What to Say Next

David meets Kit at a diner, afraid that after he tells Kit what he has learned, she will no longer wish to be his friend. He confides that he doesn’t believe Robert was driving during the accident. He suggests that it must have been a woman driving and posits that Robert was having an affair. Kit calls David a “dumbass,” which hurts him, given his history of facing ableist slurs from his classmates. Kit cries, and David apologizes for being “too much.”

Kit apologizes for yelling at David but finds herself unable to admit that she was driving the car when her father died. This information was suppressed after Mandip urged local newspapers to keep Kit’s name out of news reports, as she is a minor. David puts together the pieces himself, sounding “perversely excited” to Kit to have solved the mystery. He angrily shouts that she lied to him, which makes other diners, including Gabriel and Willow, hear that Kit was involved in her father’s accident.

Jack, who was eating nearby, escorts Kit out of the restaurant. David suddenly realizes that he has revealed Kit’s secret. Later, he laments to Miney that he forgot to think about Kit’s perspective. He protests when Miney reports that she still intends to return to school as scheduled even though he wants her to “fix this.” She argues that his mistake is actually a sign of his improved awareness of others’ emotions; he very quickly realized that he had hurt Kit, when he previously might have been unaware for longer. She supports his plan to apologize to Kit, though she warns him that Kit might not forgive him.

Kit casually references her role in the accident to her friends, considering it a “new persona now that [her] secret it out” (309). She hasn’t seen David since the incident at the diner, though she has told Annie and Violet the full story. Her friends support her by reminding her that the crash was accidental; Kit is not at fault. Kit has cautioned her friends to expect the “new version” of her to remain. She and Mandip have started seeing respective grief counselors. Kit still elects not to go to prom with her friends, thinking of the inadequate text apology she got from David.

David struggles with shame over his initial inappropriate reaction to the discovery about Robert’s death and his continued inability to figure out how to properly apologize to Kit. He worries that Kit thinks he’s a “sociopath” or “monster,” as while his reactions made sense to him at the time, he failed to consider “context,” including Kit’s emotions. Trey encourages David to try to apologize again, which David finds frustrating. He makes an apology plan.

Kit finds a cooler on her doorstep, filled with homemade Indian food and sketches of Kit that show her freckles shaped like pi and the infinity symbol. Kit hangs them in her room and shares the food with Mandip. She considers the frightening vulnerability of being honest.

The next day, Kit finds an old copy of the DSM, bookmarked on a section about Asperger’s syndrome. David leaves a note clarifying that this diagnosis, though no longer recognized, resonates with him the most, though he clarifies that it is “more an explanation than an excuse” (318). The next day, he leaves her tickets to a Princeton basketball game, as well as a drawing of her attending the game with Violet and Annie. The next day, he leaves a bonsai tree, which he knows Robert loved. On Friday, he leaves a sketch of the numbers 137 and 139 personified, explaining that they are his favorite twin prime numbers. On Saturday, he sends an email about identical snowflakes; on Sunday, he leaves her a radio so that they “can always hear each other’s waves” (321).

When she returns to school on Monday, Kit receives a paper from Annie, which shows a copy of David’s notebook entry about Kit, entirely crossed out. In its place, he has written that she is his “FAVORITE GIRL IN THE WORLD. STILL MY FRIEND?” (322). He expresses his remorse many more times and asks her to meet him at their school’s bleachers.

David worries that Kit will not arrive and that he will be “heartbroken.” He wonders how love has shaped his perception of time. He decides that she is not coming, but she eventually appears. Stunned, David explains his theory that Kit’s name doesn’t “fit” her. He rambles about how her name should contain his favorite numbers and letters to reflect how he feels about her. Kit cuts him off; she wants to talk about the incident at the diner.

David tries to explain that he got “hyperfocused” on finding the answer behind Robert’s death but that he would “never, ever, ever be intentionally cruel” to Kit (327). Kit feels uncertain about where this leaves their friendship. David expresses his regret both for his own actions and that Kit had to experience the “inexplicable cruelness of [the] bad luck” of driving during the accident (328). He explains that, mathematically, there was nothing she could have done. He argues that she actually saved the life of the woman driving behind her; if Kit had slammed on the brakes, that woman would have died, too. Kit says that they can still be friends but laughs when he asks about kissing, though she doesn’t reject the possibility. Even so, David is thrilled at their renewed friendship and at having made Kit laugh.

Kit considers David’s insistence that she couldn’t have made the accident outcome better. She decides to “grow and forgive” (333). They joke about David’s preferred name for Kit and the possibility that they will kiss in the future. They sit together, holding hands.