What to Say Next

By Julie Buxbaum

"What to Say Next reminds readers that hope can be found in unexpected places." –Bustle

From the New York Times bestselling author of Tell Me Three Things comes a story about two struggling teenagers who find an unexpected connection just when they need it most. Nicola Yoon, the bestselling author of Everything, Everything, calls it "charming, funny, and deeply affecting."

Sometimes a new perspective is all that is needed to make sense of the world.

KIT: I don’t know why I decide not to sit with Annie and Violet at lunch. It feels like no one here gets what I’m going through. How could they? I don’t even understand.

DAVID: In the 622 days I’ve attended Mapleview High, Kit Lowell is the first person to sit at my lunch table. I mean, I’ve never once sat with someone until now. “So your dad is dead,” I say to Kit, because this is a fact I’ve recently learned about her.

When an unlikely friendship is sparked between relatively popular Kit Lowell and socially isolated David Drucker, everyone is surprised, most of all Kit and David. Kit appreciates David’s blunt honesty—in fact, she finds it bizarrely refreshing. David welcomes Kit’s attention and her inquisitive nature. When she asks for his help figuring out the how and why of her dad’s tragic car accident, David is all in. But neither of them can predict what they’ll find. Can their friendship survive the truth?

Named a Best Young Adult Novel of the Year by POPSUGAR

“Charming, funny, and deeply affecting all at the same time.” –Nicola Yoon, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Everything, Everything and The Sun Is Also a Star

“Heartfelt, charming, deep, and real. I love it with all my heart.” –Jennifer Niven, New York Times bestselling author of All the Bright Places

Also by Julie Buxbaum

Year on Fire

Admission

Hope and Other Punch Lines

Tell Me Three Things

Chapter 1

David

An unprecedented event: Kit Lowell just sat down next to me in the cafeteria. I always sit alone, and when I say always, I don’t mean that in the exaggerated vernacular favored by my classmates. In the 622 days I’ve attended this high school, not a single person has ever sat beside me at lunch, which is what justifies my calling her sitting there--so close that her elbow almost grazes mine--an “event.” My first instinct is to reach for my notebook and look up her entry. Under K for Kit, not under L for Lowell, because though I’m good with facts and scholarly pursuits, I’m terrible with names. Partly this is because names are random words completely devoid of context, and partly this is because I believe names rarely fit the people they belong to, which, if you think about it, makes perfect sense. Parents name their child at a time when they have the absolute least amount of information they will ever have about the person they are naming. The whole practice is illogical.

Take Kit, for example, which is not actually her name, her name is Katherine, but I have never heard anyone call her Katherine, even in elementary school. Kit doesn’t in any way look like a Kit, which is a name for someone who is boxy and stiff and easily understandable with step-by-step instructions. Instead the name of the girl sitting next to me should have a Z in it, because she’s confusing and zigzagged and pops up in surprising places--like at my lunch table--and maybe the number eight, because she’s hourglass-shaped, and the letter S too, because it’s my favorite. I like Kit because she’s never been mean to me, which is not something I can say about the vast majority of my classmates. It’s a shame her parents got her name all wrong.

I’m a David, which also doesn’t work, because there are lots of Davids in the world--at last check 3,786,417 of them in the United States alone--and so by virtue of my first name, one would assume I’d be like lots of other people. Or, at the very least, relatively neurotypical, which is a scientific, less offensive way of saying normal. That hasn’t been the case. At school, no one calls me anything, except the occasional homo or moron, neither of which is in any way accurate--my IQ is 168 and I’m attracted to girls, not boys. Also, homo is a pejorative term for a gay person, and even if my classmates are mistaken about my sexual orientation, they should know better than to use that word. At home my mom calls me son--which I have no problem with because it’s true--my dad calls me David, which feels like an itchy sweater with a too-tight neck, and my sister calls me Little D, which for some inexplicable reason fits just right, even though I’m not even a little bit little. I’m six foot two and 165 pounds. My sister is five foot three and 105 pounds. I should call her Little L, for Little Lauren, but I don’t. I call her Miney, which is what I’ve been calling her since I was a baby, because she’s always felt like the only thing in a confusing world that belongs to me.

Miney is away at college, and I miss her. She’s my best friend--technically speaking, my only friend--but I feel like even if I had friends, she’d still be my best one. So far she’s the only person I’ve ever known who has helped make being me a little less hard.

By now you’ve probably realized I’m different. It usually doesn’t take people very long to figure that out. One doctor thought I might have a “borderline case of Asperger’s,” which is stupid, because you can’t have a borderline case of Asperger’s. Actually, you can’t really have Asperger’s at all anymore, because it was written out of the DSM-5 (the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) in 2013, and instead people with that group of characteristics are considered to have high-functioning autism (or HFA), which is also misleading. The autism spectrum is multidimensional, not linear. The doctor was obviously an idiot.

Out of curiosity, I’ve done my own reading in this area (I bought a used DSM-4 on eBay; the 5 was too pricey), and though I lack the necessary medical training required to make a full diagnostic assessment, I don’t believe the label applies to me.

Yes, I can get myself into trouble in social situations; I like order and routine; when I’m interested in something, I can be hyperfocused to the exclusion of other activities; and, fine, I am clumsy. But when I have to, I can make eye contact. I don’t flinch if you touch me. I tend to recognize most idioms, though I keep a running list in my notebook just in case. I like to think I’m empathetic, but I don’t know if that’s true.

I’m not sure it really matters if I have Asperger’s, anyway, especially because it no longer exists. It’s just another label. Take the word jock. If enough psychiatrists wanted to, they could add that to the DSM and diagnose all the guys on the Mapleview football team. Characteristics would include at least two of the following: (1) athleticism, especially while wearing spandex, (2) unnatural ease with the concept of strapping a hard cup around your penis, (3) being an asshole. It doesn’t matter whether you call me an Aspie or a weirdo or even a moron. The fact remains that I very much wish I were more like everyone else. Not the jocks, necessarily. I don’t want to be the kind of guy who gives kids like me a hard time. But if I got the chance to make some sort of cosmic upgrade--switch David 1.0 to a 2.0 version who understood what to say in day-to-day conversation--I’d do it in an instant.

Maybe when parents name their children they do it from the perspective of wishful thinking. Like when you go to a restaurant and ask for a rare steak, and even though there is no universally agreed definition of the word rare, you hope you get exactly what you want.

My mom and dad ordered a David. They got me instead.

In my notebook:

KIT LOWELL: Height: 5' 4". Weight: Approximately 125 lbs. Wavy brown hair, pulled into a ponytail on test days, rainy days, and most Mondays. Skin is brownish, because her dad--a dentist--is white and her mom is Indian (Southeast Asian, not Native American). Class ranking: 14. Activities: school newspaper, Spanish Club, Pep Club.

Notable Encounters

1. Third grade: Stopped Justin Cho from giving me a wedgie.

2. Sixth grade: Made me a valentine. (Note: KL made all the boys valentines, not just me. But still. It was nice. Except for the glitter. Because glitter is uncontainable and has sticky properties, and I generally don’t like uncontainable and sticky things.)

3. Eighth grade: After math class, she asked what I got on my math test. I said: 100. She said: Wow, you must have studied hard. I said: No, quadratic equations are easy. She said: Um, okay. (Later, when I reenacted the conversation for Miney, she told me that I should have said that I had studied, even if that meant lying. I’m not a very good liar.)

4. Tenth grade: Kit smiled at me when only our two names were announced as National Merit semifinalists on the loudspeaker. I was going to say “Congratulations,” but Justin Cho said “Damn, girl!” first and gave Kit a hug. And then she wasn’t looking at me anymore.

Important Characteristics

1. On cold days, she stretches her sleeves to cover her whole hands instead of wearing gloves.

2. Her hair isn’t curly, but it isn’t straight either. It hangs in repetitive, alternating commas.

3. She’s the prettiest girl in school.

4. She sits crisscross-applesauce on almost all chairs, even narrow ones.

5. She has a faint scar next to her left eyebrow that looks almost like a Z. I once asked Miney if she thought I’d ever be able to touch that scar, because I’m curious what it feels like, and Miney said, “Sorry, Little D. But as the Magic 8 Ball says: My Sources Say No.”

6. She drives a red Toyota Corolla, license plate XHD893.

Friends

Almost everyone, but mostly hangs out with Annie, Violet, and sometimes Dylan (the Girl Dylan, not the Boy Dylan). Common characteristics of friend group, with the exception of Kit, include flat-ironed hair, minor acne, and larger than average breasts. For five school days last year, Kit walked the halls holding hands with Gabriel, only occasionally stopping to make out, but now they don’t do that anymore. I don’t like Gabriel.

Additional Notes: Nice. Miney puts her on the Trust List. I second.

Of course I don’t open the notebook in front of her. Even I know better than that. But I do touch its spine, because having it nearby makes me feel less anxious. The notebook was Miney’s idea. Back in middle school, after the Locker Room Incident, which is irrelevant to this discussion, Miney decided I was too trusting. Apparently, unlike me, when most people talk they aren’t necessarily telling the truth. See for example the Test Lie suggested above. Why lie about whether I studied for a test? Ridiculous. Quadratic equations are easy. That’s just a fact.

“So your dad is dead,” I say, because it’s the first thing that pops into my head when she sits down. This is new information that I have not yet added to her notebook entry, only because I just found out. I’m usually the last to know things about my classmates, if I ever learn about them at all. But Annie and Violet were talking about Kit at Violet’s locker this morning, which happens to be above mine. According to Annie, “Kit’s been, like, a total mess since the whole thing with her dad, and I know it’s been hard and whatever, but she’s kind of being, I don’t know, mean.” I don’t usually listen to the other kids at school--most of what they have to say is boring and feels like bad background music, something clanky and harsh, heavy metal, maybe--but for some reason this seeped through. Then they started talking about the funeral, how it was weird that they cried more than Kit, that it’s not healthy for her to keep things bottled up inside, which is a ridiculous thing to say because feelings don’t have mass, and also they are not doctors.

I would have liked to go to Kit’s dad’s funeral, if only because he was also on my Nice List, and I assume when someone on your Nice List dies, you should go to their funeral. Kit’s dad, Dr. Lowell is--was--my dentist, and he never complained about my noise-canceling headphones getting in the way of his drill. He always gave me a red lollipop after a cleaning, which seems counterintuitive and yet was always appreciated.

I look at Kit. She doesn’t look messy--in fact, she seems better groomed than usual and is wearing a man’s white button-down shirt that looks recently ironed. Her cheeks are pink, and her eyes are a little wet, and I turn away because she is breathtakingly beautiful and therefore very hard to look at.

“I wish someone had told me, because I would have gone to his funeral. He used to give me lollipops,” I say. Kit stares straight ahead, doesn’t respond. I take this to mean I should keep talking.

“I don’t believe in heaven. I’m with Richard Dawkins on that one. I think it’s something people tell themselves to make the finality of death less scary. At the very least, it seems highly unlikely to me in the angels-and-white-cloud iteration you hear about. Do you believe in heaven?” I ask. Kit takes a bite of her sandwich, still doesn’t turn her head. “I doubt it, because you are a highly intelligent person.”

“No offense or anything, but would you mind if we didn’t talk?” she asks. I’m pretty sure this is not a question she wants me to answer, but I do anyway. Miney has put the expression no offense on the Be Wary List. Apparently bad things usually follow.

“I’d prefer it, actually. But I’d like to say just one last thing: Your dad shouldn’t have died. That’s really unfair.”

Kit nods, and the commas of her hair shake.

“Yup,” she says. And then we eat the rest of our sandwiches--mine peanut butter and jelly since it’s Monday--in silence.

But good silence.

I think.

Chapter 2

Kit

I don’t really know why I decide not to sit with Annie and Violet at lunch. I can feel their eyes on me when I pass right by our usual table, which is at the front of the caf, the perfect table because you can see everyone from there. I always sit with them. Always. We are best friends--a three-person squad since middle school--and so I realize I’m making some sort of grand statement by not even waving hello. I just knew as soon as I came in and saw them huddled together talking and laughing and just being so normal, like nothing had changed at all--and yes, I realize that nothing has changed for them, that their families are no more or less screwed up than they were before my life imploded--that I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t sit down, take out my turkey sandwich, and act like I was the same old reliable Kit. The one who would make a self-deprecating joke about my shirt, which I’m wearing in some weird tribute to my dad, a silly attempt to feel closer to him even though it makes me feel like even more of an outcast and more confused about the whole thing than I was before I put it on. Just the kind of reminder I don’t need. Like I could actually forget, for even a single minute.

I feel stupid. Could that be what grief does to you? It’s like I’m walking around school with an astronaut’s helmet on my head. A dome of dullness as impenetrable as glass. No one here understands what I’m going through. How could they? I don’t even understand it.

It seemed safer somehow to sit over here, in the back, away from my friends, who have clearly already moved on to other important things, like whether Violet’s thighs look fat in her new high-waisted jeans, and away from all the other people who have stopped me in the hall over the past couple of weeks with that faux-concerned look on their faces and said: “Kit, I’m like so, so, so sorry about your daaaad.” Everyone seems to draw out the word dad like they are scared to get beyond that one sentence, to experience the conversational free fall of what to say next that inevitably follows. My mom claims that it’s not our job to make other people feel comfortable--this is about us, not them, she told me just before the funeral--but her way, which is to weep and to throw her arms around sympathetic strangers, is not mine. I have not yet figured out my way.