I spend the first week after screwing everything up with Kit too ashamed to do anything except write her a stupid text. I keep it short, limit it to the words I know can’t be the wrong ones: I’m sorry. I don’t trust myself not to make a bigger mess of things by saying more. Whenever I pick up the phone to text again, I freeze up with anxiety. I don’t feel like I deserve the chance to explain. I don’t even deserve to share the same air molecules as Kit.
I have spent all my waking hours following rule number four by trying to imagine what she must be thinking. My guess is she assumes I am a sociopath. I smiled. At McCormick’s, while we were talking about the accident, one in which she was driving and her father was a passenger, one that resulted in her father’s death. I smiled.
And then, then I had the nerve to yell.
Since I am in my own brain, I understand why I did all that—the sequencing makes perfect sense to me—but to her, a person on the outside of my mind, a person who knows nothing about my synaptic responses, I must seem like a monster.
Here’s what happened in that booth, with Kit sitting across from me and the cold milk shake in my stomach and the strange dimensions of my new clothes: My brain got narrow. It did what it’s best at. It tunneled in. If that moment was a Russian nesting doll, I was paying attention to the smallest figurine. Pawing my way through the details of blood spatter and brake data and an algorithm I had elegantly designed. I found an answer, right there, at the very center. A tiny nugget. That’s all I could see. The solution to a mathematical equation that had been troubling me for weeks. The missing data point.
I did not see all the other metaphorical dolls. The one wrapped around the smallest one, and the one wrapped around the next-smallest one and the next and the next after that.
What neurotypical people call the context.
I did not see Kit or the people nearby or the delicate nature of what we were discussing. Honestly, I did not see anything else at all.
—
“David, if I gave up every time I pissed someone off, I wouldn’t have any friends either,” Trey says a week later, after I’ve told him the whole sad story, even the parts that are hard for me to admit in the retelling. Our lesson today will be one hundred percent about social skills, since I am so shaken up about Kit I don’t even bother to take out my guitar.
“She probably won’t forgive me,” I say.
“Maybe not. But you have to at least try. And if you really do your best to apologize and she doesn’t forgive you, then you move on. You messed up. It happens. There will be other girls, man.”
“Not really. I mean, of course there are other girls in the world, but by definition there’s no one else exactly like Kit, with her precise genetic and environmental makeup.” I regret that I left my guitar in the closet. My hands want to move. The strings would come in handy.
“What’s the worst thing that can happen if you try?” Trey asks.
“I make her hate me even more. I humiliate myself again. I spin out and crawl into the fetal position and start rocking in front of the entire school.”
“I see you’ve given this a lot of thought.”
“You’re not helping,” I say.
“How about this: You can’t control how she reacts, but you can control what you do. So you do you. Be your best and hope for the best.”
“I am paying you forty dollars an hour, and all you can come up with is you do you?” I ask.
“Your parents are paying me, smart-ass.”
“Fair enough,” I say, because it’s true. They are.
—
And so five full days after my conversation with Trey, five days in which I apply my Russian-nesting-doll focus to winning Kit’s friendship back, five days in which I think hard about what it means for me to do me—though I’m not sure the expression can be converted from second to first person—I am ready to put my plan into action.
I start with food. After all, we met at my lunch table.
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.