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shorts and seemed to have left her Goth days behind. He’d gone to preschool with Sanjay Modhi, though twelve years had passed and they hadn’t spoken since then. Apparently Sanjay had worked at Hot Dog on a Stick over the summer, where the uniforms were striped polyester and included a mustard-colored baseball cap. “No surprise why I’m here,” Sanjay said when Ms. Hynes, the guidance counselor, asked them to introduce themselves and say why they were interested in this job.
    Because Amy wasn’t there, apparently they all felt free to be honest. Chloe said her boyfriend, Gary, had been arrested in July, and she was trying to turn her life around. “Like, I pretty much have to change everything. My friends, my focus, everything. I guess I’m hoping doing this job with Amy will help.”
    On her turn, Sarah said, “I’m here because I loved that essay Amy wrote. It made me want to get to know her better and find out how she got to be such a good writer.”
    Nicole smiled and nodded. “That’s wonderful. Thank you, Sarah.”
    Matthew was the last to speak. He felt his throat close up before he could start, like his brain was spinning cotton and stuffing it in his mouth. He coughed a few times and counted the empty desks in the room. “I don’t know Amy,” he finally managed after a silence that felt excruciating. “But I would like to.” Good enough, he thought, stopping before he did something horrible like throw up on his shoes.
    They spent most of that first training session going over how Amy’s talking computer worked. They learned about preprogramming what she might say in class if an idea was complicated or too long to type in while everybody waited. They learned about battery packs and which bathrooms were best for Amy to use in school. They learned how much weight she could safely carry herself (almost none) and how to read her body’s signals of overexhaustion: facial twitches, spasticity, louder vocalizations. But mostly Nicole talked about expanding Amy’s “friendship circles.”
    “We know friendships don’t happen because you’ve been introduced to a person or eaten one lunch together. We’re looking for a start. For eleven years, kids have been unsure about talking to Amy. They see that walking is hard work for her and they don’t want to interrupt. With all these introductions, we’re hoping to convey the message: Go ahead! Interrupt her! She wants to get to know you!”
    Chloe raised her hand. “When we’re making these introductions and giving you the names, should we make some distinction between who we think Amy should be friends with and who she shouldn’t bother with? Like, should we put a star by people we know are jerks?”
    Sanjay laughed so hard one of his flip-flops fell off. Chloe shot him a look. “Well, I’m sorry, Sanj, but we all know some of my friends aren’t model citizens. I’m just being honest.”
    “No, I appreciate that,” Nicole said. “Chloe has a good point. We want Amy to find people she shares common interests with. But we also want Amy to get a little practice deciding for herself who the jerks are.”
    Matthew was less worried about the quality of people he could introduce Amy to than how quickly he’d run out of names he knew. He imagined himself in any of a dozen awkward scenarios. With someone whose name he thought he knew but wasn’t sure. (“Amy, this is Vic or Nick; I’ve never been sure.”) Or someone whose name he knew perfectly well—an athlete or a cheerleader—who had no idea who Matthew was or why this introduction was taking place. It was a big high school, sixteen hundred students—every year Matthew got the exact numbers within the first week—which meant some people were well known and an equal number unknown—a beige, amorphous mass. Ever since the worst of his troubles started, Matthew worked hard to be part of the latter group. Unnoticed. Unseen.
    He rarely talked in class. So rarely, in fact, that his comment in