 
# THE AMY VIRUS

# by Andee Joyce

# Copyright 2016 Andee Joyce

# Smashwords Edition
Smashwords Edition, License Notes:

Thank you for downloading this ebook. You are welcome to share it with your friends. This book may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form and the author is credited.

Song quote credits:

"Look Around" by Sergio Mendes, Alan Bergman, and Marilyn Bergman

"Mas Que Nada," by Jorge Ben Jor

"Promentalshitbackwashpsychosis Enema Squad" by George Clinton, Garry Shider, and Linda Brown

"Shake it Off," by Taylor Swift, Max Martin, and Shellback

"Up, Up and Away," by Jimmy Webb

"Roxie," by John Kander and Fred Ebb

All other quoted song lyrics written by Andee Joyce.

### ABOUT THE AUTHOR

###

### Andee Joyce is, much like her heroine, an autistic singer-songwriter-musician whose musical identity showed up when she began embracing her autistic identity. Unlike her heroine, however, she did not know about her diagnosis until well into adulthood, and once she found out, she discovered that she could do many things she had always assumed she could not do, as long as she did them "autistic style." She is a graduate of Oregon Partners in Policymaking 2014, a member of the Oregon Council on Developmental Disabilities, and teaches classes on autism to service providers. She also writes and records music under the band name Normal Fauna. She was born in Brooklyn, NY, and currently lives in Hillsboro, OR with her domestic partner and an enormous elderly black cat.

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# STAGE 0:

# Disease process takes root; no obvious symptoms yet.

Here's a Wikipedia page no one will ever get to see:

Cyan Beaut (born August 12, 2001) is an American musician and songwriter, best known for her top10 hit, "Awesome Hit Song that Doesn't Exist Yet."

Early life

Born Cynthia Ann Butt in Steens Center, Oregon--

Stop right there.

No. Nobody who has ever had a name like Cynthia Ann Butt could ever have a hit song. Or a hit anything. Or do anything people would consider worthy of a Wikipedia page. Because Cynthia Ann Butt is the kind of name you don't live down, ever, even if you change it. You will not fool anyone; the smell of Butt will always enter the room ten seconds before you do. Your only hope is that somehow, before you have to start putting that name, that life killing name, on job applications and school transcripts and SATs and dear God, your badgerfracking driver's license, you can get rid of it and legally name yourself something else.

I just turned fifteen. I am rapidly running out of time.

DAY 1

Boom cha-cha boom cha-cha BOOM...

The first time it happens, my seventeen-year old sister Tamarlyn and I are walking down the street on a Saturday morning, the day after my birthday, to a neighborhood yard sale half a mile away from us. Out of nowhere, this rhythm bubbles up in my head:

Boom cha-cha boom cha-cha BOOM...ba da dat-dat-dat...

Tam does not see or hear any evidence of this happening. What she sees is me clapping my hands while I walk.

"You're doing it again," she says.

"Doing what?"

"Clapping where there's no music."

Of course, there _is_ music. It's in my head. But how do I tell her that? Or anyone else in my family?

As an incoming sophomore, I was given a summer assignment to create either a biography or a mock Wikipedia page about where I expect to find myself at age thirty. I knew what I was supposed to write, a bio saying something like:

Cynthia Ann Butt, M.D., grew up in Steens Center, Oregon, an isolated small town near the California border. She received her medical degree from Oregon Health & Science University after graduating summa cum laude from her father's alma mater, California Institute of Technology. Cynthia's father, whose major was information technology, encouraged all three of his daughters to become doctors...

"Encouraged" is an understatement; "relentlessly pressured" comes a lot closer. My parents believe that there is only one way to secure your future in today's job market, in which Ph.D.s drive taxis, lawyers wait tables even after passing the bar exam, and engineers work for almost nothing due to offshore competition. This is what happened to my dad; he majored in information technology and was forced out of the job market by a glut of younger competitors. My oldest sister, Annabeth, is carrying out their wishes right now; she graduated Caltech, nailing down those A's in organic chemistry and molecular biology, got into med school at UCLA, and is a third-year intern at a hospital in Glendale, California.

No doubt Tam will follow suit; she has the grades. I am going to be the biggest obstacle to the Butt sister med school trifecta; last year my grades started to slip. I missed crucial sentences uttered by my teachers and my class notes had more holes in them than a kitchen sponge. I was sent for an ADHD evaluation and was told I didn't have it. I started to develop migraines and stomach problems, probably from all the stress. My verbal prescriptions, courtesy of the doctor and my parents: "Relax" and "Try harder." (Don't those contradict each other? Or am I just being a crank case?) This year I can't let B minus report cards happen again. I know that.

So when I wrote that fake Wikipedia page, I thought of it as kind of a joke, because let's face it, there is no ambition for a teenager more cliched than becoming a pop star. But my fantasy wasn't really about being a pop star; it was more about being a songwriter and musician who other musicians admire. And I actually like the name I picked for myself; the first name, Cyan, is an amalgam of Cynthia Ann, and Beaut is how Butt would be pronounced if it had an E at the end, only my spelling looks a lot cooler. And I invented it right there on the spot, I didn't have to think about it or anything. I suppose I'm creative, in a way.

But although I can write halfway decent sentences, I've never even written a rhyming poem, let alone a song. Of course it's a joke. Has to be. And I can only imagine what my parents would say if I told them I wanted that name. That's not a doctor's name. Not to mention that they'd remind me I came from a completely unmusical family and that it was ridiculous even to think about.

But today, here it is: _Boom cha-cha boom cha-cha BOOM..._

To Tam, I say, "Do I really clap that much?"

"I've seen you do it more and more over the summer. Ever since you went to that old hippie guy's yard sale and bought all those vinyl albums, you've been clapping a lot, even when you don't have music on. What's up with that?"

The sale she is talking about was three months ago, when the old hippie guy who lives four blocks over (and who sticks out like a broken toe in a place like this) had his own individual yard sale. That was where I discovered bossa nova music. He had some of it playing on an old record player, something called "Soul Bossa Nova," which came out in the 1960s and, the old hippie guy told me, has also been used in a bunch of movies. And I got hooked. Why, one might ask, would someone my age be interested in that type of music?

Because it's awesome, that's why. It's like music from some funky lounge that people thought was "space age" back in the sixties, with rust-orange shag carpeting and lime green throw rugs shaped like giant feet and drinks that make you feel like you're getting a preview of heaven without actually having to die. Where people just kind of hang, do their own thing, don't even think about other people's weirdness for a second, because they're enjoying themselves too much. I have no idea if places like that ever existed, but this music makes it sound that way. And I want to be there. I can't even find the words to say how much.

So yes, at that time I bought a bunch of his vinyl and his old box record player plus a set of bongos, and have been wiggling around to Sergio Mendes and Jorge Ben and people like that ever since. Skips, pops, and all. Nobody in my family understands why I would want to listen to scratched-up records instead of nice, clean digital downloads and streams, despite my telling them, repeatedly, that music recorded using analog technology -- which was the case for every commercial album prior to Ry Cooder's _Bop til You Drop_ in 1979 -- should be listened to in an analog format. Even with scratches and pops, you hear things that you don't hear when recordings are reduced to little tiny digital bits. Hardly anyone seems to understand that. Not even the old hippie guy, who was getting rid of his vinyl because was transferring it into MP3s. But I hope he's at the sale, and that he has more vinyl for me to scavenge.

"You're not coming down with autism again, are you?" Tam jokes. "Remember how you used to clap all the time, until they put you on that diet?"

"Autism is no joking matter, Tamarlyn," I say, reciting almost completely verbatim from Mom's autism-recovery Web site. "It is a brain-killing, soul-destroying scourge, and I am in complete and total recovery. I'm just standoffish and have an intractable case of intellectual snobbery."

That last sentence isn't from the Web site, but I know that's what my parents think, because they've all but said those very words to me. Since the age of four, they have had me on the Good Brain Diet, which they make money endorsing, and supposedly it's because of this diet that my speech delay ended and I was willing to snuggle with them, which I had never done before. And now I have to eat it forever, or my autism will return. That's what they tell me. So there are about ten things I can eat, which is why I don't understand why I have fat thighs. I don't have fat anything else, but my thighs look like I'm hoarding food for the winter. Maybe it's because the diet is heavy on organ meats. Supposedly eating the brains of other creatures is what's making my brain closer to a normal one.

So according to my parents, I don't have a disability, just the worst attitude in teenage human history. With Tam's help, I'm working on it.

Seriously. I am.

The second time it happens, it's when we're almost at the sale, and Tam and I haven't spoken for the last ten minutes, just because we have nothing to say. As I walk, I hear and see a band in my mind's ear and eye, heavy on drummers and percussionists with chops galore. The squiggly basslines and propulsive, Latin-influenced rhythms have the festival crowd dancing and grooving and taking videos on their phones and waving their hands in the air, even before I come out on stage. When I come out, I am wearing a sparkly but stretchy sleeveless dress, and I shimmy and slither on over to my position at the front of the stage, where a staggering assortment of congas and bongos and other noisemaking things to tap on awaits me. I tear through that lineup of drums like a specially trained octopus, playing hot, hot rhythms that sound like they couldn't possibly be made by one pair of human hands. The crowd goes bananas, whooping and applauding with every flourish as I play faster and faster —

And then reality intrudes, in the form of a carful of sneering high school boys.

"Hey, pretty Butt, how come you're hanging out with that ugly Butt?"

And as the carful of boys, who I don't recognize but who evidently do recognize me, pulls away, trailing hard laughter in its wake, my fantasy comes crashing down to earth. There's a catch: in order to be a successful musician, the audience has to like me. And I don't have a whole lot of evidence that that's possible, social skills lessons from my well-intended sister notwithstanding.

Tam notices the crushed-tomato look on my face as the car fades into the distance. "Okay," she says. "The first thing you need to remember, when you hear a bunch of douchebros saying stuff like that, is that you can't automatically assume you're the ugly Butt."

I am not sure what is worse, those douchemobile guys thinking I'm a pimple with feet, or my sister, who actually knows me, thinking I'm a dim bulb. I know perfectly well who the ugly Butt is, and so does she. "Come on," I say, making myself smile while praying I don't start crying. My unmatched ability to burst into tears in public has not endeared me to my classmates over the years. "You know better than that."

Tam stops walking, and I follow her, and when I turn to face her, she puts a hand on each of my shoulders. "Okay, so the second thing is, there's no such thing as objectively pretty or ugly. Pretty and ugly are just ideas. You don't have to buy into them." She stares at me intently. "Look at me, Cindy. Promise me you'll remember that, okay?"

I try to look into her eyes. I do. Doctors must be able to make eye contact. This is a skill that I must must must must pick up, even if I feel like my eyeballs are dissolving on contact with others'. I've worked at it all my life. I must work some more.

And I need more self-esteem. I know that's a problem. I must believe. Believe that my terrible hair (which grows as if someone patched my scalp together with leftover scraps from other white people's scalps with the same off-brown hair color but different hair textures) is just as lovely as Tam's gleaming cascade of honey blondeness. Believe that my irregular, frowny features and acne-spotted complexion are just as good to look at as the chiseled porcelain of my sister's face. Believe that my lumpy, ungainly figure is every bit as hot as Tam's graceful, slender hourglass. Believe that anything I have to say is completely fascinating and that anyone who's bored by my ebullient wit and impressive body of arcane knowledge is too shallow to care about. Believe believe believe.

I must believe I could actually be someone who slithers and shimmies and sparkles and gets wild applause from thousands of people. Or, excuse me, someone who could walk into an exam room and say, "Hi, I'm Dr. Butt," and have the patient simply smile sweetly instead of bursting into derisive come-on-that's-not-your-name horselaughs. Or better yet, could marry someone with a nicer name because someone would actually want me for forever, because my beauty would make people forget my horrid surname. Tam and AB don't seem particularly hampered by it.

I shouldn't be thinking about going on stage anyway. Me, a musician? I can't play anything. I have those bongos, but I hardly do anything with them. I can't sing; years of seeing family members and classmates wince at my attempts to do so have provided ample evidence of that. Why am I thinking about this all of a sudden?

I ingest the lump in my throat, then look at Tam for a split second, see her face pleading with me not to be so hard on myself. A lot of girls, if they had a younger sister who ranked somewhere in the bottom five in her grade in popularity (in a school small enough to have only 125 kids in each grade), would never be willing to be seen with her in public, let alone be seen in public trying to build up little sister's badly squashed ego. Tam is Southeast Oregon Nice. Nobody doesn't like her. And that includes me. I do like her. I do appreciate what she's trying to do for me, and I hope she knows that. It's just that teaching me regular-girl (or future-doctor) social skills is like trying to turn a pair of bongos into a pair of rollerskates. But try telling my parents that. They simply don't want to hear it.

I nod at Tam, to let her know I hear what she's saying. Then we start walking, and I feel my hands clapping again, _clap-clap, clap, clap-clap, clap._ And then I hear myself sing, sort of half under my breath: "My name is not Cindy Butt" – _clap-clap, clap_ – "my name is..." Tam whips her head around at me, looking startled, and I drop my voice to a whisper for the next line: "I can't tell you what." Then I shove my hands into the pockets of my hoodie, feeling my reusable shopping bag that I brought for the sale brush against the side of my leg as I walk.

Tam laughs. "Whoa, what was that? Are you rapping?"

"Rapping?" I have no idea what's happening to me. All I know is that, as I'm walking down this street with my genetically superior sister, for the first time in my life I am feeling myself pulsate with music. My own music. For a split second at a time, I can imagine a future that makes me feel good, even if it makes my parents tear their hair out. I can imagine being good at something that nobody else in my family is good at. Or good at something, period. Obviously that's not much of a song, but it's a rhyme, and a spontaneous one at that. My first. "Not really. I...I think I was just rhyming."

" _Butt_ and _what_ aren't really rhymes."

"It all depends on the accent," I say. "In England, _pain_ and _again_ are rhymes. And there's also something called a visual rhyme, do you know about those? Last year in my LA class, Caroleena spent like twenty minutes trying to convince Ms. Kekich that _baseline_ and _Vaseline_ were rhymes because only the first letter was different. That was funny stuff."

I force a laugh, but instead of laughing with me, Tam gives me a sad little smile. "You miss her, don't you?"

She's referring to the fact that Caroleena Cernik, who was my only official friend, moved away two months ago. At the time, honestly, I wasn't broken up about it. We hung out and read books together; we barely spoke. (From the time I turned ten up until a few months ago, I voraciously devoured young adult novels, thinking they might give me a clue about how my peers' minds worked. No such luck.) It was a carryover from the days when our parents arranged playdates, nothing more, or so I thought then. When she moved away, we didn't hug, didn't cry, didn't do any of those girls-parting-forever-geographically things.

But once she was gone, it hit me: I am now officially a person with no friends at all. Which is partly what motivated my parents to get Tam (possibly with the aid of some sort of bribery) to take on their Teach Cindy Social Skills summer project. Of course there are people who would love me to candy-coated pieces, if they only knew I wanted to be friends with them! Never mind that when I asked my parents to name actual names of potential friends, they were stumped.

I decide on the spot that I will no longer answer to Cindy. I don't know if I'm ready to tell people I want to be Cyan yet, not until I can legally change both my first and last names; Cyan Butt is not much of an improvement over Cindy Butt, and someone would undoubtedly notice that cyan is a shade of blue and would start calling me Blue Butt. I am readying my argument for my parents, but in the meantime, if I must, I will settle for Cynthia. That they will have to give me, because it's my legal name.

In response to Tam's question about Caroleena, I answer, "Sometimes." My back starts to itch, and I contort myself to try to scratch it, but it's about half an inch out of my reach. "You know, you don't have to hang around with me all day. You can go be with your friends if you want. I don't mind. You've done plenty for me already."

Tam looks at her watch and grunts. "It's only eleven-thirty. They're probably still hung over from last night. To be honest, I'm starting to get kind of annoyed with most of them."

"Really?"

"Yeah. They're a pain in my rear end." Everyone in our family carefully avoids the use of the word _butt_ unless we're saying our names. "They always want something, and they're never there for me when _I_ want something."

"Wow," I say. "You hardly ever say anything bad about anyone."

"Even I have my limits," Tam says. Which is why it bewilders me that about thirty seconds later, we pass one of her friends' houses, and a bunch of Tam's friends pour out of the house and swarm over her, and they all squeal and hug and kiss each other like they haven't seen each other in years, and Tam forgets I exist. I'm starting to get the idea that normal-girl social skills involve a lot of lying, but I'm not sure whether it's them she's lying to or me.

I wave to her as she disappears into her crowd, and then, as I am walking away, it happens a third time: _Boom cha-cha boom cha-cha BOOM..._

As I clap my hands – silently, so I won't be detected – I hear myself softly sing: "Is there any truth to the rumor" – _clap-clap, clap –_ "that my family has no sense of humor?"

The girl on the album cover has long black frizzy hair, and her eyes are so dark they look almost like one big pupil. She looks...I don't know how to describe it, exactly. Preoccupied? Obsessed?

The title of the album is _Just Looking_ , and it's by a singer named Amy Zander, who I've never heard of before. But one of the songs on it is a Sergio Mendes song called "Look Around," which is one of my favorites. Unlike the other albums on the table, which are priced at fifty cents apiece, this one is marked two dollars.

"That girl was about your age when she made that record," says the old hippie guy, who is probably my grandfather's age, the same one whose bossa nova albums I bought a few months ago. He did show up today, thank you God. He has long gray hair and a gray beard and a rainbow-swirl tie-dye shirt that's a size too small for him. It might be the same shirt he wore last time I saw him, but I never remember things like that in detail.

I look at the picture again. This girl looks a lot older than fifteen, but I suppose they could do a lot with makeup, even back in the sixties. Then I look back at the old hippie guy, who says, "The reason that album's two dollars is because it's a rarity. It's in terrible shape, but if it was brand new, it would run you probably fifty bucks or more, if you can even find it. It wasn't a big seller, and that's the only one she made. You can't find any digital versions of it either."

I pull the inner sleeve, which is brown and slightly brittle, out of the cover. Then I slide the vinyl out of the sleeve to take a look at it on both sides. "This really looks thrashed."

"I told you it was. But a few songs on there are playable. If you like that kind of music, you'll probably like her. She played the drums too."

"In 1969?"

"Yeah, she was ahead of her time. But she played a special drum set they call a cocktail kit. You play it standing up. And she had a very unique voice. Some people would probably call it an acquired taste, let's just put it that way. But she didn't sound like anyone else."

I slip the vinyl back in the inner sleeve and put the sleeve back in the jacket. Then I tuck the album under my arm and look in my purse for my cash. I count out one dollar bill, two quarters, three dimes, and four nickels, and hand it to Hippie Geezer Man, then slip the record into my shopping bag. "I can't wait to hear it," I tell him. I sort of mean it, too. How could I have eaten, drunk, and slept bossa nova for the last three months, and never have heard of this girl? I have spent my summer lurking constantly on bossa nova message boards and blogs, and I don't remember any posts about an Amy Zander.

When I get the Amy Zander album home and put it on, I find that it's almost unlistenable because of all the skips. But from what little I can hear, her voice is hypnotic; it starts really low, then swoops way up into the sky, then back down again, and it has a tight, heavy vibrato. I wish I could hear it for real. Maybe if I look her up, I'll find a video or some kind of pirate download or something.

Bingo. Here's a video of Amy circa 1970, performing "Look Around" on a children's show called _Your Generation._ I've heard of it because I've seen video of Joao Gilberto, Charlie Byrd, and David Frischberg on it. Pretty highbrow stuff for a show aimed at third graders. I click on it and wait while the video begins its hiccupy download. Our dinky little ten-stoplight exurb doesn't have the swiftest Net connections. Finally, I get it to play. The video quality is bad (it looks like someone filmed a TV set playing the show) and the sound quality is worse, but at least it's not skipping and popping, so I can actually hear a song of hers all the way through.

And I can't believe what I am hearing.

And seeing.

On a scale of zero to a hundred, with zero being "if you play this song anywhere in my time zone I will turn a football stadium power hose on your face," and a hundred being "if you don't like this, I don't like you," this is my first and only hundred, maybe the only hundred I will ever have. Amy Zander kicks the stuffing out of this song, just kills it dead, in the best possible way. All those cute and fluffy words about grains of sand and drops of rain become angry poetry in her mouth as she thrashes away on those drums so hard she has to grab them before they fall over.

The children are watching her and dutifully trying to clap along, like they usually do when there's a musical guest, but they look completely, utterly, gloriously confused by what they are seeing. You can see them looking strangely at each other, like, "Is she okay?"

Oh, she is more than okay. She is planting seeds in their little minds that will change them forever, even if they don't know it in that moment, as they are trying and failing to clap to her wildly unpredictable rhythms.

When the video is over, only then do I realize that I haven't breathed in the entire four minutes I've watched this, and I feel myself suck in a giant lungful of oxygen. Then I play the video again.

And again.

And again.

After the twentieth straight time watching this (I counted), I close the window and make sure to delete my browsing history, then shut the computer down. In theory my parents don't monitor my Net usage any more, but I can't trust anyone in this house not to snoop. Even Tam could be bribed to do it, I'm sure.

I want to watch it some more. And then I want to find out everything there is to know about her.

But I'm afraid to. Is she dead? If I found out she was, that would kill me. This girl cannot possibly be dead. Someone like this has to live forever.

Oh, Amy.

# STAGE I:

# Disease begins to grow in one area of the body; the first symptoms might manifest here, but are frequently mistaken for those of a different disease.

DAY 15

School starts again in thirteen hours, seven minutes, and twenty-four seconds, and I'm sitting on my twin bed in my shoebox of a bedroom, picking at the pills of my twentieth-century blue polyester comforter, trying with all my might to get my nerves to calm down. Tonight is the night I have to walk the thirty feet between here and my parents' workspace to tell my parents I want to be Cyan Beaut. It was going to be Friday night, but I got caught up in doing Amy research (which has come to almost nothing), and put it off until Saturday. On Saturday, I came down with a migraine. Today I still don't feel so hot; my stomach is cramping so hard it feels like my digestive tract is pumping out brown diamonds, and my pulse is going like I just ran up twenty flights of stairs with a live panda strapped to my chest. But it has to be done now.

The reason it has to be done now is because when I walk into school tomorrow, I want to be able to tell everyone that this is my name now, and even if it can't be officially legal yet, it will be soon, so I have the right to call myself that. Really, I shouldn't have waited this long. But I know this is not going to be a walk in the park. I've brought up the idea of changing my name before, although not what I wanted to change it to (because I didn't know yet), and they think I'm drama royalty for even thinking the name Cindy Butt is what's slowing me down. I just have to smile more. Be friendlier. Ask people questions about themselves and never talk about myself. But don't ask too much, or they'll think I'm nosy. And don't just smile and nod, because then they'll think I'm dull. Know when I'm supposed to look happy for them and when I'm supposed to cluck with sympathy. Laugh at their jokes, but not too loudly, and understand just what it is I'm supposed to be laughing about, even if I don't. Yeah. It's a lead-pipe cinch, right?

What they don't get is that everyone else in this family is pretty, and I'm not. If I was a Pretty Butt, I could skate by with the name. If I was _really_ pretty, nobody would give a rodent's hindquarters about my social skills, either. But I can't be sandbagged with being funny-looking _and_ having a jokey name _and_ being socially Butt-backwards. The combination is lethal. And since it would be ludicrously expensive to make me pretty even if it were physically possible, and I have the dead-man's learning curve when it comes to meshing with people in spite of Tam's Herculean efforts all summer, it has to start with the name change. With the name change, I can leave behind the Butt of All Jokes for good. That girl will not exist anymore. There will be a new girl in town, full of sultry rhythms and off-the-charts creativity, who just happens to inhabit the same set of cells. The transformation will shock them in exactly the right way, as much as Amy's performance on _Your Generation_ shocked those little kids.

What's in a name? Only everything. I don't care what William fracking Shakespeare said; if a rose was called a stinkburger, it would smell like a stinkburger. I do not want to smell like a stinkburger, or a Butt, for one second longer than I have to.

I have all of this written down on index cards for when I talk to them. They will be in their study/office, working on bloggy things. Dad handles the tech stuff, Mom does the writing. I should not be this terrified of talking to my parents. It's not like they're going to beat me up for this or anything. But getting laughed at is a definite possibility.

I clutch the cards in my hands, then fire up Amy's video of "Look Around." It's the only one I have been able to find so far, and by now I have played it enough times that it's burned into my memory and I shouldn't ever have to play it again. But play it I do. "Just look around," I sing along with her, over and over again, drumming the back of my desk chair as I channel her furious energy, first with one hand, and then with two, forgetting the index cards are in my hand.

And of course, they go flying all over the room.

I collect all the index cards but one, which I spy under my desk. I crawl under there to get it, but as I'm backing out, I forget that the top of the desk is still right over my head, and I whack my head on the drawer. Hard. "Ow!" I yelp. Then I bang my head on the wall behind the desk, deliberately, six more times, because I can't fracking believe I keep doing that. Cyan Beaut will not whack her head on anything, deliberately or not. But Cindy Butt? Still clumsier than a five-legged giraffe. It's gotta stop.

I sit on the floor holding my pile of cards, and will myself to pull it together. Then I hear a girl's voice in my head, whispering to me.

Go get 'em, tigress. You deserve this.

I don't know whose voice it is. It's not mine, and it's not anyone I recognize. And I know I'm alone in here.

I use the desk chair to pull myself up, then check myself in the mirror before I go in there. I take off my glasses, picture myself with my entire head of hair dyed electric blue, and not with the spray-on stuff I'll be using tomorrow to create a little blue streak in my unmanageable pile of ash brown, but with real hair dye. The color of Cyan. If I tilt my head at the right angle, I can see Cyan. But I don't know if my parents will be looking at me from that angle.

Other things not to do in their presence while I'm making my case: Pass gas of any kind; stick any of my fingers, including thumbs, into any of my orifices; scratch myself; look at the ceiling or the floor or the wall instead of at them; say "um" every other word; puke, or mention any desire to do so; trip on the rug; bump into the furniture; knock over something breakable or spillable. I get exhausted just thinking about that list. I do at least three of those things every single day, often in the presence of witnesses. How do people just hold it in all day?

Ready or not, here I come. I look over the cards one more time, then swallow hard, and begin walking as slowly as possible across the house to their office. They are at their respective desks typing away at their respective laptops. _Oh, they're busy,_ I think, _maybe now isn't_...

And then, with my lips unwittingly parted, I burp. I can already scratch one of the things off my do-not-do list. That gets their attention, although not in the way I planned it. "'Scuse me," I say, with an embarrassed chuckle. "Um...that wasn't...anyway, am I interrupting anything?"

Mom smiles her former-plus-size-model smile. "Nothing that can't wait." On the wall behind her is something I am trying desperately not to look at: a pictorial chart, in color, of what a child's bowel movements are supposed to look like if the Good Brain Diet is being followed properly. This was designed by Dr. Catherine Nansi, who invented the diet. That's another obstacle that I have to becoming a physician: I cannot look at things like feces and vomit and open sores and crushed human tissue, even in movies, without wanting to scream or heave. I'm pretty sure that medical professionals are supposed to be calmly neutral in the presence of such things, and I don't see that happening for me. "So what's up?" Mom says, closing her laptop. You excited about school starting tomorrow?"

I recoil. "You're kidding, right? You know school is a torture chamber for me."

"She's fifteen," Dad reminds her. Dad is one of those guys who was a pencil-necked geek in high school but grew up to be handsome enough, in a slim, goateed sort of way, that he and Mom can make infomercials hawking the GBD and not melt any camera lenses. But he's not exactly what you'd call strapping; Mom is taller than he is, and outweighs him too. "She's fifteen, she's not allowed to say she's excited about school."

Oh, Dad. Not allowed by _whom?_ Does he really not know that my peers have universally and irrevocably rejected me, regardless of my stated attitude about starting school? If he does, it's not because he hasn't been told. "I doubt most girls my age would use the words _torture chamber_ to describe their school."

"I had the time of my life in high school," Mom says. "And I don't know why you're so worried that people won't like you. You don't have a mean bone in your body."

Yeah. This is what I'm dealing with here. These people refuse to believe there's any such thing as a social reject, even though Dad _was_ one when he was my age; maybe by now Mom has convinced him he just had a bad attitude about it. "If you think that _mean bones_ are the only reason people get snubbed," I say, glancing down at the carpet briefly before realizing I'm supposed to be talking to them and not the rug, "you really don't live in my world, Mom. I'm telling you, my experience is nothing like yours. And that's kind of what I wanted to talk to you guys about."

"Okay," Dad says. "Shoot."

I make a pistol motion with my hand and let out a little _bang_ noise. They smile indulgently but do not laugh. "So...remember when I said I wanted to change my name but didn't know what I wanted to change it to? Well, now I do." I hear my voice quaver during the last sentence, a sure sign that my amped nerves have taken over my breath control, and I fixate on my index cards, trying to get myself calmed down.

"Oh, really?" Mom says. "What name do you want?"

I take a deep breath and hold it a second, then let it out. "Well, I was just kind of playing around with the spelling...and what I came up with is Cyan Beaut. C-Y-A-N B-E-A-U-T."

My parents look at each other like, "isn't this cute." I despise that look. "Cyan?" Dad says. "You mean as in 'cyan, magenta, and yellow'?"

"What's 'cyan, magenta, and yellow'?" Mom asks him.

"Printer ink colors," Dad says. "Cyan is a shade of blue, magenta is a red, and yellow is...yellow."

"Got it," Mom says.

"And Cy...An is also the first two letters of my first and middle names," I add.

"Cindy," Dad says, "there is nothing wrong with your given name. Your name is our name. Why do you want to reject it?"

"I don't know what the big deal is," I say, feeling magenta start to creep up to my face. "You guys use pseudonyms on the blog and in interviews. If our name is so great, than why are you guys 'Shelley and Harrison Kelly' instead of 'Belinda and Daniel Butt'? How come the site is called 'Haley off the Spectrum' and not 'Cindy off the Spectrum'?"

"We do that to protect everyone's privacy," Mom says. "Not because the family name embarrasses us."

"Like everyone here doesn't know," I mutter.

"Everyone here might know," Dad says, "but everyone in Dubuque, Iowa and San Antonio, Texas, and everywhere else, doesn't know."

He has me there. If I'm going to be nationally famous, I don't want it to be for the color of my droppings, or what I eat to make them that way. "I have social obstacles you guys don't have," I protest. "I have social obstacles my beautiful and charming sisters don't have. All I ever hear in school is Butt, Butt, Butt, Butt. Butt Ugly. Ugly Butt. I have to do something now, or I'll be the Ugly Butt forever. This can't wait three years."

Dad picks up a pen from his desk and starts fiddling with it. "Let me tell you a story about a girl I went to middle school with," he says. "Her name was Rivka Winokur. She was chubby and socially awkward and didn't know how to dress. But she came back to school in eighth grade after the summer and she was out to make an impression. She had her hair streaked blonde, she wore a hot pink minidress, and she went out to the smoking court to show off her newly acquired habit of smoking cigarettes, which was the ultimate in badass in my day. You know what the kids at school did when they saw the new Rivka?"

I feel a searing itch start to take over the bottom of my foot. I very much do not want to take off my shoe and my sock to scratch it, but it's tormenting me. I wriggle my foot around in my shoe and say, "No, Dad, tell me. What did your peers do when they saw the new Rivka?"

"They laughed," Dad says. "They could not stop laughing. They laughed at her like they'd never laughed at her before. They laughed so hard that Rivka went home sick that day and didn't come back for a month. And when she came back, her hair was back to brown, and she was wearing her usual stained sweats, and she never smoked again."

I lose my battle with my itching foot, and lean up against the wall to hastily remove my shoe and sock to scratch it. They do not look amused by this. Future doctors aren't supposed to scratch their feet either. "You're comparing my wanting a name change to taking up smoking?"

"Cyan Beaut is a much weirder name than Cindy Butt," Dad says. "It's not going to do for you what you think it will."

See, this is what I hate about asking Dad for anything. Whatever my heart wants, he can "logic" me out of. And he's probably right that people in school probably aren't going to like me any better if I have a new name. I glance hastily at my index cards to see if I have a decent counter-argument written down. I don't. Instead, I just sputter, "You know why Rivka's big transformation failed, Dad? Because she forgot to change her name."

"But...Cyan Beaut?" Mom says, then bites her lip to keep from laughing. "That sounds like the name of a pole dancer or something."

"Or a Phish groupie," Dad says. "Remember those girls who used to show up at their concerts dressed up like neon-colored mermaids, and they all had names like Koi Pond?"

Mom lets a half-laugh escape from her. "Right. Or, you know, some...flaky artistic type." Then she looks up at me, not smiling at all. "That's not you."

And then it hits me, right there, that I have a much better argument to make in favor of the name change. But I can't go there ever. Because Cyan Beaut is my _music name,_ and my parents think pole dancers, Phish groupies, and artists (including musical artists) are exactly the same thing.

My parents have no idea about me and music. They don't know about my percussionist fantasies. They don't know anything about Amy, either. I have not mentioned Amy to anyone. Tam knows I bought that album, but she thinks it's just another bossa nova album to add to my burgeoning collection. They don't know what any of this means to me. I should tell them. They should know right now that there is no way I can possibly be a doctor. This is a part of me that's too big to hide.

But if I fight them tooth and nail to get them to agree to a name change and they won't budge, I can only imagine the nuclear meltdown that would happen if I told them I can't be who, or what, they want me to be. I'm not refusing to be that person. I wish I could be that person, it would make my life so much easier. But with every passing day, it becomes more obvious to me that I can't. It makes me sick.

"If you want to change your name when you're eighteen, we can't stop you," Dad says. "But I think it's just going to get in your way."

I sigh. "Well, could you guys at least not call me Cindy anymore? That's kind of a baby name."

My parents glance at each other, then look back at me and nod. "Okay, Cynthia," Dad says, "you got it."

"Thank you," I say, although I don't know what I'm thanking him for. I back out of their office, close the door, turn on my heels, and clap my hands, and sing, "Just look around, stop and look around," over and over again until I get to my room. When I get there I close my own door, and as soon as I do, I hear that girl's voice talking to me again, all deep and echoey, from inside my head.

_You'll be okay,_ she says. _You're already okay. These people aren't going to hold you down._

Then I get a mental picture of her. She's about my age, with wild curly dark hair and inky-black eyes, in a black t-shirt and vinyl miniskirt. And of course, now I know who it is.

Amy.

Here is what I've managed to find out so far about Amy Zander, after countless hours of research over the last two weeks.

If alive, Amy is now approximately sixty-two years old. The reason I say "if alive" is that her Wikipedia page, which is constantly being flagged or taken down for "lack of notoriety," lists her as a "possibly living person" with a birth year of "c.1954." And "lack of notoriety," in Wikipedia terms, means your page gets zapped if not enough people have heard of you. So we're talking about someone who completely dropped out of sight for decades. As far as I can tell, she recorded only that one album. She has no credits on her IMDB page later than 1971, and I have yet to locate even one interview of her online.

I haven't even managed to find a single image anywhere of her adult self. Her parents are both deceased. Her dad was a session drummer in Los Angeles named Rick Zander, and he produced her album and co-wrote four songs on it with her. Her mom's profession, if any, is publicly unknown. Amy's birth place is listed as Santa Monica, California, which is a beach town on the western edge of L.A., and she went to New York University and majored in music education. I have been able to find nothing about what she did after that. Nothing about whether she got married, had a family, or anything like that. But also, no confirmation of her death. Can you really die and not have anyone find out about it?

So with no modern-day images of Amy for me to build on, the Amy that I "see" before me now, in my room, is identical to the one on her album cover and in the video, a girl my age. Her "voice" is a teenager's voice; deeper than the average girl's, but clearly not the voice of a woman of grandma age, and it has that echo like it's reverberating off the inside of my skull. She's translucent; when she "appears" before me I can see through her. She doesn't seem real, exactly, but as I'm sitting on my creaky, tiny bed, staring at my worn, stained powder blue carpeting, I can feel her presence, standing before me.

Yikes. I'm too old to have imaginary friends. But will this spectre (I don't know what else to call it) of Amy answer me if I "think" my questions to her?

I ask Spectral Amy, without speaking out loud: _Where are you now?_

_What do you mean?_ Spectral Amy asks me. _I'm right here._

_No, I mean the 2016 version of you,_ I tell her. _What have you been doing the last almost half century? Nobody seems to know, and if they are, they aren't telling._

And then she vanishes. Maybe that's a good thing. It's not like I don't have enough social difficulties, without having a spectral "friend" who's sixty-two and acts fifteen.

DAY 16

Three months ago, when I last walked through the doors of Eisenhower High School on my way home for the summer, I had never heard of Amy Zander. Now, when I walk back in those doors on the first day of school, it seems preposterous, that a world with Amy's music in it existed for my entire life and I never knew. What else could I possibly have been paying attention to all this time that was so important?

Last night, before I went to bed, I willed myself not to dream about Amy. I don't want to like her that much. So far I have not had any dreams about her, but this may be because I sleep like a cat, half awake for twelve hours, and not like a human being. It's reached the point where I almost don't have to physically put on her music; I already know it so well that I can conjure up every single note, every inflection, in my head.

I know this is not normal.

Yes, a lot of people (even adults) get stuck on certain singers or bands or whatever else they like. That's not the abnormal part. The abnormal part is that I feel like I'm living in some parallel universe where she existed and nobody knows except me (and Hippie Geezer Man, and for all I know I dreamed him up too). When normies become fans of something, they have other fans to share their fandom with, and they share it with anyone they think might be interested. But even the bossa nova heads online seem to have forgotten all about Amy. Either that or I am terrible with search engines. So yeah, I might as well be a fan of pocket lint from the nineteenth century or something, for all I can share this with anyone else.

Caroleena and I used to have each other as buffers on the first day of school. I could always meet up with her and walk in with her, to guard against people cornering me at random and baiting me. We never had much to say to each other, but at least we had that. So now I'm just bracing myself for what's coming, now that I have to brave these hallways all alone, for the first time. Tam's classes are in the junior-senior wing, so she has a separate entrance.

As I walk through the entry doors, putting one misshapen leg in front of the other, it hits me that just three weeks ago, if you had asked me what my hopes for the school year were, they'd have been the same as they were for the nine years before that: that people would hate me a little less than they did the year before, not because they appreciated me more (fat chance of that) but because they found something more amusing to do than tell me over and over again that I need to kill myself, yesterday if possible. I still don't know why that's even funny to anyone.

But now, I feel like Amy is with me in the hallways, telling me, _screw those people. They're never going to get out of this dump. They only hate you because they know you're going to leave them in the dust._

In my mind, I ask her, _how do you know that? Couldn't it just be that they know Cindy Butt will never amount to anything?_

And she answers: _You are not Cindy Butt. That's just a name you've been stuck with. It's not who you are._

As I walk down the hall, I watch other girls, squealing and hugging each other, so happy to be reunited. I watch boyfriends and girlfriends wrapped around each other in total, love-drugged bliss. I have no idea what that's like, for someone to light up or want to touch me in a nice way when they see me, other than my parents, and not even them all that often lately. Am I really that bad? That evil? That toxic? But according to Mom on her blog, I'm a normal girl who just likes to read a lot, so much so that she even does that when she's with her friends. Isn't that precious?

"Grab the Butt! Grab the Butt! Grab the Butt!"

Boys. They've been doing that to me, running up to me in groups, miming ass-grabs in the hall and yelling my name when they think no one's looking, since...well, I don't even remember a year when they didn't do it. Once, in seventh grade, they actually did grab me for real and I reported them, so now they just get as close as they're legally allowed to, always making me wonder if they're going to go over the line and I'm going to have to go through the hassle of reporting them all over again. That was not fun.

You'd think it would bother them that they've been doing the same thing over and over again since first grade, but I get the feeling that if I don't get the fracking hell out of Steens Center they'll be grabbing me from the second we graduate. I can just see it now, when I'm eighty, these now-ancient bros tackling me at the bus stop and kicking my walker aside so they can do a group grope. I can only pray that they're all in wheelchairs by then, but then they'd probably just use blow darts or something to nail me. As they form a ring around me in the hallway and wave their hands near the forbidden zone, I tighten up, waiting for it to be over.

This time, though, a short, slightly built, young-looking, blondish man walks up to them in the hall and says, "Guys," before they can manage to really get going. They mumble something about how they were just kidding and Cindy knows it's a joke, blah de blah, but the man doesn't smile, he just says, "You guys need to get better jokes, or next time I'm going to have to report you." They all slink off with their lizard tails between their lizard legs, and I'm about to turn to the man and mouth the words _thank you_ , when I see that he's just about to disappear into room 4, one room down from here. That's my homeroom. So that must be Mr. Shunsberg, who wasn't here last year.

_At least you know your homeroom teacher might not be a douchelord,_ Spectral Amy whispers to me. Her deep, throaty voice feels good in my inner ear. I feel my lips curl upward, even though I have no idea what the real Amy's speaking voice sounds (or sounded) like, and the word "douchelord" probably didn't exist when she was my age.

I walk into the room, and maybe I'm imagining things, but this time I'm not hearing people burst into collective snickers or chants of "Cindy Butt, Cindy Butt" the minute I enter. Tam has told me that ninth grade is usually the peak of social horror like I've experienced and people gradually start to lose interest in acting like eight-year-olds after that. I'm not so sure; let's be real, most _adults_ act like eight-year-olds, except that they put different things in their mouths. But according to her, by later in high school, people start getting over themselves, or at least spread their douchery around a little more instead of concentrating on one person to hate out of existence. That's something, I guess.

On the other hand, this is a tiny school; both high schools here (Steens Center High is the other one) used to be elementary schools. (At least this school is in an actual building; in middle school, we literally went to classes in trailers. If they could have legally gotten away with using Honey Buckets for bathrooms, they probably would have.) And we don't get a lot of new people here, because there aren't many jobs. So I'm a little surprised to see a tall, stocky girl I don't recognize, wearing a black sparkly beret and a red crushed velvet cape, slipping something –a note?--on to the teacher's desk while he's writing stuff on the whiteboard. She then comes down the aisle where I'm sitting, and when she passes by, I catch a whiff of something that takes a few seconds for me to identify. Then I glance up at her waist-length hair, which is light brown with jet black streaks in it, and realize it's the smell of shoe polish. She has shoe polish in her hair. I have my little Cyan streak in the front of mine, but I used a product made for hair. Shoe polish. Wow.

"What are _you_ staring at?" she growls at me.

Without thinking, I blurt out, "You're a who, not a what." As soon as the words are out of my mouth, I think, are you out of your navel-picking mind, C? You don't know anything about this girl, she could beat the snot out of you over this. But instead she just shrugs as if to say, well, that's different, and makes her way to her seat in the back of the room.

The final bell rings, and now comes the time I always dread the most: roll call. See, sometimes people forget for a minute what my name is. But as soon as they hear it, out come the jokes. Again. Cindy Flat Butt. Butt Plug. Cinder Butthole. And my personal fave, Cigarette. Get it? Cigarette Butt? Yeah, I'm not exactly rolling on the floor, either. At least I'm in the beginning of the alphabet, so I get it over with early.

But before Mr. Shunsberg can get to that, he has to introduce himself to us, because we don't know him. Now that I'm getting a good look at him, I can see that he has a baby face that makes him look about twelve. As soon as he says his name, I hear Ryan Crousse, the class clown, mutter to no one in particular, "I thought our teachers had to be older than us." A few kids snicker.

"I heard that," Mr. Shunsberg says, with a wry grin. "But just so you know, I'm twenty-five. Not only that, but I'm married and have a fourteen-month-old son."

"Ooooh," Ryan coos in mock astonishment.

"What's the baby's name?" Shaina Dill asks. Shaina is one of the nice ones. When I got new glasses last year, with multicolored frames, she complimented me. I don't think she's ever said a bad word about anyone. How do people do that?

"Harry," Mr. Shunsberg says. "And to answer your next question...yes, my wife is a Harry Potter junkie." He then puts on his reading glasses, picks up the roll-call paper, and starts in. He goes through Rayne Aardsma, Jayden Allis, Lora Benitez, and Mya Brisco, and I suck on my lip and wait for what's coming. He squints at the paper, like he can't quite believe what he's reading. "Cynthia...is that Butt?" Of course it gets a big laugh. My name will never stop being funny.

I sigh. "Yes, that's not a typo."

"So that's why those –"

"Yup."

He purses his lips and shakes his head, and for a second I wonder if he got picked on in school too. He's small enough, and he doesn't exactly strike me as hip, slick, and cool. "So do you prefer Cynthia, or—"

I should tell him I prefer Cyan. But after what happened last night, that's a non-starter. "Cynthia's fine," I murmur, eyes fixated on my notebook.

"Cynthia Butt what?" Ryan says, to more giggles.

"Congratulations," I say, still looking down at my desk while I talk to him. "It took you seven years, but you finally came up with a new one."

Then Ryan repeats the joke, "Cynthia Butt what?", only this time he runs "Butt" and "what" together so that the last word sounds like an incredibly vile word that I refuse to ever type or say.

"Watch the language," Mr. Shunsberg says to him. "Homeroom teachers don't give out grades, but we can report you." He then runs down the list until he gets to S, where there's a name I've never heard before. This has to be the new girl. He squints hard at the paper and even holds it a little away from his face, like it smells bad. "I know I'm going to get this wrong...but is it Ren, uh—"

"Ren-AH-tay," the girl says. "I put a note on your desk telling you how to pronounce it. Everybody gets it wrong. I should just put an accent over the last E or something."

"I'm so sorry," Mr. Shunsberg says, and makes a note on the roll-call list. "Renate...Silverdick? Is that—"

"Yes," Renate says through gritted teeth, while almost everyone except me and Mr. Shunsberg busts up laughing. "I didn't pick it out, so shut up."

"Okay, everybody, cool it with the pointing and laughing," Mr. Shunsberg says. Then he turns back to Renate. "You're new here?"

"Yeah, I'm a transfer from Steens Center."

Mr. Shunsberg makes another note on the list. "I thought this _was_ Steens Center."

"Um, hello?" Renate says. "Steens Center _High School_. That's the other high school here?"

Now everyone is laughing at Mr. Shunsberg. He puts a hand to his forehead. "Of course. I just...well, welcome to Eisenhower."

Renate rolls her eyes. "Thanks bunches."

A transfer? People don't usually move from one part of Steens Center to the other; either they stay in the same place forever, or they get all the way out. There hasn't been a new house built here in over thirty years, and the closest town with more than a handful of jobs is more than a hundred miles away. And Steens Center is small enough that you can walk from one high school to the other in about forty minutes if you're not very fast. That means Renate Silverdick probably got _expelled_ from Steens Center High. For what, I wonder. But of course, with a name like Silverdick, she's got the same bulls-eye painted on her that I do, and unlike me she looks like she can lay waste to almost anyone who starts up with her. I've mostly avoided too many physical poundings by making as quick an exit as possible and learning numerous distraction techniques.

"Renate's a nice name," Shaina tells her.

Renate's frown softens a little. "Thanks."

_You should talk to her,_ Spectral Amy says.

_Now?_ I say back to her in my head.

Of course not. Between classes. But you guys probably have a lot in common.

_I need more in common with someone than an unfortunate name,_ I tell Spectral Amy.

"Who are you talking to?" Lora Benitez, who's sitting directly to my left, whispers to me. Lora seems pleasant enough. She's Native American (Paiute) and Mexican American, one of the few students here who isn't white, plus she has a little bit of a lisp, so she's gotten her share of crap too. But she almost never talks, so when she says that, I recoil a little and point to myself.

"What? You mean me?" I whisper back.

"Yeah. Your lips are moving. Who are you talking to?"

"Nobody. I didn't know I was doing that."

Lora nods and turns back towards the teacher. I put a hand over my mouth. Have I been doing that all this time, mouthing all my thoughts? Or did it just start up now?

Amy's music is a constant soundtrack in my head all day long, and no less than three teachers have given me the side-eye for drumming on my desk today. I am getting very good at paradiddles, but no one is impressed. The latest is my Biology 2 teacher, Mr. Graves, and I can't afford to get on another science teacher's bad side, not after the B minuses I got in Life Science last year. When I'm sitting in his class, which is sixth period, it hits me that Mr. Graves does indeed resemble an undertaker, someone who has seen so many dead bodies he's beginning to look like one, and _apropos_ of nothing anyone has said out loud, the thought makes me start laughing. _Do not think about coffins, just don't, just don't..._ And then it starts up again. I tell him I'm sorry and it has nothing to do with him. Because it doesn't. I just have an extra ticklish brain today. That part, I don't tell him. But it's the first day of school and he already thinks I'm out to lunch. Not good, C., not good.

When I hit the restroom in between sixth period and seventh, I pull out my phone and type into my Web browser, _I laugh even when no one is saying anything to me_ , and when I look over the search results, the first one is for something named "Ten Confessions of Someone with Depression," but the actual phrase I typed isn't in the excerpt, so I don't even know why it showed up. I delete the page, then type, _I have interests no one else my age has,_ and two of the top five results are about social anxiety disorders.

Then I delete that page and as the warning bell sounds, I furtively type in _I hear music in my head_ , and this time the top of the list shows auditory (sound) hallucinations and something called "musical ear syndrome," which is a type of auditory hallucination that happens to people who are going deaf. Then I type in _I can't stop clapping and drumming,_ and the first three listings are about drummers and the fourth is a message board post about a ten-year-old kid who's constantly clapping and snapping. I take a peek at that post and the replies advise that the parents get him evaluated for autism. Mom and Dad are going to love that one.

So according to my Web browser, I might be a drummer, but I am also either mentally ill, about to lose my hearing, or not really "off the spectrum." I knew I should have left my phone in my fracking purse.

Don't pay any attention to that, Spectral Amy murmurs. You can't tell anything from a browser search on the toilet, come on. You'll do real research later.

I delete the browser page, put the phone away and quickly yank up my pants so I won't be late for Language Arts, the only class I have virtually no chance of getting a bad grade in if I show up on time.

After school, I am in my room sitting at my desk, with yard sale bongos in my lap, having my after school snack of pickled steamed chicken skin (yes, really; Dr. Nansi claims it plugs holes in the gut), and doing an "official" Net search about auditory hallucinations. Because that's what this Amy thing is, right? I hear a voice in my head and I know it's not mine, and my head is playing her music on a loop, so what else could it be?

I wipe my fingers off with my napkin and tap out a paradiddle on the bongos: _right-left-right-right, left-right-left-left..._.I manage to get in two repeats before the search page loads with the results, and I get a laundry list of psych disorders: schizophrenia, psychosis, schizoaffective disorder. Then I look up _hearing voices_ , and believe it or not, there are a few things listed there that say hearing voices isn't necessarily a _bad_ thing, as long as those voices aren't being mean to you or telling you to harm people. But no one says it's perfectly normal, either.

_Why would you even want to be "perfectly normal"?_ Spectral Amy says to me. _There are enough boring people in the world, why be one of them if you don't have to?_

_I'm all for not being boring,_ I tell her. _But you know what? I really need you to be a little quieter. Once people find out about you, I'll never live it down._

_I am the best thing that's ever happened to you,_ she murmurs.

Instead of answering her, I tap out paradiddles, _right-left-right-right, left-right-left-left,_ at faster and faster speeds, picturing hundreds of bare feet dancing on soft grass, thousands of glow sticks bobbing up and down in the darkness in time to me...

_You see?_ Spectral Amy says. _Would you be doing that right now if it wasn't for me?_

_No, and that's what sucks about it,_ I say. _How can I ever possibly explain this to anyone?_

_Being influenced by other musicians is as natural as it gets,_ Spectral Amy says.

I sigh and start doing more searches about psych disorders.

DAYS 19-21

"Dr. No, the school psychologist for the Steens Center School District, has office hours here this week on Tuesday and Thursday after—"

The squeaky freshman-girl voice reading the morning announcements can't get through the rest of that sentence without cracking up, and most of my homeroom class is giggling also. Dr. _No_? Don't people have the most hilarious names? Out come the James Bond jokes, right on cue. _The successful criminal brain is always superior; it has to be, mwahaha!_ My own funnybone remains untouched. I'll bet anything that it's a Southeast Asian name and it's not actually spelled N-O, and that it isn't even supposed to be pronounced that way; the urbane teen sophisticates of Steens Center apparently think Southeast Asia is a separate planet.

I look around to see if anyone is having a similar response to mine. Renate Silverdick, sitting two seats over from me, isn't laughing, but she isn't looking around to see if anyone else is, either. From where I'm sitting, what she seems to be doing is drawing. Drawing a girl in a cape and a beret. A self-portrait on lined notebook paper, with a cheap ballpoint pen. Impressive. I'm careful not to stare at her, though. After only three days of exposure to Renate, I get the impression that she wants to be noticed, but doesn't want to notice other people noticing her.

Sure enough, once the freshman announcer girl spells out the name of the school shrink, it's N-G-O. Dr. Peter Ngo. Which I thought was supposed to be pronounced like _mango_ without the first two letters. But nobody here cares about doing the right thing; it's majority rules, and if the majority is dominated by boneheads, _c'est la guerre._ The announcer girl says that you can email him for a confidential appointment after school and gives us his email address, as if anyone is going to be caught dead writing it down. Fortunately, Mr. Shunsberg is aware of this phenomenon and writes Dr. Ngo's contact information on the whiteboard, and leaves it up for the rest of the week. At the end of homeroom on Friday, with Mr. Shunsberg's attention occupied by talking to Lora Benitez and everyone else out of the room, I take a picture of the whiteboard with my phone.

DAY 25

I get in to see Dr. Ngo the following Tuesday after school, and it's not a second too soon. I have just endured six full school days where I have spoken to almost no one here except for teachers, and they're none too happy with me; I have handed in one late, incomplete, or just-plain-wrong homework assignment after another. It's only seven days, and maybe I have time to right the ship, if Dr. Ngo can figure out what the hell's wrong with me.

Dr. Ngo's office looks like a converted broom closet with a cheap metal desk and a couple of cheap chairs with discolored green vinyl seats that have probably been around since the Reagan administration. He looks almost like a Vietnamese version of Mr. Shunsberg; maybe a little older, different coloring, but the same small body and perpetually bemused facial expression. "So how _do_ you pronounce your name?" I ask him, as soon as I sit down.

"I usually tell everyone to just say No," he says, smiling roguishly. He has a little bit of a foreign accent, but not much. "Most Americans aren't going to get the pronunciation right anyway, so I might as well make it easy for them. At least I'll know who they're talking to." He reclines his desk chair for a second, then tilts forward again and nods. "So...Cynthia, right?"

"Pretty much," I say. He looks confused, so I backpedal and say, "I mean, yes."

"So what can I help you with?"

I inhale slowly through my nose, and as I let out an exhale, I can feel my breath on my bare forearms. Eucchh. I hate that feeling. "I, uh...I think I might be psychotic."

Dr. Ngo laughs. "Well, that's a change of pace. Usually, I have kids coming in saying, 'I think my parents are psychotic,' or, 'I think my girlfriend or boyfriend is psychotic.' Of course, what they really mean is _psychopathic_ , which is completely different."

"No, I do mean psychotic," I say, squirming in the worn-out chair. My buttocks itch; am I developing a latent allergy to vinyl? That could seriously mess things up for me. "I've looked up psychosis and I know what it is. I think I'm having auditory hallucinations."

He squeezes his lips together and nods. "Okay. Can you describe in detail what you're experiencing?"

I notice he isn't taking notes. That's good, right? That means there won't be any evidence that I was here. "I'll try. So...so there's this singer who was sort of popular a long time ago, as a teenager, before I was even born, and since then, they haven't really been in the public eye." Good. Degenderized pronouns are good here. "And I just kind of discovered their music and I love it so much that I hear it playing in my head even when I don't have the record on." I glance quickly up at his face to see if he's having any reaction. He's not, at all. "And...God, this is embarrassing, but...I hear this person talking to me all the time, this singer. It's like, they're with me all the time, telling me stuff. And since I don't know what this person looks like now, decades later, my image of them is from when they were my age."

"So you see this person, too," Dr. Ngo says.

"Kind of," I say. "I mean, she doesn't—" Aaargh. Two minutes in and I've already had pronoun slippage. "Okay, so now you know it's a girl singer."

Dr. Ngo smiles and nods.

"But anyway," I go on, "it's more like she's an overlay or something, like I can see through to the other side of her. I don't really see an actual... _opaque_ person."

Dr. Ngo stretches his arms out and rotates them a few times, then puts them back down on his arms of his chair. "And when she talks to you, do you experience this as a real person speaking to you?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, if you were to tell one of your other friends about her, would you say something like, 'Tiffany told me the most hilarious joke today,' or something like that?"

I recoil slightly. "Tiffany?"

Dr. Ngo laughs. "There was a teenage girl singer who was popular about thirty years ago whose name was Tiffany. When I was a little boy, I used to dream I'd grow up to marry her."

Now it's my turn to laugh. "That's very cute."

"But it's not her, right?" Dr. Ngo asks.

"Nope."

"And you're not going to tell me who it is?"

"Nope."

He shrugs. "Okay. So getting back to what I was saying—"

"To answer your question," I say, "I have no other friends. I probably never will."

"I don't think that's true," Dr. Ngo says. "You're what, a sophomore? You have a lot of life ahead of you to make friends if you want them."

"You really don't know me." I pick at the peeled vinyl on the arm of my chair. "But anyway, if I did have friends...no, I would not talk about this girl as if she actually existed. I know she's a lot older than that now in real life. For all I know, she has no hair and no teeth now. There are no pictures of her as an adult anywhere."

"Okay," Dr. Ngo says. "So what kinds of things do you hear her saying to you?"

"She encourages me to play my bongo drums," I say. "I'm actually getting fairly competent at it. But that's bad, because my parents want me to be a medical doctor, and I have no aptitude for anything scientific or technical. And the music is just kind of sucking me in, like it has tentacles, and pulling me away from math and science. My parents think I'm one kind of person and she thinks I'm another kind."

"Who do you think is right?"

I exhale, a little too loudly. "Unfortunately, I think she is."

"Why 'unfortunately'?"

"Why do you think?" I say. "Do you know what it's like to have to live with people who will hate you if you turn out to be something they don't want?"

"Actually," Dr. Ngo says, "I do know. But enough about me. Cynthia, is there any abuse happening for you at home?"

"No, it's nothing like that. I'm just not the same species they are, and they're going to vomit me up like a swallowed rubber band once they realize I'm not food."

Dr. Ngo laughs and pounds on his metal desk with his fist. "Cynthia, you really have a way with words."

"Thank you," I whisper. I find myself choking up. He's saying nice things to me and I want to cry. This isn't right.

"So do you experience this girl as commanding you to do things that you wouldn't otherwise do?"

"Hmmm," I say. "That's a good question. But no, it's more like she's egging me on to do things she knows I want to do, but I don't have the guts to do, or things my parents wouldn't approve of. She never tells me to hurt anyone, or hurt myself. But she's distracting me from my homework, big time."

"Have you ever thought about writing about this?" he asks me.

"What, you mean like a song or something?"

"Anything. You are starving for a creative outlet. It's obvious. You're drawn to this singer because she's you. What you're hearing in your head are your own thoughts and your own ideas, and you've assigned them to another person's voice because you're so hungry for people in your life who get you. These aren't hallucinations like someone with psychosis would have."

"They're not?"

"No. What you're describing to me sounds more like...for want of a better term, a crush."

I laugh incredulously. "A _crush_?"

"Yes. I wish I had a more scientific term for you, but essentially...yes. It's a crush."

I shake my head. "That just sounds so...shallow _._ " I glance up at the clock to see how we're doing on time. Ten minutes left. "And I don't have _those_ kinds of feelings about her."

"A crush doesn't necessarily mean you have a physical attraction. It's just a kind of fascination that makes your heart beat a little faster when you think about them, maybe snap to attention when you hear their name."

"I'm hardly ever going to hear her name," I say. "There's so little information about her out there, it's like everyone's forgotten her. But yeah, a faster heartbeat. That's for sure."

"Cynthia, can you look me in the eyes?" he asks me. "You haven't made eye contact with me once since you've been in here."

"I'll try," I say, raising my head up and feeling lasers beaming from his eyes into mine. "It's kind of hard for me sometimes. I used to have autism, and I think it's kind of a vestige from that."

"What do you mean, you _used_ to have autism? Autism is a developmental condition. Do you know what that means?"

"It means you've always had it, right? Since you were a little kid?"

"And that you always will."

Oh boy. He went there. "I guess you're not familiar with my parents' blog?" I tell him about the blog and the Good Brain Diet, including Dr. Nansi's system of doing twice-per-calendar-year home inspections with only 24 hours' notice (unless we've told her a month in advance we'll be out of town) to make sure we're doing it right and I'm still "in remission."

"I did remember reading something about that," Dr. Ngo says. "I didn't realize it was about you and your family."

"Really? I thought everybody here knew that."

"I've only lived here for a few months on temporary assignment. I haven't had time to catch up with everyone." He leans back in his chair and taps his fingers on the sides of the chair for a second. "And I don't want to get you in trouble with your parents, but...as far as I'm concerned, there's no such thing as 'former autism.' You can acquire enough skills that most people wouldn't think 'autism' when they meet you, and you can learn to manage things so that you can function in society somewhat, but it doesn't go away entirely."

"Oh, God," I say. "You're not going to talk to them about this, are you? Because you'll be stepping in a landmine if you do. I can guarantee that."

"What you tell me is absolutely confidential," Dr. Ngo says. "The only exceptions are reporting physical abuse or neglect, or intent to physically harm yourself or another person. But I'm a little concerned that they're insisting you're not on the spectrum any longer. I would really like to meet with your parents to discuss it with all three of you, if at all possible."

"That's not going to be at all possible," I say. My mouth is as dry as a flannel sheet. "Trust me on that."

"But if they agreed to it, would you be willing to do it?"

"Maybe." I can barely say the word. I have lost my voice. He can't be right, can he? I can't possibly still...no. I worked like a mule, learning how to make small talk, smile, meet people's gazes, lie and say I'm fine when I'm not. They took away my toys and gave them back to me, one by one, once I could meet their demands. And still...nobody likes me. My parents think it's because I don't try hard enough, but if I tried any harder, my brain would explode out of my auditory canals. If I'm not fixable, my whole family goes down with me. The entire selling point of Dr. Nansi's diet is a child who will lead a normal life and fit in. I am the match that will light us all on fire, if Dr. Ngo is right.

I don't know if Dr. Ngo can tell I'm thinking any of this, but I know he sees my cheeks getting wet, and he passes me a box of tissues. "Listen, Cynthia...I do have someone coming in right after you, or I'd spend more time talking with you about it. But please, make another appointment to come back as soon as you can. I don't want to lose track of you."

I nod, stand up, blow my nose, take another tissue, wipe my eyes, blow my nose again. When I leave his tiny closet of an office and enter the empty hallway, my sandals slapping against the tile floors sound like trucks backfiring. I don't know what just happened. But I don't think I'm the same person I was half an hour ago.

You're drawn to this singer because she's you.

I walk home as slowly as possible, trying to digest everything I just heard from Dr. Ngo. I'm a singer? Really? I'm Amy? Me?

And then Spectral Amy appears, walking alongside me. Because of course she does.

_Well, it's not the most off the wall idea in history, is it?_ Spectral Amy says. _Why couldn't you be like me? I mean, not exactly like me because you're you, but...why do you think you can't sing? Everybody can sing._

I test out my singing voice, after looking around to ascertain that no one is nearby, on "Agua de Beber," a song in Portuguese by Antonio Carlos Jobim. It has like five notes in it. My voice cracks on the third line, and I clear my throat a little too hard.

_Yeah, right,_ I tell Spectral Amy. _Everyone except me._

_You haven't given yourself a chance,_ Spectral Amy says. _If you practice like all get out every day, you'll get good. I promise._

_You seem to be forgetting something here,_ I say to her. _I'm not supposed to be a singer, or at least, not one who practices like all get out. If I practice anything like all get out, it has to be math and science._

_That's not going to end well for you, Cyan,_ Spectral Amy says.

_Cyan._ That's the first time I've "heard" her say that name. The first time I've heard anyone say it besides my facetious parents. It goes through me like a blast of arctic wind.

And the autism stuff...my God. I'm not sure what would upset my parents more, me thinking I'm really a musician or me thinking I'm still on-spectrum. Either one seems to be a one-way ticket to a frozen sidewalk from Chez Butt. I can't have worked this hard for nothing.

_But you did work that hard for nothing,_ Spectral Amy says. _I mean, after all these years, how often do you have a conversation with anyone besides me? You're wasting your energy trying to convince people you're regular, when you could be putting that energy into mastering music._

_Mastering music. Mastering music. Mastering music._ First it repeats over and over in my head. And then I sing it. "Mastering mu-uu-uu-si-ii-iiiic..."

_There you go,_ Spectral Amy murmurs. _Nice ostinatos, girl!_

It felt great to do that, while it was coming through me. But it feels really awful afterwards, once I realize what it could mean.

When I get home, there's a package–a pretty decent-sized box--with my name on it waiting for me on the hall table. It has the word FRAGILE stamped on it. A few seconds after I walk in, Tam emerges from her bedroom, beaming as she sees me examining the box.

"It's here!" she says.

"It?" I say.

"Remember when AB and I said we would have a birthday present for you but it had to be special ordered? This is it. Open it."

"Wow, thanks." I open the box with my house key, take out lots of packing material, and underneath it all is a pandeiro—a Brazilian drum that looks a little like a tambourine, but is bigger and has extra-large brass jingles called platinelas. I take it out of the box and hold it in my hands. It looks handcrafted, with a beautiful blue and gold checkerboard pattern painted on to the side _._ And there's a tuning key, a small wrench attached by a string to the side of it, which means it's a tunable instrument. It's professional-grade.

See? I hear Spectral Amy say. This is a sign, girl. You know I'm right.

"Oh, my God...really?" I say. "How did you guys even know what a pandeiro was?"

Tam smiles. "The Internet is magic. Oh, and confidentially, I'm the one who told AB what a pandeiro was, and she found someone in East LA who builds them. At a price we could afford."

I turn it over and stroke the synthetic skin head, strong enough to play with a stick, responsive enough to play with my hands. It even has a mounting bracket, so I could mount it on a stand to play it if I wanted to. I thump on it softly with my fingers, and the booming, jingly sound brings Mom out of her office. She does not look happy to see this gorgeous rhythm-generating thing in my hands. I guess Dad isn't here, or he'd be joining her in scowling unison. I don't think either of them has ever listened to anything but classical music, composed and performed by long-dead Europeans, since college, and even that maybe once a month.

"What _is_ that thing?" Mom says, like it's a live monkey or something.

"It's tunable!" I say. "Look, you can adjust the sound so that it's higher or lower in pitch." I know Mom couldn't give less of a rat's whiz, but I start messing with the tuning anyway, just because I need to hear it.

"Mom, I know what you're thinking," Tam says. "But look at it this way. She's been playing those crappy yard sale bongos all the time anyway. At least now she has a real instrument to play, it'll sound a lot better."

I give her a hug. "Thank you thank you thank you! So I guess AB doesn't think I'm a waste of skin after all?"

"Nobody thinks you're a waste of skin, Cynthia," Mom says, with no warmth whatsoever.

"Thanks, Mom," I deadpan. "That's the nicest thing you've ever said about me."

_You might as well be talking to a dog,_ Spectral Amy says. _Except the dog would be friendlier. Come on, let's go play some pandeiro._

"Tamarlyn, can I have a word with you in my office?" Mom says, ignoring my sophomoric jape. Tam looks at me and shrugs, then follows Mom into her office, leaving me standing there with my pandeiro. Which is mine. They can't have it. I will build a fortress around it in my room so it cannot be seized. I start thinking of what I could use to build it, as I bounce off to my bedroom thumping and jingling.

Right before dinner, I'm in my room with the pandeiro, which hasn't left my hands for the last two hours, although I'm trying to play it as quietly as humanly possible. Tam has flipped on her stereo, and I can hear her enormous woofers booming through our shared wall at me. It sounds like something country-ish—Miranda Lambert, maybe? Something about "hell on heels"—so not exactly the kind of thing I can practice Latin grooves to. However, I can pose for future album covers (my stuff will be vinyl-only releases, thank you) with my _professional-grade drum._ Oh yes. I plop hats on my head, tie scarves, anything I have to in order to cover up the incorrigible mess growing on my head that would require a three-hundred-dollar salon visit every two weeks to fix, if I had that kind of scratch. In the meantime, I check myself out smiling, not smiling, head down, head up, head tilted back, tapping on the pandeiro, hugging it to my chest—and then, finally, as a joke, putting the pandeiro on my head and wearing it like a hat. It would easily be the most expensive hat I own, but also the coolest. I giggle and take it off my head, and immediately hear a knock on my door. I open it and it's Dad telling me dinner is ready.

"So what are we having?" I ask him. "Is tonight eyeball night?" At least once a week I have to eat stewed cow's eyes, among the various exotic animal parts Dr. Nansi has prescribed me. I know it sounds gross, but flavor-wise, I honestly don't have a lot to compare it to. I think my taste buds are mostly dead after all these years. Tam and AB (when she's here) don't have to eat the offal that I am required to consume, but it's a house rule that no one can eat GBD-illegal food in my presence or let me see or smell it. And Mom and Dad do eat offal along with me, although I know they (along with my sisters) have a locked mini-fridge and snack food stash in their bedroom in case the eyes or stomachs or whatever else we're having doesn't satisfy them. Don't know why it wouldn't.

Dad smiles wryly. "No eyeballs tonight," he says. "We're only doing that on Fridays now. Tonight you get sheep's head."

"Oh, excellent." I run my finger along the outside of the pandeiro. The paint is textured. Nice. "So did you guys chew out Tam and AB for getting me this?"

"Mom had a talk with Tamarlyn," Dad says. "She agreed not to buy any more noisy presents without our permission."

"But I get to keep it, right?"

Dad reaches out to take the pandeiro out of my hands. "Can I see?"

I hand it over to him, swallowing hard. I don't know what I'll do if he doesn't hand it back to me. He examines it and nods, as though he's impressed with the craftsmanship. "It looks very well made," he says. "But you're not to play it until you're done with all your homework."

He hands it back to me, and I sigh with relief, although by the time I'm done with my homework most nights, it'll be too late in the evening to play it. "Thank you," I say. "I want you to know that I'm actually sending Annabeth a _written_ thank-you note." I hold up my memo pad to show him. "She won't know what hit her."

Dad smiles tightly. "Yes, I remember those," he says. "My parents always used to make me write those when I got a gift. I hated it."

"And if it's too loud I can throw a towel over it. Just let me know." I nod towards Tam's room and the booming bass emanating therefrom. "But I don't think I'll ever be louder than a Miranda Lambert concert, or whoever that is."

He nods. "Go wash up, we don't want the sheep to get cold."

I bust up laughing at that, partly because it sounds outlandish, and partly because he has no idea it sounds outlandish. As I cackle madly, he looks at me like I've lost my marbles. Though that's nothing new.

DAY 33

"You got a second?" Mr. Shunsberg asks me on the twelfth day of school, as I'm about to leave homeroom and go to my first class, which is Spanish. I've already figured out that if I wanted to understand Portuguese, which is the dominant language of bossa nova (including some songs that Amy, according to Wikipedia, recorded phonetically), the worst thing I could have done was sign up for Spanish and try to learn them both at the same time. A lot of the words look the same, but the pronunciations and meanings are totally different, so my Spanish is hosing my Portuguese badly, and I've already bombed a quiz because of it. So if he wants to write me a late excuse, I'll give him all the time he wants.

"Yeah," I say, "and I have a third, a fourth, a fifth..."

He gives me a lips-only smile and we confer over by the coat closet, which isn't actually used as a coat closet here because it was built for little kids. "It's about Renate," he says. "I have Renate in my fourth period geography class also, and...well, I hope this isn't out of line, but the two of you have some things in common."

I snort. "Like horrible names?"

"Your names aren't horrible," he says. "If people want to make fun of somebody, they'll invent a reason if they have to. That's not on you."

"Doesn't make it any easier."

"Tell me about it. There's like one Jewish family in Steens Center besides us. We don't even have a synagogue here." He glances around to make sure nobody is listening in. "But anyway, please don't tell Renate I said this, but I think she'd like it if you struck up a conversation with her."

"Based on what?"

"Well...for starters, she has unconventional tastes in music. Her big thing is George Clinton, who was a pioneer in 1970s funk music. I've heard you humming those songs in Portuguese and drumming on your desk, so obviously you don't go along with the crowd music-wise either.

Right. Because all twentieth-century musical forms are completely interchangeable. Who else is he going to dig up for me, someone who's into speed metal? :"I...I don't know that Renate would like the same stuff I do," I say, running my finger along the spaces between the concrete blocks. I look at my finger instead of at him while I'm talking.

"Well, for whatever it's worth, I do know that the circumstances of Renate's leaving SCH had something to do with music."

"Yeah, I overheard some people talking about it, that there was some dirty song and she refused to stop singing it." I start itching in a place I can't scratch myself in public, especially not in front of a male teacher. I squirm a little, hoping I can get it to stop before he figures it out. "They kicked her out of school over that?"

He laughs. "Well, this is kind of a conservative town."

I roll my eyes. "You think?"

The final bell goes off for first period. Mr. Shunsberg walks over to his desk, presumably to write a late note for me, and I follow him. "Well, there could be more to the story than that," he says, as he grabs a note pad and pen off the desk. "But she hasn't been very forthcoming with details."

"You're not expecting me to report back to you on that, are you?"

"Of course not. But I have a feeling she's keeping a lot bottled up so she doesn't get in trouble again." He scribbles something on the note pad, pulls the paper off the pad, and hands it to me. "And it might help for her to know that there are kids here who don't think 'different' is bad."

I glance at the note, which is barely legible. I suppose Reading and Writing in Teacher Scribble is a class they all take in college. "Well, I guess that's...a charitable way to put it."

"What do you mean?"

"I don't know," I say, making myself smile as much as I can. "That sounds kind of like, 'you're a weirdo with no friends, so here's another weirdo with no friends.'"

He winces. "I'm sorry if I gave you that impression," he says. "I don't mean for it to be a putdown. If anything, I think both of you are much too sophisticated for this place, and that's a compliment."

I nod. If nothing else, Mr. Shunsberg knows what I like to hear, and hardly anyone else does. "I'll think about it," I tell him before making my exit. "Thanks for the note."

He didn't say I had to become BFFs with Renate. He just told me I should "strike up a conversation" with her. Sure. Piece of cake. Normal kids do it all the time. Every day, even. If I'm really totally in remission from autism, this should be like falling off a log. Except that I'm a lot better at falling off logs.

And I'm trying not to remember all the things other kids have said to me when I tried to make friends with them. _Me be friends with you? Did you hear what the Butt said? Hahahahaha that's funny. Well, that's really nice of you to invite me to the bookstore, but I don't really read. You're having what for dinner at your house? Fermented veal tongue over raw zucchini "noodles"? Yeah, I think I'll pass..._

Joining club after club, volunteering like nobody's business, and still having no friends.

And of course my parents didn't see this as a sign of my having a disability, oh no no no, it's just kids being shallow jerks and me being better and smarter than them, and maybe if I didn't use so many big words...

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

But I'm an interesting person now. I have a pandeiro, and I'm not afraid to use it. I might even have a singing voice. Why shouldn't I--

"Hey, watch it, Butthead!" one of the ninth graders says to me in the hall on my way to lunch, when I accidentally veer off course and bump into her shoulder. I don't even know her name. But that is how low I am in the pecking order: kids _younger than I am_ know that I'm someone they can get away with bagging on.

And I tell her I am sorry, so sorry, so sorry.

Always sorry.

Please don't spit in my ear.

I don't say that last part, but I might as well. Pandeiro or no pandeiro, I do not and never will meet adolescent social acceptability standards in my town. Even for freshmen, who are supposed to look up to us elders.

Yeah, even Renate Silverdick will probably die laughing contemptuously when I try to converse with her. Except that I pretty much have to do it. No, Mr. S. doesn't give out grades for homeroom, but he's one of the few people here who actually seems to like me, for some strange reason, and I'd kind of like to keep it that way. I can always tell him I tried. Because I always try.

"Emancipated minor," I hear myself sing under my breath, tapping my fingers on my purse in rhythm. "Ooooh..."

And after I start mumble-singing, Spectral Amy shows up in the hallway alongside me. _Emancipated minor? Do you actually want to do that, emancipate?_

_Not really,_ I answer. _I don't even know how I'd do that. I just thought it sounded catchy._

_Maybe you_ should _emancipate,_ Spectral Amy says. _You'd have a lot more control over your life._

_Right, like I could make a living on my own now,_ I answer.

_I bet there's a way,_ she says. _I know you have real talent. I wrote some songs myself, you know._

I tell her, _Thanks, coming from you that means a lot. And you really did write those, right? I mean, with your dad, but..._

Last night, after going through about thirty pages of searches on Amy's name, I finally found a discussion on her, on an archived message board from a defunct Latin-music Web site called Chachaville.com. They talked about the four self-written songs on Amy's album, and the posters generally agreed that her father, who was listed as co-writer, probably wrote most if not all of them. They cited as evidence the fact that he had other credits as a songwriter and she didn't. Like that means anything.

_I wrote poems,_ Spectral Amy says. _He wrote the music, and we both came up with the rhythm arrangements._

_The poems are beautiful,_ I say. _I really like "On a Horse," that thing about wanting to be rescued and then realizing that you have to rescue yourself. That was ahead of its time!_

Spectral Amy smiles, transforming her face into something warming and radiant, like...a human fireplace? I can't figure out what else to call it. _You know_ , she says, _you could just approach Renate about this in a humorous way. You can be really funny, you should use that._

And then I see her. Renate, that is. She's down the hall at her locker, trying locker combinations and then wiping them out and starting over again, cursing under her breath. I gave up on combination locks a long time ago for the same reason. Finally she gets the lock open and opens her locker, and I think, _well, I might as well get this over with. Let her reject me and then I'm done._

"So get this," I say when I get to her locker. She turns her head and looks at me with the kind of abject horror I expected her to. "Shunsberg told me he thought you would like it if I _struck up a conversation_ with you. So here I am. You can tell me to screw off whenever you want to, that counts as a conversation."

She stares at me for a second, and then something happens I didn't expect: her face relaxes, and she chuckles, shakes her head and looks down at the ground. "Poor little Brian," she says.

"Brian?"

"Shunsberg," Renate says. "That's his first name."

"He told you his first name?"

"It's not exactly difficult information to obtain. He's a public employee."

It never would have occurred to me to try to find out my teachers' first names. It's not like I'd have any occasion to use them, right?

"And guess what else," Renate says. "He told me the same thing about you."

I laugh derisively. "Yeah, that figures. And of course, you didn't try to talk to me."

"I was going to." She grabs a lunch sack out of her locker, shuts the door, and locks the lock. "I just didn't know what I was supposed to say."

"Well, I guess I took care of that for you."

"Yes, you did. Thank you."

So then we stand there, two dorkettes with the dreaded lunchtime staring them in the eyes. The school has a no-saving-seats policy, so there's none of the crap I went through in middle school when I had to eat in the bathroom, but that doesn't stop people from giving me the death stare because I dared to occupy their exclusive real estate. "You going to eat?" I ask her, as if it's not obvious.

"Highlight of my day," she says.

We walk down the hall towards the lunchroom, staring straight ahead and not talking. Should I ask her to eat with me? Should I assume she'd eat with me? What is the protocol here? "So it's kind of nice out today," I say, "not too hot. I was thinking about eating outside on the lawn. They let you do that here if the weather's decent."

"Would you like me to come with you?"

"Sure," I say, "if you want."

"Hey, we have to report back to Shunsberg, right? And I'm not that good at making stuff up."

"He told me I didn't have to report back to him. But I'm not good at making things up either." I make a left turn down the hall where my locker is. "Just to warn you, though, I eat weird food. Not by personal choice. Or did you already know about that?"

"Define weird food," Renate says.

"Oh, so you don't know. Let me stop at my locker and I'll give you the grand tour of my lunch sack."

We stop at my locker and I retrieve my lunch sack, and hold up my lettuce wrap sandwich for Renate to inspect. "This might look like an ordinary, innocuous lettuce wrap," I say. "But within those lettuce leaves are parts of animals which, if I told you what they were, would probably cause you to lose your appetite. Although in fairness, in other countries those animal organs would probably be considered delicacies."

"In those countries, people don't have much of a choice," Renate says. "Meat is scarce there and they have to use the entire animal or they don't eat."

"I don't have much of a choice, either. But then, I don't remember what normal food tastes like. I haven't eaten it since I was four." I put the lettuce wrap back in my bag. "I also have to eat a quarter cup of cold fermented chia seed pudding with a teaspoonful of serrano pepper seeds."

Renate winces. "Just the seeds? That must be killer spicy."

"It would be, if I still had taste buds."

We go outside and sit down, and while attempting to choke down my bad-joke lunch, I tell Renate all about HaleyOffTheSpectrum.com and the Good Brain Diet, and she sits there with her eyes bugging out of their sockets like hard-boiled eggs.

"I can't believe I didn't know about this," Renate says.

"Yeah, in this school most people know, but they don't talk about it a whole lot at SCH, maybe? I guess they don't gossip about kids in other schools." I bite into the lettuce wrap. I'm not sure exactly what's in it, but I'm also not sure it really matters. All my food tastes fairly sludgy to me. "Also, if you visit Dr. Nansi's site, I don't recommend doing that while you're eating, because there are pictures on there of things that are even more sickening than my lunch."

"Wow," Renate says. "You're, like, a _survivor_. And that's supposed to be a cure for your autism?"

"Not cure, as such." A bit of mystery meat falls out of my lettuce wrap and down the front of my shirt, landing straight in my cleavage—not that there's much of that. "If I was cured, I wouldn't have to keep eating like this. They call it _remission_ so they can cover themselves legally. They can always claim that if their kid slips back into autism that they did the diet wrong."

"Do you actually think you're in remission?"

I take a deep breath and huff it out. "You know what? I don't even know anymore. Seriously, I don't." I glance furtively down my shirt to see if I can spot the cleavage-diving bit of offal. No luck. "Why, do I not seem like I'm in remission?"

"Dude. I've known you ten minutes, and I know you are so not in remission it isn't even funny. And that diet is probably causing you serious malnutrition."

"That I don't have to worry about," I say. "They have some compounding pharmacy in Eugene put together these massive supplement capsules for me to swallow, and they make sure they have all the nutrition bases covered." Then it hits me that she just said she knows I'm not over my autism. Sometimes I have kind of a delayed reaction to things people say to me. "So what makes you so sure I'm not in remission?"

Renate takes a bite of a relatively-normal-looking avocado, cheese, lettuce, and tomato on multi-grain bread. "Oh, where to start," she says, with her mouth full. Then she swallows her mouthful of food and keeps talking. "Okay, so first off, the fact that cheating on the diet has evidently never occurred to you. Even when your parents can't see you. One of my best friends at SCH was autistic. That's her phrase, she hates it when people say she 'has autism.' And she's like that, too. You guys think you can't hide anything, so you don't even try to flout the rules."

"I can't remember ever eating any of that stuff," I say. "Not since I was really little, and even then it wasn't much. I'd probably hurl, because I don't have the digestive enzymes to handle it."

"But you've never tested it to find out," she says. " _La ley es la ley."_

"I'm not a 'rules are rules' person," I protest. "I'm an 'I hate throwing up worse than anything' person."

"You do seem to have a very sensitive gag reflex, judging from the fact that you almost heaved a couple of times from the chia seed congee." Renate balls up her sandwich wrapper and sticks it in her lunch bag. "That's another tipoff. Adolescents who are completely normal don't puke up their lunches until after they're done eating."

"That's not funny."

"I used to be bulimic," Renate says. "I'm allowed to make that joke. But you don't have to worry about me outing you as autistic. I don't out people, ever. And I'm trusting you not to out me about the bulimia."

"That will be no problem," I tell her. I don't mention that that's mostly because nobody ever talks to me. "So why are you here? I mean, how come you're at Eisenhower?" I take my banana out of the lunch bag. It's kind of green. They always are.

Renate stares aghast at my fruit. "They make you eat unripened bananas too?"

I start peeling my green banana, trying not to think about the awful chalky-slimy texture it's going to have when I bite into it. "Don't change the subject."

Renate takes a sip of her V8 juice and smiles mysteriously. "What, you haven't heard the story of me being booted out of SCH because I kept singing this filthy, dirty song?"

"Is that the truth?"

"It is and it isn't." She reaches into her lunch bag for her squeeze-bottle yogurt. "I guess you could say it's a _dirty_ song, but it's not about sex. It's about poop."

"Poop?"

"Poop."

I take a little tiny nibble of the banana and swallow it without tasting it. "There are songs about poop?"

"There are songs about everything," Renate says. "But this isn't really a song, even. Or a rap. It's more like a spoken word call-and-response chant where someone says a line and then a whole bunch of people repeat it. It's on a Funkadelic album called _One Nation Under a Groove_ , from 1978. Funkadelic is one of George Clinton's bands from the seventies, the other band is called Parliament."

"What's the name of the song?"

She beams like she's been waiting all her life for someone to ask her that. "'Promentalshitbackwashpsychosis Enema Squad.' With the subtitle 'The Doo Doo Chasers.'"

"Unbelievable," I say.

"I'd play it for you, but it's almost eleven minutes long and I don't want to make you late for class. But maybe later."

"Eleven minutes." I toss my banana peel in my lunch bag. "Did you sing, I mean recite, the whole thing?"

"Sometimes."

"Sometimes? How many times did you do this?"

"Probably twenty partial versions, maybe five reciting the entire thing. Including one on the last day of school, after which I was invited not to return."

"So they kept telling you not to do it, and you kept doing it anyway?"

"I had to," she says.

The end-of-lunch bell rings. I stand up and brush the dirt off my pants. "I suppose you'll tell me why you had to, some other time."

"If you listen to it, you'll know why." Renate stands up and checks the back of her red velvet cape for dirt stains. "Don't do it now, but when you get home, just do a search for Funkadelic, spelled like it sounds, then a space, then type the letters p-r-o, it'll pop right up."

"Pro..."

"...mental. Shit. Backwash. Psychosis. Enema. Squad."

"I'm almost afraid to ask if you can spell it without looking."

"If you break it down into individual words, it's easy." We pause at the trash can near the front door to throw our lunch trash away before re-entering the building. "Also, it's not literally about poop. It's more about...people having poop in their heads, if that makes any sense."

"Oh, okay," I say. "It's _metaphorical_ poop." I make a mental note to inform Dr. Catherine Nansi in time for her next BM chart update.

That night, before I go to bed, after I've worn my hand out banging on my pandeiro and attempting to catch up on homework, I decide to pull up "Promentalshitbackwashpsychosis Enema Squad," to find out why Renate "had to" keep repeating it over and over again. Supposedly it's self-explanatory, but things like this never are for me.

I give a listen to it, and it's like what she says, some guy (George Clinton?) reciting a line and then a whole bunch of people repeating it back, over a thudding rhythm with Jimi Hendrix-style guitar and some girl singer crooning some innocuous-sounding love song in the background. And the first lines I hear are:

_The world is a toll free toilet_

_(The world is a toll free toilet)_

_Our mouths neurological assholes_

_(Our mouths neurological assholes)_

_Talking shit a mile a minute_

_(Talking shit a mile a minute)..._

And it goes on and on like that, for ten minutes and forty-five seconds, finally ending with multiple repetitions of the phrase _fried ice cream is a reality_ until the fade-out.

Holy Toledo. This is almost worth getting kicked out of school for. Not that I would do it. And not that it's my kind of music, exactly. But it is ovaries-out hilarious that Renate wanted everyone in Steens Center High School to remember it, and remember _her_ by it.

_Music to get your shit together by,_ indeed.

DAY 34

The next day, when I get to homeroom, Renate is already in her seat, and I walk right up to her and say, "You are a badass."

She nods and smiles sagely. "I told you."

And then, because the geniuses we go to school with cannot conceive of any kind of meeting of minds that does not involve the doffing of undergarments, we start hearing a chant of "Silverdick and Butt Face, Silverdick and Butt Face," followed by some revolting suggestions of how a Silverdick and a Butt Face could intersect physically. I don't even turn around to see who it is; I know who the usual suspects are. Shunsberg immediately tells them to put a sock in it or they'll get detention. He obviously approves of our interaction.

I tell her about the pandeiro. "Are you allowed to leave the house with it?" she asks.

"Nobody said I couldn't."

"I have a soundproof music room in our garage. And there's a piano in there."

"You play?"

"Yes. And I have perfect pitch."

"I don't."

"You're a percussionist. You don't have to."

I am a percussionist. I am. A percussionist. What a difference a brand-new pandeiro makes. And Amy, of course. I like it.

So...you want to jam?" Renate asks me.

"When?"

"Today?"

Is this how it works? If someone wants to be friends, they ask _you_ to do stuff? And if musicians find out you play something, they want to play with you? Who knew? "Today works," I say.

"So after school, we can go to your house to get the pandeiro, and then take it over to my house."

"Or I could just go home and get it and then come over." I'm kind of dreading the idea of Renate meeting my parents. Somehow I don't think they'd like her very much, and the feeling would be mutual times a billion. Also, I might have left some Amy stuff lying around my room. Not that I should be worried about what she'd think of my "Amy thing." This is a girl who got kicked out of school over her favorite musician's eleven-minute ode to bowel movements. But I think I need more time to explain it than just one day.

"If we do it my way, we don't have to write anything down. And you don't have to worry about getting lost on your way to my place."

I nod. "I would never have thought of that, but you're right." The hell with it, she's going to find out all this stuff sooner or later. I'd rather be rejected over it now than drag it out. I think.

When we get to my house after school, there's nobody in the common areas of the house. The door to my parents'office is closed, and they've turned the sign around to the BUSY side, which means no interruptions unless an object or vital body organ has literally caught fire. I can hear their muffled voices arguing, likely with a third party on the phone and not each other, going by phrases like, "No, that wasn't in the contract," and, "You guys didn't tell us we had to sign in both places." And Tam isn't home. So we just go to my room.

My heart is doing pandeiro impersonations. Why? Because of potential Amy droppings?

_You can tell her about me without telling her everything,_ Spectral Amy whispers. _The details can wait._

I push the door open. "Sorry about the mess. If I'd known you were coming..."

"You'd have baked a cake made out of calf brain flour and emu eggshells," Renate says.

"I would have cleaned up the clothes-splosion in here," I correct her. "And vacuumed."

"Cool story." Renate looks around the room at my bossa nova memorabilia. There is no Amy stuff lying around anywhere, including my record bins; that, I managed to hide under my bed in case of family doing random searches of my acquired intellectual property. I hope my sigh of relief isn't too audible. Renate finds the vinyl bin and starts leafing through it. "I like vinyl," she says.

"We both listen to music that was made for vinyl."

"Exactly." She continues leafing through the records. "I've never heard of any of these people."

"They've never heard of you, either."

"Touche."

"Also, half of them are dead." If I'm going to tell her about Amy, now is the time. Now. Now. Now.

"A lot of the P-Funk guys are dead, too," Renate says. "Like Eddie Hazel. Probably the most underrated guitar player of all time."

"P-Funk?"

"Parliament and Funkadelic."

"Oh, right."

I could still tell her about Amy now, despite the subject change. Instead I get my pandeiro out of the closet and show it to Renate. "It's tuned to bass drum tuning now, but you can tune it a lot higher than that, if you want a snare or tom sound." I tap on it to demonstrate the sound, then hand it to her.

She holds it in her hand. "It's so light. A little drum like this makes all that noise?"

"Yeah. In fact, I got yelled at a few times last night for playing it too loud."

Renate hands the pandeiro back to me, and I put it in the pandeiro bag I got with it and zip it up. "Won't be a problem at my place. I have serious soundproofing. And my mom will be occupied with all things cat. Sorry, I forgot to make sure you weren't allergic."

"You have cats?"

"My mom fosters rescues. We have rooms set aside just for them."

"I want a cat so bad," I say. "But my dad is killer allergic."

We walk out of my room, and there's still no one in the common areas. Good. We can deal with that some other time. We exit the house, and I follow Renate to her place.

"Is it just you and your mom?" I ask her on the way over.

"And my brother. He's in sixth grade. So it's just three of us for like half the year, when my dad's in Alaska fishing. That's what he does for a living."

"Wow," I say. "People really do that."

"What, did you think all those fish just swim to Fred Meyer's freezer case?"

"No...I just always heard about those people who fish in Alaska for half the year and don't work for the other half. But I never met one."

"He'll be back next month after coho season's over. Do they let you eat salmon?"

"When we can afford it."

"He brings back so much we get sick of it," Renate says. "I'm sure we could hook you up."

"No pun intended."

"I hate puns."

Here I am, walking down the street with a pandeiro bag. I feel like a real musician all of a sudden. Or at least I will, until Renate finds out I don't really know how to play this thing yet.

When we get to Renate's house and open the door, a petite lady with long, curly gray hair comes out of one of the rooms with a handful of paper towels in one hand and a squirt bottle that says NATURE'S MIRACLE on it in the other. She looks almost shocked at the sight of Renate bringing a friend home. "Oh, hello," she says. "Sorry to be so rude, but I'm in the middle of cleaning up an accident."

"There are no accidents," Renate says.

"I thought you hated puns," I say.

"That's not a pun," Renate says. "Mom, this is Cynthia. I warned her about the felines."

"Hi," I say, waving at her.

"I'm Kitty," she says. "I know that sounds kind of funny, considering..."

"Actually, that's perfect," I say, making sure to smile. I have a naturally downturned mouth (a.k.a Resting Bitch Face), so if I don't make an effort to smile, I look perpetually irritated. "And I love kitties. I mean, cats. I didn't...well, you know what I mean." This is why I am better off just waving hi.

"We'll be in the garage," Renate tells her, and mercifully shows me the way out there.

Renate's studio is a box-within-a-box, a hand-built wooden shed with a door and lots of sound-deadening material nailed to the walls. An upright piano, which looks like it's a good thirty years old, sits against the far right wall. "Don't worry, there are vents for air to get in here," she says. "But I've played piano and sung really high notes in here late at night with no complaints."

She takes her seat on the piano bench, and I sit down on a stool next to the piano. "So I'm trying to think of a song both of us would know and could play," I say.

Renate shrugs. "Play whatever you want, I'll figure it out."

My back starts itching. I twist and bend to try to reach it, but I can't. Renate hands me a wooden back scratcher sitting on top of the piano. "Try this," she says. "If you need it again, it's right up here." She points to the top of the piano.

"Thanks." Okay. Play something.

" _Mas Que Nada,"_ Spectral Amy says. _That's a great piano song._

_But she's probably never heard it,_ I protest silently. _Maybe she knows the Black-Eyed Peas' version from ten years ago, but that doesn't sound anything like the original._

_So sing it for her,_ Spectral Amy urges me.

_I can't,_ I tell her.

_Of course you can,_ Spectral Amy says.

I start doing this _boom, tap tap tap ta-boom, tap tap tap ta-boom_ thing, with Renate watching intently. Then I sing very softly, in phonetic Portuguese, being careful to softly roll the R's:

_Oh, whoa-oh-oh-oh, ra-ee-rye-eye-oh_

_O-ba, o-ba, o-ba..._

"I can barely hear you," Renate says.

"I'm not much of a singer."

"Have you ever sung on a microphone? Like, amplified?"

"At karaoke."

"That doesn't count. Everybody sounds terrible on those mics. You probably have no idea what you really sound like."

"My sisters always plug their ears when I sing."

Renate snorts. "They're sisters. They have to do stuff like that, it's in their contract. I have a baby brother, and they're even worse." She points to a mike stand in the corner, about five feet away, with a silver microphone on it that has the word BLUE on the front of it. The brand name, I guess. "Stand over there and I'll plug you in."

I do what she says, and she hooks up the microphone to a little amplifier on the floor—and when I say "little," I mean it's the size of a bag of goldfish crackers. "We have to leave the mic where it is, or we'll get blasted by speaker feedback," Renate says. "But say something so I can adjust the volume."

"Something so I can adjust the volume," I say.

"Pull down the pop filter, stand a little closer and do it again." When I give her a confused look, she amends that. "I mean...see that thing that's clamped to the mike stand, that has a black circular thing on the end of it? That black thing is the pop filter, it prevents popping P's if you're standing close. Pull that right in front of the mike, stand closer to the mike, and say it again."

We go through this process a few times, winding up with me so close to the microphone that I could electrocute myself with one good sneeze, if not for this black thing. "Don't worry about that," Renate says. "A lot of singers have to practically have the mic in their mouths in order to be heard." She sits back down at the piano. "Now sing."

I take a deep breath, start tapping out the same rhythm I was doing before, and then repeat the first line of the song:

_Oh, whoa-oh-oh-oh, ra-ee-rye-eye-oh_

_O-ba, o-ba, o-ba..._

The first time through I miss the highest note in the song, so when the line repeats, I just hold the first, lower note a little longer. I do this a few times, and Renate doesn't plug her ears or make a face, she just listens to me do it a few times, nodding along with me, and then starts playing some chords. They're not quite the same chords as the record, but they sound okay with the melody and the rhythm sounds right, so I keep singing. But after about thirty seconds, Renate stops playing and gives me what looks like the evil eye.

"What?" I say. "What did I do?"

"You keep switching back and forth between your higher voice and your lower voice," she says. "Why?"

"Because I can't hit those high notes."

"We'll see about that." She thinks for a second, then says, "Okay, let's try something. Stand back from the mike for about a foot, because this could get loud. Now pretend that a cat-shaped spaceship just landed in your living room, and it just opened up and six adorable space kittens are flying around your living room and purring, and you're the only one home. Let your jaw hang open and your eyebrows go up, and breathe from your belly until you fill it up, shake your head out, and now let out the highest squee you possibly can, like this."

She shakes her head and wiggles her hands next to her head and squeals, and I imitate her.

And a high note comes flying out of me that even a space kitten wouldn't be able to hear.

"That's way up here." She hits a high note on the piano, a couple of octaves up from middle C. "E-flat-six, girlie. That's way higher than the note you missed, which is like a D-flat five." She plays that note on the piano. "You just have to practice every day, you know, scales, slides, all that boring stuff. You can look up videos on voice exercises, Roger Burnley's are really great. But you'll get it."

Practice. Just like Spectral Amy said. That means make noise. Annoy people. Neglect my schoolwork. Even more than I already have.

Renate must be reading my mind, because she says, "If you're worried about the noise, practice in the closet and duct-tape a blanket to the door. The clothes will help muffle the sound."

"How'd you know I was thinking that?"

"Because girls are always afraid of that." She laces her fingers together and cracks her knuckles. "You don't sound bad, you know. Everybody has to start somewhere."

I really could tell her about Amy. She might actually get it. Who knows, maybe she has a Spectral George Clinton who talks to her. Maybe she'd even understand my wanting to be Cyan Beaut. But right now, it feels like I have everything to lose if I'm wrong about that. I know that the longer I wait, the harder it will be, but there has to be some midpoint where it's easier than it would be now.

"Fried ice cream is a reality," I say into the microphone.

Renate sighs with contentment and nods her assent. "Fried ice cream _is_ a reality."

# STAGE II:

# Symptoms become more seriously felt, begin to impede daily functioning. Often this stage is when diagnosis is confirmed with further testing.

DAYS 36-49

The rest of the first quarter passes by, and as I get better at music, I get worse at everything else—sleeping, digesting food quietly and painlessly, concentrating in class, coherent speech with everyone who isn't Renate. I know this happens to young musicians a lot, they get the music bug and everything else goes into the round wet file. But something about this is different. The difference is Amy.

Yes, I know teenagers get obsessed with bands and musicians and all that. But you know what normal teenagers who get obsessed with bands and musicians do? They plaster their walls with posters of those musicians. They wear t-shirts with those musicians' images on them. They doodle these musicians' names in their notebooks. I have zero stigmata of my "Amy thing" anywhere in my room, anywhere on my clothing, anywhere on my phone, anywhere period. Amy Zander t-shirts don't exist, and there's a reason for that: I'm the only one on earth who'd buy one. And then not wear it. Because I don't want to have to defend the fact that I like her. People make you do that, you know, justify your tastes. Like there's a wrong way to like music.

_A t-shirt with my picture on it?_ Spectral Amy says, hovering next to my bed at night two weeks after my first time in Renate's music shed. _Just the idea makes me shudder._

I know what she means. I'm trying to imagine people at school wearing Cyan Beaut t-shirts. I just can't picture it. I try to talk to other musicians in my school, who are in bands. They are too cool for me and they don't hesitate to let me know it. I haven't heard _of_ any of their favorite songs, let alone heard them. Maybe some people can fake knowledge of (and enthusiasm for) cultural things, but that gene passed me by.

I read music Web sites and it just depresses me, knowing that I will never be accepted into the club because I just can't do what other people apparently do: figure out what they're supposed to like, and what they're supposed to hate (the second part is just as important as the first), and put out signals that their tastes are "correct." The music world makes noises about accepting freaks, but they can't be my kind of freaky.

_So your kind of music doesn't have teen appeal, big deal,_ Spectral Amy says. _It doesn't have to. There's such a thing as music for adults._

_Right,_ I say, _like classical music. That's all my parents listen to now, on those rare occasions when they bother listening to anything at all. As long as the musicians and composers are long dead and from other countries, it's safe for them to express appreciation._

_Your parents aren't everybody,_ Spectral Amy reminds me.

_You need to go to sleep now,_ I tell her. _Because I need to go to sleep now. I have six hours left to sleep. Sleep. Sleeeeeeep. Please please please._

The hours in the dark drip by, without my ever losing consciousness. Every night, I ask myself: how can you be completely exhausted and not be able to sleep? Is it like watering a plant that's totally dried out, where the water just runs right off the top because the soil is so dry it rejects moisture? If so, how long can I do it without dying? What if I never fall asleep again? Ever? Then I do fall asleep. Finally. And an hour or so later, my alarm begins its gradual rise in volume, which is supposed to be more soothing than being jolted awake, but instead, I hear that first trickle of NPR noise as an oh-so-subtle reminder that I have again failed, at one of the most basic bodily functions there is.

Again.

DAY 50

"All you guys are doing is reading from the textbook," I complain to Dad and Tam, as the two of them double-team me the second Sunday night in October, trying to explain geometry to me. We're sitting at the dining table, with my three quizzes with B minus to D plus grades spread out before us, like murder trial evidence. "I actually do know how to read. That's not the issue here. The issue is that those words are just words. I can't...connect them with meaning."

"Your grades should mean something to you," Dad says, tapping the side of his coffee mug with his nails.

"That's not what I meant." I try with all my might to come up with a more Dad-friendly explanation, and can't. Because in a way, he's right. My grade only means something to me because it means something to him. I have no personal interest in this subject. None. And no ability to fake any. That's all people do in this world. Fake, fake, fake, fake, fake. (That's a song lyric, right?) Could I be the only one in the world who finds this incredibly disturbing?

"Do you take notes in class?" Dad asks me. "Because Ms. Prathipati says she sees you staring at the light fixtures a lot."

I gnaw on my left thumb cuticle. "She told you that?"

I don't even _want_ to go to fracking medical school. Who even gets into med school if they don't want it badly? How many people start out as premeds in college and wind up getting in, like two percent? And that's not even counting all the people who get weeded out in high school. The other day, Spectral Amy dared me to say it out loud in front of my own mirror: _I am not going to medical school. Ever. I am a musician. An autistic artiste. Like it or lump it, folks._ I couldn't even say it to the mirror. How am I going to say it to my parents?

Caltech doesn't do legacy admissions, at least not officially. If you have a parent who went there and did well, it helps, but it's not a slam-dunk. They can still reject me for premed (or anything else) if I don't regularly pull B plus or higher in math and science, even if I manage to get perfect SAT scores.

Okay, I won't get any F's on my report card, that much I know. But almost nobody ever gets an F around here anyway. You'd pretty much have to light your desk on fire and then pull your pants down and take a dump on the floor on a daily basis, without apology, to get an F.

This school year, I have shown up every day, except for one day when I was contagious with a cold. I do not eliminate on the floor or engage in pyrotechnics or stick gum in anyone's hair or interfere with anyone else's learning experience in any way. I haven't even so much as burped audibly. But you might as well park a wire-mesh dummy with a curly brown wig in my desk chair, for all anything they say actually gets through. Exception: Language Arts, in which my parody of "Desiderata" ("You are a child of Eisenhower High/a mess of broken TVs and guitars/you have a right to drink beer") made Ms. Samman laugh so hard that I got an A plus for it. But Caltech doesn't give a crap about my being able to parody poetry. Or even write lyrics.

"Dad, I think she needs a real tutor," Tam says. "If she doesn't understand what's in the book, she needs more help than we can give her."

"I can read," I say. "I just...I can't..."

"You can't what?" Dad says. I can tell this is seriously annoying him. His two older daughters never needed any help acing their classes. Why do I have to be so difficult?

"I...I don't know how to explain it. I just don't connect it—what's in the book--to anything the teacher says. It's like I lose parts of her sentences or something, and then I get lost. And once I get lost, I can't catch up. And it's not like I'm busy passing notes in class."

"They said you didn't have ADHD," Dad says.

Here is my opening. I can say it here. They can probably hear my heart thump from where they're sitting. "Maybe I don't have that," I manage to say, slowly. "But...I...I must have something." I pause to notice a muscle twitch on my left palm. "And I'm not on drugs either. If I was on drugs, probably I'd have more than one friend and maybe get the occasional party invitation, even."

That's about as close to coherent speech as I've gotten with Dad—with almost anyone—lately. Even though it probably took me three times as long to finish those sentences as it would have taken a normal person.

"Even a tutor isn't going to help if you don't pay attention, Cind—Cynthia," Dad corrects himself.

"Maybe...maybe I just don't have it in me to do this." That little tendon on my palm feels like someone is twanging on it like a guitar string. "I'm not...I swear I don't do anything but listen to the teacher. But there has to be...something else. Other people are sitting there passing notes and giggling and they get better grades than I do. And if someone else is making noise while the teacher is talking, I can't hear her. Even if it's three rows behind me, it throws me off."

"That's why you need a tutor," Tam says. "You can tell them where you're getting lost and they can figure out how to get you un-lost. That's their job."

Dad takes a sip of his decaf. "If Cynthia can't get through a tenth-grade geometry course without needing a tutor, how is she going to get through college-level science and math?" Then he looks at me with high-beam eyes. I flinch instinctively. "You can do better than this. You're just as smart as your sisters are. This is a basic course, Cynthia. There's no reason you can't maybe consult with Ms. Prathipati after school and catch up."

_Yes there is,_ my brain is practically shouting _. Dad, you're not paying attention. Can't you see I'm not like them? And I can't be?_

No, he can't see it, and there's no point in saying it. Because he doesn't want to know how bad it's about to get.

Any more than I do.

DAY 51

"I have something I think you should read," Renate says to me in homeroom the next morning. She hands me her phone. "This is someone I used to be friends with at SCH. We knew each other in chamber ensemble. It's her Tumblr."

_Free to B3...You and Me?_

_By Eroica Witt_

_Imagine the scene. She has finally, finally, finally, after all these months, realized that I am the woman for her, and once I have parked my 1969 Maverick that I have just lovingly restored (not easy to make one of those panzers driveable in 2016, lemme tell you), and a torrid makeout scene commences in the front seat after we park two blocks away from her house. At least that's what I think it is._

_Condensation forms on the insides of the windows as she keeps kissing me, and I know this is entirely the wrong time to start thinking about whether I have gapped the spark plugs on it correctly. But I live for spark plugs. She knows that, and yet would be completely appalled if, just as things are heating up between us and she is starting to lick my lips, I couldn't put those thoughts aside and just concentrate on her. It is not her. She is beautiful and brilliant and everything I could want, and she wants me. Me!_

_"_ _Is something wrong?" she murmurs, in a voice as sweet and pretty as windchimes, as her lovely long hair tickles my cheek._

_"_ _Of course not," I say, as I'm simultaneously mentally calculating whether .032 or .036 was the correct gapping choice for a 302 Ford Engine originally built in 1968. It is kind of a hard starter, that could be a warning sign that I did it wrong. I want to tell her she's perfect and the problem is that I'm not. But that's not the right thing to say either._

_The above is a work of fiction; you can relax, Dad! I have never had a torrid makeout session with anyone. But I know—I just know—that if I did meet the girl of my dreams, my B3 would become a divider between us. Spark plugs are my B3._

_So what is a B3, you ask? If you look at the DSM diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorders, there are category A traits and category B traits, and you have to have all three A traits and two out of four possible B traits. The third B trait (B3) is "highly restricted, fixated interests that are abnormal in intensity or focus." It cheeses me off just to type that, because somebody has to care passionately about spark plugs, damn it! The world runs on spark plugs, and has for at least a century. Surely there are people without (official) ASDs who have encyclopedic knowledge of spark plugs. How do they do it, just forget about that stuff and be in the moment with other people?_

_The reason I know my B3 would present a problem with girls is that it already does. Recently I had my first Skype date with a girl in Austin, Texas who's my age and fixes up old cars. We met on a message board for girls who fix vintage cars, and she showed me the 1966 Mustang she just finished. It's pretty, red with white leather upholstery. But I kept asking her questions about the spark plugs, and after the fourth spark plug inquiry, she suddenly remembered needing to wash her feet before dinner or something and logged off. Permanently._

_I should have known; girls can't get away with going on for half an hour breathlessly about whatever it is we're stuck on, not even with other queer girls. And I already have one strike against me, being autistic. If I was in a big city where there were lots of queer autistic girls that would be one thing, but in Steens Center I am a freakity-freak in more ways than one. Here, it's allistic girls or nobody, pretty much._

_Only three other junior or senior girls in my school are autie and they identify as hetero. One of them is a fiend for old issues of Rolling Stone magazine; she can name everyone who's been on the cover going back to the first issue in 1967. Another one has staggering knowledge of cat genetics, and can look at a cat and tell you what its DNA looks like just from its markings. And number three is a baseball freak, a Dodgers fan who quotes Vin Scully (their announcer for over 50 years) at the drop of a hat._

_Like me, they let this out only in little drips and drabs, knowing that they will narcotize whoever is listening to them if they don't. All of them say the same thing: "Good luck finding a boyfriend when I'm this into (whatever their B3 is)."_

_Sigh._

I hand Renate's phone back to her, not knowing what to say. Did she show me this because she thinks (knows) I'm hiding a "B3" of my own and wants to know what it is? Or because she thinks I might be into girls and she's using my reaction to this to find out? "Wow," I say. "She's a really good writer. But what's 'allistic'?"

"It means not on the autism spectrum," Renate says, turning the phone screen off. "She likes that term better than _neurotypical_ , because there are people who have nonstandard brains who aren't autistic."

"Does she really talk about spark plugs all the time?"

"No. She'll only do that if you say you're really interested in auto repair. That's kind of what she's saying here, that autistic girls kind of have this secret internal monologue that they won't let anyone in on even though it's harmless."

I nod, as casually as possible. "But you said you're not friends with her anymore?"

"She's pissed at me for getting myself expelled." Renate sticks her phone back into her purse without checking to see which pocket it's going into. "I mean, at first I thought she was being supportive, but over the summer there was more and more of, 'How can reciting some bizarre scatological poetry by some perpetually stoned five-hundred-year-old black dude who'll never remember your name be more important than staying in school with me?'"

"Ouch," I say.

"Exactly," Renate says. "She's a year ahead of me. Would I ask her to get left back a year so I don't ever have to go to school without her? And besides, he's not perpetually stoned anymore."

"So why'd you show me this, if you think she's a jerk?"

Renate heaves a dramatic sigh. "I hate to admit it, but she's so frigging talented that even though she annoys the crap out of me, I thought you should read her stuff."

_Just because I think someone's a jerk_

_Doesn't mean I can't appreciate their work_

That just pops into my head, while I'm standing at Renate's desk.

_Maybe you could talk to your parents in rhymes_ , Spectral Amy says. _Then maybe they'd get it._

DAYS 75-76

My finals are the first Thursday and Friday in November. On Thursday I get my two easiest ones, language arts and history. These are mostly essay questions. I usually do fine with those, thanks to my ability to write a comprehensible sentence and spell things correctly, even the big Scrabble words, and the fact that they're based on reading rather than lecture material. I figure those for maybe somewhere in the B range, even though I have a vague sensation that I'm skating by on what I already knew how to do.

But those aren't the grades my parents care about. They also don't care what grades I get in my studio art class or freestyle basketball gym elective. Everyone here gets A's in that stuff just for showing up; colleges don't even pay attention to it. The next day, the bomb hits right on schedule: Spanish, geometry, and biology. Despite all my cramming, I can only guess at the multiple choices and calculations and translations. How could I show up every single day except one, try my damnedest to _pay attention, pay attention, pay fracking attention_ , and know less than diddly squat? My parents are wrong about me being as smart as my sisters. Having a kid who has the brains of a fencepost wasn't in their life plans, I'm sure, but that's who they're stuck with.

DAY 86

"Bal-LOON!"

This has become Renate's usual and customary greeting to me when she first sees me, because now, in mid-November, after two months of being friends, we have a musical inside joke. She told me about this song that she and her father and grandmother did at a talent show at her grandmother's church when she was eight years old, called "Up, Up and Away," and it's about a hot-air balloon ride. There's this part that goes "Bal-LOON!" with the second syllable being a jump between a third and a full octave depending on which part you're singing, so we've been trying the jumps at higher and higher notes to see how far we can go. Carefully, of course. Vocal cords are persnickety little things, but I've been stretching mine out gradually in the shower, practicing the bel canto exercises where you lift your soft palate to hit the highest notes. So when she "Bal-LOON"s me, I do it right back even higher: "Bal-LOON!" People turn around to see who hit that ridiculous high note. I think a few are actually smiling. I know Spectral Amy is.

Yes, she's still with me, and no, Renate still doesn't know. I'm working on it. I am.

"Whoa, dude," Renate says. "That's an A5. Remember when you had trouble hitting a D5? Nicely done!"

And then I remember what day it is, and how completely screwed I will be by the time I get home today, after managing to push it out of my mind for a few blissful minutes. I slump against the locker next to hers and mumble into the air, "At least I can do one thing right."

Renate takes off her winter coat and hangs it up in her locker. "You know I hate it when you say things like that."

"Sorry."

"Don't apologize to me, apologize to you." She closes her locker and looks squarely at me. "Come on. It's a freaking report card. You didn't knock over a gas station."

"Yeah, like my parents know the difference."

"Maybe they don't know the difference, but you should. In fact, you have to. Or you die."

I can feel that sharp pain in my stomach that reminds me something horrible is around the corner. "Thanks for the pep talk."

"Seriously, C., I'd come home with you and defend you, but I have to go to therapy. But this is your chance. You have to tell them. What they have in mind for you is not going to happen."

My stomach makes a snarling noise, which I'm sure Renate hears even over the noisy hallway.

"You know what?" Renate says. "It's kind of like singing. I'm a mezzo-soprano. You're a coloratura soprano, or at least you would be if you got formal training. You have the vocal capacity to go way higher than I do and sound all fluttery like a bird. But I can belt a lot louder than you because that's how I'm constructed. We'd both lose our voices if we tried to sing like each other instead of like ourselves."

"Understood," I say. "But today is still going to suck."

She nods. Nothing she can say to that.

The report cards are scheduled to hit everyone's email (students' and parents') between 2 and 3 pm today. Before leaving school at 2:45, I look at my email, with my stomach curdling worse than ever, and it isn't there yet. Not that I'd want to look at it if it was. I got my final exams back today, and there were no surprises: B plus for language arts, B for history, C for Spanish, C minus for biology, and a whopping D plus for the geometry final. I wish I had the nerve to take a lighter to them, but even if I did that, the teachers keep copies. The final counts for half my grade and we get marked a half grade up for no unexcused absences, of which I've had none. So figuring in quizzes, I'm getting a C in bio and a C minus in geometry. C as in Cindy. Cynthia. Cyan. Whoever I am.

Crap.

I walk home as slowly as possible. I have very few places I can hide right now. The town library is closed on Mondays. I could have hung out in the school library, I suppose, but the amalgamated odor of Sharpies, Ajax, barf, and coleslaw that permeates the air at school makes me want to evacuate as soon as possible, even considering the alternative. And there's only so much dawdling I can do in the convenience store, especially since I can't consume anything they sell. The only thing left is Safeway, which is Screaming Kid Central in the afternoons. My cat-like hearing will make this a no-go also.

Renate is right. Spectral Amy is right. Dr. Ngo is right. All of this is a symptom of something a lot bigger than a damn report card. I have to tell them. Because there are no brain transplants, they will have to deal with the brain I have. To anyone who is the slightest bit rational, it makes perfect sense.

But these are my parents we're talking about. These are people who are in massive denial and will go to their graves that way. So now the music accompanying me home is Chopin's Funeral March, something my parents might actually recognize, because as soon as those report cards hit, I am the deadest of meat. Even if I get a smile as I walk in the door, they will not be smiling by dinnertime. They will not be smiling during tomorrow's dinner, either. They may never smile at me again.

I wish this was the old days, when everyone got paper report cards at school and you could just shred them on the way home. Or doctor them, if you were clever enough and/or your parents weren't very savvy. Not that I would have gotten away with it, because I get away with almost nothing. But it was a thing, once. For somebody. Maybe for Amy?

Barely breathing, I unlock the front door and walk in, expecting to see the firing squad. I don't. Maybe I still have a few minutes to prepare for this.

But when I get to my room, I know instantly that something isn't right. First I notice that my crates of vinyl are gone. My record player is gone. Laptop: gone. Fearing the worst, I check the closet for my pandeiro.

It's gone too. Along with the bongos, and the spiral notebook I had with "LYRICS" written on the cover.

But nothing else is. Not even the peridot-and-titanium earrings I got for my middle-school graduation present. Only my music stuff.

Heart thudding, I shut my bedroom door and look under my bed, where I hid my Amy album in a bag of yarn I obtained when I foolishly thought I could learn how to knit. It's still there. I quickly stuff the record back in my yarn bag and stick the bag back under the bed, as if I'm being monitored on some kind of spycam. Which, who knows, I might be.

Thank God I never mentioned her to anyone.

For a split second, I don't make the connection. Then it finally sinks in. I knew they'd punish me, but this is way over the top.

I didn't even get a warning that they were thinking about doing all this. I knew there'd be yelling and screaming that I didn't apply myself, and I was thoroughly prepared for there to be some sort of grounding or "no TV" thing or some other suspension of privilege. But as shocked as I am that they went this far, this just proves what I suspected: telling my parents that I'm not who they insist I am will just result in them doubling down on me, over and over again, to make me be that person, until I can find a way to get the hell out of here. They will never respect me. Unless I score a big hit record, of course. Then they'd brag about it all over the place, I'm sure.

I hear a knock on my door and practically jump off my bed. Here it comes. With a ragged exhale, I open the door to find my red-faced mother standing there, smartphone in hand, saying, "How could you do this to us?"

Any well-reasoned arguments I had in favor of taking a different academic and life path have evaporated, since there's clearly no use for them here, and all I have left is pure petulant outrage. "Newsflash, Mom," I say, "if what you want is for me to be a completely normal kid, normal kids are allowed to be happily imperfect. That means the occasional dud report card." Now that I'm aflame with outrage, my sentence-forming ability has returned with a vengeance.

She pushes her way past me to stand inside my room. "But it doesn't mean lying to your parents about not having a problem in school."

"I didn't lie. I tried to tell you a whole bunch of times." I know I'm not going to win this one, but right now any guilt I was feeling before has been canceled out by the severity of the punishment I'm getting. "Really, Mom. Taking my record player? My computer? How am I supposed to get my homework done?"

"If you need to look up something for an assignment you can ask one of us. You'll be given AB's old laptop for any typing you need to do."

Of course. That prehistoric Macbook whose OS was last updated before I was born, so nothing on it works except the word processor, and that just barely. They kept it to use as a weapon against me in case they ever needed it. There aren't even printer drivers made for it anymore; I'll have to burn all my work on to a CD and give it to them to print. ''That piece of garbage is older than she is. I can't believe you even still have it."

"Which reminds me," Mom says, with an icy cool that would no doubt shock most of her readership, "I'll also need your phone."

"No."

"What do you mean, 'no'? You don't get a vote here, Cynthia."

My phone is in my purse, which is hanging on the back of the door. I move to block Mom's path to the doorknob. "You will have to physically fight me for my phone. You've taken away too much already." I glance at her face, for the split second I can stand to, and notice that she has lip liner on, but her lipstick is all worn away. She's still really pretty on the outside, but I know the ugly in her all too well.

"You'll use the prepaid phone until you pull your grades up."

"Oh my God," I hear Tam saying from out in the hallway. "You're giving her the stupid-phone? What for?"

"For not being a perfect clone of you, that's what!" I yell.

"Cynthia!" Mom says.

"You can't have it both ways, Mom. Normal teenagers get bad report cards. Normal teenagers don't give their parents a running laundry list of every single thing that's on their minds. Normal teenagers are passionate about music. You want normal? This is it." I crane my neck to try to see Tam, and then give up and talk to her through the door. "Tam, she took away all my music, including the pandeiro."

Now Tam is standing in the doorway, her jaw slack. "Mom, you didn't sell that thing, did you?"

"No," I hear Dad's voice saying from behond Tam. "We won't sell it unless Cindy brings home another bad report card next quarter."

"My name is not Cindy!" I scream. "Never ever call me that again!"

Sometime between when I first started ranting and now, Mom has grabbed my purse and fished the phone out, and without missing a beat, she and Dad perform a perfect relay: she hands him my real phone, he hands me the stupid-phone.

"This is draconian," I say, looking at the stupid-phone in my hand like it's rubber vomit. Except rubber vomit has more features. "This is like cutting my hands off for stealing a slice of pizza. But you wouldn't even let me _buy_ a slice of pizza, because pizza causes autism, and autism is the Worst. Thing. Ever. Right?"

"Ever since you started hanging out with that Renate," Dad says, "you haven't been yourself. Is she on something?"

"Yeah, she's on _me_ , to actually make something of the talent you don't take seriously." I throw the stupid-phone down on the bed. "I suppose I'm also barred from seeing her?"

"She can come over here," Mom says. "In fact, I think we should see a little more of Renate, to see what kind of influence she's having on you. We'd also like to meet her parents. But you're not to go with her anywhere else."

"Not until we get a negative result back from this eight weeks in a row," Dad adds, handing me a little plastic vial. For pee. This means that until I pass eight consecutive urine tests, I can't even sing with Renate at her place, or hold Renate's cat Sedona in my lap. Sedona is a giant orange purring beanbag; I feel more loved by him than I do by my parents right now. I can't believe I have to go eight weeks without even getting to pet him. And that's if there's no false positive; if there is one, I might never get to see him--or Renate, other than at school--again.

"This can't be happening," I say. "You guys have joined some kind of religious cult or something. What's that organization called, 'Kill Autistics Dead' or something like that?"

"Don't use that word," Mom warns me.

"What word? 'Autistics'? That's what they call themselves, Mom." I almost say "what _we_ call _our_ selves," but stop it in time. "I know, it's called 'Stop Autism Dead,' but what's the fracking difference? You're killing me here. You don't want me to be me, you want some Frankenstein overhaul so I can be someone else, someone you actually _like_."

My face must be about twenty shades of puce, because everyone backs away from me a little bit, like my skin might burn them.

"See," I say. "You admit it. You don't like me at all. You never did. You don't even deny that you think I'm not a real musician, that I don't have the talent."

"Cindy, stop," Dad says. "Talent has nothing to do with anything, But there's no money in music for anyone but a few huge stars. And you've proven to us that you can't handle your studies and playing that pandeiro at the same time." Note that he doesn't deny disliking me or thinking I have no talent. I know some shrink told him not to take the bait from me, but it's not just that; he knows I wouldn't believe him. And he's calling me Cindy again.

"And there _is_ guaranteed money in what, exactly? You think doctors don't burn out and have to leave the profession? Neither of you ever went to med school, you don't have any idea what you're asking of me."

"You still haven't apologized," Mom says.

"Oh, okay." I try to think of a good one. "I'm sorry I didn't realize that there was only room in this house for one scam artist, and it can't be me."

Mom smacks me in the face. She has never done that before.

And I have never slapped anyone before. So when I slap her back, I don't realize how hard I'm doing it, and she careens backwards, hits her head on the side of the door, and collapses. Tam shrieks. I gasp. Mom didn't injure me when she hit me, but I can still feel the sting on my face, the shock, the imprint of her hand.

"I didn't mean to hit her back that hard," I whisper to Dad. "You can kill me now if you want to."

But he's not paying attention to me. He's pulling out his phone, while Mom sits up and groans. Tam leans over her and asks her, "Mom! Are you okay? Can you talk?"

I'm supposed to be asking her that, right? Since I injured her? Or would that just sound hypocritical, if I said something now?

"Hello," he says into the phone, with his voice shaking, "I..I think my wife is unconscious."

"No, I'm not," Mom says, a little faintly but not slurring her words. "I never lost consciousness. Let me talk to them." Dad hands her the phone while she's sitting there on the floor, and there's a lot of "uh-huh" and "no" from Mom, this time at her normal volume, but I don't know what they're asking her. Then she says, "I tripped and fell. I think it was over a mechanical pencil or something like that. My daughters leave pencils on the floor all the time." She laughs a lilting laugh, the way you'd expect "Shelley Kelly" to do.

Dad starts to say something, but Mom waves him off, shaking her head rapidly. "I think I just got a little woozy for a second, but I'm okay. If you want to send EMTs over to check me out, that's fine, but I was never unconscious. I might have a little bit of a headache, but that's all."

Dad's jaw is (figuratively) on the floor. I glance over at Tam, and she just raises her eyebrows noncommittally. Maybe she knows what Mom is doing, but I don't, and Dad sure doesn't.

When Mom is done talking to the 911 operator, she punches the off button and tucks Dad's phone under her, like she thinks he's going to grab it away from her and call them again. "Dan, before you say anything," Mom says, "the last thing we need is for Cynthia to get in trouble over this."

"I think...it's a little late for that," I say, very quietly. My face doesn't sting any more, but head is still sloshing. That's not an injury, right? That's just me being rattled. That's what my head feels like. A rattle. Built-in percussion.

"She means legal trouble," Tam says. "If Mom says you injured her, then there's going to be some social worker investigation and we could both wind up in foster care while they sort it out."

I try hard to access the left side of my brain, the logic side. I'm still hearing that smack in my ear, over and over. "So...so what happens if I say she slapped me, even if I'm not injured? I mean physically? Isn't it state law that it's only abuse if there's an injury, physically?" I did manage to remember something from last year's Civics class, yay me.

"We could still wind up in foster care, considering that Mom just hit her head, and it wouldn't take them long to connect the dots."

"At least we'd have each other."

"No, they'd put us in separate homes. And believe me, a foster home is probably your worst nightmare. It's like 24/7 screaming kids, constant drama, not to mention food you wouldn't be able to digest. You'd have a headache all the time and never get any sleep."

"You mean it would be just like now," I say. My words sound a little slurry. Tam looks away from me.

I glance over at Mom. She doesn't have any outward signs of being injured at the moment, but she hasn't tried to stand up yet. "I'm not going to ask you to lie for me," she says. "I know I'm the one who started it, and I'm sorry. I shouldn't have slapped you."

"Technically you're not asking me to lie," I say, very slowly and deliberately. "But the message I'm getting here is that you'd all prefer it if I did."

Mom takes a deep breath. "You do what you think is right, Cynthia."

I look at Dad, and he nods in agreement, as Mom helps herself to her feet.

"Are you okay?" I ask Mom.

She doesn't answer me.

As the paramedics examine Mom in our living room, I ask myself: _so what's "right?"_ Through the sloshing in my brain, I manage to determine that I don't give half a gerbil doodle what happens to my parents, other than not wanting anything medically wrong with Mom because of what I did. If they want me to lie, or at least not bring up the subject, to make them look good, the hell with that.

But should I do it for me? And Tam? She knows what foster homes are like; her friend Ruby lives in one, and they never go to Ruby's place unless they have to. As bad as my current situation is, a foster home might be even worse. A true sensory dystopia.

The devil you know, etcetera.

After the EMTs do some tests on Mom, they say she has a "very mild concussion." She doesn't need to be taken to the hospital, but she does need to rest as much as possible for the rest of the week and stop whatever she's doing if she gets dizzy. They tell Dad to stay by her side for the next twenty-four hours to make sure her symptoms don't get worse.

Right after that, the cops show up—both female, one about a size 2 and the other about a size 22. They take us each into the bedroom one at a time for questioning—first Mom, then Dad, then Tam, and then me. _Mechanical pencils. Remember that, C. The narrative is mechanical pencils._

They'd all pass a polygraph test easily, I'm sure. They're all smooth as spandex. They take an extra long time with Dad. Tam says they're trying to figure out if he hit her, though I can't imagine how they'd think a guy his size could beat up someone Mom's size. Then again, I got her pretty good without even trying, and I don't weigh any more than he does.

Then it's my turn. I am the kind of person who would flunk a polygraph even if she was telling the truth. Polygraphs measure how nervous you are, not how honest you are.

I could get out of here, right now, if I wanted to. I could light that match. I've never had that kind of power in my hands. But I could destroy myself with it, too, not just them.

I have no idea what's going to come out of my mouth, until it does.

First I fake a coughing fit, to stall a few seconds for time. Then I take a sip from my sippy cup of distilled water, to gain a few more seconds.

Then I say it.

"Yeah...I left this mechanical pencil on the floor and Mom tripped over it and hit her head on the door. I'm always dropping those on the floor. She's tripped on them before, but she's never hit her head. I feel terrible about it."

I don't sound remotely believable to my own ears, but my ears are not standard issue.

I look at the two cops, who are standing in front of me as I'm sitting on my parents' bed. At least, as much as I can manage to. Do they believe me, or do they just not want to borrow trouble?

Then the cops look at each other and nod, and the skinny cop addresses me. "Thank you, Cynthia. Your testimony is a big help." Then I follow them out to the living room.

"Okay," the skinny cop says to all of us, "I think we have what we need here. Belinda, you get as much rest and sleep as you can. If you need anything, you can call us."

The fat cop smooths out her uniform pants as she's walking toward the front door with the skinny cop. Then she looks at me and grins. "And Cynthia, keep those pencils off the ground, okay? Those can be dangerous."

I nod and smile with my lips only.

Once the cops are gone, the enormity of everything that just happened hits me like a brick on the head. I'm still here. Still without my music. I just lied to the cops, along with my entire family. Who all hate me right now anyway. Even Tam probably hates me, she won't even look at me. Why didn't I tell the truth? At least the people in a foster home wouldn't hate me, they'd just find me inconvenient and annoying. I'm used to that.

"I have to go lie down," Mom says.

"Do you need anything?" Tam asks her.

"Nothing right now," Mom says. "But thanks for asking." She goes into the master bedroom, and Dad pads along after her, and they close and lock the bedroom door.

"I have to lie down, also," Tam says, and goes off to her bedroom before we can talk about any of it. I've probably alienated her, too. I at least hope she knows I didn't mean to give Mom a concussion. I am not a fists person, I am a words person. If anything, I know that now more than ever.

And now I have my own bedroom, stripped of any evidence of musicianship, stripped of even an Internet connection, stripped of everything that was the real me, to retreat into, with only my rattly head for company.

_You have your vocal cords, your hands, a pen, and blank paper,_ Spectral Amy whispers in my inner ear. _You can still make music. Clap, snap, pat your lap and sing._

I can't believe I wrote "lyrics" on the cover of that notebook, I answer her in my head. How can I be a musician when I'm that fracking incompetent? I might as well have written "steal me and burn me" on that notebook.

_The whole reason songs rhyme is so people can remember them without writing them down,_ Spectral Amy intones. _Songs existed before paper did._

I go to my room, grab the stupid-phone, and realize that they didn't give me the charger for it. Fortunately, it takes the same charger my real phone does. When it has enough juice to start, I send Renate a text:

_Hi Ren, it's Cynthia, parents took my phone and gave me this stupid-phone b/c report card. Punishments out wazoo. Have to pay big $$ for every text + call minute, so could you meet me 15 mins early at school tomorrow and I'll tell you everything in person?_

I wait a couple of minutes for an answer and don't get one. Probably because she's not hearing my assigned ringtone.

Then I grab the phone, a pile of blank paper, and yes, a mechanical pencil (I'll never look at those the same way again), slip into the closet where I have a blanket duct-taped to the door, turn on the light, and try as hard as I can to remember the words I wrote to "Emancipated Minor," which was about two-thirds finished when my notebook was snatched. If this song is worth remembering, I should be able to remember it. I pat my lap, snap, clap, in the rhythm I created for it, and hum the opening nylon-string guitar riff that someone else will have to play because I don't know how.

Here it comes:

_How will I ever get out of this place if I don't live to tell about it_

_Too many people want that to happen, I won't give them the satisfaction_

_Someone could come and rescue me but somehow I highly doubt it_

_I can't wait until it's too late and I'm stuck in a tiny round hole_

_For the rest of my life, that can't be right, I've got to free my soul_

_Emancipated Minor_

_I've got to be an Emancipated Minor_

_Jump on an ocean liner and set out on the sea_

_To discover me_

Spectral Amy bursts into applause and delighted shrieks. Yeah. I got this. They can't take everything, no matter how hard they try.

Now all I need is a second verse. But first I have to do my homework. Oh God. My fracking homework. How?

The stupid-phone buzzes. Only one person has the number. I grab it eagerly and read Renate's text:

_I wouldn't get up earlier for just anyone, but for you I will._

DAY 87

At 7:45 the next morning, I meet Renate in front of the school. We go over to the grandstands and I tell her everything that went down yesterday, and she punctuates every other sentence I utter with a "holy crap" or similar exclamation.

"So let me see if I understand this," Renate says. "Your parents did all this because you allegedly lied to them about how you were doing in school, even though you tried to tell them and they stuck their fingers in their ears. And then, after this...altercation that your mom started with you...they pressured you to _literally_ lie to law enforcement?"

I let my jaw hang for a second, then shake out my head to get going again. I never would have thought about it that way. Until right now, I've been thinking that I'm the one who did the terrible thing, the thing that required Mom to have medical attention and police at the house. "I thought they did that to protect me."

"They did it to protect _themselves_ ," Renate corrects me. "If you wind up in juvie, or some foster home, there's a good chance they get canned by Dr. Nansi. She comes by like twice a year for an inspection, right? Plus, you never would have hit your mom if she hadn't hit you first. You don't even like to swat mosquitoes."

Of course Renate is right. None of this ever would have happened if they had just told me I couldn't watch TV for a month, or something like that. Now I'm getting mad all over again. "Oh, and guess what. I asked them if I was barred from seeing you, and they said no, as long as it's at our house. In fact, they want you to come over more often so they can see how you're influencing me. Like I'm some blank notepad with no ideas of my own."

"Oh, really?" Renate's face lights up with an evil grin. "They should be careful what they wish for."

"Don't make any more trouble for me, Ren," I beg her. "I know you want to strangle them and I don't blame you, but I'm on thin enough ice already."

Renate pulls the fake-fur-trimmed hood of her parka over her head. The hood is so big that it covers her eyes. "I think you have a lot more power here than you realize."

"You want me to expose them? If I expose them, I expose me, too. I can't win this one." I haven't actually acknowledged officially that I'm not "off the spectrum," even to Renate--but at this point, at least, I'm not actively disputing it.

"You're going to get exposed anyway," Renate says. "It's inevitable. Your teachers are already calling your parents and telling them about your sudden fascination with light fixtures. You're not going to reverse that process. It only goes in one direction."

"How do you know that?"

"Because people get worse at covering things up over time, not better." She fishes a Chapstick out of her purse and goes over her lips with it. "Believe me, I know. All it took was one girl at school noticing that my feet were facing the wrong way when I was in the toilet stall, and before I knew it, I was whisked off to an eating disorder clinic."

"That's different," I say. "If you hadn't gotten treated for that, you could have died. Autism isn't like that."

"But you're acting like it is. You think that if you get exposed, your whole family will starve to death and you'll be homeless. It doesn't have to be like that."

I feel myself welling up with tears. How do I even begin to tell Renate what's really going on? A couple of weeks ago, she made some snide remark about girls who created this whole fantasy life around actors and musicians and what airheads they were. Her George Clinton thing was different, she said. She actually did meet him once, at some book signing for his memoir, and he signed her vinyl copy of _Maggot Brain_ and smiled. But she didn't have fantasies about him as a person, she insisted. She just really, really respected him as a musician and songwriter. I don't know whether I totally believe her or not, but it's made me a little more afraid to tell her about Amy. It seems so _juvenile_ compared to her purely-musical appreciation of P-Funk, even if her appreciation expressed itself in walking down the halls at school chanting about dookies until they hit the eject button.

The other piece of it is, I actually have a real, in-the-flesh friend now, who encourages me to do music. So why do I even need Spectral Amy, if I have Renate? Because real Amy is a percussionist? And made records when she was my age? Is that really why? There has to be some other reason Spectral Amy keeps showing up, even now. And I have no idea what that reason is. Not yet. How can I explain what I can't even understand?

I will have to try to sneak up on it. Like Spectral Amy says, Renate doesn't need to be told everything all at once. But Amy is such a big part of me that I almost feel like if she doesn't know Amy, or the Cyan Beaut thing, she doesn't know me. Telling Renate will probably just cement in her mind that I'm a nutjob, and maybe even an airhead. Maybe if she gets it in small enough bites, it'll go down easier. But the more I think about it, the more I want to cry.

Renate rubs my arm gently. "Do you want a hug?"

I nod. But having her arms around me just makes me cry harder. I really am a nutjob.

At lunch that day, which we're eating outdoors although it's a little too cold out, Renate buys a cup of yogurt and a half pint of milk, even though she hates milk unless it's in cereal. When I ask her about it, she says, "We're going to use these things to make you some percussion instruments. We're going to empty them, wash them out, collect pebbles and acorns and pinecone pieces, and you will have a pair of shakers, cleverly disguised as food."

"Food I can't eat," I remind her.

"Oh, that's right," she says. "Okay. So once we get the stuff that goes inside the shakers, we cover the shakers with duct tape." She reaches into her purse and pulls out a roll of light purple duct tape and holds it up. "Ta-da."

"You keep purple duct tape in your purse?"

"We were learning how to make duct tape wallets in art class, so it's your lucky day. I just happened to bring my favorite color duct tape from home today."

I laugh. "You are such a freak."

"Takes one to know one."

"No argument here." I stare at the yogurt cup. All of a sudden, I'm thinking that my chia seed mush with sunflower seed butter and desiccated lamb intestines isn't going to cut it for lunch. "I want to eat that yogurt."

Renate looks around us to see if anyone is listening in. Once she determines that the coast is clear, a conspiratorial smile creeps across her face. "Are you serious?"

"I am so sick of this un-food I could puke. So who cares if I puke from eating yogurt?"

"How do you know you'll like it?"

"Do you not want me to do it?"

"No, I'm just playing devil's advocate to make sure it's what you really want."

"It has blueberries in it, right? How bad could it be?"

She nods and hands me the yogurt and a spork. "Okay, you passed the test. You are wicked, Cynner Woman." That's what she's been calling me lately sometimes, Cyn (sounds like _sin_ ) or some variation of it like Cynner. I kind of like it. Cyn is almost Cyan; all it's missing is the A, which is what I need earn this next quarter in geometry and biology so I can get my notebook back. And a little extra calcium couldn't hurt my chances, right?

I unwrap the spork, pull the top and the inner seal off the yogurt, and dip the spork into it. "So the fruit is already mixed in?"

"Uh huh."

I tentatively bring a tiny sporkful of yogurt to my lips, stick out my tongue, and lick it off. Two seconds later, I'm grabbing a napkin and spitting into it, like I just accidentally ate tile grout.

"Uccch! That is so disgusting!" I say, as Renate throws her head back and roars with laughter. "Why didn't you tell me it tastes like mashed green bananas?"

"Everyone's tastes are different," Renate says, still giggling. "I happen to really like yogurt, but a lot of people hate it. But of all the things to break your lifelong diet with...why didn't you go for something like chocolate? You know, something that's not an acquired taste?"

"The yogurt was there. Do you want the rest of it?"

"Yes. Please." I hand my future percussion instrument over to her, and she licks off her own spork and uses it on the yogurt, making yummy noises when the spork goes into her mouth. "Nectar of the gods."

I shake my head in dismay.

As Renate is slurping up the last of the yogurt, the first bell rings. "So I'm going to wash these things out in the bathroom, and put the duct tape on them," Renate says, indicating the yogurt cup and the milk container. "After school, we can walk over to your house, and on the way there, we'll collect the noisemaking stuff, and put one more piece of duct tape on to seal them. I'll keep them in my bag until it's time for me to go home, and then I'll pass them on to you."

"You think we'll get away with this?"

"Did they say you couldn't make percussion instruments of your own from other people's dairy containers?"

"No," I say. "But they also didn't say they were taking all my music away, until they did it."

"This will be different," she insists. "This time, they'll have to answer to me, too."

_One and TWO and three AND four AND...one and TWO and three AND four AND..._

We walk to my place as slowly as possible, picking up little pebbles (they have to be the size of half a thumbnail or smaller), shredding pinecones, stomping broken acorns, and putting them into the purple dairy containers. With each clunk of a noisemaking object hitting the bottom of the container, my pulse thumps too. My parents didn't say that walking home slower and collecting pebbles was going to get me more punished, although yesterday I discovered just how big they were on the _ex post facto_ stuff, so who knows what fresh hell they'll put me through for it. But I don't care. I tried to be good, and look where it got me.

Once we have about a dozen little bits in each container, I shake them to see what kind of noise they make, at a nice steady 110 beats per minute. _One and TWO and three AND four AND...one and TWO and three AND four AND..._

"Not quite shakery enough," I say. "Maybe three or four more things in each of them?"

We find a few more things, then I shake them again. I like that the yogurt container has kind of a deep, clunky sound and the milk carton is higher-pitched and more rattly because we put tinier objects into it. _One and TWO and three AND four AND..._

Renate starts doing a little slinky dance along with my rhythm. "I made you dance," I say. "I think we can tape these up now."

She takes the duct tape and a pair of sewing scissors (the three-inch blunt kind that we're allowed to bring to school) out of her purse and tapes up the containers for me. "So what were you playing?"

"Just a basic bossa nova rhythm. But it's actually something I've been working on myself. My parents snatched my lyrics notebook, but I managed to remember how it goes, so I guess it's—"

Renate recoils in horror. "They took your _notebook_? You didn't tell me that."

"Well, yeah. They pretty much ransacked my entire room." I am almost at the point where I can tell her about the one music-related thing in my room they didn't steal. Almost. So, so close.

"They left your fine jewelry," Renate says. "They did this to send you a message, and the message is, you're making music over our dead bodies. This isn't about your grades. This is about them being on a power trip to get you to conform, and the grades are just an excuse. Cynner, we have to stop them."

"How?"

"Play me your song. Right here. If anyone happens to hear it, tough titmouse. People have to know you're serious about this. Everyone should know. You want to make music so bad that you'll collect dirty pebbles and get pinecone splinters for it. Right? Isn't that true?"

I inhale in a series of tiny little gasps. "I..."

"Am I wrong?"

I let out my breath, then start breathing more or less normally again. "No. No, you're not. Not wrong. It's true." I take a few deep breaths from my diaphragm, the way the singing lesson videos said to do. "But...but I'm not warmed up."

"Ahhh-aaaaaaahhhh-aaaaaah," Renate sings, starting at middle C and sliding up a fifth (the first five notes of a scale) to G, then back down to middle C. "You know how to do that, right?"

"Ahhh-aaaaaahhh-aaaaah," I repeat after her.

"Good. Just keep doing that until you're two notes, or four half tones, above the highest note in your song, and then reverse it until you're two notes below the lowest note."

Turns out the song doesn't cover that many notes, probably less than an octave, so it only takes me a minute or two to warm up. People pass us on the sidewalk and give us funny looks, or laugh. But they've always done that to me, so I might as well do something I like while they snicker.

"Okay," Renate says, when we're about a block away from my house, on the opposite side of the street. "Stop walking. Sing your song here." She looks at me intently. "Unless you really, really don't want to. I don't want to pressure you into doing something you—"

"No," I say, my pulse beginning to ascend, my mouth drying out. "I...I do want to. It's just...you know, scary, to sing something I wrote where people can hear me."

"Well, remember when I said it was your lucky day? Because here comes about the most nonthreatening audience you could have." She nods in the direction of a group of little girls, about ten of them, in sky-blue and brown uniforms and beanies with matching winter jackets, coming down the sidewalk towards us, accompanied by a young-looking, willowy woman with light brown shoulder-length curly hair tied at the side of her head in a sky-blue scrunchie. "Brownies. They're between seven and nine years old. And that troop leader barely looks old enough to drink. They're gonna love you, even if the girls don't understand a word you sing."

"Really? How do we—"

"You just sing, when I give you the signal. I'll take care of the rest of it." Then she hesitates. "Wait a second, there's no PG-13 language in this, is there? I guess I should have asked that first."

I flash back to the Amy video from _Your Generation_ , and all those fantastically perplexed little kids getting an unforgettable crash course in music. I don't know if I'm going to blow their minds like Amy did on that show, but I'm starting to get excited by the idea of getting a chance to try. "No, it's clean."

Oh, Spectral Amy sighs, I can't wait to see this.

"Okay, good," Renate says.

"But I don't have a second verse yet."

"Just sing the first one twice. Who's gonna know?" As soon as the Brownie troop is about to pass us, Renate says, "Hey, you guys, Cynthia's about to sing a song she just wrote, you want to hang out and watch?"

"Oh, wow," the troop leader says. "Live music. Sound good, girls?"

They all nod and say yes, and Renate says, "Excellent. You all know how to snap your fingers?"

Apparently girls between seven and nine years old love to show off the fact that they can snap their fingers, because they all get these big smiles on their faces as they demonstrate that particular skill for us. I wonder if there's a Brownie proficiency badge for finger-snapping now.

"Rock," Renate says. "Okay, let's wait until Cynthia gets her shaker rhythm started, and then when I snap my fingers, y'all follow along with me." She looks at me and counts off. "One, two, a one, two, three, four..."

As I begin to shake my new shakers, I count out loud, "O _ne and TWO and three AND four AND, one and TWO and three AND four AND,"_ and on the third bar, Renate snaps her fingers on two and four and the Brownies all join in. Most of them aren't landing straight on two and four, or following my rhythm either, but they're close enough that they won't mess me up. The delayed syncopation feels nice, actually. Really nice. They're speeding me up to maybe 120 BPM, and the song actually sounds better faster. So then I start singing to my jazzy-bluesy melody:

_How will I ever get out of this place_

_If I don't live to tell about it..._

"Louder!" Renate yells.

" _Too many people want that to happen,"_ I sing at a louder volume, feeling my pitch wobble a little. But nobody cares. They're snapping, they're playing patty-cake in time with me, they're dancing, they're whooping...I don't think I've ever felt this good.

" _I won't give them the satisfaction!"_ I shout, and Renate shouts back, "You tell 'em, Cyn! Woo hoo!"

Once I've gone through the whole thing once, I repeat it over again like Renate says, this time getting louder and louder as I approach the end of the verse.

" _Someone could come and rescue me,"_ I belt out at the top of my lungs, going for an octave jump on that last word, and hitting it dead-on. " _But somehow I highly doubt—"_

"Cynthia?"

I turn around and see Mom standing there in her sweats and slippers, with the mailbox key in one hand and what looks like a bunch of bills in the other. For a second, I almost don't recognize her, because she never leaves the house looking as ratty as she does now, with her hair sticking out, no makeup, and scuffed slippers. This is a woman who primps for an hour a day in the bathroom even if she's _not_ leaving the house. She also looks seriously irked, and I instantly freeze. Song over. How much of it did she hear before she said something?

"Hello, Renate," Mom says, like she's saying hi to some kid who egged her car once.

"Hi," Renate says, with an equal lack of enthusiasm.

"Wait a minute," the troop leader says. "You're _that_ Cynthia and Renate?"

"You mean there's more than one?" Renate says. It's such a preposterous thing to say that an involuntary snort-laugh punches its way out of me.

The troop leader laughs, too. "No, no, but...I'm Ellie Shunsberg. My husband is your homeroom teacher. He talks about you two all the time."

Renate and I glance at each other like we're on one of those TV shows where someone comes out with a hidden camera and tells you the last twenty minutes of your life were all a joke. "Oh, God," Renate moans, palming her forehead. "I forgot this town has about seven people in it. I'm so—"

"He doesn't say anything bad about you," Ellie Shunsberg says. "In fact, it's really the opposite. He says the two of you are a breath of fresh air. But I don't think he knew Cynthia could sing like that, or he would have told me." She glances over at Mom. "Are you Cynthia's mom?"

Mom is standing there looking like she just got the hidden camera trick pulled on her, too. "Yyy...yes," she manages to say. "Yes, I am."

"Your daughter and her friend are my husband's favorite things about his job," Ellie says. "I'm serious. They make his day. They're so funny, so smart, so musical..."

"Thanks," I say, feeling a little flushed. Other than from Dr. Ngo, this is more praise than I've gotten from an adult since I was Brownie age. I actually had no idea Mr. S. thought of me so highly. I take a look at Mom, who looks like you could knock her over by coughing two feet from her ear. "I guess homeroom teachers don't bother calling your parents to tell them everything's going great."

"He probably should," Ellie says. "But he's new at this. He's just getting the hang of it."

"Before him, most of my homeroom teachers barely knew my name," I say. "He actually wants to _know_ us."

"Is she going to finish singing?" one of the little girls asks. "Because I really have to pee."

I laugh. "Go pee. We can finish this up some other time." If Mom wasn't standing right here, I'd keep singing. But she's heard enough already.

Wise move, Spectral Amy tells me. You don't need anyone killing your art now, you're just getting started.

"Cynthia does have a wonderful voice," Mom says to Ellie. "We don't get to hear enough of it." My God. What a fracking hypocrite. How does she even stand herself?

I'm not the greatest at reading subtle facial expressions—okay, I flat-out suck at it—but I know an _oh-really?_ eyebrow raise when I see one, and just for a second, I see one from Ellie Shunsberg. I wonder what she'll say to Mr. S. when she gets home. I think I'd pay to watch that conversation. "Well, it was great to meet you all," she says. "But I've gotta get you girls back home so I can relieve Brian from baby duty."

"She said _doody_ ," one of the Brownies says, and they all giggle, Ellie included.

"D-U-T-Y, Mikaela. Not D-O-O-D-Y," Ellie says, patting Mikaela on top of her beanie.

"I knew that," Mikaela says. "It was a joke."

"Your song is awesome," one of the bigger (probably older) girls says to me. "I hope you sing a lot more. I'm Cat. I like to sing too."

"Thanks, Cat," I say. "You have my favorite name."

As soon as they leave, I fold my arms and look smugly at Mom. "So Mom, what do you have to say for yourself now, huh?"

"This doesn't change anything," Mom says. "Your homeroom teacher doesn't grade you."

"He grades me," Renate says. "I have him for geography. He gave me an A. And he made me work for it, too."

"Mom, did you not hear anything she said? My homeroom teacher shows up at his job because of me. Because of us. Why do you not want me to be that person?"

Mom stumbles backwards a little bit, and I don't think it's because of what I just said. She's obviously not over the concussion.

"Crap," I say to Renate. "We have to get her into the house and call the advice nurse, like now."

"I'm fine," Mom says.

"You shouldn't be on your feet," I tell her.

We get Mom back to the house and Dad calls the advice nurse, who tells him over the phone speaker what I just told Mom: she shouldn't be on her feet now. In fact, she probably shouldn't even be sitting up. After he hangs up, he looks at us and says in a monotone voice, "I'm going to take care of blog moderation tonight and close comments when we're ready for bed. We have dinner ready to go, Tam can just put it in the oven." Then they both go into the bedroom and close the door, without another word, and we go out again and sit on to the lawn to talk. Mom still hasn't said a word directly to me about my song, or my singing.

"They are so cold," Renate whispers. "Especially him. I mean, I thought _my_ dad was an ice cube. He has nothing on yours."

"It's probably from fishing in Alaska," I joke. "My dad doesn't have that excuse."

"Seriously, though, you should have slapped both of them. I know that's a bad thing to say, but—"

"Yeah, it is. Let's not go there, okay?"

"Sorry." Renate shows me the shakers in her bag, which miraculously weren't confiscated. "But I am keeping these as a memento for a momentous occasion. That song is a killer, and I'm not just saying that."

"But it's not exactly commercial, and it doesn't even have a second verse yet. You want to write one?" Then I remember I didn't thank her for the compliment, but she starts talking again before I can thank her. I suppose she's used to that sort of thing from me by now.

"I can't write rhyming verse to save my life. But as a concept...I think your second verse should be about what you're going to do to emancipate." She cocks her head and looks at me quizzically. "So are you actually serious about wanting to emancipate, or is that like a metaphor or something?"

"I've been looking into it," I tell her. "But the standards are really strict. I can't even apply until I'm sixteen, and you have to be working at least twenty-five hours a week and making enough money to pay for all your own living expenses, plus covering your own health insurance. I don't know how I'd ever do that."

"So when does Tam turn eighteen?"

"April. Why?"

"I don't know. I was just thinking that if she's going to be eighteen soon, she wouldn't have to worry about being put into a foster home if you rat them out."

I pick up a stray pinecone and start picking at it. "No such luck. And even five more months of this feels like forever."

She thinks for a minute. "I know what you can do. You can write an exposé of them and of Dr. Catherine Nansi. You'd get a book deal in like six seconds if you did that."

"How's that going to work?" I say. "I mean, it's not like someone would give me a check with five figures on it for writing an exposé, and I could move out before they ever found out about it. Besides, they're not all _that_ famous. People whose kids are on the spectrum know about them, and disability rights people know about them and complain about them and stuff, but nobody else would know about them."

"Maybe you could live with us," Renate says.

"You guys can't afford that."

"How do you know that? Did you hack into our bank accounts or something?"

"Not so loud," I whisper. "They can probably hear you."

Renate claps a hand over her mouth. "Sorry," she says at a much lower volume. "But I really think you need to watch out for your dad. I just get an intensely bad vibe from him."

"Worse than my mom?"

"She's more obvious about it, but your mom at least has some feeling in her voice when she talks to you. Your dad...brrrrr. I don't know if he can love anyone."

"What makes you—"

"Oh my God," Renate interrupts me. "Your finger is totally bleeding, Cynner."

I look down at the finger that was toying with the pinecone, and sure enough, there's a big old gash in the fingertip, like a huge paper cut. I am such an expert at slicing myself open without looking. Renate hands me a tissue for me to press down on the cut, and then hands me a second tissue to use as a spare. I stand up, preparing to run into the house to cleanse my wound, and stick my hand in the air to get the bleeding to stop, like I always do when I gash myself.

"You'd better go," I tell Renate. "Before they accuse you of cutting me."

Renate left—at my request--before I could tell her about Amy. Did I do that on purpose, cut myself so I could delay telling her for one more day?

_Don't do that to yourself,_ Spectral Amy coos, while I'm sitting on my bed, looking at my Band-Aid-wrapped finger. I hate Band-Aids so much. I especially think they're disgusting when I see them around a swimming pool, I have actually (on three occasions) held in my nausea until I got out of the pool and then went to the bathroom and gave up my lunch, without telling anyone. I hate that I have to have one on my finger now. I pick at it mindlessly.

_Don't do what to myself?_ I ask Spectral Amy. _Cut myself, or accuse myself of doing it intentionally when I didn't?_

_The second thing,_ Spectral Amy says.

_I actually tried cutting myself once on purpose,_ I confess to Spectral Amy. _It didn't make me feel any better, and I should have known it wouldn't. I am a pain wimp._

_Are you worried that Renate is going to be jealous of me or something?_ Spectral Amy murmurs.

Now that is something I never even thought of before. _Of course not. I know you don't really exist._

_I might not physically exist in this form,_ Spectral Amy says. _But what you love about my voice came out of the real me. And maybe it would bother Renate if you liked my voice more than hers? Or if she thought you liked me better than her?_

_Renate knows better than that,_ I say to Amy, yanking the blasted Band-Aid off my finger and attempting to pitch it in the trash. I miss and have to get up and place it straight into the can. _I don't believe that at all._

But maybe she's right. Maybe I do.

Even if I know it's irrational. I know. I know. I know.

As the minutes before dinnertime tick by, I think of my little performance out in the street. For about ninety exhilerating seconds, I got a taste of what it would be like to be Cyan, beating out a catchy rhythm that makes people want to move in time to it, have people identify with what I'm saying, hearing myself make those incredible noises, all of it. So what if it was a bunch of Brownies and my homeroom teacher's wife? I still saw them move. I moved them. I did. And I moved me, too. And Renate, let's not forget her.

And my parents will take any chance they can get to make sure it never happens again.

After dinner, Tam calls me into her room and tells me to shut the door behind me. I know I'm not allowed to close my own door as part of my punishment, but they didn't say anything about Tam's door. After I close the door, she hands me her tablet, with a big canary-eating grin on her face.

"You have to read this, Cyn," Tam says. She's starting to pick up on the Cyn thing too, which is kind of cool. "Read what Mom wrote about you."

"Are you serious?" I say. "You know I'm not allowed to touch the Internet until—"

"I think they'll make an exception for this," Tam says. "I really do." She shoves the tablet at me, and reluctantly, I begin reading.

_I HEARD HER VOICE_

_Today I have a headache. A bad one, the kind that requires quiet to make it go away. But while I was lying down, in my room, I heard something from out in the street that I had never heard before._

_Haley singing. And playing what sounded like some kind of percussion instrument, handmade out of her friend's milk carton. And I heard the sound of something else: other people. Other fingers, other palms, snapping, clapping, making those rhythmic sounds only a group could make. Even the parade of feet stomping through the fall leaves seemed to sync up with Haley's beat._

_Haley was leading a group in song. Her song._

_I could tell she wrote it. It was teenage-girl verse about how she wants more from life than just being in our little town and being the baby in the family. But she put her heart, her soul, and her lungs into it. She hit clear, bell-like high notes and dark rumbling low notes and everything in between. This is a voice I had never heard before, and yet I knew it was her. I felt her in between every note. There is a timbre that your own child produces, which a parent can hear no matter how well that child bends and shapes and disguises her voice._

_So why had I never heard that powerful voice before? Why would she sing to a group of little girls she just met, and not to us, her parents? Well, because she's fifteen, that's why. Moms of normal girls are always the last to know anything they're up to. In our world, this is the happiest of developments._

_So I went outside and watched as she and her BFF put on this impromptu show for a Brownie-scout troop. Girls who still suffer from autism don't do this. They don't make up songs with their friends, they don't invite others to hear them right out on the street. They face a future with no one hearing their voices, and in some cases maybe not much caring if anyone ever does. But this will not be Haley's fate._

_If you feed your children well, this is what can happen._

This can't be real. The woman I just saw out there on the sidewalk, dripping with disapproval of me--so full of it even sweet, wholesome Ellie Shunsberg could see right through her--could not possibly have written this. No way.

I read it again.

Then a third time. This sequence of events still doesn't pass earth logic standard, by my interpretation.

I hand the tablet back to Tam. I plunk myself down in a beanbag chair and force myself to breathe from my diaphragm. I can feel resentment start to build in me, just the first tiny flickers, and I shake my head. "The only things in that essay that aren't total BS are the punctuation marks."

"So none of that happened...at all?" Tam asks.

"The big picture stuff did," I say. "I did write a song. I did sing it to a bunch of Brownies who were walking by. Mom did hear me do it. But everything else is cheap plastic crap. She _hated_ my song, Tam. She hated me for singing out in public when she and Dad did everything they could to get me to stop making music."

I'm becoming aware that my voice is probably carrying and that my parents might be able to hear me. But I can't shut myself up. My mouth has a mind of its own.

"And my song had nothing to do with small towns and baby of the family stuff. You know what the name of that song is? 'Emancipated Minor.' She heard me sing the exact words, 'How am I ever gonna get out of here if I don't live to tell about it?' She heard me, and then she wrote _that_." I feel the corner of my eye twitch, and press it with my finger. "Oh, and you missed the best part of all. That Brownie troop leader was my homeroom teacher's wife. And she told Mom that he thought I was great, and Mom barely cracked a smile. She simpered something about what a _wonderful voice I had_ and that she _didn't get to hear enough of it_ , and this lady actually gave her the eyebrow." I do my best to mimic Ellie Shunsberg's subtle-but-observable eyebrow raise. "She just met Mom like ten seconds before, and even she wasn't buying it."

Tam sighs and shakes her head. "And I thought she was doing something _nice_ for you. I had no idea it went down like that. I'm so sorry."

"And that stuff about girls with autism having no friends and no voice and no creativity, that's crap too. Maybe _some_ autistic girls don't have those things, but some non-autistic girls don't, either. If that's the standard she's using to prove that I'm quote-unquote in remission, then who knows, maybe I _am_ still autistic."

There. I said it. It's out. This is the first time I've said it out loud, to anyone. If Mom and Dad could actually hear me, this is when they would storm out of that bedroom and give me what-for. If that doesn't piss them off, maybe Renate is right. Maybe they _are_ walking ice cubes who can't love anyone, although for some reason Renate thinks that only applies to Dad.

But I hear no activity coming from that direction. And all Tam does is nod her head, almost like she knew it was coming. "Our parents are normal in name only," Tam says. "I know a lot of people at school and online with brothers and sisters on the spectrum. Their parents aren't like this."

"So you believe me."

Tam bites her lip."I don't want to believe you. But...that story does sound very Mom."

"Can't you say something to them? Like, about the pandeiro, at least? From you, it might mean something."

She shakes her head. "I don't think I'm their favorite person right now either. The other day I said something about how I was thinking about—just _thinking about_ —applying to Rhode Island School of Design just to see if I could get into the industrial design program, and they about stroked out."

"Was that before report cards?"

"Yep."

I let out a _whew_. "Maybe that's why they went off on me, I was the last straw. But you _are_ really good at drawing. You'd probably get into RISD, no sweat."

"I'm actually thinking of applying and not telling them."

"Can you do that?"

"I can apply," Tam says. "I just can't get financial aid without their help. But there's no guarantee that Caltech will take me anyway, so why put all my eggs in that basket?"

"Because artists are all doooooomed to starve to death and dieeeee," I deadpan.

She picks up a felt-tip pen and starts scribbling angrily on the blotter on her desk. "I can't believe she actually had the nerve to write an essay to make money off you singing, when she doesn't support it at all. I mean, that's just...shameless." She puts the cap back on her pen and tosses it on her desk in disgust. "Let me see if I can get them to back away from the pandeiro, okay?"

"Thanks." I stand up from the beanbag chair and go to open the bedroom door to leave. Before I exit, I turn to her and say, "Normal in name only. NINO. That's perfect."

After dinner and supplements, I get back to my room and that twenty-pound dinosaur laptop is sitting where my real laptop should be, staring at me and laughing. And then, for the first time today, it hits me that I have no Net connection. I can't listen to any digital music (even digital versions of analog recordings are better than nothing), can't check Amy's Wikipedia page or browse the Net looking for stuff about her. Amy could die, and her obituary could be hitting the wires right now and I'd never know. This is torture.

_I'm still here_ , Spectral Amy says from under the bed, slightly muffled by the skeins of snarled yarn surrounding her album. Which I can't even take out to look at, for fear of being busted.

_How can they do this to me?_ I wail at Spectral Amy, being careful to keep my physical mouth shut. _I'm in jail. I am in fracking jail._

_Get your homework done and study for your tests,_ Spectral Amy says. _I'm not going anywhere. When we're done, you can change into your jammies, hit the lights, and you'll remember every sound I ever made, like it's right in your ear._

I am dubious, but I attempt to do what she says. I push the on button for the Macbook, and hear it buzz and whirr. Last night I tried booting it up and it took fifteen minutes (I timed it), and then froze over and over again when I was trying (despite all the, ahem, distractions) to work. Now five minutes, ten minutes, fifteen minutes go by, and the laptop still isn't usable yet; all I get is the endless twirly ball of death. Then it conks out entirely. No picture, nothing. Well, now they pretty much have to give me my old machine back, if they want me to get anything done.

I leave my room and see Dad in the kitchen, fixing himself a snack. Pickled garlic, it looks like. "Um, guess what?" I say. I don't know what he's going to say. Did he hear me ranting before?

"What?" Dad says, barely glancing at me.

"That old Macbook finally bit it. Doesn't run at all. If you want to try to fix it be my guest, but in the meantime I have to get my work done."

"Hmmmm." He takes a spoon and a fork out of the silverware drawer.

"If you give me my old laptop back, I won't have to bug you guys every time I need to look something up or print something," I say, then practically duck in anticipation of what he might throw at me, verbally or otherwise. "Last night I probably drove you up the wall, asking you to run my stuff through the Spanish translator about seventy-five-thousand times. And believe me, I didn't want to ask you for anything, after all that happened."

He nods. "Yeah, that's a good point. Fewer interruptions now might be better." He stops what he's doing and goes into the bedroom for a second, then emerges with my laptop and the power supply. "Just leave the old machine on the dining table and we'll deal with it. Either I'll fix it, or..."

"Or not fix it?" I say, hoping to add a little levity to the proceedings.

He laughs, but very mildly. "Right, or not fix it. But your laptop needs to be back on the dining table by eleven every night, and if we see any abuse of your time because of it—"

"Oh, you won't." I debate telling him I read Mom's blog post already. He's not bringing it up. So for now I'm going to assume that he didn't hear me before. Let the dormant flea eggs stay dormant, unless I start itching. "Thanks, Dad."

I go back to my room and plug in the laptop and boot it up. It's up and ready to work on in less than two minutes. And when I get a browser window, the first thing I do, with my heart clanging away, is look up Amy's Wikipedia page. It's not there anymore.

You failed their notoriety test, I tell Spectral Amy. But that's their loss.

I stick in my earphones and play her "Look Around" video twice, then clear out all my browsing history and cookies. I have to put up a new page for her. If they erase it, I'll put it up again. But not now. Not now. I crack open my Spanish workbook. This is one of those take-home quizzes where they give you the questions in Spanish and the answers in English, and you have to tell them in Spanish if the answer is true or false, and why. That should be a slam-dunk. _Que es la diferencia antes esta con accente y esta sin accente?_

_Just look around...emancipate minor...ocean liner, discover me..._

I drum on my lap for a minute, then put the question through the translator, which I'm going to have to keep using until I stop confusing my Spanish and my Portuguese, and it comes out, "What is the difference between is without an accent and is with an accent?", which doesn't make any sense. If I knew how to input _esta_ with an accent, I'd probably get a different answer, but I don't know how to do accents on this keyboard.

_O-baaa, o-baaaa, o-baaaa...one-and-TWO-and-three-AND-four-AND..._

The test answer (in English) is: _With an accent, it means_ is _, without an accent it means_ are. Is that true or false? I think it's true, but is it the entire truth? Doesn't _esta_ have another meaning? Or multiple other meanings? And if it does, does it make the statement false, or just incomplete? God. I hate questions like this.

While chewing furiously on my thumb cuticle, I play the Amy video again two more times. I know I need to stop. If I spend eight minutes watching her for every five minutes studying, I'll get nothing done for the rest of my life.

But I can't stop.

But I have to stop.

I really, really, really do.

At 10:55 pm, I shut the laptop down and get it to the dining table by eleven sharp, my homework still incomplete.

This is not going to work.

"Why are you doing this to me?" I say out loud to Spectral Amy, once I'm back in my bedroom. "Why? Why do you want to own my entire brain?"

A second later, I hear a soft knock on my door. I open it and Tam is standing there bleary-eyed in her nightgown. Before she can say anything, I whisper, "I was just having a bad dream, sorry, I'll be okay," and close the door quickly before she can see that I'm not in my pajamas yet.

I never do get an answer from Spectral Amy. I take out a piece of paper and start writing out text for a new Wikipedia page for her, only to realize how ridiculous it is to write a Wikipedia page on fracking _paper._ I crumple up the paper and pitch it in the trash can next to the bed.

I get into my pajamas and hit the lights. I've barely slept the last two nights, and I feel like I'm about to pass out, but her video is on autoplay in my mind. All night. When I'm not thinking about shakers and Brownies and my homeroom teacher's wife, and bouncing up and down in my squeaky little bed, _one-and-SQUEAK-and-three-SQUEAK-four-SQUEAK, one-and-SQUEAK-and-three-SQUEAK-four-SQUEAK..._

DAY 88

"Your wife is awesome sauce, Mr. S.," Renate says as she walks into homeroom about two seconds after I plop down in my seat, completely out of it. I think I had about ninety minutes of unconsciousness all of last night, after getting maybe four hours total for the prior two nights; it's caught up to me, big time. "You must have done something right."

Mr. S. beams. "Or _she_ did." Then he turns to me and says, "She told me about that little concert the two of you gave out there on the sidewalk. She was very impressed."

"I didn't do anything but direct traffic," Renate says.

I am so tired that I can't even form a sentence, but I try. "You did more than that. You helped me percussion...er, make my percusssion. Instrument. Instruments. I'm tired." I make snoring noises.

"It was exciting, wasn't it?" Renate says, winking at me. "Hard to come down after a performance."

"Did you read that pile of..."--I think for a second, remembering that I'm not supposed to make a habit out of cursing in here—"...of excrement my mom wrote about it?" A three-syllable word, wowsers. Didn't think I had it in me.

"Uh oh," Renate says. "No, but I can only imagine. She did a total whitewash, right?"

"I read it," Mr. Shunsberg says. "And I have to say, her account of what happened differs from my wife's pretty significantly."

"Believe your wife," I say. "Always." I lay my head down on my desk. I haven't even had to try to take in information today, and already I'm out of brain space.

"I didn't know you played an instrument, Cynthia," Shaina says.

I raise my head off the desk, then put a fist down on the desk, pinky side down, and rest my chin on it. "I play an instrument?"

"Yes," Renate says. "You're a percussionist. And you sing. And write your own songs. Why are you trying to hide that?"

I close my eyes. "Because it's nothing. Chick singers are a dime a dozen." My feet start tapping rapidly on the floor, two bars of 6/8 time followed by a single bar of 2/2, then repeating over and over again. It's the same rhythm as the opening to "Carpet Man," a Jimmy Webb song on Amy's album: _RIGHT-right-right LEFT-left-left RIGHT-right-right LEFT-left-left RIGHT RIGHT._ Jimmy Webb also wrote "Up, Up and Away," the "bal-LOON" thing, which makes it even weirder than I haven't said anything to Renate about it. _RIGHT-right-right LEFT-left-left RIGHT-right-right LEFT-left-left RIGHT RIGHT..._

"Says your dad," Renate says. "Who, I want everyone to know, is a brass-plated flying doucheplane." She then addresses the rest of the room. "People, they took away her professional-grade Brazilian drum from her, which she had just mastered playing, because of a bad report card. They are evil. And the report card wasn't even that bad. It was just unworthy of California flipping Institute of Technology."

My feet continue working away at the floor. "Ren, stop."

"Did they really?" Mr. Shunsberg says. With my feet still tapping, I open my eyes to look at him. He looks genuinely freaked out. So do some of the kids in the room, even some of the ones who have laughed at me before. "Seriously, Cynthia, is that true?"

"Cyn, there's nothing to be embarrassed about," Renate said. "You did nothing wrong. Well, okay, you got a couple of C's, but the punishment here doesn't fit the crime."

_RIGHT-right-right LEFT-left-left RIGHT-right-right LEFT-left-left RIGHT RIGHT, RIGHT-right-right LEFT-left-left RIGHT-right-right LEFT-left-left RIGHT RIGHT..._

"I..." I try to process everything that's going on here. My homeroom teacher, who actually does something besides take roll, now knows that my family's blog is, at the very least, factually questionable. And he has seen me lose my speech and do all this stuff with my feet, which I want to stop doing but can't. That means he'll probably figure out in short order that I'm not "in remission," if he hasn't already. And the other kids in the class know about my ex-pandeiro and that I sing. That should be a net plus socially, especially if they also know my evil parents are trying to stop me. But that's just one step away from them finding out about the rest of it, Spectral Amy included. "I...I..."

"Remember what Pauline Kael said once," Renate says to me. "'A good-girl artist is a contradiction in terms.'"

In the blur that occurs in my head over the next ninety-ish seconds, someone asks Renate who Pauline Kael is, she tells them Pauline Kael was an influential film critic from the 1960s and 1970s, someone else asks me if I'm okay, and I don't answer, they ask me again and I don't answer, Renate says to Mr. Shunsberg, "Can you write us a note?", and Renate picks up my arm and says, "Come on, we need to get you some air," and leads me out of the classroom, grabbing my jacket off the chair on the way out.

Once we're in the hallway, Renate says to me, "Dude, what the hell? What did they do to you now—I mean, other than publish some bogus blog post, which they always do anyway?"

"I miss Sedona," I answer in a slurred murmur, even as I realize how ludicrous that must sound.

I expect her to recoil and say, "What, this is about missing my cat?", but instead, she asks me, "Does that stupid-phone of yours have GPS tracking on it that your parents can follow from home?"

I shake my head. "It barely makes phone calls," I manage to squeak out.

"Then we're going to my house," Renate says. "I know your parents told you that you couldn't be there, but screw them. Screw them to the wall. You'll go home at your usual time and they won't know anything. We have a note. Mr. S. is going to tell the office that we're doing an independent study project and we'll be excused from class. You won't get reported. Come on."

I follow her down the hall towards the front door, wondering about the contents of this magic note Renate has in her possession that will allow us to do this without my parents' knowledge, but knowing I don't have a choice but to believe her, because I can't be here and there's nowhere else to go. "What about your parents?"

"Dad's still sleeping off Alaska. He probably won't come out of his room the whole time you're there. But I just texted Mom about it. I don't think she'll object, it's not like I make a habit out of this." She pauses. "In fact, I've never done it."

"Then why are you doing it for me?"

"No one else ever let me before."

Spectral Amy hasn't put in an appearance today. That might be because I yelled at her last night.

"The world is a toll-free toilet."

My eyes flutter open and I see Renate, standing there over her bed, which she has let me have a nap in, with Sedona, her fur-coated white noise machine, purring away next to my head. I have no idea how long I've been asleep for. I don't even want to know yet.

"The world is a Toll House cookie," I sleep-mumble.

"Our mouths neurological assholes," Renate recites.

"Our mouths neuro...what you said."

"Talking shit a mile a minute."

"Talking fertilizer seven thousand billion kilometers a micro-nano-nanosecond. Thing. Stuff. Blues." Sounding a little more with-it now. But geez, what an alarm clock. At least once a week she wants me to recite "PE Squad" with her, so she won't be tempted to do it at school. Usually I do it straight, so she knows I know the real words and that I'm just messing with her now.

"Good. You're awake and making jokes. It's two o'clock, you have to start thinking about getting up. And maybe eating your lunch so you don't go home ravenous."

I sit up, nudging Sedona from his snooze zone and on to the floor, where he lands on all fours and scampers away. "I guess I can sleep for real after all."

"How do you feel?"

"Halfway human again." I pick up my glasses from the side table and put them on, and notice that Renate isn't wearing her beret or her cloak; this is the first time I've seen her without either one. "Thanks for letting me do that. My homework last night was a nightmare." As I wake up, it starts occurring to me that I can't have a repeat of the last few nights again tonight, and nothing has changed in order to prevent it, and my upper trapezius, right under the base of my skull, starts barking at me. I wince and rub it.

Renate sits on the bed across from me. "Feel up to helping me with a boy problem?"

"There's a boy?"

"Not here. In Kissimmee, Florida. I was chatting with him online while you were sleeping."

I reach for my lunch sack and start digging food-like things out of it. "I was gonna say, I didn't think there was anyone here you'd want to touch with a ten-mile light sabre." I open my bag of raw almonds, the only vaguely appetizing thing in there, and start crunching away. "But what's in Kissimmee, Florida? Is that where Disney World is?"

"Close." All of a sudden, Renate has been transformed into a giddy, love-struck girly-girl. "But I met him on the Funkateer Friends board."

"So what's the problem, other than geographic undesirability?"

"He's nineteen," she sighs.

"Illegal."

"Not for long." Renate flicks back a piece of her shoe-polished hair. "Florida and Oregon both have close-in-age consent starting at age sixteen. I'll be sixteen in five weeks."

"Well, you seem to have that figured out," I say. "So...is there another problem?"

"The other problem is, he hasn't asked me how old _I_ am. So either he assumes I'm an adult or he doesn't have that kind of interest. It's so hard to tell these things online. And I could get him in trouble if I ask if he's interested. At least before December thirtieth."

"So isn't it better if he doesn't ask, since that could get him in even more trouble than if you do it? Or am I missing something here?"

She thinks for a second, then nods. "No, that's a good point. Besides, for all I know he could be lying about his age."

"That does happen." I shrug, palms up. "Sorry to be a wet blankie. But if you're still talking to him in five weeks, then you can ask, or tell him you just turned sixteen and see what he says. It's a time limited problem. You're just getting to know him, so for all you know now, by then there'll be someone else you like even better."

Renate flops on her back and groans. "I hate to say it, but you're right." Then she turns her head towards me and smiles. "But I haven't heard you talk about your love life, ever."

"That's because there hasn't been anyone I thought was worth it." I take a sip of my vinegar water, and dribble some of it on the bed, then wipe it off with my napkin. "I'm starting to wonder if there ever will be. Aren't I supposed to be fantastically horny by now?"

"There's no 'supposed-to.' Some people don't have those feelings until they're adults. Some people never have them at all."

"Oh, I have those feelings," I say. "I just don't have them...about physical contact." Okay, this is my test for Renate. If I tell her about what turns me on and she doesn't make a big deal about it, maybe I can tell her about Amy.

_You sure you want to tell her this first?_ Spectral Amy asks me.

_No, but I'm doing it anyway, because I'm chicken,_ I reply.

_Oh,_ Spectral Amy says. _Carry on, then._

"Um...okay," Renate says. "Then what _do_ you have them about?

I take a deep breath and let it out all at once. "I know this is going to sound kind of bizarre," I begin. "But...I have them about performing in front of a big audience. You know, I go onstage, like an opening act or something...they have no idea who I am or what this weird-looking girl is doing on stage...and then I start making these amazing sounds, these irresistible rhythms that they get totally caught up in...and then when I'm done, I leave the stage and I hear them stomp and chant for me to come back for an encore..."

"So basically," Renate says slowly, "you don't have any desire to get busy with an individual person...but you want to get laid by, like, Carnegie Hall."

I hide my face in my hands. "I knew I shouldn't have told you."

"No, I think that's tremendous." I hear Renate sit up, and I pull my face up out of my hands. "I _love_ that. That is the mark of a true performer."

"You really think so?"

"What else could it be? Shy and retiring shrinking violets don't have fantasies like that. You've only been like that because this town is full of narrow-minded jerks and your parents are music-hating sociopaths. If we can get you to Portland, or even, what the hell, Las Vegas or something, where there are performers everywhere you look...the real you will come flying out."

"I don't think my parents hate music, as such," I say. "They just hate it coming from me."

"Then they can get some frigging soundproofing, like I have," Renate says. "But they won't, because they have their heads lodged in their small intestines." She gets up from the bed. "How about a little 'Maggot Brain' before you go?"

"Sure," I say.

Renate grabs her laptop and starts up the song, then lies down on the floor while I lie on the bed looking up at her cottage-cheese ceiling. I've listened to it with her before. I don't think I'll ever feel the same way about it she does, but it's kind of cool, this ten-minute-long, droning, slow-ooze instrumental in 6/8 time featuring a long, intense, psychedelic-sounding guitar solo. Renate says some of the stoners she's talked to like to get high and listen to this, but she gets high just listening to it, without any chemical help. I can see why, I get some of the same kind of floaty feeling from it. She told me once that supposedly George Clinton told Eddie Hazel, the guitar player, to play as though someone told him his mother was dead, but then he found out it wasn't true.

I guess musicians who aren't autistic know exactly what that means. As I'm lying there listening, I'm trying to imagine how I would play drums or percussion if someone told me Mom was dead but then I found out it wasn't true. Would I be mad at that person and just beat the living tar out of my instrument to show that? Would I be relieved that they were wrong and make happy noises? Would it be different if the person who told me just had wrong information, as opposed to deliberately lying to me? Would it be different depending on what they told me she died of, whether it was all of a sudden or whether she'd been sick a long time? Or whether we were on good terms or not when she died? Would it all make more sense if I was on recreational drugs? Or would I just be even more confused? I'm fairly certain I would drive George Clinton straight up the wall if I was in one of his bands.

When the song ends, I look at the bedside clock. It's two-thirty. That gives me fifteen minutes before I leave. As the floaty feeling starts to wear off, it hits me again that last night can't keep happening. It just can't. And Amy will be waiting for me, in that computer, the minute I get home. Maybe if I do this now, it'll break the cycle. At least it would be one less thing for me to stress about. Renate has shared her special favorite music with me, why shouldn't I do the same?

So while I'm putting my shoes on, I blunder ahead. "So speaking of interesting discoveries," I say, "I just found out that back in 1969 there was a singer our age who sang bossa nova music and put out an album on a major label."

"Is that right?" Renate says.

"Yeah, her name's Amy Zander. You ever heard of her?"

Renate shakes her head no. So now I have a snap decision to make. Do I tell her how much Amy has meant to me, or do I show her Amy's video first and see how she reacts to it? Because if she hates it, there's no point telling her that it's my favorite thing ever.

Just open your mouth and see what comes out, Spectral Amy says.

"Okay," I say, my voice trembling a little, "so I found, like, one video of her, and the sound quality is awful because it's a zillion years old and it's a total accident that anyone has film of it at all, but it's something to see. You want to see it?"

"Sure, we have a few minutes."

Renate hands me her laptop, and I pull up the Amy video and put the laptop on the bed in between us, with the screen where both of us can see it. I clamp down on my lower lip with my teeth and don't look at Renate or say anything while she watches. When it's done, I look at her, and she nods thoughtfully. Here it comes.

"Well," Renate says, "there's one thing I know now that I didn't four minutes ago."

"What's that?"

"I now know exactly who Jim Henson used as the prototype for Animal the Muppet." She laughs at her own joke, then looks at me like she's expecting me to laugh too. But I'm not laughing. Is that her only response to this, the most important thing in the world to me? Some inane Muppets joke? Right away she can tell something is off with me. "Wait a minute," she says. "This isn't some random singer you happened to just find out about. This is someone you really like, isn't it?"

I start hyperventilating. My mouth wants to say something. But it has nothing.

"Damn it, Cynner." Renate closes her laptop, too hard. "Why didn't you tell me that before we watched this thing?"

All the blood in me seems to be on a pipeline straight to my face. Then I finally manage a few words. "Why, so you could make fun of me over it?" I reach for the bedside tissue box and pull out a tissue, expecting the gusher of tears to start, but it doesn't. "Or so you could say something like, 'hmm, that was interesting,' when you're secretly like, 'wow, Cynthia's a nutbag if she's into this'?"

"I don't think you're a nutbag. I just don't understand. She's nowhere near on pitch."

"She bends notes."

"She's _off key_. There's bending notes, and there's stomping them flat like she's doing. And her timing on the drums...I can't even. To be honest with you, I'm kind of shocked that you'd go for this."

"So you _do_ think I'm a nutbag."

"Don't put words in my mouth."

"I don't have to. They're already on your face." I crumple up the tissue and toss it on the bed. "I'm so stupid. I thought you might be the one person on earth who'd understand. But I guess that's impossible, right?"

Renate doesn't say anything. She has her mouth open like she wants to, but for once she has no slick answers for me. She's already told me why she thinks Amy sucks, in more detail than in my worst nightmares. I don't see any way to fix this.

"I'm sorry I'm not the hipster-in-training you thought I was," I mutter, and then jump off the bed and grab my stuff—except for the rest of my ludicrous lunch, which she can dispose of after I'm gone. "You never knew me at all."

"Come on, don't do that," Renate says, then gets up and follows me out the door to her bedroom and into the foyer. I pause before the front door and whirl around to face her.

"Don't do what?" My voice sounds so shrill, at least in my own head, I feel like I could crack mirrors with it. "Don't like anything that you don't think is hip and cool enough?"

As I'm pulling my jacket on, Renate closes her eyes and lets out an impatient sigh. "Just tell me what you like about her, okay? Because I just don't get this at all, other than her being our age and making a record, which she obviously wasn't ready for. They put her up on that stage to be a freak show, not a musician. Is that who you want for a role model? Seriously?"

"Do I have to defend my taste in music like I'm being cross-examined in court? Is everybody in the whole fracking world going to make me do that for the rest of my life?"

I stare her down for a few seconds, focusing on her nose so I don't have to look at her eyes. When she doesn't say anything, I zip and button my jacket as hastily as I can. "Yeah," I say, as I open her front door to leave. "That's about what I thought."

Once I'm out of her house and down the street, and no longer have anything to wipe my face with, _then_ I start crying. Naturally.

I thought she was like me, at least a little. But nobody is like me. At all. Nobody. Now I know, and I will never forget.

No, I didn't defend Amy on the basis of any kind of logic, or musical historical significance, or whatever. I didn't have the cleverest argument ever. But why do I have to? Why do other people have such a bone up them about everyone not being their exact Xeroxes? I don't do that to people. I can't. If I only talk to people exactly like me, I might as well never have learned to talk at all.

And maybe I shouldn't have. Who knows. If I hadn't learned to talk, then stuff like this would never happen. People wouldn't expect me to be cool, so they'd never be disappointed when they found out I wasn't.

When I get home at my usual time, Tam is already there, and she sees that my eyes and face are red and soaking wet. "What happened to you?" she asks me.

"Ren and I had a fight," I say.

"Really? About what?"

"Perfect pitch," I say, and walk away before she can ask me anything more.

I go into my room and lie down on my bed, and I say to Spectral Amy, _it's just us now. You're all I have._

# STAGE III:

# Illness begins to spread to other parts of the body; by now, the patient is aware of the disease and has likely tried multiple modalities to attain remission, with only intermittent success at best.

DAY 89

"How about schizotypal personality disorder? Do you think maybe I might have that?"

I'm meeting with Dr. Ngo after school, a week after the fight with Ren. She and I still haven't spoken since then. She can't even look at me. I stopped trying to look at her after the first day. I take solace only in the fact that she's not the gossipy type, so I don't have to worry about her spreading lies about me or telling people (truthfully) that I only get aroused by the thought of being on stage. And since she doesn't know the entire truth about Amy and never will, the worst she can say about it is that I have bad taste, and that's just an opinion. But still. I finally make a fracking friend, at age fifteen, and lose her within two months over this Amy-shaped phantom object that sits between us. I need help.

Dr. Ngo chuckles. "I'm not sure why you're so eager to diagnose yourself with things that aren't autism."

"I'm not." My foot itches. I remove my sneaker and sock, scratch the bottom of my foot, and put my sock back on. I don't put the sneaker back on yet; I am waiting to see if it will itch again. It does. I scratch again. Geez, my heels are so rough, I could sand drywall with them, even though I put lotion on them every day. Itchy and scratchy feet as such are not part of the autism diagnostic criteria, but sensory hypersensitivity in general is. I think I might be allergic to my own skin. "I was just reading about it, and there was something in there about pseudo-hallucinations, things people know aren't real but they feel real. Isn't that what this Amy thing is?"

"Personality disorders are generally not diagnosed in people under eighteen." Dr. Ngo is holding a pencil in his hand, but there's no paper on his desk. "If you still have this 'Amy thing' three years from now you can revisit the issue. But I don't think that will happen."

"Right, because I'm not going to live that long." I laugh, to try to let him know I'm kidding, but he doesn't react. "I'm joking. You know that, right?"

"Are you?"

"Yes. If I thought I was a danger to myself, like life and death danger, I would tell you." Not that I've been completely honest with him, though. I haven't told him about coming to blows with Mom, because if I told him he'd have to report it, and I can't go there yet. I tell myself I'm holding it back because of Tam, because she wouldn't want to go to a foster home, and it doesn't sound like a barrel of laughs to me either. And also, I don't think Mom would ever slap me again, not after what we went through. That's what I'm telling myself.

He nods thoughtfully. "Also, a lot of people, even completely neurotypical people, have mental cheering sections like yours that they know aren't real. It's not a bad thing. In fact, right now it might be saving your life."

"And costing me friends." Now that my foot hasn't itched for a full minute, I put my shoe back on and tie it. "What makes you so sure I'm going to outgrow it?"

"Because Amy--or this spectre of Amy, as you like to call it--is a symptom of an exogenous problem. You know what that means, exogenous?"

I shake my head no. I actually kind of like the fact that he's using words I don't know, he probably doesn't do that with just anyone.

"It means it's related to external circumstances, rather than internal ones like a mental health issue or personality disorder. And those circumstances existed before you met Renate."

"You mean my family."

"It's very hard living in a household with people who don't accept you. Maybe your sister does, but you still feel separate from her in a lot of ways, right?"

"Well, yeah. She actually gets party invitations." The foot itch starts up again. Argh. I decide to ignore it as long as I can stand to. "But don't all people my age have conflicts with their parents?"

"Yours is different." Dr. Ngo turns the pencil in his hand eraser side down, and taps the eraser a few times on his desk. "Your conflict isn't about the usual things parents and teenagers fight about. Neurotypical adolescents, for the most part, fight with their parents over being not allowed to do what their peers are doing. You fight with yours about _not_ _wanting_ to do what your peers are doing, or not being able to do it."

I swallow hard. "But why Amy? Why did I have to pick someone so completely obscure that nobody but me understands her appeal?"

"Well, think about it. Don't you identify with her _because_ she was misunderstood and overlooked?"

My eyebrows go up. I don't know why I never thought of that before. And I can't come up with an argument against it. "Well, maybe that's part of it. But why do you think it's going to go away in three years?"

"Three years from now, you'll be living a very different life, Cynthia," Dr. Ngo says, smiling that little I-know-something-you-don't half-smile of his. "Bank on it."

"How do you figure that?"

"Because three years from now, you're going to know exactly what you have to offer, and who you want to offer it to, and who you have to stay away from. And you'll have the legal rights to do exactly that. You'll have the name you want, you'll be writing your songs, recording them on your computer and posting them to the Internet, maybe even going out there and performing live, and they won't be able to stop you. You might always like Amy's music, but this spectre of her that you experience is a temporary thing."

I take a couple of pencils out of the cup on his desk, and start drumming on my lap with them. I don't know why I can't stop doing that, because obviously I'm not really a drummer. The only person who thought that was Renate, and how can I believe anything she said after what happened with her? It was all a lie, her little fantasy that I was her cool percussionist friend. Now that she knows I'm a complete dweeb, and not cool at all, even she probably doesn't think I have talent. Why would Dr. Ngo think I could change all that in three years?

"Penny for your thoughts?" Dr. Ngo asks me. "Or are thoughts more expensive these days?"

I let out an uneasy laugh and stop my drumming. "Sorry." I clasp the pencils together in one hand. "I just can't believe I lost my only friend ever to all this Amy crap. If I could stop liking Amy, I would. That's just not an option, and I'm not good at pretending."

"You and Renate didn't split up because of Amy. I know it looks that way on the surface, but lots of people, especially young people, have strong feelings about music. But that doesn't mean they avoid everyone who doesn't agree with them a hundred percent. You and Renate split up because you think there's something wrong with you for liking Amy, that you're so out-there and so bizarre that nobody could possibly understand you. If you didn't feel that way, you'd have laughed and said something like, 'Oh, get over it, Amy is awesome, one day you'll see,' or, 'Hey, more for me, then.' But you have that sore spot, and she kicked it pretty hard. Probably not on purpose, because she didn't know. You were only friends for two months."

" _Only_ two months?" That fracking foot of mine just won't stop itching. I grunt and put the pencils back in the cup, and prepare for a serious scratch attack. This time I take off both shoes and both socks, because if I have only one foot uncovered for more than a couple of seconds, it feels freakishly imbalanced, and I don't trust my itchy foot to ever be satisfied with what I do to it. As I'm scratching away, I say, without looking up, "Two months sounds like a really long time to me, especially if you see each other almost every day."

"It's not, though. It takes years to really know another person. Most people don't know that, because they think if you know a bunch of facts of someone's outer life, you know what their inner life is like."

I continue to scratch, and he peers out over his desk to get a closer view of Cynthia Versus the Itch, Part Eleventy. "Be careful you don't draw blood, okay?"

"I won't." I stop scratching and put my socks and shoes back on, hoping this finally does the trick. "But I'm not a real musician."

"Cynthia, you were using your lap for a drum set five minutes ago. Of course you're a real musician. Do you still sing?"

"Sometimes."

He looks at me intently.

Then I confess, "Okay, it's more than sometimes. I worked hard to develop my range, I have to keep testing it to make sure it still works."

"And where do you do this?"

"Closet. Shower. Anywhere they won't hear me."

"But your mother has heard you sing already."

"Once. I'm not going to risk it a second time."

Dr. Ngo looks at the clock, then back at me. "We only have a few minutes left, but I want to ask you, how long do you think you can keep all this from your family? Do you really think you're going to magically pull it together and be what they want?"

I bite my lip and shake my head no.

"I can help you with this, Cynthia," Dr. Ngo says. "You don't have to do it all by yourself. But I can't do it without you, either."

"Do what?" I say. "Tell them I'm autistic, or that I'm a quote-unquote musician? Because you know they won't buy either one. Not even if the school shrink backs me up. Their entire lives depend on me not being autistic and on me achieving financial independence at a young age. They're just going to hold their ears. You know that."

"We can try. Otherwise, what else are you going to do? You have to make the break sooner or later."

"There has to be another way." I close my eyes tightly. "There has to be another way. There has to. They can't find out about Amy."

"Why not? What is so shameful about it? What have you done that is so wrong?"

"School is important," I intone. "I have to be well educated. You know what they call musicians who don't have an education and don't make it? Homeless."

"You need an IEP, Cynthia. An Individualized Education Plan. That's what students with disabilities have to get them accommodations in the classroom. For example, you say you understand written instructions better than verbal instructions? That's one of the things you could get accommodated for. But not if you keep trying to cover it up. You know you're a lot smarter than your grades would indicate."

Since we're out of time now, I don't press the argument. If I get an IEP, that means I'm officially still autistic, and my parents lose their jobs. The entire house of cards comes down. But maybe I should say that's their problem, not mine. They're the adults. It's up to them to keep the household afloat. I shouldn't have to do it. Of course I shouldn't, I'm a fracking high school sophomore. So why the hell am I still protecting their sorry asses? Why?

"I'll...I'll think about it," I tell Dr. Ngo.

I have to tell them. I have to tell them. I have to tell them.

At dinner that night, my family picks over this awful offal that they eat only because of me and acts like we're a perfectly normal family sharing a bucket of fried chicken or something. Mom compliments Dad on how good the veal brains taste. (He prepares the offal, which Dr. Nansi sends them a shipment of every week, because she can't stand the sight of it uncooked.) This new recipe he has, where he mixes the brains with freeze-dried beets and ground watermelon pits (seeds?) and steams them in a sausage casing, hardly even tastes like brains at all, she says.

Tam doesn't try this delicacy for herself; she plans, as usual, to eat pizza or some other form of teen cuisine with her friends after dinner. But she doesn't make faces or noises or anything to express any sort of disgust. It isn't done here. No one is to make me feel bad because I don't get to eat regular food. They do this for me. Mom can make all the fake yummy noises she wants, but I know they wouldn't go near any of these _braaaaaains_ , or any of this other crud, if not for me. I am The Thing That Ruined Dinner Forever. Or at least until they get me out of the house and earning a living for myself, so they can get to some semblance of a life again.

_Hey Mom, Dad? I'm still autistic, so you can quit feeding me and yourselves this horrible slop. It doesn't fracking work, okay? You know you want to go get a bucket of chicken and some mashed potatoes and gravy for dinner like everyone else, so fracking do it already. You might as well._

Dad keeps the comments on file that he deletes from or moderates out of the blog, all the stuff about how they're full of BS and that kids can pick up skills that make them look less autistic over time, regardless of what diet they eat. Or that I was misdiagnosed in the first place. Or that I might still fit the criteria for autism even if I don't fit the obvious stereotypes. He's collected thousands of them over the years. Thousands of people have told them this whole thing is a crock. He and Mom laugh at those people. Laugh. They're not going to listen to Dr. Ngo or anyone else who says they're wasting their time. Plenty of people with Doctor or some other title have called them out. They don't care. They don't care. They don't care.

Dr. Nansi has this system in which her "network families" (who have blogs like my parents' that sell the diet) are graded on inspections, and get either a red (very bad), yellow (not great), or green (keep up the good work!). They send the report a month after the inspection. If you get a red, or two yellows in a row, you're on probation until your next inspection; two reds in a two-year period, or a red following three yellows in a four-year period, mean you're fired. I got a red back in fourth grade when I made the mistake of admitting to Dr. Nansi that I got picked on in school, which this diet is supposed to prevent. (Really? Eating lettuce wraps with ground chicken toenails buried in them every day is supposed to charm your classmates?) You can't even imagine the drama and the accusations. They demanded to know if I'd traded lunches with anyone else. Dude. I couldn't have _paid_ anyone to eat my lunch for me, even if they didn't have to trade me theirs.

But my parents are gagged from ever telling their readers, or anyone else, about any of this. On our last inspection, which was back in June right after school let out, we got a yellow, because Dr. Nansi, all six feet of her, quizzed me in her thick Hungarian accent about Caroleena moving away, and I wasn't sufficiently broken up about it for her tastes. A normal girl who was totally in remission would have been crying about her best friend moving away, she said. This time, though, my parents actually defended me to her, saying Caroleena wasn't really my best friend, she was just some girl I used to hang around with in elementary and middle school and we'd just drifted apart. _That happens, Catherine!_ I remember my mom saying to her _That's perfectly normal!_ But still, we got a yellow. Our fifth in eleven years. That's not enough for probation, but it is enough for some testy phone calls to have taken place between them and Dr. Nansi in the last few months.

But my parents have been surprisingly stoic about it all; evidently they are now convinced that nobody else on earth would want to eat my food and that I wouldn't take the chance of eating anyone else's after all this time. All they have to do is get themselves through a few more years of this until I can live on my own, and they will be free. It will be their turn to party. Oh, and write books. Lots of books. They've been offered book deals and turned them down because the care and feeding of me keeps them soooo busy. Once I'm out of the house, making a living, they can ride that nonstop rocket to the _New York Times_ bestseller lists. _Want to make sure you don't have to take care of a disabled child for the rest of your life? We'll show you the way._

I just look at them and see a slippery wall made of titanium bricks. There is nothing I or anyone else can say or do that will get them off this train, this gravy train where actual gravy is not allowed because of the opiate-generating starch it contains.

I sit there looking at my half-eaten, cold plate of brain sausage, knowing that this will be all I get to eat for the next twelve hours, and make myself swallow as much of it as possible without tasting it, lest I gag. I "listen" (in my head) to Amy's music while I eat, try to imagine her voice singing other songs. Singing _my_ songs, even. Cyan Beaut songs of the future. When I have made enough of a dent in my pile of grub, I push my chair away from the table and hastily get up, and promptly stub my stocking-footed toe on the chair.

"OWWWWW! OW OW OW OW OWWWWWWWWW!"

My scream of pain is so loud it scares even me. Am I really in that much physical pain, or is it everything just piling up on me?

"I think I broke it," I moan. "I think it's broken." I don't know if I really think it's broken, or whether it just feels like it is, but I really crushed it.

"Sit down," Tam commands me. I do what she says. "Can you wiggle all your toes on that foot?"

I wiggle my toes, which surprisingly decreases the pain in my foot, then tell her yes.

"Then it's not broken," Tam says, looking a little irritated with me. I don't blame her, after the cold-blooded shriek I just let out.

"From now on, please wear shoes to dinner," Dad says, then stands up and starts piling up all the dinner dishes to take to the kitchen.

They put up with so much from me.

After dinner, I sit down at the computer and attempt once again to do what I've been trying to get myself to do for the last week: block all the sites containing Amy's video.

Something feels so _final_ about doing that, like it's an irrevocable decision. It feels like saying goodbye forever. I know it's not forever. Just maybe for the next, I don't know, three years maybe? Not counting summer vacations? Maybe Dr. Ngo is right and I'll have a life then and looking at her video won't do anything much for me. But I can't get there from here.

_Change scares the bejeebus out of you, doesn't it?_ Spectral Amy says, as my fingers hover over the keyboard, about to type the site info into the blocking window. _That's why you won't rock the boat._

_I like change just fine as long as it's good change,_ I retort. _And you know what good change would be? You leaving me alone while I'm trying to get an education._

_My music is in your head all day, even when you're not at a computer,_ Spectral Amy says. _You're trying to hold back high tide with your palms here, Cyan._

Dr. Ngo thinks that my problem isn't liking Amy, it's thinking there's something wrong with me for liking Amy. But the problem isn't that I like Amy; the problem is that for me, almost nothing else exists now. If I cared about anything else as much as Amy, then liking her would just be a cute little harmless quirk at most. I'd be like one of those people who does podcasts or Web pages about obscure music from the sixties, and Amy would be just one of the unheralded artists I support. But I'm stuck on her. And only her. For no good reason.

I type in the video site URLs on the screen, but don't click the OK button yet. _You know,_ I tell her, _Renate isn't necessarily wrong about you technically not being a very good singer._

_Is that right?_ Spectral Amy says, sounding more amused than insulted.

_Yeah,_ I say, reaching for the water bottle on my desk. _Now that I'm paying attention I'm starting to see what she was talking about. You reach for notes you can't quite hit. Back then they didn't have Auto-Tune and Pro Tools, so they couldn't fix that. And your vibrato is so tight that if it was on a CD it would sound like the CD was skipping._

_That's probably true,_ Spectral Amy admits.

I then knock over the water bottle, which is supposed to have an airtight seal on it, but not if I forget to close it all the way, which I apparently did last time I took a sip. It gets all over my laptop keyboard and all over my clothes. I yelp in frustration and run to the kitchen for the super-absorbent microfiber spill sheets, hoping no one sees me and asks what I need them for. Fortunately, the coast is clear. But now my keyboard is wet. I blot it up as much as I can, then try typing something. No dice.

I start removing the snap-off letters from the keyboard so I can dry in between them. This isn't my first time with a saturated keyboard, but at least this time it's only water and not some kelp-and-tripe-tapioca gunkfest, so I don't have to summon Dad and risk his ire. While I'm removing keys, wiping the keyboard bed, and replacing them, I continue my smackdown. _Yeah, so you admit it. You're flat, you're sharp._ Snap off, wipe, snap on again. _You're ahead of the beat, you're behind behind the beat, circling around the beat like you're a plane that hasn't been given permission to land yet._ Wipe, wipe, wipe. _I don't even know why I like you._ Snap off, snap off, snap off. Careful careful careful. Don't want to damage them.

_Yes, you do,_ Spectral Amy says, smiling as if I just complimented her.

_No,_ I say, continuing my snapping and wiping, _I actually don't._

_It's because I go places nobody else does,_ she says. _And that's what you want to do. You want to make the kind of music no one has ever heard before, make people walk away with a whole new experience of music. You want to innovate. Influence. Inspire. And not just inspire because nobody expected an autistic girl to do anything right, but inspire because you're completely amazing. You want to be Cyan Beaut, the person you really are. And come on, I'm not that far off. Renate just hears it more because of her perfect pitch. It doesn't really bother you, does it?_

I test the keys to see if they're working better now. Bingo. I put the keyboard cover back on and snap it back into place. _If it bothered me that much,_ I tell Spectral Amy, _I'd never have kept listening to you. But maybe it_ should _bother me._

_You really think you're going to talk yourself out of this, girl?_ Spectral Amy says. _People love what they love._

_I don't know,_ I say. _But for now, you're blocked._ I take a deep breath and click the OK button on the site blocking window, and her sound and image instantly vanish in my mind.

DAYS 90-91

I didn't think about Amy or her music the entire rest of last night. I actually managed to get an entire history paper done, about the differences between the Korean, Vietnam, and Gulf Wars, which makes sense and everything. And get to sleep by eleven, too, and stay asleep. I can't remember the last time that happened.

The next morning, I don't wake up with her on my mind either. I don't even think about her the entire day and night, or the following morning. Wow. Maybe I should have done this months ago. Maybe my parents didn't go far enough; they should have blocked all my Net access and made me look stuff up in the library. Or stuck with their original plan to have me ask them to look up stuff for school. I don't know why they didn't. It's easier for them this way, maybe?

For the first time in months, when I walk the halls at school and sit in class, I have no one's voice in my head, and no one's voice in my ear, at least not directly. I am free. Right? That's what this means? I can try and make other friends, then, because now I don't have to worry about Amy getting in between us. She's gonzo. Even my hand and foot hyperactivity seems to have stopped, for the time being. Could it be, I might be turning into someone who could be liked? By someone, at least? Was it really this easy, all this time, to become someone who isn't unbearably tedious, and I just never knew that the secret was blocking the right Web pages?

By seventh period language arts, on the second day of my Amy-free interlude, I'm feeling good enough about myself that I have the nerve to say to Danya Cregg, who just moved here last month and sits right behind me, "I love your poem," after she has recited "Shineys," which she wrote for our assignment to write a poem about something we like to wear. Danya has an artsy look, always wearing at least five beaded necklaces that look handmade, and maybe eight pairs of earrings. I always wonder if her neck and ears hurt, but she looks great.

"Thanks," Danya whispers. "Don't tell Samman, but I wrote it a year ago."

Hmm. Someone who writes poetry on her own time. I smile and say, "She'd never believe me anyway," and Danya laughs.

After class, I turn around and ask Danya, "So do you use, like, a rhyming dictionary and a thesaurus and stuff like that when you write your poems?"

She looks a little surprised that I would ask her that, but also maybe a little flattered. "Actually, I do," she says. "I have apps on my phone for rhymes, synonyms, antonyms, and thesaurus. You never know when an idea's going to hit you."

"I know how that is," I say.

She raises her eyebrows and smiles, in sort of a conspiratorial way. "Oh, do you? You write poetry?"

"Songs," I say. "Or at least, I'm trying to."

"Do you play an instrument?"

"I sing," I tell her. "I had a pretty cool percussion instrument, but my parents confiscated it."

"Sorry to hear that," Danya says, putting her books into her backpack.

There's a brief lull, and I rack my brain for what to say next. "So this might sounds like a weird question," I say, in a more warbly voice than I mean to. "But...how do you manage not to let your art get in the way of your schoolwork? I mean, do you...do you get ideas when you're supposed to be studying that you just have to follow, right that very second?"

Danya furrows her brow. Boy, I really am sucking my toes here, aren't I?

"Sorry," I say. "I didn't mean to sound like a buttinsky or anything."

"No, that's okay." She zips up her backpack, then stands up. I stand up along with her. "But no, I've never had that happen to me. It doesn't even occur to me to try writing poems at the same time I'm doing homework. That's a totally different side of my brain." She slips the straps of her pack over her shoulders. "I mean, William Carlos Williams was a pediatrician, you know? He wrote poems when he got home, not when he was seeing his patients."

I nod. "Well, thanks." I walk out of the room at the same time she does, wondering if we're done. I kind of want us not to be done. This is a rare event for me, being able to sustain a back-and-forth conversation--about creativity, no less. But as soon as we get out in the hall, and five seconds have passed between us without any more words, she says, "See you later," and strides quickly to get ahead of me.

Five seconds is apparently too much time for someone to wait for me to talk. So much for my not becoming tedious.

I head for my locker, open it, and have just gotten my coat out and started putting it on when a familiar voice echoes in my head.

_Not everybody can compartmentalize. Don't be too hard on yourself._

Oh, crap. She couldn't have given me even forty-eight hours, could she?

On my way home, I stumble my way down the sidewalk, intoxicated by Amy. Her singing voice drowns out other voices, cars, rustling leaves, anything that isn't her, no matter how many times I ask her to stop. The depth and texture of her voice gives me a sort of physical pleasure that makes me feel sick in other parts of my body, knowing that other people must wonder what I'm on as they see me tripping by. I only wish it was something as socially acceptable as alcohol or drugs. After an absence of less than two days, she has returned with a vengeance.

The temperature has dropped precipitously in the last twenty-four hours, and the sidewalks have patches of ice on them. When I'm halfway home, I slip on one of the ice patches and fall, landing on my Cindy-Butt.

"Would you like a hand up, bossa nova girl?"

I look up and see Hippie Geezer Man, who I haven't seen since I bought the Amy album from him, salting the ice on his driveway, wearing a dirty fleece jacket. It's been six months since he had his yard sale, and in my Amyfied state I didn't notice that I was on the street where he lives. He holds out his arm, and I grab on to it and get up, then let go as soon as I'm stable. "Thanks," I say. "That was...embarrassing."

"Nothing I haven't done," he says. Until right this second, I don't make the mental connection that—as far as I can tell--he's the only other person in Steens Center besides me (and Renate, if she counts) who remembers that Amy ever existed. "So how'd you like that record you bought from me?"

Oh God, am I ever not up to answering that question honestly. "It skips all over the place," I tell him. "But she has a really interesting voice. Thanks for telling me about her."

"You're welcome." He nods in the direction of his house. "So as long as you're here, I think I might have something else you'd like to see."

"Uh..." This isn't what I think it is. Is it? No. It can't be. He's about the same age as my grandfather.

I must look completely bugged out, because he bursts out laughing. "Sorry, that was a bad way to state that. What I mean to say is, I have an object in my garage I think might be of interest to you, as a fan of bossa nova music. If you want, I'll open up the garage door and show it to you."

"Um...okay." I don't even know his name. Should I ask?

"Oh, by the way, I'm Graham," he says, when I approach the garage door. Thank you, Graham, for making that easy for me.

"I'm Cyan."

Oh my badgerfracking God. Did I really say that? Is Graham What's-His-Nose, ancient moldering hippie, the very first person on the face of the earth to whom I have introduced myself by my future name? What made me do that?

"Pleasure to meet you, Cyan," he says. "That's a nice name. Did you pick it out yourself, or did your parents name your sisters Magenta and Yellow?"

"Ha ha," I say, as he reaches down and opens up the door of his garage. For once, I don't mind getting kidded about my name. Because I picked it.

When it's open, I almost keel over from what I see. It's a cocktail drum set. Yes, the kind Amy played. And in her color, red sparkle.

"Holy Toledo," I say. "Where did you get that?" I go over to it and examine it. To say it's in bad shape is like saying I'm not likely to be elected prom queen. The cymbals are cracked, the heads are bashed in, and the bass drum stand is missing one of the rubber feet, so it stands up crooked. The shells and the frame are in one piece, but the frame has dents and rust spots, and at least half the lugs (fasteners) are missing. I start laughing about how beaten-up this poor drum set looks. "Did this thing sit out in the rain for three months or something and then get mauled by coyotes?"

"Very possibly," Graham says. "My, uh, lady friend found it by the side of the road on her way back from a trip to Reno last week. Probably fell off the back of someone's truck on the highway. You should have seen it before I hosed it off."

I can feel my eyebrows scrunch together in disbelief. If I have to guess, he's telling me some fish story about someone finding it by the side of the road, when it's more likely that someone traded it to him for drugs or something. But I am so not going to pry into that. "But your lady friend thought you'd like it anyway."

"How often do you see a cocktail drum set by the side of the road? Besides, she doesn't really know anything about drums. She thought I'd be able to fix it up and sell it."

I finger the cracked crash cymbal mounted in between the snare and the tom. Then I examine the hi-hat cymbals; they're a mess, too, cracked _and_ warped. A two-inch chunk of the bottom one is missing. There's no pedal for them; on a cocktail set, they stay closed. I'm amazed that the bass pedal even managed to stay attached with that much abuse, though it's way off hinge. "Good luck with that. I mean, I'm not a drum expert, but I know you can't really fix these things once they crack, and cymbals are spendy. So are pedals."

"That they are," Graham says. "But I was going to put it on Craig's List to see if any collectors might have a use for it."

"How much?"

Graham shrugs. "Oh, I don't know. I looked up some pictures, and I'm pretty sure it's a Trixon; that's a brand that was around in the fifties and sixties and got revived about fifteen or twenty years ago. I know that a set like this one sells for about four or five hundred new, but I'd probably be lucky to get fifty bucks for it, in the shape it's in."

My mind instantly recalls two things: one, that Mom has a gyno appointment this afternoon; and two, that I have two twenty-dollar bills folded up in my wallet, left over from my grandparents' birthday presents.

"I want it," I hear myself say.

_You still love me_ , Spectral Amy breathes in my ear.

_Shut up,_ I snap at her. She smiles indulgently at me, as if it's cute.

Graham smiles and nods. "Okay. So would your folks come by to pick it up?"

"Are you kidding? They'd kill me if they knew I was here. But I need this drum set. I don't know how to explain it. But I do." I take my wallet out of my purse and peek inside it to make sure the twenties are still there. Yes. "I have forty dollars on me. Will that be enough?"

"Teenage rebellion, man," Graham says. "I completely approve. But just so you know, all sales are final. I'll give you a dolly to wheel it home on, and you can keep that, it's old...but I don't ever want to see this thing again once you haul it out of here, and I don't want you to tell your parents where you got it, either."

"If we take the cymbals and the heads off and cover it with trash bags, they won't ever know it's there. I'd have to throw that stuff out anyway. You got a drum key?"

"It's hanging from the side." He points to a red cord tied to the side of the bass drum, with a butterfly-shaped mini-wrench about four inches wide hanging from it. It's a different shape from the pandeiro key, but the bottom of the key, where the lug would fit in, looks about the same, maybe a little bigger. "You know how to use that to get the lugs off?"

"They're all the same size, right? If they're fastened tighty-righty lefty-loosey, it shouldn't be too hard to get them off." I have no idea whether this is true or not; maybe some of them are stuck in place or put on a different way or something. But I have to try. "I just need a little baggie or something to put them all in."

"That I can get you." He turns to his workbench and grabs a quart-sized Ziploc bag and hands it to me. Then he folds his arms and smiles. "Now, this I have to see. If you know how to change a drum head, you're one up on me. I'm a bass player, myself, or at least I was back in the day. Drums always seemed like too many tiny little parts for me."

"I know how to get them off, I think," I say. "Putting the new ones on is another story. The tuning and all that can be kind of a pain, from what I've read."

"You know, they have these mesh heads and cymbals now that hardly make any noise. They're not cheap, but if you want to practice without bothering anyone, you might want to save some of your holiday cash for that."

"Interesting." I start unscrewing lugs, like I've done it all my life. Because actually, Spectral Amy is instructing me: _Turn it to the left. No, no, your other left, ha ha. That's it. Ooh, ow, that one's got some dirt stuck in there, maybe come back to that one later, you don't want to hurt yourself...there. Yeah. That's it. Girl, you're a pro._

Fifteen minutes later, I've gotten all the thrashed heads and cymbals off the kit, and I put the Ziploc with the lugs in it in my purse, and hand Graham his forty dollars. He helps me bag up the drums and tie them to the dolly. Before I leave, he says, "May you one day drum your way out of Steens Center."

"That would be nice," I say.

I have no idea what is going to happen to me between now and the time I step inside my house. Icy winds, the kind we don't usually get two weeks before Thanksgiving, lash my face; as I start pulling the dolly down the sidewalk I'm starting to feel like a sled dog, only I'm the one whipping myself. I can't believe I hung on to forty dollars for three months and then blew it all on this hopelessly borked drum set just because it looks like Amy's. Also, I have to be ready with some kind of cheeseball excuse for having it if I'm caught bringing it in. I can access the garage from outside, but if both cars are the garage (which they shouldn't be if Mom is at the doctor, but you never know), either I have to put it somewhere along the side or back of the house, or—if I dare—drag it inside and put it in my closet. I can just picture it now:

_I'm not telling you what this is, it's an early Christmas secret!_

_You didn't say I couldn't have drum shells with no heads or cymbals. It's only for decoration._

_Someone was throwing it away and I just had to have it. Oh, the dolly? Yeah, I found that in the giveaway pile too. No, really._

How do people hide things? How do they have these double lives that nobody ever finds out about, for years? Me, I feel like I'm committing suicide by cocktail drum kit, because I'll be shot by my parents if they see this thing and find out I spent real money on it. But since I can't buy junk food or eat in restaurants like normal kids do, and I don't give a rip about clothes, and most of my records and books were acquired at garage sales, and the only digital downloads I ever bought were obtained via gift card, what else did I have to spend the money on?

So here will be my excuse, should I need one: _Mom, Dad, these empty drum shells are a symbol—that's s-y-m-b-o-l, not c-y-m-b-a-l, ha ha. When I look at these, I will be motivated to do homework and get the A minus or higher in math and science you require of me in order to get my pandeiro and my bongos and my albums and my record player back._

_You love me,_ Spectral Amy says. _You bought it because I told you to._

_Would you stop?_ I groan internally.

"Ow." I feel a stabbing pain in my upper back. This thing isn't hugely heavy--maybe thirty pounds, since the cymbals are off--but I'm not used to pulling things behind me on a rope, and somehow I manage to dislodge something which makes the whole thing tip over. I bend over to try to straighten it up and the stabbing pain happens again. I can't get it to stand up again, so I wind up laying the drum set on its side on the dolly. As I do so I manage to mash my finger in between the drum set and the dolly. More "ow." I want to say it out loud, but I just mouth it this time. Then I get behind it and push it the rest of the way, instead of pulling it.

As I approach our house, my heart starts pounding like I'm about to go on stage. Which I sort of am. I have a line to deliver, and I'd better do it right.

But when I get to the house, both cars are gone, which means either Tam's boyfriend finally got that clunker she bought to run, or she gave up and had it junked. Whew. That means I have a nonzero chance of stashing this thing without being noticed, as long as Dad doesn't hear me. I push, pull, shove, yank to get it up the driveway and finally—back hurting, finger hurting, panting, sweating even on this penguin-weather day—wheel it as quietly as I can into the corner where we store all our stuff that we can't bear to get rid of but can't bear to have in the house. I bury it as best I can behind some boxes with old clothes in them, with Graham's impossibly tight knots still intact.

Yow. This must be a taste of what it's like for normal kids, for whom it wouldn't be a day ending in Y if they weren't pulling a fast one on their parents. I can't believe I'm actually getting away with it. Well, at least until I take it out of the bag to look at it, which I know I won't be able to resist doing. But I'll jump off that bridge when I get to it.

_You know you're going to fix that up and play it,_ Spectral Amy says. _And buy brush sticks. Brush work on drums is sooooo satisfying._

I enter the house through the garage, and when I walk into the house, the door to my parents' office is closed and the BUSY sign is hanging from the door. My dad has no idea what I just smuggled on to his property. It probably wouldn't even occur to him that it would be possible for me to do it. _A cocktail drum set? What the hell's that?_

DAY 92

It's something I can't stop thinking about for the next week and a half, that's what. The fact that I have a red sparkle drum set in my garage, or at least the shells of one, makes my hands and feet want to move again, even when sitting. In my head, Amys of various ages and I are having constant jam sessions together on matching Trixon kits. The Friday night before Thanksgiving break, on eyeball stew night, my limbs are especially hyper at dinner.

_Keep still, Cindy. Hold your hands still, Cindy. Breathe nice and deeply for me._

I have vague memories of a therapist named Jessica or Jasmine, I forget which, who used to work with me to get rid of the "last traces of autism habits" when I was about six years old.

_Sssshhhh. Keep your hands quiet._

To this day, I cannot stand to be shushed or told to "relax." Who finds it relaxing to be ordered to relax, anyway?

We're going to do this hand over hand.

I picture Jessica/Jasmine reaching for my hand as I grab an imaginary drum stick, reaching for my foot as I tap the imaginary pedal, pulling me away to stillness. _Look at me, Cindy. Look at me. Look at me. Let me see your eyes...I'm so sorry, Belinda. She doesn't want to do eye contact yet, but we'll keep working at it._

If they had to work that hard to stop me from acting autistic, how could I not have been autistic all along? Who retains "autism habits" without actually being on the spectrum?

Cindy. That's one reason I need to be rid of that name. _Cindy, we can't send you to school with the other kids unless you cooperate._ In retrospect, I should have refused to cooperate altogether. I don't know whether I literally pooped in my pants the first day of first grade or not, but it became part of my legend that I did, and it could have happened. Easily.

_Hold your feet still. No kicking._

_Say hello, how are you? I'm fine, how are you?_

_It doesn't matter if you're not really fine. Nobody needs to know that..._

"Cindy!" I hear my dad bark at me from across the table. It's just me and him and Mom for dinner, Tam has gone out with her significant other. Will I ever have one of those? Ever? "Can I get your attention for a minute?"

"I...did you say something before? I'm sorry, I didn't hear you."

"Obviously," Dad says. "But we got an interesting phone call today from your homeroom teacher."

I flinch, remembering that Mr. S. knows more about me than most teachers do, even though I only have him for homeroom. I've never had a homeroom teacher who asked about my life before and actually cared about the answers. Even though he hasn't had the Cynthia and Renate Show to entertain him lately, he still asks me how I'm doing, asks if I'm still singing, asks when I'm going to let him hear me sing, tells me to keep writing, no matter what. "Interesting how?"

"He wanted to know why you didn't have an IEP." Dad cuts hard into his stewed eyeball with a steak knife, as if it's still alive and he has to stab it to death. "He's only your homeroom teacher, why would you even be discussing that with him?"

"You mean IEPs? I'm not even sure what that is, exactly." I keep my eyes fixated on my plate. If they tell me to look at them, I'll tell them to look at _this,_ and flip the bird.

"It's an Individualized Education Plan," Mom says. "For students with disabilities."

"I know what it stands for," I say. "I just don't know what exactly goes on there."

"He said today he saw you bopping in your chair—those were the words he used," Dad says. "He was sure you must have had one of those tiny wireless headphones on or something listening to music. And then he checked around your head and didn't see anything. And that you were completely oblivious to him doing it."

"I must have been. I don't remember that at all."

"And it wasn't the first time he saw you moving your hands and feet in a rhythm pattern when there was no music playing. He's spoken to some of your other teachers and they say you're doing it quite a bit now. And I just saw you do it under the table, just now."

"Is that a disability?"

"Mr. Shunsburg thinks it's consistent with the B1 trait of autism, the stereotypic motor movements. He says that he's not convinced your autism ever went away."

I inhale and exhale quickly through my nose. "And what did you tell him?"

"That it's probably acting out since we took your drums away from you."

"Acting out," I repeat. "I'm a perfectly normal person acting out. With imaginary drumsticks. With imaginary foot pedals. To play my imaginary music. All alone. All day. Even when I tell myself to stop, I can't stop. Maybe I even do it in my sleep for all I know."

"Cynthia, please," Mom says.

"It would really suck if you did all this for nothing," I say in a hushed monotone. "You don't want to be eating eyeballs on a Friday night. Nobody wants to be eating eyeballs on a Friday night, unless there was no other food for five hundred miles. Eyeballs. I mean, my God. Ten years—no, make it eleven now—years of Friday...night...eyeballs. How do you even stand it?"

At that moment, I look up and see Mom stiffen in her chair. I have hit a nerve with her. Is she going to yell at me? No. Not this time. I see her look at Dad, as if to say, _What are you going to say to her? You have to say something, Dan._

But he has nothing, either. Not this time.

DAY 101

When I get to homeroom on Monday after Thanksgiving, I catch Renate looking at me for the first time since the fight. I look back. Neither of us looks away for two entire seconds. Then we look away at the same time.

It's taking me every bit of willpower I have not to break down and go over there to tell her about the drum kit. Even if she doesn't think much of Amy, the fact that I snuck a cocktail drum set into the garage would tickle her pink. But the fact that Spectral Amy "told" me to do it, and I listened to her—and that really, all I've done since the last time we talked is listen to Amy, in one way or another--she wouldn't be so amused by. If she thinks I'm out of my tree for even liking her, I don't even want to think about thinking about what she'd say about the rest of it.

On my way out of homeroom, I stop at Mr. S's desk and say to him, "Look, I appreciate you sticking up for me and everything. I really do. But..."

"But what?" he says.

"You're just getting me into more trouble," I whisper. "My dad...was pretty steamed about the whole thing."

"How about your mom?"

"Well..." I flash back on her freezing at the dinner table after my eyeball rant. "I assume she feels the same way."

Mr. S. looks up at me with the same kind of eyebrow raise I saw from Mrs. S. that time she talked to Mom. Maybe they practice eyebrows together. "But she hasn't said anything herself?"

I flip through my mental video clip file trying to come up with something. But now that I think about it, she actually _hasn't_ said anything about it. And it's her name on that blog, her words, her reputation. "No," I admit. "But that doesn't mean she isn't thinking it."

"Parents aren't always a monolith," Mr. Shunsberg says. "And they can fool you pretty hard about what they're really thinking."

"Monolith," I repeat. "You mean, like a united front?"

"Yes, exactly." The first period warning bell rings, and he stands up, as his first period geography students start filling up the room. "In a few years, when you're an adult, it's possible that you'll find out some things that would shock you if they told you now."

"Like what?"

"I don't know what's going on with them, Cynthia." He picks up a notepad and a pen from his desk, then comes around to where I'm standing so that he can talk to me without being overheard. "But I have to say, I haven't ever seen a situation like yours, where the parents had a kid who was entitled to accommodations and they refused them. If anything, I have to deal with the reverse, parents trying to get extra test time or whatever, claiming their kid has this or that, when there's no evidence anywhere. Or parents whose kids do have disabilities getting stonewalled by the school district over getting an IEP or getting the school to implement it."

"You haven't been teaching that long," I remind him.

Mr. S. scribbles out a note on the notepad, then pulls the note off the pad and hands it to me. "I know a lot of teachers who have been doing this for a long, long time, who go back to before kids with disabilities were being mainstreamed. Including my mom, by the way. It's very uncommon for parents to act like this, Cynthia. Trust me on that."

I glance at the illegible tardy note in my hand. If anything, his handwriting has gotten even worse in the last three months. "So it's not just me," I say. "They really _are_ that whacked."

"You said that, I didn't," Mr. S. says, with a wry smile.

I thank him for the note and leave.

DAY 105

"The world is a toll-free toilet."

Four days after our two-second glance, I hear Renate's voice from behind me, as I'm standing outside freezing my watatas off after lunch, trying to clear the din of cafeteria clanking and yakking and shrieking out of my head before my next class.

So this is how it happens. You don't talk to someone for a month, and then your first words to her are from an inside joke—and if she continues the joke, you take up where you left off. Right? I ask, I do not know from experience.

But this moment, I know, is crucial. If I repeat her line back to her, it leads to her coming back into my life and finding out more Amy stuff that might disturb her even more. If I don't, I might never have a conversation of substance with anyone my age ever again.

"The world is a toll-free toilet," my lips say. I hope my lips know what they're doing.

"Our mouths neurological—"

"Teacher," I hiss at her, nodding my head towards my geometry teacher, Ms. Prathipati, who just came outside to throw some stuff in the trash. "If they kick you out of this dump, they have nowhere else to put you."

Renate nods her acknowledgment of this fact. "So if they did kick me out, would you miss me?"

"What do you think?"

Five seconds go by, and then Renate says, "That's, like...the worst question ever."

And then we bust up laughing, in spite of ourselves.

"I don't want you to make me laugh," I say. "I don't think we're ready for that yet."

Renate sits down at one of the picnic tables nearby and nods. "I can understand that."

I sit down across from her and blow on my cold hands. While I'm trying to think of what to say to her, she beats me to it. "So what I was trying to say that time," Renate says, "but obviously failed at, was that friends don't have to agree on everything. But if someone's your friend, and there's something she loves and you have a bad reaction to it, you at least owe it to her to find out her side of it. Maybe there's something about that thing that you didn't think of, and you can learn something from her. You know what I mean? I wasn't going to make fun of you. You should have known me better than that."

"Ren," I say, "the exact words you used were, quote, 'Frankly, I'm shocked that you would go for something like this,' unquote. How is that any better than making fun of me?" Damn, it's frigid out here. I know you can't get a cold without being exposed to the virus, but I start having a sneezing fit to beat all sneezing fits. Five in a row. I think it's called vasomotor rhinitis.

" _Salud_ times five," Renate says. "Consider yourself blessed for all eternity. But can we finish talking about this inside before we get frostbite?"

We go inside the cafeteria, and then, realizing it's going to be too noisy to really talk in there, we go out into the hallway just outside of it. "So I watched that video a few more times, just so you know," Renate says. "And I think I get it. You think of Amy as being subversive, as being someone who kind of _deconstructs_ bossa nova and lounge music because instead of singing it all cool like those other singers do, she goes at it with this wildfire intensity. Right?"

"Exactly."

"So the first time I watched her, I didn't see that. What I saw was someone with killer stage fright who was panicking because the cameras were on. I've had that kind of stage fright, where all that stuff you practiced goes out the window because you didn't practice it in a roomful of people. Even with perfect pitch, you can go totally flat if you're nervous enough. I think it kind of triggered me or something, seeing her up there."

"Really?" I say. "I didn't think you were afraid of anything."

She lets out a rueful laugh. "Oh, dude. You really don't know me, do you?"

One point for Dr. Ngo. I suppose two months isn't enough time to know someone after all.

As the hallways start to fill up with people, we start walking in the direction of our lockers. "But can't you be subversive _and_ nervous on stage?" I say.

"Sure. And after a couple more plays, I got that. You identify with her because she's a fish out of water. She wanted to be playing rock and roll, but it was 1969 and rock and roll female drummers weren't happening. So she brought rock and roll to bossa nova, almost without realizing it."

"That's it!" I squeeze her arm while walking down the hall. "I have to remember what you just said, because I'm trying to get her Wikipedia page back up. They keep flagging me for 'lack of objectivity' and 'original research,' and of course the ever popular 'lack of notoriety.'"

Renate smirks. "Lack of objectivity. Like anyone would bother writing someone's biography for free if they didn't feel strongly about them?"

"Right, and original research...I know, links or it didn't happen, but what if there just aren't any links, and you know it _did_ happen?"

All of a sudden, I feel fantastic. There's a real person in my life again, not just a spectre, talking to me about things that matter.

DAY 112

A week later, Renate walks home with me after school, and on the way over there I tell her the story of how I bought the cocktail drum set and snuck it in the house. Just as I expected, she eats it up. "Can I see it?" she asks me.

"It's all tied up in leaf bags and twine. So my parents don't spot it."

"Well, then what the hell did you buy it for?"

I take a deep breath. "I know this is going to sound freaky...but I almost want to say Amy made me do it." I make quote signs with my fingers over the last four words. "I mean, I know she didn't, I'm not delusional, but...it just kind of feels that way. Like her spirit was with me or something. Does that make any sense...at all?"

"That does sound freaky," Renate says. "But given what I know about you, not shocking."

"Really?"

"Yeah." Renate stops walking and looks at me with her head cocked thoughtfully to the side. "Cynner, believe it or not, I've been worried about you. I only see you in homeroom lately, but you look so stressed out and you're always tapping your feet, slapping the desk, humming, mouthing words to yourself...if you're escaping into a world of Amy because your world is shit, there are worse ways you could be dealing with it. But the fact that it _is_ shit is what worries me."

I look down at the ground. "Shunsberg called my parents a few weeks ago and demanded to know why I didn't have an IEP. Guess what they said?"

"'Why does Cynthia need an IEP? IEPs are for—'"

"'Kids with disabilities.'" I finish the sentence with her. "But I don't even know what 'accommodations' means for someone like me. I know Dr. Ngo mentioned something about instructions in writing, but what else? Not getting marked off in class for foot-tapping?"

"That would be a start."

I reach into my purse and fish out my house keys, and we start walking again. My exhales produce vapor clouds, the only good thing about winter as far as I'm concerned. "So I don't know if I ever asked you this...but what did your parents do when you got expelled from SCH?"

Renate laughs. "What do you think they did? They crapped their drawers. They grounded my ass for twenty lifetimes. Then they got me a shrink. The shrink brought them in to a couple of our sessions, and told them I had a splash of oppositional defiant disorder and a skosh of obsessive-compulsive disorder—I mean, he didn't say 'splash' and 'skosh,' but, you know—so anyway, he also said both of those were exacerbated by a hostile school environment, and referred me to a psychiatrist to help with the anxiety stuff. The psych helped get me readmitted to a new school, and put me on Klonopin, which is a tranq. I still take it. It actually does help."

"How did I not know you were on tranqs?"

"You didn't ask."

I let out a vapor-producing snort. "Yeah, I guess I had that coming, right?"

We arrive at the house and I see what looks like a rental car parked in front of it, with a Hertz license plate bracket. That means Annabeth is home for winter break.

"So...does George Clinton ever egg _you_ on to do things?" I ask Renate.

"George Clinton has more important things to bother with than me. Like, you know, his next album?"

"I don't even know if Amy is still alive."

"Well, whether she is or not, she quote-unquote 'made you' blow forty bucks on a busted drum set, so let's unbag that thing and have a look at it. What do you have to lose, really, if they catch you?"

"I don't know," I say, feeling my pulse accelerate slightly as I fixate on the rental car. I don't know what anyone has told AB about the last few months of life with me; since the big fight, she hasn't even responded to my texts. "Access to you, maybe?"

"I don't think they'd go there, Cynner. I really don't. They know you still see me at school. If I come over, they can keep better tabs on us than if I don't."

"My sister is here," I say, pointing at the rental car. "I mean, my other sister."

"Perfect," Renate says. "They'll be distracted. Unless you're just dying to see her right this second."

"Should I be? I mean, she is my sister, even if she's pretty much blocked me."

"She'll be here for almost a month. You'll have plenty of time to get sick of each other. And I need to see those drums, like, yesterday."

We make our way up the driveway, extra quiet, tiptoe up to the bagged drum set, yank away at the twine until it loosens, and then—after checking around to make sure no one is coming—I pull off the trash bags, first the one on top, then the one on the bottom.

"Ta da," I stage-whisper.

Renate gasps. "That is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen."

"Well, it would be if it were new. It's a pretty color."

"It's more than that." She runs a finger over a rust spot on the side of the bass drum frame. "Cynner, you _are_ this drum set. Someone left it for dead, but it refused to die. You got it so you could bring it back to life. And bring yourself back to life at the same time. Don't you get it? This is so much better than a new set of drums. They were meant for only you."

I feel myself begin to shake. "It needs all new heads, top and bottom. It needs new cymbals. I don't even know if that rust will come off. I'd need to get some timbales and a cowbell, too. Maybe a woodblock." But even as I'm saying all that, I know she's right. I am these drums. And neither of us is going to get fixed overnight. But we will get fixed—by people who respect who we really are--and be more than anyone ever thought we'd be.

"The rust is cosmetic," Renate says. "It should be removable. We might have to cover this thing up for now, but it's not going to stay that way. One piece at a time, it's going to be revived. Bank on it."

Since Renate and I have no privacy here, I have to cough up a huge chunk of my allowance to text her, it's freezing cold both outside and in the garage, and there's too much to tell her just over lunch break or walking to my house, I tell Renate before she heads home that I'm going to write her a series of letters—with a pen, on paper—giving her more details about the Amy stuff and mail it to her house. The first one will arrive on the first Saturday of winter break, two days before Christmas. I write better than I talk, anyway, so this will be easier. And during break, I can be sure I'll be the first one to the mailbox every day.

I will put _CB_ on top of the return address so she'll know it's from me. And if she wants to send me a letter back, she will put RS on top of the return address so I know it's her. I don't want to take any chances of getting hacked—my father has a degree from Caltech, after all—or of getting a note snatched at school. I don't think there's any chance her family would tell mine, since they have nothing in common short of being carbon-based, so I tell her it's fine if she tells them about it. But I'm not telling my parents squat. I will grab the mail the minute it comes, every day of winter break; by the time we go back to school in January, our letters will cease. I will stash her letters in the same bag the drum set is in. Even as control-fiendish as my parents are, they'd never suspect I was getting _snail mail_ from my best/only friend at school, during the school year. I don't think that was a thing even when they were my age. If they do figure it out and grab the letters, so be it; I will have done what I could. But they won't figure it out.

"Wow, a letter," Renate says. "Handwritten, on paper. I don't think I've ever gotten one of those in the mail."

"I print," I say. "My cursive is more illegible than Shunsberg's. But it will be in ink, on paper. An epistolary correspondence. And no, I've never done it before, either."

She nods. "'Epistolary.' For a minute, I thought it had something to do with pistols, but I know you better than that."

"E-pistols. No, it just means an exchange of letters. The old school way."

"Excellent," Renate says, "And when we're both famous, they'll frame our letters and put them on display at Experience Music Project. You ever been to EMP?" I shake my head. "It's in Seattle. It's a museum that has a lot of Jimi Hendrix stuff, but it also has all kinds of music displays in it, including drums. You'd love it."

I smile weakly. "I'm not sure that what I'm going to tell you is suitable for a mass audience." When Renate shoots me an alarmed look, I back up and add, "Don't worry, there's nothing really dangerous in it, but people don't always know different from dangerous."

"Don't I know that," Renate groans.

When I enter the house, mentally psyching myself up to face the future Dr. Annabeth, I feel an odd sense of pride, that I hatched a plan like this to communicate with Renate. AB _should_ like me, right? And not just because we're related, either. I have original ideas and execute them. I'm not just some giggle-puss sophomore. But she might wind up being the only Butt sister who fulfills my parents' doctor fantasies, so they fracking worship her, and the feeling is probably mutual. So original thinking probably isn't part of her value system. On the other hand, she did help obtain my much-missed pandeiro, so I'm completely confused and have no idea what to expect when she sees me.

When I get to the living room, my parents are shooting video of AB, wearing a Dodgers baseball cap and huge, dorky-looking sunglasses---probably in preparation for our annual Christmas video. Not that it matters all that much how the video turns out; they disguise our voices and colorize it and have us wear things we don't usually wear (I don't think I've ever seen AB in a baseball cap in my life), so they might as well sculpt figures of us in Plasticene and shoot it with stop-motion animation. I instinctively pause before entering the room, but AB notices me and her face lights up. "Yo, Haley, come over here," she says, using my blog name. This means I'm now going to be on camera. She gets up and gives me a big hug, like there's no tension between us at all. I get bonked in the forehead with the bill of her cap.

"Camera's off," Dad says. "You can use your real names now."

"Good," I say. "Because I can't remember her fake name anymore. It's been too long." Annabeth laughs. I'm still really nervous around her. I don't know why. Or maybe I do. When Mom and Dad leave the room, I ask her, "So how come you didn't answer my texts?"

AB takes off her sunglasses and hat and puts them on the coffee table. "You texted me? When?"

"Like three times, about a month ago."

She rolls her eyes and sighs. "I swear, I'm going to switch carriers. I've had all kinds of people tell me I missed texts from them. I'm really sorry."

She looks and sounds like she means it. There's no reason not to believe her, right? If someone has a bone to pick with me they can just pick it. I shouldn't have to guess what it is. So I jump right into how-was-your-flight-how-is-your-job small talk. She tells me she's exhausted, but she looks like she just had ten hours of sleep, fresh as a daisy. I wonder if she even knows what happened here last month, and with Mom and Dad in the next room I'm not going to risk bringing it up. Once she's been here a few days, I should talk to her about it, maybe ask her if she can help rescue my pandeiro for me. They might actually listen to her. But I have to be careful with timing. I always wind up bringing things up at the wrong time.

DAYS 113-120

Writing my first letter to Renate, which I brainstorm about all day long at school, costs me something like three days (in between frantically studying for midterms on Friday) and five trees' worth of paper. I am very jiggly all week, even more than usual; I'm wondering how I can quiet my daily drum-dance long enough to take my exams. But there's a different feel to it now. Yeah, it's scary about telling Renate all this, but I'm also kind of thrilled that it's going to be a real thing, in ink, at last.

At first, I try to write it on unlined paper, but I can't write straight on unlined paper to save my life, and after going through all my nice stationery (shredding each failed attempt as small as possible), I give up and write it on lined looseleaf paper. And then, after about twenty godzillion cross-outs and corrections, I copy it over again for my final draft. My hand is killing me.

_December 21, 2016_

_Ms. Renate Silverdick_

_77 Brooker Avenue_

_Steens Center, OR 97915_

_Dear Renate,_

_Here, as promised, is the first of my letters explaining to you my fascination (I refuse to call it an "obsession," that sounds so creepy and stalkery) with AZ._

_I found her album at a yard sale over the summer; and although the album was too scratched up to really let me hear the entire thing, I heard enough to know that she was a true original and shouldn't have fallen into obscurity. (That album was the one music-related thing they didn't commandeer, because it was hidden in a bag of old yarn under my bed.)_

_But it was more than that. When I saw that video of her on Your Generation, I wanted to go back in time and be one of the kids in that audience. I would have explained to them afterwards that they were in the presence of greatness. Or maybe I would have just been too stunned to move my mouth or anything else afterwards. It's hard to say which._

_Of course I know that if AZ is alive (which I still can't confirm), she is going to be in her sixties. I have no idea what she did with her life after that album, and as far as I can tell, neither does anyone else. Her father, who probably would have known the most about her, died in 1992. He had a co-producer credit on her album and co-writer credit with Amy on four of the songs. The other credited producer on the album is deceased also. One of the songs, "On a Horse," is especially gorgeous; that's one of the few things on the album that played all the way through without skipping, and it's about rescuing yourself instead of waiting for someone else to do it for you. It goes:_

_Got an invitation to get everything I need_

_Got transportation that will follow where I lead_

_I waited for that dark haired prince_

_Or that white knight on a steed_

_They promised they'd come, but they didn't show_

_And I had places I had to go_

_So I bought a saddle and my own set of reins_

_And it hurt a little, charley horses, growing pains_

_But that's okay, because now I can ride_

_Without a dark prince or white knight at my side_

_On a horse I can jump up into the sky_

_On a horse I know what it feels like to fly_

_Down on the ground I hear the sound_

_Of rain in people's eyes_

_And here I am, riding above the clouds_

_Staying dry_

_Nice, huh? Of course the know-it-alls on the bossa nova boards insist that Amy couldn't possibly have written anything that good at the age of 14 or 15 and that her father probably wrote most if not all of those songs. As far as her drumming goes, all the percussion on the album that I was able to hear sounds great. But again, both she and her dad were credited with drums and percussion and it's impossible to tell who played what. On that video she played live, that wasn't lip-synching like they did on most music shows back then._

_Okay, that's all the dry factual stuff. But what you probably want to know is what AZ is like in my head. Hooboy. But you (and only you) deserve to know the entire truth._

_The AZ in my head is forever my age. She gets all my jokes. (Even you don't get all my jokes.) She keeps a running commentary going in my mind about my nauseating lunches, the witless writing on the walls in the girls' bathroom, and my yet-to-exist love life, and how I could write songs about all of it. She "guided" me on what to say to you when we had our first conversation, and how to remove the lugs on that blasted drum set. She dances with me to the rhythms in my head. She didn't even get mad when I told her you were probably right about her singing off key. She never gets mad. Of course she doesn't. She isn't real._

_But what is she? And why won't she go away even though I know she's not real? I feel like Sedona chasing after the laser pointer, thinking he's finally going to catch the dot, as if the dot was a living creature. You see him acting all blasé about it, like, 'Eh, it's just a dot, I'm not falling for that again,' but five minutes later, there he is trying to catch it for the 45,975th time. AZ is my laser pointer dot, and unlike your cat, I have enough sense to be embarrassed about it, but not enough to quit running after it._

_Please advise._

_Very unbelievably truly yours,_

_CB_

_P.S. I watched "Look Around," on average, twenty times a day for three months, then tried to block all access to video sites. But you could block Internet access to me for life, and I'd still watch it. In my head. Constantly._

On Friday morning, on the way to school, I drop it in the mailbox three blocks away. As soon as I hear the clunk of the mailbox slamming shut, sending my letter down into the pile, I suck in a lung-freezing amount of winter air in one big gasp. I can't believe I did it. I told her. She now has something she can use against me if it ever comes down to that.

_She's not going to do that,_ Spectral Amy insists. _You did the right thing telling her._

_You're not exactly an objective party here_ , I rejoinder. She nods in grudging agreement.

When I get to homeroom and see Renate sitting there, I just smile at her and raise my eyebrows, as if to say, _It's coming._ She returns my smile. We don't talk otherwise.

That same day, I take a bunch of midterms and turn in a paper for Language Arts on _Tess of the d'Urbervilles,_ a book I think I almost understood well enough to fake a ten-dollar-word-laden paper about. About the tests, I am stumped about how well or poorly I did. I don't have the answers to anything anymore.

When I get home, I see my laptop sitting on the dining table, instead of being put away like I expected, even though it's now winter break and they know I don't have any homework. No one is watching, so I pick up the laptop and take it to my room. They can snatch it back from me if they want, but I'm going to get it while I can. Once I'm in my room, I open a private browser window, unblock my access to the video sites that have Amy's video on it, and watch it over and over and over again, with only one earbud in so my other ear can listen for approaching footsteps. We eat dinner, and nobody asks for the laptop back. I retreat into the bedroom again and keep watching the video on continuous loop for hours, until I start falling asleep. But before I do, I make sure to clear out my cache, just in case Dad knows how to hack a private browser window history.

Nobody says a word about any of it. It's almost like I'm not here.

DAY 121

The next day, Saturday, I hear the notification beep on my stupid-phone when I wake up. I fish the phone out of my purse, and notice that it's almost out of juice, and also that there are two texts from Renate.

The first one reads: _I don't xpect u to answer this bc I know u get charged 4 sends, but all imma say for now is: WOW. Longer letter coming, will include it in back of xmas card when I come over Monday._

The second one reads: _p.s. there will be crappy decoy gift with your xmas card but your real prez is a cowbell with a mounting bracket, which I will keep at my place until your progens chill the hell out. DELETE THIS AS SOON AS U READ IT._

I delete both texts immediately, then hook my phone up to the charger. And I start getting tingles about the idea that there's now a mountable cowbell with my name on it, then pissed off that I have to hide the damn thing, then grateful that there is someone who cares enough to do it for me. And then I grab a pencil off my desk and start tapping the eraser part on my side table, imagining the _tonk-tonk-tonk-a-tonk_ I would be hearing if I was allowed to play the real deal. So sweet.

_You see?_ Spectral Amy says. _If you weren't meant to be a musician, you wouldn't have something like that happen to you. All you have to do is get out of this house for good, and life will start happening to you._

_But I can't get out now,_ I tell her, still playing my imaginary cowbell. _And by the time I do, my parents will probably kill any musical impulses I have._

_You might have to take a big risk,_ Spectral Amy says. _You might have to do something drastic. But listen to you. All you have is a pencil and you can still hear the other things your hands could do, if they were allowed to._

Something drastic.

A big risk.

Then it hits me. If Renate is willing to store a mountable cowbell at her place, then she'd probably be willing to store the rest of the drum set over there. And maybe I could even have the replacement parts sent to her house, and resurrect that drum set there. The idea makes me feel deliciously wicked. And I know she'd love it.

_Now you're talking,_ Spectral Amy says.

But I lucked out by getting it into the garage in the first place; how am I going to get it out?

_That's easy,_ Spectral Amy says. _One piece at a time._

One piece at a time. That's what Renate said.

Of course. I can take the tom and snare off, break down the stands and brackets, stuff the bass drum pedal into a backpack. The only thing that might be a challenge to smuggle out would be the bass drum, which is over two feet high and has a non-detachable mount which makes it come up to my waist. But once we get everything else over to her place, we can figure out that last part. And we can have the replacement parts sent to her house, too.

_You really are a genius,_ I tell Spectral Amy. _And one day, everyone will know._

Then I text Renate, although I will have to pay for the privilege: _You rule so hard. I'll see you Monday._ Right after that, she texts me a smiley, and then I erase the entire exchange.

DAYS 122-123

I spend the next two days, when I'm not furtively getting my hourly Amy fix in, surfing the Net for gear, including mesh cymbals and heads, that would fit a Trixon cocktail kit. My two sets of grandparents, if they stay true to pattern, will probably send me a hundred bucks each for Christmas, along with a savings bond for the same amount (I don't get to open their cards until Christmas morning). But I'm going to have to save my pocket change for the rest of it.

_If I had four hundred simoleons to blow all at once, I could just buy a new set,_ I complain to Spectral Amy.

_Maybe,_ Spectral Amy says, _but this is a much better story. Besides, you want those mesh heads and cymbals. I wish I'd had those, I probably wouldn't have driven my mom so crazy!_

_At least your mom let you play,_ I say.

_She did what my dad told her to,_ Spectral Amy says. _It was the 1960s. She wasn't going to overrule him._

At least she had one parent who got it. Sigh. Now I'm really depressed.

DAY 127

Annabeth fascinates me. How is it that this perfect creature, almost a decade my senior, actually came out of the same birth canal that I did? I know I make her feel weird, the way I watch her like she's some anthropology project; she never seems to spend more than thirty seconds in the same room with me alone, what with all the people in town who are dying for a few minutes of her time. How do I even talk to her? It sounds absurd that I should be asking that question about my own sister. But obviously, Tam has no problem with it. They go to Tam's room and talk and giggle for hours at a time. I can't ever picture AB doing that with me.

On Christmas Eve, through the wall that connects my bedroom to Tam's, I can hear her and AB watching some TV singing contest and cackling about the contestants. Unlike me, Tam has a TV in her room; she bought it with her own money. The TV is loud enough that I can hear one of the contestants tell her back story. She's fifteen, my age, and her parents agreed to move to Nashville so she could pursue her dream of being a singer, and they built a state-of-the-art recording studio in their new house. Her parents talk about how wonderful and special she is, how talented, how deserving. I am trying to imagine what I would say if I was on one of those shows. _My parents think I suck in every possible way; they did everything to stop me short of surgically removing my vocal cords, but here I am anyway. Screw you, Mom and Dad. For my audition song I'm singing Ray Charles' "You Don't Know Me,"and dedicating it to them. The woman who wrote it even has the same first name I used to have, ha ha!_

I swallow the lump in my throat and shove a pair of drummers' earplugs in my ears so I don't have to hear any more.

Two entire days. I have to wait two entire days to get Renate's letter. How did people not explode out of their own skins and get stuck to the ceiling, waiting to hear back from people through the mail, in the days before communication went electronic? I sit at family meals that weekend forcing my hands and my head to stay still and quiet, while I move my feet around rhythmically, glancing under the table to make sure I'm not in danger of kicking anyone. I bite at the insides of my lips, pick my cuticles, unravel a thread at the bottom of my shirt, hiccup loudly, hiccup again, hiccup again. The hiccups keep going until I drink water upside down, holding my glass, bending over it, and tipping the glass into my mouth. It's the only hiccup remedy that ever works for me. When I'm done, gas comes out of both ends of me simultaneously, and my sisters crack up laughing, as my parents sit there stone-faced.

My parents ask me if I`'m feeling okay. Since I know they don't want the real answer to that question, I just say yes. But I can see AB and Tam exchanging glances, like they know what's really happening.

How long can this go on?

DAY 128

On Christmas morning, we open our gifts. I get a couple of David Sedaris books from AB. (Isn't his stuff supposed to be kind of racy? My parents don't comment.) I get a hundred-dollar gift card for Powell's Books from my parents that I can use for mail ordering books and nothing else, and a hand-crocheted Dr. Who-like scarf—twice my height, in multiple colors of microfiber yarn--from Tam. No return of my pandeiro, alas.

I give everyone handmade ceramics that I made in art class; they seem mildly appreciative. I have a ceramic cat for Renate, for when she arrives at noon, painted in Sedona's red-rock colors. Since no one else knows about the cowbell, whatever she gives me will probably seem like weak tea to everyone else, compared to a handmade ceramic piece. No one else knows about the letter, either. I get so tingly thinking about it that I turn around and bump into the tree and knock some ornaments off it.

Finally we get to open the cards from our grandparents. At which time I find out that my mom's parents have bumped up their gift for each of us from the usual hundred dollars to a hundred and fifty. My paternal grandparents give me their usual hundred. But still...that puts me fifty dollars closer to my goal of getting the drums restored. I try really, really hard not to shriek with joy. "It's fifty extra dollars," Tam says. "I mean, it's nice, but don't, like, rupture yourself over it. Fifty bucks buys like what, two pairs of pants if they're on sale?"

Oh, how I wish I could tell Tamarlyn about this. Of all my family members, I think she'd be the most supportive. But once she knows, the others will bleed it out of her somehow. I can take no chances.

I start playing bongos on my knees, going faster and faster and faster. "Hey," AB says, "have you guys noticed that ever since you took away her pandeiro and her bongos, she plays drums on _everything_ now? I mean, she even drums with her _feet_. It's bizarre. You might as well just give that stuff back to her."

So she knows about them seizing the pandeiro. Which means she probably knows why. I don't know why I didn't (couldn't) talk to her about it myself, other than sheer cowardice. A girl who was anything close to neurologically normal would have brought it up in the first twenty-four hours AB was home. But if she knew all this time, why didn't she bring it up in my presence until now? I do not understand this species the rest of my household belongs to.

I drum even faster. My parents don't comment on what AB just said, and make a point of turning their backs to me as I drum. I glance at Tam. She makes a wry face in their direction.

When eleven-thirty rolls around, I go to my room and retrieve a small notebook from my purse, stick it in my pocket, and slip off to the frigid garage, the only place in this house I can write anything with no chance of being seen. I write a note for Renate asking her if we can get the drums to her place and if she'll order the replacement parts for me if I give her the money. Then I pull the pages out and fold them, and write NOT MY NEXT LETTER, SOMETHING EXTRA on them and put them in my pocket, along with the notepad. I'll hand her the note when she's about to leave. I look at my watch, which is something I do approximately every forty-five seconds between now and noon, with my heart going _tonk-tonk-tonk-a-tonk_ the entire time.

Renate finally arrives at twelve minutes after noon. "She's here!" I shout, like I haven't seen her in months. Even Renate seems surprised by my display of ecstasy over her arrival, although she might just be playing along to keep my parents pre-clue. She hands me her holiday card, and when I open the envelope, I see some folded stationery behind the card, and I carefully remove the card from the envelope without taking out the letter behind it. I'm so excited I think I might throw up. I wonder if I look green. I bet I do.

I take out the card, which is one of those I Can Haz Cheezburger?-type of cat pictures, with the caption EX MUSS KITTEH SEZ, I CAN EATZ YER RIBBEN?, over a photo of a black and white kitten chewing on a red ribbon tied to a wrapped present. "Aww, cute," I say, and then open the card. Attached is a gift card for Unscentedly Yours, a local store that sells fragrance-free beauty products. The inside of the card says, NAH, KITTEH TUMMEH NO LIKEH, U CAN HAZ BACK, with a picture of what looks like cat vomit on a rug with pieces of red ribbon in it. I laugh and show it to everyone. "Eww," everyone else says, although Tam giggles when she says it. I read aloud what she wrote inside the card: _Thank you for rocking my world. Please keep doing that. Xo, renate._ I give her a hug, then present her with her ceramic Sedona. She loves it. "It does look like Sedona," Renate says. "You have a great visual memory."

It's all I can do not to race into the garage and read her letter right away. But Renate doesn't stay long, only two hours, probably because she knows I'm dying to read what she wrote, and also, my parents (as usual) are staring at her like she's a sewer rat I found and asked if I could keep as a pet. But this time I'm sort of grateful for it. The sooner she leaves, the sooner I can read the letter. Isn't that weird? I practically fell off my hinges waiting for her to get here, and now I'm more interested in what she has to say than I am in her physical presence.

But if it bothers Renate, she doesn't show it on her face. She just tells everyone cheerfully that she has to go to her grandma's this afternoon and texts her parents to come pick her up. When their car pulls up, I go with Renate out to the car, under the pretense that I'm saying hi to her mom and dad, and when Renate gets into the car, I pull the note I wrote for her out of my pocket and hand it to her. She reads what I scribbled on top of it, and smiles, then tucks the note in her coat pocket. "Merry Christmas, Cynner Woman," Renate says, and her parents crack up laughing, like they've never heard her use that name around them before.

Her parents seem amazingly chill, considering everything she's put them through. I don't know what my parents would have done if I did the stuff she did at her last school. Fed me to a snake, probably.

I then go to the garage (which is open from the outside) and take out Renate's letter, which is on what looks like hand-designed stationery, with a sketch of her likeness wearing her trademark beret and cloak. It might even be the one I saw her doing on notebook paper in the beginning of the year. She can write in a straight line on unlined paper; in fact, she writes in _calligraphy_. Why does that not surprise me?

_December 24, 2016_

_Ms. Cynthia Butt_

_1105 Noe Street_

_Steens Center, OR 97915_

_Dear Cynner,_

_First thing I'm going to say is, wow, you can really write, girlie. I doff my beret in your general direction._

_Second thing is, it's totally, totally (and I mean totally totally) understandable that you would "hear" AZ saying nice things to you and being supportive. I mean, my gods, you have to be starved for it considering who you live with. I cried when I read that stuff, I really did. And now I actually want to murder your parents. How could they do that to you?_

_Seriously, how? I know kids whose parents insist that they go to med school or get science degrees or whatever, and are really hard-nosed about it, but they don't insist that their kids flail around with no help, and then punish them for not being able to tough it out, extremely harshly with NO WARNING and forbid them to even LISTEN to their favorite music.I checked to see if any of this is illegal in Oregon. Unfortunately, no. But one day, very soon, they will get theirs. And it will be magnificent._

_Meanwhile, though, about the AZ stuff: I was thinking, "If this girl did all that, there's no way in the world she doesn't have other fans." Couldn't you form some kind of online fan group and put a comment on one of her videos advertising it? Couldn't you blog about her for some site that has community blogging open to anyone? Someone at one of the feminist blogs has to remember her, especially one of the older women. If you don't know how to do that stuff, I can help you figure it out. If you're paranoid about your parents finding out,you can use a fake name and get a separate email address, and we can read everything you get on my phone at school._

_Also, are there other musicians, engineers, etc. credited on her album? There have to be a few people who aren't dead or in hiding or too senile or drug-damaged to remember anything. Maybe there's someone who used to work for her record label when she was signed there? I also saw a book on the interlibrary loan list, called Rhythm Methods: An Oral History of Female Drummers and Percussionists, 1960-1990. I took the liberty of ordering it myself, knowing the wicked witch puddle your parents would turn into if they saw it in your room; if the authors did their homework, there has to be something in that book about AZ. I should have it by the time we have to go back to school again._

_Between all those people, there has to be someone who can at least tell you if Amy is alive or not, and if she is, whatever happened to her. And you could help get her the credit she deserves for breaking new ground. I can't understand why there would be, like, zero information or discussion about her, anywhere, unless she went through the Net with some big old eraser and just deleted everything ever written about her. I don't even know if it's possible to do that, but it's the only explanation I can think of._

_Sedona says meowy Xmas._

_Xo, renate_

I understand what Renate is trying to do here. She's trying to get me hooked up with other Amy fans so I don't feel like I'm the only freak who likes her. And she's right, I can't possibly be her only fan, but it feels that way. A few years ago, there was this sitcom called _Flight of the Conchords,_ about a band so pathetic that they had only one fan in the entire known universe and she was this obsessive stalkery ladycreep. I used to think that show was funny. Now that I feel like I could be living it, with me in the role of Mel the ladycreep, I'm not laughing. Not that I would ever do the stuff she did, or even close to it, but I feel like I'm mentally glommed on to Amy in that way, like I have no other life. And if Amy ever found out about me, she'd think I was a "Mel," even if I never said a word to her.

If I actually did the things Renate suggests, like try to get in touch with someone who played on her album, I would probably trip them out with Mel-like vibes, too. Like attracts like, unlike repels unlike. It's as natural as magnets turned the wrong way. And I am a magnet turned the wrong way. What Renate is suggesting are things I could only get away with if I was a normie.

But I do love her for trying.

When I'm done reading the letter, I hear the notification beep on my phone, and there's a text from her. It says, _Oh hells yes, tell me what u want and put yr $ on a prepaid credit card and give it to me, and I will order it 4u. I told my parents we have to do it here because we have soundproofing and u don't. They bought it._

Oh my fracking God. This is the best Christmas _ever_.

DAY 129

The day after Christmas, which is Monday, while my parents are sequestered in their office, I leave them a note (which they probably won't get around to reading anyway) and take a walk over to Safeway, shopping list in hand. There, I pick up the raw almonds and cider vinegar and organic unripened avocados and bananas on the shopping list, then buy a prepaid credit card with my Christmas money. My intent is to sit in the café and write to Renate, without buying anything else. But on the way over there, I spot the coffee bar. Normally I wouldn't even look at it because everything there is forbidden to me, but this time I pause and stare at the menu, a menu that normal people order from all the time without another thought. It might be technically junk food, but it's food, not fracking poison, regardless of what my parents and Dr. Nansi think.

"Would you like to order something?" the barista asks me. She's probably about college age, and very smiley and cheerful. Obviously, she knows nothing about me, or she wouldn't be asking me that question.

"Actually...yeah," I hear myself say. "I'll go for a small hot chocolate."

"Whipped cream?"

Whipped cream. Oh boy. Chocolate. Sugar. Dairy. I feel like I'm buying crystal meth. "Um...yes, please."

"You got it."

Sixty seconds later I'm handing her two dollars and she's handing me a hot cup, and my hands are shaking so hard that I'm scared I'll drop it. "Thanks so much," I say, hoping my voice isn't shaking as badly as my hands are. She looks at me a little funny, like she wants to ask me if I'm okay, but she just says, "Enjoy it."

I sit down in the café and open the lid to my liquid meth equivalent. I dip my fingertip into the white stuff on top, and, with my pulse pounding out sixteenth notes at 170 beats a minute, I flick my tongue at my fingertip and taste it. It's super sweet, a lot sweeter than unripe bananas, not at all sour like the yogurt I tasted at school. Then I dip my tongue in the cup and get a little more of the whipped cream on my tongue. I take in the taste of it, letting the sensation wash over me of a mouthful of milk product going down my gullet for the first time since I was four, which might as well have been never, because I don't remember it. I wait ten seconds to see if I change into a werewolf or start having projectile vomiting or something, and when it doesn't happen, I take a sip at the brown liquid lurking beneath it. It's so hot it burns my tongue, and I leave the cup on the table with the top off, waiting for it to cool off.

Then I take out my blank paper and a pen, and sit down and write to Renate. I know I have to make it snappy and get this done before my parents get suspicious. Will chocolate and whipped cream show up on my breath? Maybe I should have thought of that before I took a sip.

_December 26, 2016_

_Ms. Renate Silverdick_

_77 Brooker Avenue_

_Steens Center, OR 97915_

_Dear Renate,_

_You don't know how much I appreciate your being willing to help me out restoring those drums. Enclosed is a prepaid MC and a list of what I can afford to get right now. Keep the change._

_About getting me help, I did ask, but they farted in my face (not literally). That would mean I wasn't smart enough to pass "basic" math and science. Can't have that around here._

_I can't wait to see that book you ordered. But here's the problem. I don't know if I want to meet other fans of AZ, or even AZ herself. I don't know if I even want to know if she's alive or not, or find out more details about her life. I used to think I wanted that, but now it feels like I'm not good enough to meet her yet. I feel like I have to actually have a reason she would want to know me, other than my appreciating her, I have to be a much cooler and more accomplished and attractive person in order to deserve that. If she is alive, I don't want to do anything to disrupt the life she's built, and I don't want her to know me as "Cindy Butt, loser." I need a new name, a real identity as an artist and a person, before I reveal myself to her._

_And if she does have other fans, they'd either be freaked out about how much I like her, or they'd be even worse than I am, like John Hinckley types. Same with the pros who knew her or might know her now. Why would they volunteer information to someone who pushed their creep buttons?_

_Even worse, what if I found out she was dead? Or that she was a terrible person? Then I'd feel like a dead-fish-for-brains that I wasted all this energy on her. There's a lot at stake here. Too much. I know this all sounds really irrational, but it's how I feel. I don't expect you to solve this for me. I don't think anyone can._

_Meow back to Sedona. I can't wait to pet him again._

_Xo, CB_

_P.S. I'm here in Safeway alone, drinking my first ever hot chocolate. Haven't grown fangs or forgotten my name yet. Aren't I the naughtiest?_

_P.P.S. What do you think of Cyan for a stage name for me? It's a mashup of CYnthia ANn._

Once I'm done with the letter and have sealed it all up, I take a sip of my now-lukewarm hot chocolate. Whoa. I know that it's supposed to be a lot better hot, but I can't even believe anything could taste this good, or bring such joy to my nerve centers. Chocolate. This stuff is actually legal? I'm screwed now. I'm going to want it every day of my life and twice on Sundays, but for now, I'm just going to sit here and savor every illicit-for-Cynthia (but not illicit-for-Cyan!) mouthful for as long as I can get away with it.

I stick the letter and the prepaid credit card in the mailbox on the way home. I know there's no mail pickup the day after Christmas because it was on a Sunday this year, so she won't get it until Wednesday, which gives me a whole other day to obsess about it. The clank of the mailbox closing and the letter sliding down the chute makes my stomach seize up. Or maybe it's the hot chocolate. I hope not. On the walk home, it starts snowing. I let a snowflake (God knows what's in those) land on my tongue and cleanse my palate before I walk into the house with an illegal chocolate smile on my face.

DAY 130

The next night, after dinner, Mom and Dad go into their office, and as soon as they do, the phone rings. From outside, I hear the caller ID voice say, "Mr. Shunsberg."

I immediately snap to attention. Mr. S. is calling our house, the Tuesday after Christmas? Mom and Dad look at each other like they're hesitating on answering it, but after another ring, Dad punches the speaker phone button and talks, as I hover in the doorway.

"Brian," Dad says, wrinkling his brow. "This is a surprise. How has your holiday been?"

"Late Hanukkah this year," Mr. S. says. "This year, we get to celebrate when you guys do. Listen, I'm sorry to bother you during the holidays like this, but I need to talk to you guys about Cynthia's grades. The school is probably going to set a formal meeting about it after the holidays, but I thought you should know now."

"Cynthia," Dad says, and points his thumb outwards, as if to say he wants me to leave.

"I want Cynthia to be present for what we're discussing," Mr. S. says. "This is really important."

"If it's about her grades, she should be here, Dan," Mom tells Dad.

I look at Dad, and he nods. I enter the office and quietly push the door closed, then lean against the door for support.

"Why are _you_ calling us about her grades?" Dad says. "I mean, you're kind of going above and beyond the job description of a homeroom teacher here, aren't you?"

"I was a student teacher at a high school where homeroom teachers functioned in an advisory role," Mr. S. says. "I want to make myself available for my students the same way, especially since we're down to only one guidance counselor and one part-time temporary school psychologist." He clears his throat. "And...I hate to be the bearer of bad news here, but if you were hoping that depriving Cynthia of her rhythm instruments would improve her grades, it's not happening. I've been in touch with Cynthia's other teachers. Cynthia, you failed every single midterm you took before the break. I'm sorry."

"Oh, God," I whisper. I can't even look at my parents. "I...I know I was having some problems remembering stuff I was reading, but I didn't think it was that bad. I really flunked all four?"

"I wish I had better news for you," Mr. S. says. "But this can't go on. Cynthia is at a point where she's going to fall off the college track entirely unless you acknowledge her disability and get her the supports she needs."

"It's that damn Renate," Dad grumbles. "I knew we should have tried to separate them."

"Renate has nothing to do with this. Kids like Cynthia just reach a point where they can't pass for standard issue anymore no matter how hard they try."

"Did you go off your diet, Cynthia?" Mom asks me.

"No," I answer, too quickly. Obviously that's a lie in absolute terms, but the real question she's asking is, did going off the diet make me flunk those tests? So in that sense, it's not a lie, because the hot chocolate was later. What will they say if my grades improve after drinking it?

"And speaking of that diet," Mr. S. says, "can Cynthia really be getting proper nutrition on such a limited regime?"

"Kids who have seizures have diets a lot more limited than that if their meds don't work," Dad rejoinders.

"Does Cynthia have epilepsy?"

"No, but—"

"Because epilepsy is an illness that can kill you instantly if it's not effectively treated. In other words, it's not autism."

"People with autism do die of it," Mom says. "They can't take care of themselves and nobody is there to do it for them, because they have no family left, and that's it for them."

"Oh, please," I mutter.

"If Cynthia gets the right kinds of accommodations, her life can be as good and as long as anyone else's. But not if you're going to keep ignoring the evidence in front of you." I hear Mr. S. pause for breath. "I realize that could pose a problem to you in terms of finances, but—"

"You know what, Brian? Fuck you," Dad barks at him. "Who the hell do you think you are?"

"Dan..." Mom looks freaked out by how intense Dad's reaction is. Even I'm a little shocked. I never thought Dad would ever drop an F-bomb on a teacher.

Dad starts pacing back and forth, but only a few feet in each direction, like he's a tiger in a cage. "No," he says to Mom. "I'm not going to have Doogie Howser here sit there in the privacy of his living room, without enough guts to even say it to our faces, and call us frauds."

"Who's Doogie Howser?" I ask.

"He's referring to an old TV show about a teenage doctor," Mr. S. says. "What he's saying is that I don't look like an adult, so I have no right to question him." He pauses for breath again. "Dan, I'm not calling you frauds. Fraud would imply that you actually know Cynthia has...that she's on the spectrum and you're lying and telling people otherwise, and I don't believe that about you at all."

"This couldn't wait until school was in session again?" Mom says.

"I don't think so," Mr. S. says. "If you handle this right now, Cynthia has a good chance of salvaging her GPA for the year and doing a lot better after that. If you don't, then don't expect miracles from doing the same thing and expecting the results to be different. There's no reason she has to be struggling like this. Do you really think she's slacking off to punish you?"

"That's exactly what they think," I say. "Like I'm just some cruel, sadistic person who likes to make people suffer. I hate making people suffer! I hate it! I hate it, I hate it, I hate it!" I slap my hand on the wall with every "hate," generating way more hand pain than I expected. "And I passed all your damn drug tests, and you still won't let me go to Renate's house."

"You passed the first five weeks," Dad says. "You have three more to go."

"Do I have this right?" Mr. S. says. "Cynthia has to pass _eight drug tests in a row_ before she can go to her best friend's house?"

"Our friends all do the same thing," Mom says.

"Bull...pucky," I say. "I have never, in the history of forever, heard of someone who's never been caught with drugs ever having to take that many pee tests to be let off house arrest. Do you really think I'm that good at scrubbing my own urine? Or that Renate, of all people, is an expert in it? Renate doesn't even drink." With Mr. S. on the line, I am starting to rev into high gear with this. "Your friends' kids got busted for _dealing,_ or driving while they were high as kites. They had to be bailed out of fracking _jail,_ Mom. You didn't catch me doing anything but playing my pandeiro."

"We can't afford to support you after you get out of college," Dad says. "I know that's the trend now, you go get your degree in shoelace tying or whatever, and then you go live at home and apply for a bunch of retail jobs and wait to see if Burger King will hire you, if you're lucky. We can't have that. You have to get a degree that's going to make you hireable for a living wage after you graduate."

I chew furiously at my cuticle. Very professional looking, I am.

"Dan," Mr. Shunsberg says, "that's not going to happen if all you do is punish Cynthia instead of—"

"Even if we were to treat Cynthia as though she had autism, do you know what the unemployment rate of people with autism is, Brian?" Dad stops pacing and drops into his desk chair, right behind the phone. "Seventy-five to eighty percent. With no jobs, or only extremely part time jobs. Once she got that scarlet A stamped on her forehead, any gains she made academically with so-called accommodations would go right down the toilet. Employers don't have to say why they're not hiring you. They can just not do it."

"Yeah, I'm totally learning how to charm people's socks off with the way you treat me," I say to my own feet.

"There is a state initiative now to help people with developmental disabilities get jobs," Mr. S. says. "There are job developers, job coaches, people like that who she could have access to if you got her into the system."

"What jobs? Like pushing a mop around some office at night ten hours a week? Those programs are for people with below average IQs. No offense, but the people who run those things wouldn't even want Cynthia. She's too smart for them."

"She'd be bored out of her mind," Mom adds. "Wouldn't you, Cynthia?"

I nod and look down at my macerated cuticles. "Well, there is that."

"Cynthia, I'm not giving up on you," Mr. S. says. "I know there's a way you can be who you are and still be successful."

I feel my throat tighten. Because I know he's wrong. I want so much to believe him, but as much as right now I'm so far over my parents that I'm under them, they're right about one thing: I can't be a fracking janitor. I can't even clean a kitchen sink without getting water all over the floor and wasting half a bottle of dishwashing liquid, only to be told the backs of the dishes are still dirty. So here I am: too "smart" (and clumsy) to do menial work, too "stupid" (and socially inept) to do well academically. And unlike a lot of people on the spectrum, I have no mechanical or technical aptitude either. What place could there possibly be for me? Even in music, you have to get people to like you. You have to win hearts. And I can't even win my parents' hearts.

_Your parents have no hearts,_ Spectral Amy says. _You can't win something that doesn't exist._

I clench myself as hard as I can to keep from sobbing. Not in front of them. Please. No wonder I can't talk to Annabeth. I'm the kind of person she'd cross the street to avoid if we weren't related.

Before he hangs up, Mr. Shunsberg says to my parents, "I hope you guys all sit down and have a serious discussion about this. Because this is really crucial."

When he's gone, I wait for the big explosion to come from my parents. But they say nothing, and after an excruciating pause, Dad asks me, much too quietly and evenly, to leave and says we'll all discuss this tomorrow. My stomach curdles thinking about what they're going to do to me next.

DAY 131

I sleep in fits until noon the next day—and weirdly enough, no one has tried to wake me up for all that time, like they usually do.Then, as I'm putting on the last of my clothes, an envelope slides under my bedroom door. It's Renate's letter. She has written on the envelope: _I had Dad run this over to your mailbox instead of waiting for the mail to get it to you. I didn't want you to wait the extra day!_ This means she already got the mail for today and read my letter and responded to it. Holy moly. I wonder who got it out of the mailbox (I see no sign of tampering with the seal on the envelope), but before I find that out, I have to find out what she has to say that can't wait.

_December 28, 2016_

_Ms. Cynthia Butt_

_1105 Noe Street_

_Steens Center, OR 97915_

_Dear Cynner,_

_Or should I say, "Dear Cyan"? That is a PERFECT stage name for you. Do you have a last name to go with it, or are you just going to be "Cyan" with no surname?_

_Okay. So about the AZ stuff...I know this is an obnoxious question but I have to ask it: Are you in love with her_ that _way? I mean, I'm not going to judge either way, but I'd still like to know._

_Although I suspect the answer is no, because the other stuff, about not being sure you want to find out whether she's alive or not...yikes. That's way beyond a crush. If I'm marking my scorecard correctly, you can't meet AZ until you become Ms. Perfect, and you can't become Ms. Perfect because, in your mind, you have no talent or anything else to recommend you. Now that I think I can judge you for, because you have plenty to recommend you RIGHT NOW. I bet AZ would be thrilled to death to hear from someone who appreciated her music and wasn't some Charles Manson-esque whackjob, which you aren't by a long shot._

_So here is what I think. I think we need to move heaven and earth to find this woman—dead or (more likely) alive. You need a megadose of reality therapy here, dude. You don't see AZ for who she really is, a person your grandma's age who drops her phone in the toilet and burns her flapjacks and yells at the cat even if the cat hasn't done anything to deserve it. I don't mean that she does those things literally; she might, but that's not the point. The point is, you think of her as some exalted being, not the regular, flawed (though maybe still talented) person she is. If she's alive and you can just witness her living life like everyone else, even if you never speak to her, you can reduce her to human size and get on with your own life. And if, gods forbid, we find out that she's passed, you can stop worrying about what it would be like to meet her._

_You really can't lose either way, Cy(a)nner woman. You can only lose if you don't take action._

_Xo, renate_

_P.S. Birthday/New Year's Day party Sunday, 4 pm, my crib. I don't care if your parents have to chaperone you, I want you there. Please please come. The (in)famous Eroica will be there; we have kissed (not on the mouth) and made up._

Speaking of scorecards, let's see if I'm marking mine correctly here. So in the last thirty hours, the following has taken place: My homeroom teacher has called my parents during a holiday break and told them point blank that I have no chance at getting into college without a diagnosis and accommodations; Dad F-bombed him; I last spotted my parents getting together in their office to plot out their next act of scorched-earth warfare against me; and my only real friend thinks I should stalk my favorite singer. In other words, Nobody Listens to Cyan-slash-Cynthia™, chapter 9,780.

I ask Spectral Amy, _do you think I'm a Mel?_

She laughs her throaty laugh. _You? That's a good one. You should watch that show again, C. That girl had no shame. She even got her husband to help her stalk them! You have absolutely nothing in common with Mel. Why would you even think that?_

_I do sort of look like her,_ I say.

_Yeah, so did the actress who played her,_ Spectral Amy says. _That doesn't mean she was anything like Mel in real life!_

_What are_ you _like in real life?_ I ask her. _I mean, I know it's physically impossible for you to be what I'm seeing in my mind right now...but are you alive? How are you at cooking flapjacks? Do you have kids? Grandkids? A whole different career? A different hair color? Are you into men, women, both, or neither? Can you give me some hints, at least?_

She doesn't answer. I don't know why I thought she would.

I do have to leave my room before someone drags me out by the ear, and eat breakfast so my blood sugar won't become a negative integer, so I tell my cramping stomach to shut up and head towards the kitchen. On my way over there, I hear Mom calling to me from her office. "Cynthia?"

Oh God. Here it comes. "Uh huh?"

"Can you come in here, please?"

I take a few steps and pause in the doorway to her office. She's alone. "Yeah, what's up?" I say, as if my entire future doesn't depend on what she says next.

"Can you close the door?"

I push the door shut. As soon as I do, Mom opens her desk drawer and hands me my LYRICS notebook. "Dad went out shopping," she says. "But I think you can have this back now. Don't worry, I didn't read it."

I take the notebook from her and stare at it like it's an all-access pass to Valhalla. "So you and Dad decided—"

"No," Mom says. "I decided. I never wanted to take your notebook in the first place. It was his idea. Just don't leave it lying around where he can see it."

"And if he sees me with it..."

"...then I will tell him I gave it back to you. But he never looks in my top drawer, because I keep it locked. He won't know you have it unless he sees you with it."

Just when I think life can't get any more upside down and backwards, it does. "Um...thanks," I say. "That was...unexpected. In a good way. I...I missed this."

Mom closes her desk drawer and smiles in a way that might be forced, but I can't tell yet. "Did you get that letter I put under your door?"

"That was you?"

She nods.

"Renate invited me to her birthday party Sunday afternoon," I say. "She said, and I quote, 'I don't care if your parents have to chaperone you, please, please come.' Does that sound like someone who wants to feed me drugs?"

She laughs, a little reluctantly. "No, it doesn't. You can go to her party. And we don't have to chaperone you, as long as one of her parents will be there."

"Really? You're not going to discuss it with Dad?"

"No. I don't think he'll have a problem with it."

Hmmm. Doesn't smell like scorched earth to me. I mean, I'll take it, but I am still listening for the sound of the other shoe dropping. "Thank you so much. I really appreciate it."

Mom asks me if I have Renate's present yet, and when I tell her I don't, she says, "After you eat breakfast, or lunch, or whatever you call the first meal of the day at twelve-thirty, and Dad comes back with the car, I'll take you to the mall so you can shop for her."

My eyebrows go up. "Mom, is your head feeling okay?"

She smiles. "My head is fine. Go eat your breakfast, brunch, whatever."

So I eat, and then we get in the car to go to the Dempster Mall. Everyone here calls it the Dumpster Mall, the Death Star Mall, or most often, the Dead Store Mall because half the stores have no occupants; there used to be a Tower Records here, and a Borders, but those are long gone. What they do have, though, is a bead shop, where I pick out a container of black bugle beads and take way too long deciding whether Renate would prefer a necklace made of Picasso jasper, red sesame jasper, or leopardskin jasper, while Mom waits outside fiddling with her phone. I go with the leopardskin in three different sizes, along with a needle already prestrung with beading thread.

Afterwards, Mom suggests we go to Tea Time, which is one of the few places in town I can get a Good Brain Diet-legal beverage. We sit under a tree-like thing that looks almost real and order a pot of Sustainable Energy, which is a blend of white tea, dried peaches, ginger, and sage. It's not bad at all. "If this is legal for me," I say, "how come we don't have stuff like this at home more often?"

Mom nods. "We should. You know, you can buy your own herbs and other things and experiment, see what you like. Get tiny amounts in the bulk bins and make one cup, and if you like it, get more."

"You're being really nice to me today," I say. "Did someone die?"

She laughs. "Of course not. But...I wanted to get some time with you, just one on one, so we can kind of...let each other know what's going on."

"Well," I say, "you heard Mr. S. last night. I think he might be right that I'm not...you know...off the spectrum. I mean, it's not like he's the first one who ever said it."

"This is his first job out of college." Mom pours herself another cup of tea. "What makes him some kind of expert about autism?"

"I don't think he's that inexperienced. He's in his mid-twenties. And with kids with disabilities being mainstreamed now, I'm sure they learn all about that stuff in school."

"You have a crush on him, don't you?" She isn't saying it snidely, she's saying it like I'm her girl-pal or something, all smiley and nudgy-winky.

"Ew, no," I say. "I appreciate his appreciation of me. But I don't think about him when I'm not in the same room with him. Unless he's, like, on our speaker phone telling us I just flunked four tests."

Mom sighs. "We'll work on getting you some tutors. That's one of the things we discussed last night. We did slack off on that, and I apologize. A lot of that, and I hate to tell you this, is about finances. The tutors we spoke to were very expensive, especially if we needed tutors for multiple subjects. I know Dad has been putting a lot of pressure on you girls to be self-sufficient, but that's not because he doesn't want you around. I think he's genuinely frightened that we won't be able to bail you out financially if you get in trouble."

"Don't we own the house free and clear? You said that the house was an inheritance from your Aunt Shelby, and you guys only had to pay taxes on it."

"We've had to take out a loan against it," Mom says. "And we've already had one advertiser back out on us this year. It wasn't a huge amount of money, but it created more pressure on us not to have it."

"If you got me into the developmental disability system before I turned eighteen, wouldn't I get all kinds of help with money stuff?" I say. "Like living expenses, housing supports, educational supports, job training..."

"We're not going to lie and pretend you—"

"It's not pretending, Mom. You won't even try to get me help I'm actually entitled to. I don't get it. What would be the worst thing that could happen if you did?"

She stares at me with an intensity that makes me flinch. "Never mind," I say. "I think I already know."

Then I poot. Loudly. Not intentionally, but suppression of flatulence isn't part of my skill set. (Can people actually do that, stifle their gas? Wouldn't it hurt?) Then for good measure, I poot again, so that there's no doubt in anyone's mind which Butt was responsible. Mom looks like she wants to crawl under her seat in humiliation, even though it clearly wasn't her. "Human beings poot thirty times a day on average," I inform everyone who's turned around to look. "You just don't hear most of them."

In the car on the way home, Mom tells me that she and Dad "have some differences" about when they're going to let me have my music stuff (and my real phone) back. "We did agree that there wouldn't be any more urine tests," Mom says, "unless we actually did have concrete evidence that you were using, which we don't right now."

"And you won't," I say. "Why would I ever need to get wasted, when I wake up that way already?"

I think about telling Mom about Amy, and about my visits with Dr. Ngo. Maybe that would convince her, finally, that I am still autistic. But once they find out, they could find her album and destroy it; while there seems to be some sort of détente with Mom at the moment, I can't take the chance that they'll flip the hell out again. Also, I don't particularly want to share Amy with them. I have to be able to keep something for myself, something that's all me. All Cyan.

_So you're ready to be Cyan now?_ Spectral Amy asks me.

_I wish,_ I answer her. But Cyan is a much more interesting person than I am.

_How can that be?_ Spectral Amy says. _Cyan is you. And I'm you, too. You right now, not future you. Ten years from now, you won't even remember my music, you'll have moved on to something else._

_Impossible,_ I insist.

"What's impossible?" Mom asks.

Oh God oh God oh God. I said that _out loud?_ "I...I was just daydreaming," I tell her. "What was the last thing you heard me say, before I said 'impossible'?"

"I couldn't hear most of it over the car heater." Mom turns the heat in the car down a few notches. "But the last thing I heard clearly was...something about waking up that way already?"

Okay. Maybe it's good for Mom to bear witness to this right now, because this helps me make my case. But if she heard me talking to Spectral Amy, who else has heard me? When did I cross the line from lips moving to talking out loud to her? I'd think that Renate would have brought it up if she heard me do it, but maybe I don't do it around Renate. Or maybe Renate is used to it. Crap on a cracker. I wish I could call or text her right now and ask.

"Well...yeah. Exhibit A, right here," I say, pointing to myself. She rolls her eyes and shakes her head.

_December 28, 2016_

_Ms. Renate Silverdick_

_77 Brooker Avenue_

_Steens Center, OR 97915_

_Dear Renate,_

_I'm thinking about "Beaut" as Cyan's last name. Like beauty without the Y._

_No, I do not have pants feelings about AZ. In fact, I would be_ grossed out beyond measure _if I met her and she came on to me. Or anyone her age, really, but especially her. This isn't some cheap-ass groupie thing._

_And yes, I'm coming to your party. Without a chaperone. Maybe I'll bring one of the drums over, so we can start smuggling them out of here?_

_So last night, Mr. S. called and he told me and my parents that I failed all four of my midterms, and that if I didn't get a diagnosis and accommodations I could forget about ever going to college. I thought for sure I was going to be dangled in front of hungry sharks after that, but you know what my parents (or more specifically, my mom) did? Gave me my notebook back; told me I could go to your party and took me to shop for a gift; called off the ridiculous-ass drug tests; promised to work harder to find me tutors. Dad is mostly giving me the silent treatment. Mom said they "had some differences to resolve" and they still won't admit I'm autistic (or apologize for anything but slacking off on the tutoring thing), but it's an improvement over being shark food, at least. Right now I'll take what I can get._

_But oh my fracking God, Mr. S. really did drill them new orifices. And what else can they do to punish me now, lock me in a dungeon?_

_Can't wait for Sunday._

_Xo, Cynthia (not yet Cyan)_

_P.S. Thanks for delivering a day early!_

_P.P.S. Do you ever hear me talking to myself out loud? Mom did today and I almost jumped out of my flesh, because I didn't know I was doing it._

_P.P.P.S. I'm not stalking AZ, but thanks for the sage advice._

By the time I'm done with Renate's letter, it's almost dark out. I walk it out to the mailbox before it gets all the way dark and they won't let me go; it's too late for it to be picked up today, but it will be picked up tomorrow and she will have it on Saturday. Then I sit on the bed with my notebook, back facing the door because I still don't have permission to close it during the day, and leaf through it. Really, there's not much in it but the beginning of "Emancipated Minor" and a bunch of rhyming lists. But it does look like I wrote something in here about Amy in code, because on one page, it says, "Need to write stuff worthy of [redacted]."

_Dear Renate..._

_Dear [Redacted]..._

Holy crap there's a new song coming on. I grab a pen and try to get it all down before it evaporates.

Dear Redacted,

_I'm writing to you 'cause we cannot talk..._

Hmm. _Talk_ is a terrible word to try to rhyme. _Walk, chalk, balk, caulk?_ Definitely not _caulk_. Walk is the only one vaguely appropriate, and I'm just not feeling _walk_. And the near-rhymes for it sound like ass.

How about this instead:

_Dear Redacted,_

_I'm writing because we can't talk right now_

Yes. Better.

_My dear Redacted, I don't even know if heaven will allow_

_Me to ever see your face the way I need to_

_Because I need you_

_Dear Redacted, to tell my why I am here on earth_

Okay, rhymes for earth: worth, girth, birth, dearth. Near rhymes: dirt, hurt(s), flirt(s)...

_I need to hear you so much that it hurts_

_But I can hear you in my mind_

_So tell me, how much are my ears even worth?_

_I'm in a bind because you're so kind_

_And I want to tell the whole world about you_

_But first I have to make sure that you're real..._

"Cynthia!" Dad calls out. "Dinner."

_And before that I have to eat a dull disgusting meal_

_(NOT AN ACTUAL RHYME, JUST A PLACE HOLDER)_

DAY 135

On Sunday, before Mom drops me off at Renate's, I slip out to the garage and unfasten the small tom frame and shell from the cocktail kit while keeping the yarn bag nearby, in case I need an alibi for why I'm out there. I stick the lugs in my pocket, then grab the tom and stuff it in the yarn bag to see if it will fit. It does. I breathe out relief and snap the yarn bag shut, and if Mom doesn't notice, I will have gotten my Amy album and the first of my drums over to Renate's house. I have no idea if I'll get away with this.

But I do. Mom probably just assumes the bag is for Renate's gift, and that I got or made Renate something else besides the leopardskin jasper necklace, which is in a gift bag considerably smaller than the yarn bag. Or at least, she doesn't question me about it. What, she's going to ask me, "Is that a mounted tom you have in that bag?" She wouldn't know a mounted tom if it fell on her head.

When I get to Renate's place, I'm greeted by her little brother, Karl, who's eleven. Karl is such a smartass. When he sees me, the first thing he says to me is, "So they finally sprung you from your cage, huh?"

"Yeah, Karl, but before they did they made me promise I wouldn't bite anyone. So don't tempt me."

Karl roars with laughter; he has the same laugh as Renate.

Then I enter the living room, and Renate calls out to me. "Yo, Cyan, come over and meet the misfit toys from SCH," Renate says.

Cyan. She's calling me Cyan. Didn't I tell her at the end of my last letter that I wasn't using that name yet? Or did I? That's the trouble with epistolary correspondence, people don't save copies of their work. And I know she keeps in touch with some people from her old school because I've seen their posts on her pages, but there are something like twenty-five of them here; I had no idea she had that many friends from her old school.

And when I head into the living room I instantly recognize Eroica: not from her face, because I can't do that, but from her purple crocheted cat-ear hat that she wears in the picture on her Tumblr, with a mane of frizzy blonde hair sticking out if it. She's a lot shorter and rounder than I thought she would be, and she's wearing what looks like a homemade t-shirt that says MIXOLYDIAN MODE CAN GO GET STUFFED. I don't have the foggiest idea what that means. I also don't know how much she knows about me, or my parents. Ren says she doesn't out people, but the subject has to have come up.

I meet up with Eroica and Renate, hand Renate the gift bag, and Renate introduces Eroica to me, and I introduce myself to Eroica as Cynthia.

Eroica squints at me. "I thought she said your name was Cyan." Her voice is a lot squeakier than I would have expected, and she's a lot more giggly, too. I thought she'd be kind of a tough, hard-nosed chick. I don't know why I thought that, but I did.

"That's my alternate name. I don't typically use it in public. Speaking of which, how'd you get a name like Eroica? That's Beethoven's Third Symphony, right? Are your parents Beethoven freaks or something?"

"Actually, no," Eroica says. "I'm the Beethoven freak in question. My birth name was Erica. I added the O right before high school. Of course, that doesn't stop some of the jackwagons at school from calling me 'Erotica,' but whatever. So I understand about alternate names." She tilts her head to the side and looks at me like she's trying to figure something out.

"What?" I say.

Eroica bobs her head up and down, grinning like a Muppet. "I knew it. You are totally breaking the needle on my A-dar."

"A-dar?"

"Radar for other autistics."

I recoil. "And I... _broke the needle?_ Doing what?"

"Okay. So you had something that I call The Look. When autistics see a bunch of people they've never met, they take those extra couple of seconds to study the new people, to make sure they're reading them halfway correctly, and you can see them trying really hard to process a whole bunch of new information at once."

"Speaking of new information," I say, trying to change the subject, "what's mix...oly...dian mode? Did I pronounce that right?"

"Modes are categories of scales in music. It's pronounced mix-a-LID-ee-an. The problem with it is that now it's just a major scale with a flattened seventh, whereas when Sappho invented it back in 7 B.C., it had flattened third, fifth, and sixth. That was actually kind of interesting, but over the centuries it became like kind of this musical telephone game, where you start out whispering 'Abraham Lincoln' to the first person in the circle, and the last person whispers it back to you as, 'I have a toothache.'"

I nod as I ponder this, even though I am not quite sure who Sappho was. "Right, so what you're saying is, why even bother calling it mixolydian mode, then? Why don't you just give it a new name, like, I don't know, poodle mode or something?"

"That's it," Eroica says. "You got it in one." I keep waiting for her to say something about my parents, or the blog, but she doesn't. And I want to tell her that she's completely different from how I imagined her, but I don't know how she'd take that.

"So is that a drum in your bag," Renate says to me, "or are you just happy to see me?"

"Yeah, it's the small tom. Where do you want to put it?"

"In the shed. But first, I want you to play it for me. As a birthday request. I miss hearing you play."

"Awww," I say. "But it doesn't have a head yet, remember?"

_It has a rim,_ Spectral Amy says. _Remember? You can play the rim with a pair of pens or chopsticks._

"But if you have a pair of chopsticks, I can use those to play the rim," I add hastily.

Renate tells everyone to head out to the shed in the garage, and when I get there, Renate's offering around a large plastic bowl that has cheap plastic egg shakers, tambourines, and castanets, and everyone picks one out of the bowl. Then she hands me a set of bamboo chopsticks, and I sit on one of the ball chairs she has scattered around the shed, take the tom out of the bag, and hold it between my knees as I test out the chopsticks. People turn to look at me.

"You're playing a drum with no head?" Karl says.

Before I can answer him, Renate announces, "Okay, everybody, listen up. Here's what's going on. C. and I are resurrecting an old cocktail drum kit she got from her neighbor, and we're still waiting for replacement heads to come in. Meanwhile, she's going to lead us in a percussion jam by playing the rims. Because I made her. Birthday girl privilege."

"I have to say, I'm fascinated by the idea of an autistic drummer," Eroica says. "I mean, don't you have to coordinate all four limbs?" She doesn't add "and I saw you tripping over your own shoelaces on the way out here"; she doesn't have to.

"It's easier for me to do complicated things with my limbs than simple ones, at least when it comes to gross motor stuff," I say. "I know that doesn't make any sense, but—"

"No, actually," Eroica says, "that makes perfect sense. I can do differential equations in my head, but I can't add and subtract in my head to save my life." When I look at her blankly, she adds, ""Differential equations are calculus."

"Oh, okay." Yeah. I think I just marked myself off as a sophomore there.

"Okay," I hear Renate say. "Counting off. A-one, a-two, a one, two, three, four..."

I focus on the drum itself, not looking at anyone in the room, and start playing the _ONE-and-TWO-and-three-AND-four-AND_ rhythm that goes with both "Emancipated Minor" and "Look Around," and Renate starts playing a couple of chords on the piano, and everybody starts banging and rattling their plastic rhythm instruments like monkeys trapped in isolated sound-proof rooms making _thwop_ noises at random. I mean, I'm not (or, I should say, not going to be) one of those snotty types of drummers who gets their antlers bent if the people in the audience don't keep perfect time; in fact, those kinds of drummers irritate me tremendously, because who's going to have rhythm as good as a professional drummer? But something in the same time zone as a steady beat would be nice. Even the Brownies I played for kept better time than this.

After about twenty seconds of this, I put up a hand and say, "Okay, hold it, you guys...can we try something else? I think I'm getting lost here." Everyone stops banging, and I turn to Renate. "Ren, can you set your metronome for a hundred beats a minute, eighth notes?" She does so, and I listen to it go _tock-tock-tock-tock_. "Actually, that might be a little too fast. Make it ninety." After she makes the adjustment, I say, "Okay, I'm going to try something and I don't know how it's going to work, but...I'm going to add one person at a time, each doing a really simple rhythm I teach you. When you're playing it, count along with the metronome, one-and-two-and-three-and-four-and, like that."

I turn to face Karl, who's holding an egg shaker. I pick up an egg shaker from the bowl and say, "Okay, Karl, can you do shake-shake, shake? One-and-shake-shake-three-and shake-and..." He picks that up just fine, and then I go on to Eroica, and say, "Can you slap the tambourine on the one and the three, like, slap-and-two-and-slap-and-four-and..." Once I have her going, I then assign rhythms to the others, like _shake-and-shake-and-shake-shake-shake-and, slap-and-slap-and-slap and-slap-and,_ and _click-click-two-and-click-click-four-and_ , and it's really starting to sound fantastic. "Rock!" I yell over them. "Hit it, Ren!" Renate starts to play the piano chords of "Look Around," and before I know it, I'm whacking away at the rim with those chopsticks and... _being Amy_. Or maybe, Amy is being me, I can't tell which. I start out singing softly, then I gradually start raising the volume, until I'm screaming:

_All the innocence of spring in a blade of grass_

_Look around! Just look around_

_Let the child within you SIIIIIIIIIIING_

_When you look around, just look around..._

Then Amy's wacky tempo changes start, starting with a couple of bars in 5/4 and 6/8 and 12/8 and, I don't know, that one segment where there doesn't seem to be any time sig at all, or it's like 127.6/5.7 or something bizarre like that, and of course, as soon as I do that, everyone stops playing and stares at me. I can't manage to look at them for more than a second, but I know all of them, except maybe Renate, are even more confused than those little kids on _Your Generation._ I could have skipped those parts, if I was in control of my hands. But I'm not. They're Amy's hands now, because her rhythms are permanently burned into them.

_What the hell are you doing?_ I say to Spectral Amy. _I had a roomful of white people with hopelessly binary senses of rhythm playing polyrhythmic percussion, and you had to ball it up! Why are you doing this to me?_

To everyone else, I say, "Sorry, that was my fault. I just got carried away."

"Pizza's here," I hear Renate's dad call out, and everyone except me and Renate puts their cheap percussion instruments down and eagerly makes a run for the food. Eroica stops for a second on the way out and says to me, "What was that, like free jazz punk rock lounge music or something? I never heard anything like that before."

_Go ahead,_ Spectral Amy says, _tell her that's your own sound. It's not me. I can't make you do anything, because I_ am _you. Remember?_

But all I can manage to say is, "Well, you'll never have to hear it again." My voice sounds like someone took a diamond cutter to my larynx. That's what I get for screaming without getting voice lessons and learning the right way to do it.

"It really wasn't bad," Eroica says. "I kind of wanted to hear more of it."

"Cynner, don't be too hard on yourself," Renate says. She alone knows exactly who I was channeling. "You got a great rhythm going. That's not easy to do with this bunch."

"Have you ever heard of Amy Zander?" I ask Eroica, even though I know the answer.

Eroica shakes her head no. I pull out Amy's album from my yarn bag and hand it to her. As I do, I realize that this is the first time Renate has actually seen it. "Don't feel bad, her album sold about six copies," I tell Eroica.

Eroica and Renate examine the album cover together, while I take a powder. A regular girl sharing her musical interests would never go to the bathroom at this point in the conversation, I'm sure. But it hurts my throat to talk after that screamfest. And it drives me buggy that Amy (spectral or otherwise) has made it impossible for me to play anything straight anymore.

By the time I rejoin the party, everyone's in the living room snarfing pizza and hot wings and salad. I go back to the shed to check and make sure the album has been returned to its yarn bag. It has. I have no idea what Renate said to Eroica about it after I left, because when they see me, they are a lot more interested in talking me into eating pizza (which they see me staring forlornly at) than discussing Amy. I tentatively try a little tiny nibble. Weirdly enough, I think Tam was right when she told me it tasted like cardboard and wax. But maybe Steens Center doesn't have the best pizza on earth.

When I'm getting ready to leave, Eroica takes me aside and says, "Listen, I know how much it has to suck, living with people who want you to be someone else. If there's ever anything I can do to help you, please tell me."

So she does know. Of course she does. I smile, lips-only. "How good are you at making people less irrational?"

Eroica laughs and takes a sip of her Diet Coke. "Dude, if I knew how to do that, I'd have _all_ the money."

On my way out, Renate slips me a copy of her letter. On my way back in the car with Mom, I'm feeling a bit queasy. I did try a few bites of Renate's birthday cake--which was her favorite, carrot cake—and I liked it, but I'm not sure it liked me back. "I think I took too much ibuprofen," I tell her. She doesn't comment.

When I get home and open the letter, I see two photocopied pages from a book, with a sticky-note on it that says, _The interlibrary loan came faster than I thought! And yes, she's in there!!!! Publication date of the book was 1991, FWIW._

I look at the photocopy and it has a multi-paragraph quote from Amy, following some brief biographical info about her. Speaking of a 127.6/5.7 time sig, I think that's about the rhythm my vascular system is banging out now.

_I guess you're not mad at me any more, huh?_ Spectral Amy murmurs.

I ignore Spectral Amy and start inhaling the first new bit of info I've gotten about real Amy since that dead thread on Chachaville I saw months ago.

_Bossa nova artist Amy Zander was only fifteen years old when she recorded her first and only album, Just Looking, on the now-defunct Bounce Records label in 1969. The album was quickly deleted after some devastating reviews and disastrous television television appearances, but showcased young Amy's husky, wildly elastic alto voice (which some critics at the time compared to a cross between Melanie and Yoko Ono) and changeable, complex drumming rhythms in a way that suggested a budding original talent._

_Unfortunately, that is the last material Zander ever released publicly, and she has become quite reclusive ever since, retiring to her family's home in southern California after receiving a degree in music education from New York University. When we reach her by telephone at the Los Angeles apartment of her father, retired session drummer Rick Zander, she tells us she can only give us ten minutes of her time, but that is enough for a glimpse into how a young girl experienced the music business in 1969-71._

_AMY ZANDER: It was all such a blur, it almost felt like it happened to someone else. I didn't even think much about what it meant to be a girl playing drums; Dad thought it was cute when I imitated him as a little girl, but after a while, he started to see that I could really play, and he got me a deal with Bounce. Dad said I wouldn't see any money for it; we spent the advance on the recording._

_I remember the day I first got the cocktail kit. It was my ninth birthday, and I had asked for a drum kit—but not this one! I wanted a sitdown kit like Dad had, not this thing I had to play standing up. Dad told me that the world wasn't ready yet to accept a female rock and roll or jazz drummer (this was 1963), but if I learned to play this Trixon kit, which you played standing up, and work in the more laid-back bossa nova style that was taking off then, I could make it big. It wasn't my favorite music but I developed a taste for it as I played it more._

_So what else? Well, I was always playing and singing too loud for the style and people had to keep telling me to dial it back! That was hard._

_I tried to sing higher than my natural range, because my voice was really low for a girl and if I didn't go up higher, I sounded like a boy._

_Once they gave me this vinyl miniskirt to wear on TV that I thought made my butt look like a bowling ball, and I spilled my Coke on it two minutes before we were about to go on, and the producers had to find a female assistant to sponge it off for me._

_When I sang live, I would forget words that I thought I couldn't forget if I tried, and my throat would get so dry I was barking more than I was singing._

_I got called "Laura Nyro with an attack of St. Vitus's dance" by some critic, and I looked up St. Vitus's dance and found out it wasn't a compliment, even though Laura Nyro was my favorite singer and I thought everyone else loved her too. St. Vitus's dance was some kind of neurological disorder where you lost all your coordination and jerked and twitched all the time. Ha ha. Very funny. Dad wouldn't let me read any more reviews after that, but I quickly got the idea that I was a novelty act and that nobody really took me seriously._

_For my second album, in early 1971, Bounce wanted me to record a "hit" they picked out for me, called "Gypsy Love." There was a big hit by Brian Hyland then called "Gypsy Woman," which I loved; it was a Curtis Mayfield cover, and I wanted to do that kind of pop-soul music for grownups, if they were going to have me do something that wasn't bossa nova (which was on the way out by then). I figured that if Brian Hyland's record label managed to let him graduate from that "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini" stuff he was doing as a teenager in the early '60s, to "Gypsy Woman," then Bounce could let me grow up too._

_But this song they wanted me to record was just a cheap bubblegum knockoff of "Gypsy Woman," and I thought it was a) garbage, and b) something Curtis Mayfield could potentially sue the crap out of them for! I tried to record it because I wasn't in a position to say no, but it never came out right, and they dropped me and had some other girl do it. It didn't even make top two hundred, ha ha._

And that was it. Ten minutes with Amy, and that's all she wrote. Or all anyone else ever wrote, as far as I know.

I sit there on the bed reading it over and over and over again, completely ignoring Renate's actual letter until the next morning.

# STAGE IV:

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

DAY 137

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_That's exactly what I want,_ I tell her. _Okay, I don't want that to happen, but I need it to happen._

_No, you don't,_ Spectral Amy whispers. _There's a reason I'm in your head all the time. A good reason. Someday, you'll know why._

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

Crash. Bang. Bonk. All day long.

DAY 138

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

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

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

"I don't understand," Renate says. "Is that bad?"

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

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

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

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

I bite my lip and close my eyes.

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

I open my eyes. "You mean you actually _surveyed_ people about it? And they told you all that?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Tonight?" I feel like a parrot.

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

Bass drum is the sound I'm beginning to hear in my ears, right now, a _baion_ rhythm, _boom de BOOM, boom de BOOM_.

_Say yes,_ Spectral Amy says. _You are a drummer. A drummer's drums should be where they're safe. They're not safe where you live._

"I am a drummer," I echo, although Renate doesn't know who said what I'm echoing.

"Hells yes you're a drummer," Renate says. "You didn't get all this stuff for nothing."

"I am a drummer. I am a drummer. I am a drummer." I start stomping along with myself, _stomp stomp stomp, stomp stomp stomp_. "I am a drummer. I am a drummer."

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

"But what if the real me _isn't_ acceptable?"

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

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

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

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

_Renate just told me that I'm on the verge of being safely ignored at school,_ I growl at Spectral Amy. _Don't screw that up for me, please._

_Wouldn't you rather people were in awe of your talent, instead of just ignoring you?_ Spectral Amy says. _They should be. You are ridiculously gifted._

"Or I'll have my hands cut off and not be able to play again," I say.

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

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

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

DAY 140

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"So it's happened before," Kevin says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Beer," Kevin jokes.

"He has beer with everything," Kitty says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Does it have real freaks in it?" Renate says.

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

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

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

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

_I am Cyan. I am a drummer._

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

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

"It's so good," Tam says. "It's almost like sashimi. That's probably why Dad doesn't like it."

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

_I am a drummer. I am a drummer._ Just say it say it say it say it...why can't I say it to him?

"Sorry," is what I say.

_Demon spawn, getting gone, gotta go to bed at dawn..._

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

"Can't they look for it and then tell you if they found it?" Dad asks.

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

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

"Sound familiar, Dad?" Tam says.

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

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

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

_I am Cyan. I am a drummer._

"...really like this tablecloth," Kitty says. "Microsuede, right?"

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

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

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

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

Nod nod nod.

_I am a drummer. I am a drummer. I am a drummer._

Nod nod nod.

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

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

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

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

_Applause applause. I am Cyan. I am a drummer._

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I don't care," I say, and immediately stuff my mouth with chinook salmon. Which really is delicious.

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

Hand over pounding heart. Deep breath.

"...all time favorite TV show is _Nashville_ ," Tam says. "That's the show that got me into country music."

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

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

"I know I can't sing as good as you, Cyn," Tam says.

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

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

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

"...yeah, I heard that got pretty good reviews..."

"...in my knitting group..."

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

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

"...pass the salad..."

"...no, we've never been to Europe either..."

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

"...Dr. Nansi..."

"...(burp)..."

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

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

_Drums. Drums. Drums drums drums. Nothing matters but drums drums drums drums drums drums--_

"Ahem!" my dad says.

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

"You said don't rattle the table," I mutter. "And I didn't."

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

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

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

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

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

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

_I am a drummer. I am a drummer. Say it say it say it say it..._

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Why didn't you tell us?" Kitty says.

"You mean me?" I say. "Or Ren?"

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

"I am so sorry," I say. "I thought she told you."

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

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

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

"What would you have said if I'd told you?"

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

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

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

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

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

"I know I told him at some point."

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

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

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

"You're not dead yet," I offer.

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

"I do now."

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dad sneers. "I'm glad all of this is so amusing to you."

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

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

Dad looks at me, and I can see the index cards fluttering in his head: _I'm going to kill her. No, Kevin's going to kill_ me, _look at the size of him..._

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

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

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

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

"I know what _post hoc, ergo propter hoc_ means," Dad says.

"I didn't," Kevin says, a little sheepishly.

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

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

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

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

Kevin nods. "Yeah, I'd say so. You were in a pretty bad way before that."

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

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

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

"Voice lessons sound pretty good to me," I say. "I'd love half a piano. Or half a pandeiro. Anything."

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

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

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

Dad shakes his head. "Come on, Cynthia, let's go. You have to get your homework done."

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

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

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

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

For now.

Maybe forever.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All my lunch hours will be taken up by tutoring.

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

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

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

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

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

" _We" have a song to finish?_ I say. _I mean, not that it isn't my dream to write a song with you for real, but..._

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

_Does that mean you're alive?_ I ask.

_You'll find out a lot of things about me very soon,_ she says. _In the meantime, I think we know the ending to "Emancipated Minor" now, right?_

_We do?_ I say.

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

_Now?_ I say.

_Yes,_ she says, _now. If a song is coming on you have to be ready._

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

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

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

_Don't sweat it,_ Spectral Amy whispers. _Before you know it, you'll have your own video and you won't even think about mine._

Sure. That'll happen.

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

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

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

DAY 141

_Emancipated Minor, completed 1/7/17 (after midnight)_

_Verse: How will I ever get out of this place if I don't live to tell about it_

_Too many people want that to happen, I won't give them the satisfaction_

_Someone could come and rescue me but somehow I highly doubt it_

_I can't wait until it's too late and I'm stuck in a tiny round hole_

_For the rest of my life, that can't be right, I've got to free my soul_

_Chorus: Emancipated Minor_

_I've got to be an Emancipated Minor_

_Jump on an ocean liner and set out on the sea_

_To discover me_

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

_I gotta get gone, gotta get gone (slap slap)_

_My daddy says I'm demon spawn (slap slap)_

_My mental accounts are overdrawn (slap slap)_

_What will I live on, what will I live on, what will I live on..._

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

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

_I'm gonna take the first chance I get, and I don't know how just yet_

_But nobody's ever gonna rescue me so I'll hold my nose and jump_

_There's a town five hundred miles down full of people who don't belong_

_They've broken free just like me_

_They will die to sing their song_

_Repeat chorus: Emancipated Minor_

_I've got to be an Emancipated Minor_

_Jump on an ocean liner and set out on the open sea_

_To discover me_

_Outro: Gotta get gone, gotta get gone, gotta get gone (slap slap)_

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

DAY 143

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You've written songs, obviously," I say.

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

"I know what a mezuzah is," Renate says. "It's that horn thing, right?"

"No, that's a shofar."

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

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

"Cynner, I don't know if you realize how serious this is."

"I don't?"

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

"Stop that," I hiss. "That is so morbid, Ren."

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

"I finished 'Emancipated Minor' last night," I say, forcing a little smile. "With a little help from quote-unquote Amy."

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

I nod miserably. "But what can _you_ do about that?"

"A lot more than you think," Renate says.

DAY 145

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I'd probably get in worse trouble than her, right?"

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

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

"Tell me," Dr. Ngo says. "You won't have to handle it all alone."

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

_Sic transit gloria mundi_

_Post hoc ergo propter hoc_

_Quod erat demonstrandum_

_Bis dat qui cito dat_

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

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

Latin phrases, set to Latin rhythm. Why not?

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

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

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

_Amy. I think about Amy._ "Music. Drums. Percussion."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The fantasy is eating me.

And feeding me.

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

I startle at the sight of her waving hand. "I...I don't...I..."

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

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

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

"I...I...."

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

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

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

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

"I didn't know that," Melody says.

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

"Hardly anything."

"That figures. When did she lose her speech?"

"About five or ten minutes ago."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Oh, thank God," Melody says. "You can talk again."

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

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

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

"Be careful," Renate tells her. "They monitor her email."

Melody furrows her brow. "They do know they can't do that forever, right?"

"No," Renate says. "They don't. That's the scary part."

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

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

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

"Thanks," I say. "I appreciate it."

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

"Have at it."

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

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

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

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

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

"Who's 'L'?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amy is in Portland.

AMY IS IN FRACKING PORTLAND!!!

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

Also, I'm not Cyan yet.

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

_Never mind that,_ I say. _Are you Laurette Nicosia? Are you?_

Predictable radio silence.

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

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

Right?

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

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

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

_Me: Cyan Beaut._

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

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

_Laurette/Amy: Why are you bad?_

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

_Laurette/Amy: Why do you neglect your homework?_

_Me: Uh...I'm not sure I should tell you..._

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"So no Renate today?" Dad asks me, as soon as we're inside the car.

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

Dad fastens his seat belt. "Well, it's good she hasn't."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You mean for the Shakespeare Festival?" Mom says.

"Yeah, although one of the plays isn't Shakespeare."

"Which plays?" Dad asks.

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

" _Lysistrata,_ huh?" We wait at a traffic light, while some pedestrians run against the don't-walk signal. Usually he'd grumble about that, but this time he doesn't.

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

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

"You know what _Lysistrata_ is about, right?" Dad says. "All the women going on strike against their husbands? It's pretty funny."

"But also true," Mom says mischievously.

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

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

"I think so," Mom says.

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

"I don't think they'd let you go without me," I say.

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

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

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

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

DAYS 146-147

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

About Ashland.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It would be a twenty-five mile ride.

In February.

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

Ha. Ha ha ha ha ha.

Nice try.

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

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

Which it wouldn't.

And I'd run out of money.

And have to call my parents.

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

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

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

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

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

But maybe I am that kind of crazy.

DAY 150

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I know, but—"

"Besides, your parents will probably literally have you on a leash while we're in Ashland."

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

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

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

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

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

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

"And that's not her anyway," I say. "And even if it was, she wouldn't admit it."

"You know, you're beginning to drive me up the wall."

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

And I don't give it a second thought.

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

DAYS 151-159

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

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

_Amy._

_Save me._

_Maybe_

_There's no one who can save me_

_But Amy_

_What you gave me_

_Yay you_

_Yay me_

_Amy_

_You slay me_

_So may we_

_Do something that will save me..._

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

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

_He's just out sick,_ Spectral Amy says.

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

Then she goes silent.

Lather, rinse, regurgitate.

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

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

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

_Amy_

_Save me_

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

_Something has to give,_ Spectral Amy tells me. _You can't go on like this._

_Tell me what to do,_ I beg her. _Please tell me what to do._

_You'll know when the time comes,_ she says.

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

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

"Aaaaaamy," Ryan's cult following says, in perfect imitation of his inflections. "Aaaaamy."

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

DAY 160

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

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

And I know which one.

I know.

I can prove nothing.

But Dad _disappeared him_. I know he did. Maybe Mr. S. isn't dead, but he might as well be.

_You know what to do,_ Spectral Amy intones. _Extreme situations call for extreme measures. Go._

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

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

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

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

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

I look at her and nod.

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

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

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

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

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

I write on the notebook, again in caps, _NOT EVEN MY DAD?_

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

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

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

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

_Cyan,_ Spectral Amy says. _Do what Cyan would do._

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

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

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

"I brought her home," Renate says. "She's not feeling well. At all."

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

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

I nod.

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

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

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

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

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

Spectral Amy is looking over my shoulder. _Save your own life,_ she says, _save your life, Cyan._

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

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

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

"That is so not true," Renate says.

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

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

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

Mom just keeps shaking her head, silently.

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

"What?" Mom says to him.

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

"She" is Dr. Nansi. It's inspection time.

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

# 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 intelligent 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 back 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 hands 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 really 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 things 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 these 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-instrument 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 the 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 ideas? 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.

###

Thank you so much for reading my book! If you enjoyed it, I'd love it if you could leave a nice review (even a brief one) at the site where you downloaded it.

This is my first novel. But it won't be my last. Like Cyan, I too am a singer-songwriter, but I also like having a long form to write in when I want to! If you'd like to be added to my mailing list, please contact me at andeejr at gmail dot com. You can also add me on Smashwords as a favorite author, if you'd like to be notified when my next book is out!
