What to Say Next(71)

“Is it working?” Annie asks.

“Sort of,” I say. “I still get a little shaky in the car, but it gets a tiny bit easier each time.”

I have already warned my friends that the girl they used to know and love is gone. That they should give up trying to revive the old me. I’m not braver or stronger, as my mom hoped. I’m a new version. Possibly someone they could one day like better. Who knows? Maybe I’ll turn out funnier.

My mom has found me a therapist who specializes in grief counseling, and she got herself one too. She’s even talking about us seeing a third psychologist we can talk to together. We are mobilizing.

“Vi and I have decided to go stag to prom, and we’ll be taking Uber. No driving needed. So will you come with us? Just us girls?” Annie asks. “Please, please, please!”

“Sorry, I can’t,” I say.

“Why not? If I can go and watch Gabriel and Willow make out all night, you can at least come and pretend to have fun.” I shrug. My dad would have been excited about prom. He would have taken a thousand pictures of me and posted them on Facebook without my permission and begged me to text him the DJ’s playlist.

“Come on!” Violet whines.

“Sorry, guys.”

“It’s David, isn’t it? Forget about him. He’s a weirdo,” Annie says. “Obvi we’re no longer Team David.”

“This is not about David,” I say, though maybe it is, just a little bit. Because perhaps for a second there, before David was the enemy, I had pictured both of us dressed up and slow-dancing to some cheesy song. I had pictured another night just like at Dylan’s party, when he looked at me like I was something worth looking at, when I allowed myself to forget.

After what happened at McCormick’s, he sent me only one text. It was composed of two words: I’m sorry.

I might have killed my father, but I think even I deserve better than that.





I spend the first week after screwing everything up with Kit too ashamed to do anything except write her a stupid text. I keep it short, limit it to the words I know can’t be the wrong ones: I’m sorry. I don’t trust myself not to make a bigger mess of things by saying more. Whenever I pick up the phone to text again, I freeze up with anxiety. I don’t feel like I deserve the chance to explain. I don’t even deserve to share the same air molecules as Kit.

I have spent all my waking hours following rule number four by trying to imagine what she must be thinking. My guess is she assumes I am a sociopath. I smiled. At McCormick’s, while we were talking about the accident, one in which she was driving and her father was a passenger, one that resulted in her father’s death. I smiled.

And then, then I had the nerve to yell.

Since I am in my own brain, I understand why I did all that—the sequencing makes perfect sense to me—but to her, a person on the outside of my mind, a person who knows nothing about my synaptic responses, I must seem like a monster.

Here’s what happened in that booth, with Kit sitting across from me and the cold milk shake in my stomach and the strange dimensions of my new clothes: My brain got narrow. It did what it’s best at. It tunneled in. If that moment was a Russian nesting doll, I was paying attention to the smallest figurine. Pawing my way through the details of blood spatter and brake data and an algorithm I had elegantly designed. I found an answer, right there, at the very center. A tiny nugget. That’s all I could see. The solution to a mathematical equation that had been troubling me for weeks. The missing data point.

I did not see all the other metaphorical dolls. The one wrapped around the smallest one, and the one wrapped around the next-smallest one and the next and the next after that.

What neurotypical people call the context.

I did not see Kit or the people nearby or the delicate nature of what we were discussing. Honestly, I did not see anything else at all.

—

“David, if I gave up every time I pissed someone off, I wouldn’t have any friends either,” Trey says a week later, after I’ve told him the whole sad story, even the parts that are hard for me to admit in the retelling. Our lesson today will be one hundred percent about social skills, since I am so shaken up about Kit I don’t even bother to take out my guitar.

“She probably won’t forgive me,” I say.

“Maybe not. But you have to at least try. And if you really do your best to apologize and she doesn’t forgive you, then you move on. You messed up. It happens. There will be other girls, man.”

“Not really. I mean, of course there are other girls in the world, but by definition there’s no one else exactly like Kit, with her precise genetic and environmental makeup.” I regret that I left my guitar in the closet. My hands want to move. The strings would come in handy.

“What’s the worst thing that can happen if you try?” Trey asks.

“I make her hate me even more. I humiliate myself again. I spin out and crawl into the fetal position and start rocking in front of the entire school.”

“I see you’ve given this a lot of thought.”

“You’re not helping,” I say.

“How about this: You can’t control how she reacts, but you can control what you do. So you do you. Be your best and hope for the best.”

“I am paying you forty dollars an hour, and all you can come up with is you do you?” I ask.