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

sat beside her at lunch. She’d been wearing a Santa hat all day that everyone commented on, the way everyone commented on everything Amy wore. He could feel her expectation, like she was waiting for him to say something. It made him mad. “I told you I’m not that great a reader. Poetry especially. I always feel like I’m missing the point.”
    She waited a long time, though he couldn’t think of anything else to say.
    “MAYBE YOU ARE,” she finally said.

CHAPTER NINE
    A MY DIDN’T FEEL JEALOUS of Sarah anymore. That brief, two-day stab of crazy envy hadn’t been rational, she realized afterward. Matthew didn’t speak to Sarah, and Sarah could hardly remember his name. (She’d thought it was Martin when Amy asked, casually, how well Sarah knew her other peer helpers.) The jealousy fit was pointless except for the way it sharpened Amy’s impulse to tell Matthew how she felt. To say, Do you feel this, too? Do you go to sleep at night thinking about me?
    Between Thanksgiving and Christmas, it hovered in her mind every time she walked beside him and every afternoon that they spent in the Not-Really-Working-on-the-Yearbook Club. Embarrassingly, she understood, the Connie story was a misfire. She’d told it so that he would realize: Yes, Amy is a regular girl, too. One who knows about and has discussed sex with other people. Then she saw how anxious it made him, as did all her other efforts—her jokey texts, her flashy Christmas accessories, even her poem—which she assumed no one could miss the meaning of. I have spread my dreams under your feet / Tread softly because you tread on my dreams. How could anyone miss what she was trying to say?
    The problem, she realized, wasn’t her uncooperative tongue. After the rocky start in September, she’d figured out that asking questions made conversations with her other peer helpers easier: At first she asked about trivial matters ( Why do boys wear their pants so low? Why do some of them care more about their hair than girls? )—but as she thought about Matthew more, she began asking more personal ones. Starting after Thanksgiving, she asked each of her other peer helpers if they’d ever been in love.
    Poor Chloe was still riding three buses every Saturday to visit Gary, her incarcerated boyfriend: “He tells me to stop, but if I don’t go, he won’t have anyone on family day.”
    “DOES THAT MEAN YOU LOVE HIM?” Amy asked.
    Chloe wasn’t sure. “I thought I did. Now I don’t know. I wanted to be a person who stayed loyal no matter what. He needs someone . Even his mother won’t visit him there.”
    From there, Amy got the idea to ask the others the same question. Sanjay grinned, a smile so wide his white teeth stood out against his dark skin. “I love all the ladies. I tell all of them to come to me when they’re in the mood for a little brown sugar.” This was the way Sanjay liked to talk.
    “AND DO THEY ALL RUN AWAY?”
    “Some do.” His smile didn’t dim. “Some are scared of their animal attraction for me.”
    “OR THEY’RE JUST SCARED, SANJAY. BECAUSE YOU’RE CREEPY WHEN YOU TALK LIKE THAT.”
    “Maybe I am, maybe I’m not. You might be surprised at some of my conquests on the love front.”
    “EVEN THAT WORD IS A PROBLEM. CONQUESTS. YOU KNOW THAT, RIGHT?”
    “Fine, but I’ll tell you this. I’m pretty sure Cindy Weintraub has no problem with it.”
    Cindy Weintraub was a varsity cheerleader who had brown hair, and thighs that were infinitesimally bigger than those of her blond, short-skirted cheerleader sisters. For this reason, Sanjay had zeroed in on her as “possible.”
    “I love all of them,” he said when Amy asked which one he liked best. “But Cindy has a special place in my heart. She and I know what it’s like to be overlooked.”
    “BUT IS THAT LOVE, SANJAY?” Amy had never seen Cindy do anything except sit down next to him, say hello, and eat some of his fries.
    Sanjay closed his eyes. “If the world were a different