Say What You Will by Cammie McGovern Read Free Book Online Page A

Like the other day a can of Sprite spilled in my locker. It made a mess in there, but I kept worrying, what if it leaked into someone else’s locker? What if I ruined some project they’ve been working on all semester? Or all their class notes for the year?”
    “DID THAT HAPPEN?”
    “I don’t think so, but how can I be sure?”
    “HOW MUCH SPRITE?”
    “A quarter of a can.” He waited. Now he understood why he’d told her all this. He wanted her to reassure him.
    “IT’S PROBABLY FINE.”
    “But I can’t be absolutely sure.”
    “YOU CAN BE PRETTY SURE.”
    “That’s just it, though. Pretty sure isn’t good enough. Pretty sure can keep me awake all night.” He was surprised at what a relief it was to tell someone about the Sprite. “I give myself tasks—hard ones—to complete, and then hopefully nothing bad will happen because of what I’ve done. It’s sort of a game I play in my mind. Except that it’s not any fun and not really a game. It feels like terrible things will happen if I don’t do everything right.”
    “WHAT DO YOU HAVE TO DO?”
    “Walk certain ways. Touch objects. Wash my hands. Different things. It varies.”
    “LIKE OCD?”
    He didn’t know what that was. “I don’t think so.”
    Four days later, Amy met him in the morning with something she wanted to say already typed out.
    “I’VE DONE A LITTLE RESEARCH. YOU SHOULD READ THIS BOOK CALLED THE BOY WHO COULDN’T STOP WASHING . IT’S ALL ABOUT OCD AND IT’S JUST LIKE WHAT YOU DESCRIBED.”
    “I used to wash my hands a lot.” He felt a little self-conscious now. He didn’t want to tell her he still did.
    “WHAT’S A LOT?”
    He wasn’t sure if he should say. He didn’t want to spend all day discussing it. “Twelve times a day. I liked that number. It wasn’t about the washing so much as the number.” Did that make it better?
    “YEAH, YOU’VE GOT IT.”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “TRUST ME.”
    They walked in silence for a while as he thought about things he’d like to say to her: Look, who made you a doctor anyway? What medical school did you go to? How would you like it if I started reading up on all your problems? The trouble with this argument was that he already had read up on all her problems. He’d looked up cerebral palsy and had even rented My Left Foot and watched it twice. His favorite part was when the woman Daniel Day-Lewis loves tells him she’s engaged to someone else, and he spastically screams, “CUNT!” Everyone standing around them gasps, but he keeps going: “CUNT-GRAT-U-LATIONS!” He wanted to ask Amy if she’d liked that part of the movie, too, but didn’t know if he should.
    “MAYBE I’M WRONG,” she finally said, outside her classroom door. When he came to pick her up, she kept talking as if an hour hadn’t elapsed. “I THINK YOU SHOULD READ THE BOOK, THAT’S ALL.”
    He couldn’t take it anymore. “Fine. I think you should watch My Left Foot .”
    “WHY?”
    “Because it’s fun to be told what all your problems are named, so you should try it, too.”
    “I ALREADY KNOW THE NAME OF MY PROBLEM. IT’S NOT A BIG SECRET.”
    Later that afternoon, he went to the public town library and found the book. Then he had to wait an hour for a librarian he didn’t recognize to be behind the checkout desk. By the time that happened his throat felt too tight for him to speak. When the librarian asked how he was doing, he nodded vaguely like a deaf person. That night, he had to read slowly but he got through most of the book. The people in it all seemed much worse than him. They were in hospitals spending twenty-four hours a day trying not to wash their hands.
    The next day before school he went looking for Amy. She was waiting for Chloe, who was usually late.
    “Those people were crazy ,” he told her. “I’m not crazy.”
    “NO. BUT SOME THINGS ARE THE SAME. LIKE BLAMING YOURSELF FOR STUFF THAT ISN’T YOUR FAULT. THAT’S THE SAME.”
    Did she know that he’d spent a week