around the Altoid tin once again, and we get out of the van and go inside the store. Cinderella at the drummer’s ball. I swallow hard and wind up choking on my Altoid. Nice first impression to make, C. Fortunately, no one appears to notice.

  First thing I do when I’ve quit spluttering from the ill-fated breath mint is scan as surreptitiously as possible for anyone who could be Laurette/maybe-Amy. There is a group of people forming a circle in the middle of the store with percussion instruments, but I don’t see her.

  I’ve never been in a musical instrument store before, much less one that specialized in percussion. The front of the store is mostly novelty and toy instruments, and the back is where they keep the cymbals and drum heads and shells and the stuff for serious drummers. On my way over to the circle, I pick up random instruments and tap on them. God, it feels so good to finally have them in my hands again. When we’re at the circle, a tie-dyed blond guy who’s maybe thirty approaches us and says, “Hi, welcome to Drum Circle. Have any of you ladies been here before?” We tell him no. “So you have a choice while you’re here. You can either play your own percussion instrument if you brought one, or if not, you can play one of the loaner pieces we have.” He points to a big basket on the floor. “We do recommend that people switch off with each other if they’re playing loaners, so they can get a feel for different instruments. But we’ll tell you when it’s time to switch.”

  I want to ask him who he is, where Laurette is, who Laurette is, for God’s sake. But my mouth is so dry I have to peel my upper lip off my teeth just to thank him. We each grab a percussion instrument out of the basket—I pick a wood tambourine with a skin head, Renate goes for a pair of clicking sticks with ridges you can rub together, and Eroica snares a jingle stick, which is a plastic tambourine that’s stick-shaped instead of round.

  “So are you the facilitator?” Eroica asks Sir Tie-Dye.

  “For right now,” he says. “I’m going to get you guys started, at least.”

  “Okay, thanks,” Eroica says. We all look at each other like, yikes. This isn’t how it was supposed to go. I look around at the twenty other people who are there, who seem to range in age between about twenty-five and sixty. I guess this isn’t a young hipster hot spot or anything. Maybe an old hipster hot spot.

  When it’s time to start, Tie-Dye enters the center of the circle, wearing a djembe with a strap over his shoulders, and says, “Okay, everyone, welcome to Drum Circle. For those who don’t know me, I’m Ivan. Laurie, unfortunately, had a veterinary emergency and had to take France to Dove Lewis because apparently, France ate the TV remote.” I recognize “France” as the name of one of the dogs in the Bang on This anti-commercials on Marty’s page. The standard poodle, I think.

  “Dogs are so stupid,” Eroica whispers. I think she must be saying it to break up the tension, hoping I’ll laugh. But right now, I am not in a laughing mood. Of all the eleventy billion scenarios I imagined for this trip, I never thought it would be a dog eating a fracking remote that would derail my entire plan.

  “How long does it take to pump a dog’s stomach?” I say. I thought I was whispering it, but a big laugh arises from the other people in the circle, so obviously I’m louder than I thought.

  “Not long,” Ivan says. “But if it doesn’t work, they might have to do surgery and leave the dog there overnight. She said she’d join us later if she comes back in time.”

  “Mine ate my phone and pooped the entire thing out a week later,” says one of the older women in the group, to more laughter. “They’ll eat anything.”

  So there’s still a chance I could see her. If Laurette is Amy, does Ivan know? Would he even care if he did? It’s hard to believe anyone could be totally blasé about being in her presence, but who knows, I might be the only person on earth who wouldn’t be. I hope the dog is okay, for more reasons than one.

  7:05 pm

  Tie-Dye Ivan divides us into four groups of five each, putting Renate and Eroica in group two and me in group three. “Okay, group one, here’s your rhythm.” He pats out a one-two-three-and-four beat on his djembe, and group one copies him. “Okay, good. Now, group two…”

  Soon the room is pulsating with percussion rhythm, and I close my eyes and bang out group three’s one-and-rest-rest-four-and-one-and beat on my loaner tambourine, in total bliss. I can’t believe my parents went to war with me to stop me from ever doing this. Who are we hurting, if we play music? If the worst thing I ever did was bring home some unimpressive report cards and eat a few mouthfuls of pizza, aren’t they getting off easy? What the hell is wrong with thes
e people, anyway? I whack my tambourine over and over again with such force that my hand is already hurting. Take that. And that. And that and that and that and that and…

  “Laurie!” I hear Ivan’s voice say, and my eyes pop open. Striding towards the middle of the room, not six feet away from me, is Laurette Nicosia, who enters the circle and straps on a djembe of her own. I feel like I just swallowed a remote control myself. I side-eye Renate and Eroica, and they raise their eyebrows in discreet acknowledgment.

  Look at her but don’t look at her.

  Look at her but don’t look at her.

  Look at her but don’t really look at her.

  DO NOT HAVE STICKY EYEBALLS DO NOT DO NOT DO NOT…

  Laurette has long salt-and-pepper curly hair falling halfway down her back. She looks a little young to be in her sixties--but this is Portland, after all, and artists tend to look younger anyway. Medium height, five-five or so. A bit more padded than Amy at my age, maybe lower double-digit size. She’s wearing black velvet leggings and a blue paisley rayon top and black patent leather Doc Marten boots. I can’t see her eyes from here, so can’t tell what color they are. And her skin is a little lighter than I remember, but that could be because there’s no sun here like there is in southern California where she grew up, and I’m not looking at her through a badly recorded video on my computer, either. So far, nothing telling me she can’t be Amy.

  In any case, she’s radiantly lovely, the kind of beautiful that people get when they’re in love with life. I assume the dog is okay, or she’d probably be in a worse mood. She improvises a djembe rhythm with Ivan on top of our polyrhythms, facing in the opposite direction from me, and they drum faster and faster and faster (but still in rhythm with us) before Ivan calls out, “Okay, wrap it up in one, two, three, four,” and waves his hand for us to stop playing. When we do, we all cheer, banging on our instruments to applaud.

  “So how’s the dog?” the lady whose dog ate her phone asks Laurette.

  She’s going to talk. She’s going to talk she’s going to talk she’s going to talk oh God she’s going to—

  “We lucked out,” Laurette says. “A couple of pushes and she coughed it right up.” Her voice isn’t as man-deep as Renate predicted, but she’s not Betty Boop (or Roxie Hart) either. It’s actually a very gentle, musical sound, with a pitch somewhere around the G below middle C. Kind of like Glinda the Good Witch, but not as syrupy. I glance quickly at Renate and Eroica, who give me more raised-eyebrow grins. Then I look around briefly, to see if anyone else feels like their heart is being hammered away at like piano strings because Laurette might be Amy. Doesn’t look that way to me, but allistics can cover that stuff up pretty well, I take it.

  “I see some new faces here,” Laurette says then, and glances around the circle. I hope she doesn’t hear my sharp intake of breath. Is she going to ask our names? Oh God oh God what if she… ”So for you first-timers, I’m going to have you guys who have loaner instruments swap them with the person on your left closest to you who has a loaner…”

  Naturally, I look to my right instead of my left, and Laurette says, “No, your other left,” just like Spectral Amy did when I unfastened my first Trixon lugs, and I gasp—with my mouth closed, fortunately. I turn to my (real) left and hand my tambourine to the guy on my left, while Renate, to my right, hands me her clicking sticks. Once we’ve done the instrument exchange, Laurette tells us she’s going to play conductor, and she’s going to do something like what Ivan just did, assigning each group its own rhythm, but she’s going to have only the groups she points to start playing, and use various hand gestures to tell us when to start and stop. “And when I go like this”—she waves her arms over her head—“that means everybody stop.”

  “Sounds complicated,” Eroica mutters. I cringe.

  “If you don’t get it at first, don’t worry, you’ll catch on once we start,” Laurette says. She starts assigning us rhythms, and when she gets to my group--group three--I barely register what she’s telling us to do. But I notice that she has brown eyes. And when she repeats the rhythm for emphasis to make sure we get it…

  …I see Amy.

  Not because I recognize her face, because I’m terrible at that. But that brio she played that cocktail kit with in that video, that sense of being almost out of control, the motion of her head going up and down and then shaking itself out with her eyes closed tightly…it could only be Amy.

  So that’s what I look like as an old bat, Spectral Amy says with a giggle. Not bad, huh?

  It’s all I can do to keep from chewing on my borrowed clicking stick. When Amy (yes Amy) moves on to the next group, I look over at Renate and Eroica and give them the yes, that’s her nod. Their eyes almost bug out of their heads, but they mostly manage to contain it. I’m not sure I’ll be able to do likewise. Getting oxygen into me suddenly feels like a challenge.

  Oh boy. Now I really can’t screw this up.

  You can’t screw it up, that’s impossible, Spectral Amy says. Not to get all “Desiderata” on your ass, but you do have a right to be here.

  Renate holds out her hand to me and I clench it briefly, then drop it before anyone else notices. While Amy finishes assigning rhythms to groups four and five, I toy with the ridges on the clicking sticks, staring at the sticks as I press the ridges into my fingers, then examine my fingertips for indents.

  Amy then starts her rhythm conductor bit, and when she points to us, I rub my top stick over the ridges of the bottom stick to our rhythm, instead of just banging them together like Renate did, while keeping my eyes fixated on the sticks the entire time. One-and-rest-rest- three-and-rest-rest, one-and-rest-rest-three-and-rest-rest…And since I’m not looking at Amy, because I can’t, I miss her putting up the stop sign to get us to stop playing, and I don’t realize I’m supposed to stop until I hear everyone else doing it. Eeeeeehhhh. But Amy just smiles indulgently at me, the way her Spectral counterpart has always done, and moves on to the next group. I feel myself melt into the grooves of the worn Berber carpet.

  No comment from Spectral Amy.

  I resolve to look up the next time real Amy points to us. And the next time, I play it perfectly. And then someone in group five messes up the same way I did. I exhale hard, with tremendous relief, and Amy conducts us all into her grand rhythmic finale, making a sound I’d love to dance to but wouldn’t dare.

  8:15 pm

  At the very end of Drum Circle, Amy informs us all that the “gently abused” (ha ha, nice) instruments in the loaner basket are indeed for sale, at extremely reasonable prices. I look down at the instrument I have in my hand at the end, a frog-shaped hollow piece of wood about six inches long, painted red and white, with ridges down its back that you rub a stick on to make it sound like a croaking frog. This one’s going home with me. “How much for this guy?” I ask Ivan, who’s standing in front of where I’m sitting. I hold up the frog.

  “Oh, the frog rasp,” Ivan says. “I think those were going for twenty-five dollars new, so you can have that one for ten. But let me ask Laurie and make sure.” He then calls out to Amy (Laurie) across the room, “Hey, Laurie, how much for a used frog?”

  “Ten,” she tells him, without turning her head in our direction.

  I place the frog rasp stick through the storage hole along the sides of its mouth, then stand up and join Renate and Eroica. “Even if this gets confiscated by my parents,” I say, “I at least want to have some quality time with it here.”

  “So what’s your plan for right now?” Eroica says. “Are you going to talk to her?”

  “You’d better,” Renate says. “We’re getting in major trouble for you.”

  “She’s busy right now.” I pull the frog rasp stick out of its hole again and drag it back and forth across the ridges, click click cliii-iiik, click click cliiii-iiik, click click cliii-iiik… “I’m going to browse a little until she gets un-busy.”

  “Uh huh,” Eroica says, obviously not convinced that I’ll go through with it. But
I will. I think. I’ll say something to her, even if it’s only, “I had fun, thanks.” Renate has a point, though. They stuck their necks out for me. I will talk to her and say something less simpy than “I had fun, thanks.”

  Eroica takes out her phone and types something into it, then hands it to Renate. Renate pushes a few more buttons and makes a face. “Sure enough, I now have about seven hundred emails from your family.” She hands the phone back to Eroica.

  Eroica looks at the phone for a few seconds, then snorts. “And according to Shaina.your sisters came to Ashland to help your parents look for you.”

  “How’d Annabeth get there that fast?” Renate says.

  “She lives in Burbank, she can literally walk to Bob Hope Airport,” I say. “She can fly right into Medford after connecting in San Francisco. It takes less than four hours.”

  “Oh, I forgot there was an airport in Burbank.”

  “What?” I say, a little over-amplified. “You mean you used to know?”

  I’m trying to cover freaking out on top of the freaking out I was already doing. My parents probably wouldn’t have clue one on Planet Zero where I could possibly have run off to, but my sisters know enough about percussion instruments, thanks to their purchase of my long-lost pandeiro, that there’s at least a chance one of them would figure out that Portland has stores that specialize in drums and percussion (at least two others besides this one that I know of) and lead my parents up here. My parents cannot be here. They cannot. Ever. Be. Here. Fortunately, it will take them long enough to get up here that the stores will all be closed by the time they arrive, and by then I’ll be long gone. To where, I don’t know, but I’ll be long gone.

  I try to push all that out of my mind and start wandering around the store, tapping on and shaking this, that, and the other thing. I make my way to the back of the store, where they have the professional-class (expensive) percussion and drum stuff. Then I hear Eroica’s voice saying, “So, you guys bought this store a few months ago?” I turn around and she and Renate are talking to Amy. Just as casual as you please. Because Amy doesn’t make them nervous at all. I overhear Amy tell them, “Yeah, Marty saw this place for sale and she fell in love with it.”

  Okay. So now we know the gender of Marty Nicosia. But that’s not important. What’s important is that any minute now, they’re going to start talking about me. To Amy. Who I can’t bring myself to go near, not yet. How much are they going to tell her?

  It doesn’t take me long to find out. “We actually aren’t drummers,” Renate tells Amy. “We play melody instruments, but she’s the drummer in our group.” I turn around and see Renate pointing me out to Amy. My spinal cord fries as I look at her looking at me.

  “Are you looking for something in particular?” Amy calls out to me. Oh, dude. You don’t even want to know.

  I’m standing right near a shelf of Latin percussion, and I spot a pandeiro sitting there. It looks like a manufactured model, not a handmade one, with a clear plastic head. I put the frog rasp down, then pick up the pandeiro. And of course, promptly drop it on the floor. Fortunately, it seems pretty sturdy, and Amy doesn’t seem to be all that perturbed that I dropped it. I pick it up and play it a little. “Stuff like this?” I say, more like a question than an answer.

  “Well, we got lots of stuff like that. Let me know if you have any questions.”

  “Thanks.”

  Okay, I did it. I exchanged words, albeit rather fluffy ones, with Amy. I showed her that I can play stuff. But it feels like I have more to do here, though I don’t know what yet. Amy has already moved on to assisting another customer. It’s so funny that I think of her as a rock star, when a rock star wouldn’t be following other people around, they’d be the ones being followed. Well of course she’s following them around, Lady Goofball, she’s a salesperson. Just because she used to have a record deal eight hundred years ago doesn’t mean she’s going to play hard to get with her fracking customers!

  I clumsily put the pandeiro down, pick up the frog, and walk over to where the drum sets are. And then I hear a voice in my head that’s not mine, not Spectral Amy, and not anyone I’ve met in real life either. But I’ve heard it before, very recently. It almost sounds like Renate, but a lot softer and more echoey.

  Someday we’ll be together, Cyan. You know we will.

  I turn my head forty-five degrees to the right and see it. The Trixon kit.

  Red sparkle.

  Just like Amy’s. And mine, only with real heads and cymbals.

  “You guys!” I call out to Renate and Eroica. “You guys have to come see this!”

  They run right over and I show them. Renate says, “Oh my freaking gods.”

  “Oh wow,” Eroica breathes, “Ren showed me the one you guys were working on. You know what this means, don’t you?”

  I keep my voice at the same whispery level as hers. “I don’t know. Do I?”

  “It means she wants people to know she’s Amy. Anyone who knows her music would recognize this drum set.”

  I feel the stick from the frog rasp hitting my foot, and I bend over and pick it up. “It could just be a coincidence.”

  “You don’t really believe that,” Eroica says. “I mean, hello, the exact same color and everything? How many different colors does it come in?”

  I glance across the store and see Amy up front, ringing up a purchase and chatting with the customer. She has no idea we’re having this conversation.

  “It comes in fifteen colors,” I admit. I turn to Renate and say, “Can you hold this?” and hand her the frog, then pick up a pair of sticks sitting in a holder attached to the front of the kit. I never got to play the set I bought, but I’m going to get to play this one. Before I do, I look at Eroica and ask her, apropos of pretty much nothing, “What instrument do you play?”

  “Cello.”

  “I should have known that.” I test the bass drum pedal first. Boom, ba-boom, boom, ba-boom. Then I play the cowbell along with it, tonk tonk a-tonk, tentatively at first, then a little louder. I’m about to do some rimclicks on the snare drum when I hear Amy’s voice—real Amy’s voice—right next to me.

  “Yeah, that’s a nice one, isn’t it?” she says, as I gasp and drop my sticks on the ground. Boy, do I have the dropsies today. As I’m picking them up, she says, “Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you like that.”

  “No problem,” I say in a way-too-shaky voice. I stand upright and take my first up-close look at Amy. She’s about two inches taller than I am. She still radiates the same warmth that came through that badly recorded television screen. Who knows, maybe if she had become a big star, she wouldn’t have been as happy as she looks now. “These are really unique-looking. You don’t see kits like this in stores a lot.”

  “We have a really good deal on those,” Amy tells me. “Four hundred for that entire set. Birch shells. If you want name brand cymbals it’ll be more than that, but that’s a fantastic buy considering how much some of these sit-down kits cost.”

  I sigh. “Someday I won’t have to live with my dad anymore. He couldn’t deal with the noise.”

  “Yeah, that’s always the obstacle. But you know, we also have mufflers, mesh heads, mesh cymbals…a lot of people use those for practice if they live in the city.”

  I glance at Renate, who bites her lip trying not to laugh. I start playing the bass drum again, then add a ONE-and-TWO-and-THREE-and-FOUR-and on the hi-hat, and then start alternating the cowbell and tom with the other hand. Amy smiles and picks up a pair of sticks lying near the drum set immediately to our right, the same kind as this but in green, and starts jamming with me. Holy space kitties. All that’s missing is a clapping audience. But Renate playing the frog rasp and Eroica slapping a mounted tambourine sound pretty good too. People in the store start watching us and nodding their heads in time with us. We jam for something like five minutes, then Amy yells, “Big finish!” and we do two bars of toms ending with a loud crash to wrap up, and we get a big round of percussion-instrum
ent applause. Although I’m sure they’re applauding her more than me. Wow, she can still play.

  Amy puts her sticks down on top of the set she’s been playing and smiles. “That was great,” she says. “You look like you’ve played this type of kit before, or is this your first time?”

  “I…” I glance over at Renate and she nods, as if to say, tell her. Tell her. She asked. Tell her. “I…”

  Amy’s face registers concern. And then it all comes out, with me looking at the floor, of course.

  “I…have this exact same kit. I mean, I bought it, but I can’t keep it in my house because my parents…w-we fixed it up. Me and her.” I point to Renate. “But…but it was thrashed and we fixed it up but she did most of the work because I couldn’t go over there, and we hid it in her house, and…and…” I glance at Amy and then quickly look away. “And the entire reason I bought it is because of you, I know exactly who you are and I dreamed of being able to play with you and I just did it and oh God I can’t believe I said that, I’m so sorry, I have to—“

  I put down my sticks and start walking away, and it takes me a second to realize that Amy has cracked up laughing. And it’s the kind of laughing that comes in waves, like she wants to stop but she can’t. I stop and turn around to watch. “What’s so funny?” Renate asks her.

  Amy laughs one more time, then manages to contain it enough to say her next sentence. “You’re like the tenth one I’ve had this month.” Then she busts up laughing all over again.

  “Excuse me?” I say, and start walking back over to her.

  She lets out one more paroxysm of laughter and shakes her head. “I’ve lived in Portland for three months. Before that I was in southern California for decades after I made that album, and not one person there ever recognized me from like 1975 onward. Then I move here, and all of a sudden, my fans start coming out of the woodwork. Even with the name change. Although I have to say, I don’t think I’ve had one your age yet.”

  “It’s this thing,” Eroica says, pointing to the red sparkle Trixon kit. “These drums, in this color, are a dead giveaway.”

  “Also, people here actually have taste,” Renate adds.

  “Well, thank you,” Amy says. “And amazingly enough, everyone’s been really nice about it. I haven’t had any creepy fans at all.” I bite my tongue so I won’t say anything that tells her I’m her first exception. “But yes, that exact model, in that color, was the very first one I ever owned. I got it when I was nine. I don’t even want to tell you how long ago that was. They stopped making them for a long time, but then the brand got revived and it’s one of our best sellers.”

  “Because of you,” I say.

  “I’ll take it. It’s not like I got any money from making that album.” Then she glances up at the front of the store. “So what’s your name?”

  I hesitate for a second. But now I know it’s time. I take a deep breath, and on the exhale I say, “Cyan.”

  “Yes! Yes! Yes!” Renate and Eroica whoop for joy and high-five each other. Amy regards them strangely.

  “Don’t mind them,” I say. “It’s an inside joke. These are my friends, Renate and Eroica.”

  “Those are cool names,” Amy says.

  “Thanks,” we all say. Then I ask her, “So why did you change your name?”

  She sighs. “Well, to make a long story short, I decided to adopt Marty’s last name about thirty-five years ago, a long time before we were legally allowed to get married. When I did that, I decided to start going by my middle name. I just felt like my old name had some painful associations, and taking Marty’s name was my way of coming all the way out.”

  “Painful associations?” I say. “You mean…because stupid record companies are stupid?”

  Amy laughs. “Yeah, pretty much. And because of that, I didn’t play for a very long time.”

  “I read that interview you gave for that old female drummers book, I got it out of the library,” I tell her. “I can’t believe they did that to you.”

  “It wasn’t just that, though. There was another reason I quit music then. Asthma.”

  “Asthma?” I say.

  “In those days,” Amy says, “every concert hall, every club, every recording studio was filled with cigarette smoke—and other kinds of smoke, too, but especially cigarettes. You couldn’t just tell people not to smoke around you. Smoking was how people in music proved they were cool. Even the few nonsmokers were expected to inhale passively, all day and all night.”

  “Disgusting,” Renate says.

  “Yeah, now it seems absurd. But I also had to go on medication for the asthma because it was really bad, and the meds made me gain a lot of weight. By the time I was able to go off the meds and return to my old weight, the business wasn’t interested in me anymore.”

  “That sucks,” I say.

  “Maybe,” Amy says. “And maybe not. Most stars aren’t happy.” Then she lowers her voice. “I’ve already dealt with enough of them in this place to know.”

  Renate hands the frog back to me, and I hold it up and show her. “I can’t buy a drum set right now,” I say, “but I can buy this.”

  Amy smiles. “Well, thanks. Every little bit helps.”

  I run the stick over the ridges of the frog’s back a few times. “So how did you manage to get through school? I can’t think of anything else but music. I’m going to flunk.”

  “I was in a special school for kids in show business,” Amy says. “There was no way I was going to be able to graduate from a regular high school.”

  “I don’t have that option, unfortunately. And I still have two and a half years to go.”

  “That’s tough,” Amy says. “But all you can do is the best you can do. If other people expect more than that from you, that’s their problem.”

  “Exactly,” Eroica says.

  Amy glances up at the front of the store again. “If you’re going to buy that, I’ll take it up front for you.”

  “Yeah, sorry,” I say, as we follow her to the register. “I didn’t mean to monopolize you like that.”

  “We officially closed fifteen minutes ago,” Amy says. “So, no worries. But how did you find out about me? My career was probably over before your parents were born.”

  “I found your record at a yard sale,” I say. “And it was in terrible shape. Only three songs were actually playable.”

  “Which ones?”

  “’On a Horse,’ ‘Carpet Man,’ and ‘You Can’t Make Me.’ And then I found a video of you singing ‘Look Around’ on a children’s show. That’s what did it for me. You just had such fantastic energy. And you still do.”

  She beams. “Hearing that never gets old.”

  I pay for my frog at the register with a ten-dollar bill. “Are you going to record anything else?” I say. “I mean, it’s probably a lot cheaper to record music now than it used to be, right?”

  “Marty and I just started keeping a mailing list,” Amy says. “I haven’t ruled it out, let’s put it that way. We have Pro Tools on our Mac, but we’re just learning it. And one of the things we’re working on is a new remaster of my old album. If you give me an email address, you’ll be kept up to date on whatever we do.” I write down my email address for her on one of the store’s cards, and when I hand it to her, she hands me my receipt in return. “Would you like me to sign this for you?” She holds up a thin Sharpie.

  “You mean the frog? You want to sign my frog?”

  “Unless you don’t want me to.”

  “Are you kidding? Of course I do.”

  “So that’s C-Y-A-N?” she asks me.

  “Yes.”

  “All right.” She signs the frog’s belly and hands the frog to me. I look at it and it says, CYAN, KEEP BANGING ON! AMY Z. We exchange smiles, and I say, “I don’t even know how to thank you for any of this.”

  “You just did,” Amy says. “You just put some food in the dogs’ bowls for me.”

  “Say hi to France,” I say, and we walk towards th
e exit. Ivan unlocks the door for us and says, “Thanks for coming, see you soon.”

  I walked into this place Cynthia Ann Butt. I am walking out Cyan Beaut. I talked to my favorite musician, peer to peer, and although I was on the verge of making a horse’s ass out of myself, I recovered nicely. I didn’t get to sing her my song, but I feel like there’s a possibility I could some day. And I didn’t tell her about the autism, but I didn’t get the feeling she’d be horrified by it either. She didn’t mistake me for Ladycreep Mel or Charles Manson. I was where I belonged. For the very first time.

  I keep expecting to hear Spectral Amy’s smoky murmur in my head, but then I remember what she told me, that if I didn’t hear from her, that meant I didn’t need her any more. And maybe I don’t, now that I’ve seen—and actually! talked to!--the real thing.

  As soon as we’re out the door and making our way back to Eroica’s van, we all start singing, “Cyan Beaut, na naaaaa-na naaaaaa na-na,” the way they were doing in the van earlier. Eroica’s just told us that she’s texted her friend Sarah, who lives in Portland and can put us up, when I hear a familiar voice calling out to me. By my old name.

  “Cindy?”

  I whirl around and see Tamarlyn standing there. And about a foot behind her is Mom. I am dead now. Dead.

  “How did you know I was here?” I say. Renate explains to Eroica that this is my sister and my mother, and Eroica makes a tooth-sucking sound.

  Tam fishes a folded piece of paper out of her purse. “I’m sorry I had to snoop, but I was totally freaking out,” she says. “And I found this in your desk.” She hands it to me. It’s the copy of the alt-weekly page that Renate made for me that advertised the drum circle. “You didn’t cover your tracks very well.”

  Of course. I shredded everything else but that. “Crap,” I mutter.

  Mom comes forward to join us. She looks like she’s about to explode. She stares at me hard, until I have to say something.

  “Mom, I’m not going home with you,” I say. “I can’t. I don’t care if I starve on the streets here and die. At least then I’ll die on my own terms.”

  “I thought you were already dead,” Mom whispers hoarsely. “Do you know how terrifying it is to know your child has run away to a big city where she’s never been before?”

  “You didn’t give me a choice,” I say. “My prison term at the Butt Correctional Facility is over, Mom. If you shove me into your car and try to take me back to Steens Center, I’ll run away again. And again. And again.” I look over at Renate and Eroica, and they nod in solidarity.

  “Can you excuse us?” Mom says to them.

  “No,” I say. “Whatever you have to say to me, say it in front of them. They’re not going anywhere.”

  “And who are you?” Mom says to Eroica.

  “I’m Eroica,” Eroica says. “I’m a friend of Renate’s from her old school. And now I’m a friend of Cyan’s, too.”

  “Cyan?” Mom says, furrowing her eyebrows.

  “Yes. My name is Cyan now. I don’t want to be Cindy anymore. I don’t want to be Cynthia, either.” I suddenly realize it’s freezing cold out and I don’t have gloves. I blow on my hands and rub them together to warm them up.

  “Cyan?” Tam says. “You mean, like cyan, magenta, and yellow?”

  “Yes, exactly.” I turn back to Mom. “Speaking of which, I’m going to make you an offer I know you can’t accept.”

  “Oh, is that right?” Mom says.

  “Yes. These are my terms for going home with you.” I start counting off on my fingers as I talk. “One, you have to let me legally change my name to Cyan Beaut. Two, you have to get me a diagnosis and an IEP, and make sure the school follows it. Three, you have to let me eat real food instead of this wacko diet. Four, I get all my music stuff back, and I get to bring my drum set home and have a soundproof practice space for it. Five, I get to see my friends like a regular person. And six, last but not least, you guys have to call off the dogs on Mr. Shunsberg and retract anything you said to get him suspended. Otherwise, I’m never setting foot in that house again. Ever.”

  Mom purses her lips and nods. “The first five things are no problem.”

  Now this I did not expect. “Really?”

  “This wasn’t what I wanted,” Mom says. “I let him scare me into doing all those things to you. To be honest with you, I hate that damn diet as much as you do. And after the first year of doing that blog, I was ready to pack it in, but I didn’t stand up to him. That’s on me.”

  “I will be so happy if I never have to see another cooked eyeball again,” Tam says.

  “Well, this is…different,” I say. “But what does he have to say about all this?”

  “Nothing,” Mom says. “And that’s why I can’t make you any promises about your number six. I will back you up on anything you have to say, but I can’t make your dad do anything. Especially since he won’t be living with us anymore.”

  My jaw drops. I look at Renate and Eroica, and their jaws are hanging, too. Then I turn back to Mom. “Are you serious?”

  “Yes,” Mom says. “I finally had enough. And until he gets his stuff out, I’m not going back into that house, either. It’s property that I inherited, so he has to leave. AB is down there now making sure he doesn’t trash the place on his way out.”

  “Where’s he going to go?”

  “To your grandparents’ in Pennsylvania, for now. And you still need to make some sort of amends to me, and your sisters, for scaring us like that. But you’re fifteen and a half now. We—that is, I—can’t just keep punishing you like a bad dog. I’m sure you’ll be able to think of a way you can make that up to me, but I know I have a lot more to make up to you after all this.”

  “Tell you what,” I say. “I’ll learn how to cook, and we can all start eating awesome meals made out of actual food.”

  Mom nods and smiles. “If that happens, you’ll make me very happy.”

  “So are you really going to recant?” Eroica asks Mom. “You’re going to tell everyone Cyan isn’t quote-unquote in remission, and never was in remission, and that it doesn’t even matter because there’s nothing wrong with being autistic?” Eroica glances at me to make sure I’m okay with her saying this. I nod, and she turns back to Mom. “And you’re going to admit that you scammed people because you were afraid to stand up to your husband? Because that seems like the big one to me.”

  I freeze up. Mom admitting there’s nothing wrong with being autistic would be the one-eighty to end all one-eighties. But Eroica is right. I can’t go home with her unless she ends the “remission” crap once and for all.

  “I’m still going to struggle with the idea that there’s nothing wrong with autism,” Mom admits. “But yes, I will come clean publicly and take whatever lumps are due me. Even if it means I have to go to court. And I’m open to the idea that I don’t know as much about your disability as I should.”

  “I know a lot about disability,” Eroica says. “I’m autistic too. Between me and Cyan, we can get you up to speed like that.” She snaps her fingers. “I’ll even help you word your explanation to your followers and to Dr. Poop Charts. But you have to believe what we tell you, because we’re the ones who live this. Can you do that?”

  Mom laughs. “Dr. Poop Charts. She’s been paying our property taxes for the last ten years. But I know we have to find another way.”

  “Are we getting a hotel room here?” I say.

  “We already have one reserved,” Mom says. “We’re not driving all the way back down there now.” To Renate and Eroica, she says, “We’ll get you girls a room for tonight, too, if you want. Eroica, did you drive up here?”

  “Yes,” Eroica says. “And thanks. I really appreciate it.”

  “So what exactly did Dad say to the school about Mr. S.?” I ask Mom. “You know Mr. S. didn’t do anything, right? I mean, other than, like, care too much about my future?”

  Mom shakes her head. “Your father has some…how can I say this…strange id
eas? About a lot of things. We’ll talk about it more when we’re not out in public.”

  “We’re going to have an interesting breakfast tomorrow, aren’t we?” Renate says.

  “No eyeballs,” I say. “Otherwise, I don’t even care what it is.”

  Then I see Amy and an older-looking, slightly heavyset woman with short gray hair, who I assume is Marty, walk out of Bang on This, which now has the lights off. They lock the door behind them, then start walking towards us. As they’re about to pass us, I call out, “Amy!”

  She and Marty stop walking and turn to us.

  “I have the best news,” I tell her. “My parents are getting divorced!”

  Amy smiles, as if she knows exactly what that means. “Congratulations!” she says. “I’m so happy for you. I’ll see you later, Cyan.” Then she and Marty continue on their way down the street.

  When they’re gone, my mom asks me, “Who is that?”

  Spectral Amy doesn’t say anything, but I can feel her smiling. And now, I’m smiling too.

  “My fairy godmother,” I tell my bewildered mom and sister.

  ###

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