Say What You Will Read Free Page B

saying too much, telling her all the things he’d noticed—that she never said hi to other kids, that she never answered questions when people asked her things before class. “I’m not pretending I’m Mr. Popularity or anything. I’m just saying you’ve got this whole message that doesn’t seem believable. To me, anyway.”
    “I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU’RE SAYING THIS.”
    Her facial expressions were impossible to read. He couldn’t tell how mad she was. Probably pretty mad. “I’m sorry. You’re right. I shouldn’t have said anything. It’s none of my business. Like, none at all. I don’t know why I just said all that. I had this theory that you’re trying to be a certain kind of person, and that must be hard. But God, I’m hardly one to talk. So let’s forget the whole thing. Please. I’m sorry.”
    It startled him when her machine blurted out a single word. “NO!”
    “No what?”
    “DON’T BE SORRY. YOU’RE RIGHT. MY GOSH, I CAN’T BELIEVE HOW RIGHT YOU ARE.”

CHAPTER THREE
    E VERYTHING CHANGED FOR A MY after that conversation with Matthew.
    For most of her school life, Amy had felt a little like Rapunzel, locked in the tower her walker created when she walked down hallways. In eleven years, no one had ever called up to her window or asked for her hair. No one had ever tried to be her friend.
    Impossible, you might say. Everyone has some friends.
    No, Amy would have to say. Not everyone. It was possible to spend a decade with the same children—from kindergarten through eleventh grade—and never receive a phone call once, though your number was listed every year in the directory. It was possible to have a mother who tried for years to schedule play dates with other children of mothers who never called her back or did so with apologies and talk of impossibly busy schedules. It was possible to be partnered on a school project and watch others build a Pueblo Mesa out of brown-painted mini marshmallows, a project you were never, in two weeks, allowed to touch.
    Most surprising of all: it was also possible—for eleven years!—not to see this as a problem.
    Or to put it another way: it was possible to believe that the adults who loved her—the teachers, therapists, and aides who laughed at everything Amy said—counted as friends. It was possible to feel their love so strongly that she lived in oblivious happiness for over a decade.
    Then Matthew came along and pointed out the holes in her thinking. He stood in front of her and told her he’d come, not to climb her tower but to shatter it. In his clumsy way, he was like a prince who arrived with sweaty armpits and bad hair. At least I’m here, he might have said. That’s better than nothing. And it was.
    The very same day that she talked to Matthew, she went home and made some decisions: It was too late to do anything about it that year. But next year—her senior year—would be different. She would make friends before she graduated. She would look at her life with a more critical eye.
    When he’d insisted that she couldn’t be as happy as she pretended to be in her essays, he’d said something she’d never considered. You don’t have any real friends because no one acts like themselves around you. You’re always with an adult. For years Amy had blamed her lack of peer friendships on any number of factors: Typing was slow. She’d try for a joke that came out five comments too late to be funny. She was too clumsy to play at recess, too messy to eat lunch with, too slow to keep up. Until Matthew pointed it out, though, this idea never occurred to her: being with you means being with a teacher.
    It was so obvious, she wanted to laugh. Get rid of the adult and you might make some friends.
    That conversation opened up electrifying possibilities in her mind. Just because she’d never had friends didn’t mean she wasn’t interested in her classmates. Since she started middle school, she’d developed a habit every year of picking a different