The following Monday I come home to find an insulated cooler on my doorstep with my name scrawled across the top. Inside is a huge container of homemade chicken tikka masala and white rice. The note attached has no words. Just three seemingly identical sketches of me in which I look sadder and prettier than I do in real life. Of course, I know immediately they are David’s, but it takes me a minute to notice the differences between them.
In the first, the freckles on my chest are their normal shape. Almost but not quite a circle.
In the second, David has rearranged them into the shape of pi.
In the third, they form the infinity symbol.
I tack the three me’s up on the back of my closet door, in a line, my sketched faces turned toward my hanging clothes. A place where only I will see them. Me transformed into art.
That night my mother and I eat David’s food at the counter in the kitchen. We sit on our neighboring stools, the weight of truth nestled in the space between us. We are slowly growing used to honesty in this house, accepting the million different ways it unzips your skin and leaves you vulnerable. We are trying to be open to the terrifying possibility of being understood. And the opposite too, which is so much scarier. Opening ourselves to the terrifying possibility of not being understood at all.
The chicken is delicious. Almost as good as my grandmother’s and way better than Curryland’s.
On Tuesday, I open my locker to find a fat, dusty book, an old edition of the DSM. There’s a big Post-it note and an arrow pointing to the section titled “Asperger’s Syndrome.”
I’m pretty sure I have Asperger’s. This is an old DSM (the new one folds my diagnosis under autism spectrum disorders). I think this will tell you a lot about why I am the way I am (and why I acted the way I acted), though I can’t use the Aspie thing as an excuse. It’s more an explanation than an excuse.
There’s a famous expression that if you’ve met one person with autism, then…you’ve met one person with autism.
So you met me.
Just me.
Not a diagnosis.
I realize I hurt you. I forgot to think about you first. I did not put myself in your shoes, as the expression goes. (Though as a sidebar, I think wearing other people’s shoes is kind of disgusting; I’m only okay with the concept metaphorically.)
So you know, you are all I think about.
P.S. I recommend you change your locker combination for security purposes, but not till next week. I guessed your code on only my fifth try.
On Wednesday, in class, three tickets to a Princeton basketball game fall out of my laptop, with yet another note and another drawing. This time I am sitting in the bleachers of a crowded game next to Annie and Violet. I don’t look sad. Instead I’m grinning, and there’s something about my hair—it’s loose around my shoulders and falling in a perfect pattern—that makes me look liberated somehow.
Because you said you loved spectator sports. You think I’m the weird one. (That was a joke, by the way, even though I’m not sure if I’m allowed to joke with you yet. Probably not, since we haven’t spoken out loud to each other since the McCormick’s Incident. This is my new life goal, by the way. To one day have permission to make you laugh again.)
On Thursday, in my mailbox, a bonsai tree.
You said your dad loved this kind of tree. I thought/hoped maybe you did too?
On Friday, I open my locker to find a new sketch taped to the inside. The picture is of two numbers, 137 and 139, but they are drawn to look human. 139 has a backpack like David’s and his new short hair. 137 carries a shoulder bag like mine, and it wears a big man’s shirt just like my dad’s. The numbers walk down Clancy Street holding hands.
I just wanted you to know these are my favorite numbers and my favorite twin primes: 137 and 139. And since they are my favorite, I wanted to give them to you.
137 and 139.
They’re yours now.
Please take good care of them.
On Saturday, when I check my inbox, I have an email from David with the subject “This Gives Me Hope…” It links to an article about a Russian scientist who has, under lab conditions, created two identical snowflakes. I smile goofily at the screen.
On Sunday, David leaves an old-fashioned emergency crank radio on my front porch.
So we can always hear each other’s waves. Clearly I need one of these more than you, but buying myself a gift did not seem in the spirit of this multistep apology.
On Monday, after last period, Annie stops me from getting into my car. My hands are trembling a little, like they always do before I get into the driver’s seat, but this time I don’t try to hide them.
“David asked me to give this to you,” she says, and hands over a piece of paper that looks ripped from his notebook. I look at her, a question in my eyes: What should I do? She shrugs.
“It never mattered before what I thought of David. It shouldn’t now,” she says, and gives me a go get ’em shoulder punch.
I unfold the paper.
I’ve read all of it before, when his words first found their way onto the Internet from his stolen notebook, but now there is a big X through the entire entry, and written over it, in all caps:
FAVORITE GIRL IN THE WORLD. STILL MY FRIEND?
Please meet me on the bleachers after school. Please. And I’m sorry. Sorrier than any person has ever been sorry in the history of sorry people. I’ll put in one last please for good luck, even though I don’t believe in luck. I believe in science. Sorry. Again.