Say What You Will Read Online Free Page B

grew four inches over the summer and girls came to school dressed like their older, slutty sisters. Matthew hated all of it. The talk about shaving, the visible bra straps. The voice in his head came back, louder this time and more insistent. Wash your hands . Like a surgeon to the elbows. By then it made him check faucets, too. Make sure they’re off . Just double-check.
    Counting made him less nervous. Twenty-four steps from the bathroom to math class. Thirty-six chair desks, four left-handed. Counting was a relief. Almost a pleasure. A way to measure and contain a world that otherwise spun too quickly for him. He thought of his brain as divided. One half understood that counting had no bearing on his parents or his life. The other half hoped maybe it did. Gradually, that first year in middle school, he began to understand—there were many ways to be a freak. Amy had no choice, but other people did. If you worked hard and concentrated, you could hide your freakish thoughts. You could keep the same handful of friends you’d had since third grade. You couldn’t push those friendships too far or sleep over at anyone’s house when there were nighttime rituals to worry about, but you could look okay.
    That’s what he assumed.
    In eighth grade that changed again. Steven, his best friend, moved away, leaving Matthew with no one to eat lunch with. Sitting alone beside the trash cans, his fears grew worse. He went to see a guidance counselor and told her about his worries, though he didn’t get specific or mention the voice. He also said nothing about the deals he made with his brain.
    The counselor reassured him by saying there were other students like him. “You’re just anxious, that’s all.” She told him to think of his mind as a Worry Wheel with three parts—an anxious mind, anxious body, and anxious actions. She said an anxious mind got the Worry Wheel spinning, and an anxious body kept it going until anxious actions made it spin out of control. She talked about breathing and visualizations and “calm-body” tools. She told him some people squeezed their fists to release the tension from their body. “Yo-Yo Ma does this,” she said. And some basketball players whose names she couldn’t remember before they took free throws. “Believe it or not, everyone gets anxious,” she said. Did that mean Yo-Yo Ma went to the bathroom six times a day to make sure he didn’t have skid marks in his underwear? Did Shaquille O’Neal say excuse me seven times if he farted?
    Amy might have called him brave in that email but he was afraid of everything about Amy, especially her body, which had the terrible problem of being crippled and attractive. He wondered if other people noticed that, too. In ninth grade, she grew her curly, blond hair long like some princess in a fairy tale, and she was pretty now, in a bent, crooked sort of way. That was also the year she grew boobs. Did other people notice that?
    The other problem with expectations was that Amy’s mother made it pretty clear what hers were. “As long as we’re prioritizing friendship building, I want to be scientific about it,” Nicole had said in their first training session. “We’re going to ask that each of you introduce Amy to three new people a week. Keep track of the names and give them to me so I can keep a central database. We’ll also ask that each of you invite at least one other person to join you when you eat lunch with Amy.”
    At that first training session, there were four peer helpers, all seniors, all people Matthew knew vaguely. Sarah Heffernan was a girl he’d had a crush on in ninth grade because her mother died around the same time Matthew’s father remarried, which meant they were both sad and quiet most of that year. He’d never talked to Chloe McGlynn before, mostly because she hung out with a Goth crowd and wore motorcycle boots to school and he’d always been scared of her. Now, mysteriously, she wore a green IZOD shirt and khaki