my friend amy
I have a big document filled with all of my unpublished writings, and this will be the ninth one titled “my friend _____.” This is why I have not published anything in so long, because I have been writing about you! Today I’d like to share something about the first person who told me I could write.
Last night I told Kelsey that if I think about Amy Lucas for too long, I will begin to cry. Here I am, sitting at the coffee shop down the street from the last place she lived in California, listening to all the music I can remember she liked, scrolling to the very bottom of her Instagram and tearing up a little. Tearing up a lot.
Amy Lucas was my brother Daniel’s high school girlfriend, and my favorite person in the world from kindergarten to second grade. (Maybe until now.) Daniel and Amy had to break up when he was eighteen and moved away to be a missionary, but for the time they were together, she was always at our house. The time they were together was the best time ever.
I am six years old in my thick gray and red dinosaur patterned zip-up with black fleece on the inside. It’s my favorite piece of clothing I’ve ever owned. I bundle into the sweater and bury my head into my car seat, clutching onto my stuffed pig Georgie. I’m anxiously waiting in the back of my family’s white fifteen passenger van as it meanders around the parking lot of Universal Studios Hollywood in search of Daniel, Amy, Caleb, and Anna. I spot a group of four in front of glowing lights illegible in memory and press my nose against the glass. We’re waiting to take all of them home but really only Amy needs to get in the car. She needs to get in the car because as compensation for not being taken to Universal, (because what high schooler and his girlfriend want to bring babysit their six year-old sibling at a theme park all day) Amy had promised me a new Georgie story. She spends the hour-long car ride turned around, looking toward my car seat and telling me an outlandish tale about the pig in my lap’s mythological second life as a superhero. Any normal seventeen year old would want to spend that car ride leaning in close to their boyfriend and friends, clicking loudly on their flip phones and laughing about the day’s adventures, paying no mind to the small child kicking their seat behind them. But Amy was not normal.
Amy had dirty blonde hair and blue eyes beneath Justin Bieber’s 2010 swooping bangs. Her voice was kind of deep, and I don’t recall her ever making loud noises. She was funny in a clever way, not a silly one. She never got angry, and she did not crack up when things were funny. Her laugh was always a little suppressed, her chin pointing down as she grinned. She seemed solid. I imagine her in a tornado tethered by a rope to the earth. I bet she was practical, I bet she was present to the changes in her life and not overwhelmed. I can’t imagine her getting stressed. She didn’t use a little kid voice when we talked. This description of her may be wrong because I was six when I knew her best, but I know for certain that she was the coolest person in the world.
When she was at our house I can’t remember a single time I was kicked out of a room or excluded from a conversation. Daniel never made me feel like an annoying little sibling for taking his girlfriend away from him. Even when he was messaging her on Skype, he would always pause their conversations to lift me onto his lap and let me slowly type with one finger:
“HI AMY!!!!!!”
“this is michael”
“what r u up to”
“have fun bye!!!”
Looking back at Daniel and Amy’s relationship now, I realize the amount of time she spent with our family must have been an intentional conversation with Daniel. Whenever he picked her up and they wanted to be romantic or have a serious conversation, she’d get in the Honda and my brother would say, “let’s go to your house.” But two seventeen year olds, in a move I am so grateful for yet still don’t understand, often chose so generously to come over, fully aware they’d be trading their opportunity to be alone to play with me and my sister, a six and four year old, until their 9 o'clock bedtimes.
It is strange to not have to beg for the presence of someone you admire. What a gift.
I did not feel noticed as a child. I am the seventh of eight children, my dad was always at work, and I do not blame my mother for my loneliness, but it is simply impossible for one person to be attentive to the needs of eight children who beg and clamor for full possession of your heart and body. My mother’s time and love, my sustaining life force and purpose for all things as a child, was a precious resource, and one I quickly realized was not earned by begging, but bartering. In exchange for some number of glances that would have gone to my siblings otherwise, I offered scrupulosity and performance. I learned Bible verses and was good at math and never said bad words, and when my mom was impossible to reach I looked to my teenage siblings, waiting for them to see me. But sometimes to no fault of anyone at all, just the constraint of time, nothing I tried could redirect the frenzied eyes in my house to gaze over here. The one adult I recall noticing me without fail was Amy Lucas.
But unlike the rest, she did not take interest in my ability to not say bad words or know Bible verses or be helpful. She saw me and loved me as me, as nothing more than a little kid. When she was around her attention was not divided, I did not have to do the dishes at her house to seem good, I just got to have fun with her. She asked me questions and let me answer however I needed to. She thought I was funny even when I wasn’t trying to make her laugh, she knew I was many things I did not realize. I never had to earn her kindness, I never clamored. She just cared for me, spent time with me and made me stuff. She was present for me as a child. How could you thank someone for something so huge?
We’re playing the card game war. I draw the Jack of Diamonds, Daniel draws the ten of hearts, and Amy draws the six of Clubs. I win the war and as I add the cards to my deck I yell, “I’m Mussolini!” Amy tells me about this memory when I’m in eighth grade and I’m confused about it, not knowing what I meant or why I knew who Mussolini was. We hung out a lot in my childhood home. We went to Knott’s Berry Farm as a family and Daniel and Amy missed the big rides to stay in Camp Snoopy and ride the kid’s rides with me and Bekah.
At some point in 2009, Amy started telling me Georgie Stories: improvised tales of my eponymous stuffed pig as a superhero who battled the evil cheese monkey Professor Daniel with his little sister. I don’t know why, but I was a pig fanatic as a child. I drew them everywhere in their big pink glory. I was grossed out by real pigs—something I could never admit to myself or others, because my username on lego.com was PiggyPants2, I colored all things pink for pigs, and Amy told me Georgie Stories. It was a core part of my personality for a few years, in the same way that dinosaurs are for my nephews now. Maybe because they are pink but unfeminine and therefore permissible. Let’s not get into that. What really mattered to me was that Amy liked pigs, so I chose to like them for as long as she did.
For my 6th birthday she made me a Georgie Story booklet with a seemingly random letter in bold comic sans in the bottom right corner of each page. As I flipped through, the letters in the corner spelt “the cupcakes are in the refrigerator.” I jumped up to sprint to the kitchen, tearing open the fridge as fast as possible. She had baked me a dozen cupcakes with pink frosting and piggy faces on them. I couldn’t finish that many cupcakes by myself, and I let them go bad in the fridge because I couldn’t stand to throw away something she made for me.
The next year she made me a proper book with full pages and binding, illustrated by my other brother Tim’s girlfriend, who is now my sister-in-law. The book went missing when we moved houses, but I can still see it perfectly in my mind. It opened with Georgie getting a trick email from Professor Daniel that lured him and his sister Georgia to a secret evil lair. Professor Daniel had a laser gun, he chased Georgie and Georgia down a tunnel. There’s a joke where he, a long-nosed cheese monkey, asked “who cut the cheese?” that I didn’t understand until Amy explained. I probably read it everyday for a year. To this day, I’ve never received anything so thoughtful and personal, it made me feel like the most special person in the world. I still love handmade presents over stuff. It was the most perfect gift, and always will be. I look for it every time I clean the closet.
Amy made me books and told me stories, but it didn’t register to me that she was a writer—that that was her thing, her gift. I’m pretty sure she got her Master’s Degree in Literature or something awesome like that. At that age I just thought she was good at everything, so of course she could come up with stories on the spot and write them out, of course she was kind enough to make me a whole book. I didn’t realize this was her exceptional skill until a few years after she and Daniel broke up, I was in third grade and my siblings and I enrolled in her homeschool creative writing class.
Me, Nick, Bethany, and Andrew, along with maybe 8 other homeschool kids, sit in a circle in the Lucas's living room. The carpet is beige and Mr. Lucas’s desk is against a stone wall to the right of the fire place. Amy sits in the chair nearest to the wall with a whiteboard to her left and the sliding door to the pool on her right. The whiteboard on her left has one of these charts on the first day of class:
Everything I wrote Amy gave me a good grade on. On her ten point scale, I always received 10s when Sarah, who was four years older than me, would get 8s and 9s. I thought at the time it was just because my short story about the war between the bananas and tomatoes was so eloquently written, but it was probably because… I was nine.
It’s the Fall of 2012 and Psy’s Gangnam Style has taken the world by storm. My homeschool buddies and I are not allowed to go on youtube.com or say the word “sexy” to sing the hook, but nevertheless we know Gangnam Style—and we love Gangnam style. We annoy our parents and siblings by doing the riding the horse dance at every opportunity we could. At the end of creative writing class when Amy is explaining plot or something, I vaguely and loudly connect it to Gangnam Style, jumping up to sing and dance in the middle of the room for all to see. This kid Jared, who I think is so cute and good at basketball, looks at me with the same cringe that anyone would look at someone interrupting class to do Gangnam Style.
I’m so extremely embarrassed of this moment, I remember it so well and felt physically unwell when I wrote it down. I rewatched the Gangnam Style video and could not finish it after eleven years because it still eviscerates my chest. I am embarrassed of this moment now but I was embarrassed as it happened, too.
I wanted to be noticed, I wanted to be seen badly enough to keep dancing, but I knew I was being too much.
The midst of embarrassing yourself is a lonely place. And not the dropping a plate or stuttering sort of embarrassment, the deep embarrassment of reaching your hand out for connection only for it to fall back down to the side of your torso. A rejected kiss, a confident greeting of an incorrect name, an improv comedy sketch where “scene” is called way too late, or impromptu Gangnam Style that was supposed to make the room laugh and join in a dance party but is just annoying. What do you do when you find yourself reaching with nobody to grab your hand? I think it’s worse to sit down after something embarrassing than to just stay in it. Maybe you should keep doing Gangnam Style, because once your ass stops bouncing and touches the chair, there’s no way your hand will be grabbed. Every second you persist through the shame is a second you keep the possibility of connection alive.
I needed that possibility of being held. By the time I’d gotten to the third grade, I’d learned a new method to reach for the embrace of another soul, crazy jokes and antics. They were my cry for help. Oftentimes it worked and got me the attention I needed, even if it was negative.
Last week on the phone, Stella told me I need to “stop apologizing for talking about your day when I literally asked.” I say sorry to my therapist for talking too much. I get the same feeling now when I talk for too long that I got when I was doing Gangnam Style in the middle of class. I feel a scathing hot spotlight upon me. It feels like an egoist, moral wrong to happen in front of another person because if I’m speaking, aren’t I the tearing the spotlight from their hand and pointing it towards me? I get warm and anxious, I have a thirty second timer loudly blaring every time I talk. It times me, judges me, and asks if I am a narcissist. If I go past the time limit then I’m being selfish of the space, putting myself above others, and this is not what God wants from us. I feel bad for existing because my existence used to be a persistent beg for attention that I could not control as a kid, and now anything that brings any focus towards me, even in a totally normal and socially acceptable way, gets physiologically confused with the desperate, embarrassing and deeply shameful hail marys for love that led me to do just about anything to get somebody to look at me when I was nine. Isn’t that what this damn substack is anyways?
I hit the Gangnam Style (without saying the sexy ladies part, of course) in the middle of class and even though I remember feeling ashamed and embarrassed, none of that shame came from Amy. She just giggled and went on with the lesson.
I felt that with her, I could reach my hands as far as they went, and she always caught them. I made bad jokes, I bugged her to play board games with me, I talked her ear off with math and pig facts, and she was always there. I embarrassed myself over and over and she never stopped being there. Maybe that is what a friend is. Isabel and I have discussed that so much. That a true friend is someone you embarrass yourself in front of over and over again and they do not leave. I think maybe she was my first secure attachment. Maybe she was my first friend.
I think that same day I danced and sang in front of the whole class, Amy gave me another 10/10 on a project. It was the first draft of our final for the class, a short story of our own that implemented all the things we’d learned in class about structure and character development. In the margins Amy noticed that when narrating the story I called the main character Theodore, but when his mom was speaking she referred to him as Teddy. She thought this was “great attention to detail and writerly intuition.” Nobody had ever told me I had “writerly intuition” before.
Despite the Gangnam Style of it all, Amy’s writing class remains sacred in my memory. All the tricks I did in my writing that my teachers loved in high school, I learned from her. There are so many specific little things I learned from her. She taught me that you need line breaks after dialogue; the difference between first, second, and third person and their omniscient or single character variations (The Lord of the Rings, a series I’ve still never read, is written in third person omniscient but A Wrinkle in Time is limited); what the words narrative, onomatopoeia, and denouement mean. I hold on to all these little things, like that Nancy Drew was written by a man with a pseudonym (I wanted to write stories for girls and have a girl pseudonym when she told us that. Wonder what that was about…) or that horror is made scary with suspense and Frankenstein does this perfectly.
I don’t know if I would be writing this right now if Amy didn’t tell me I could write, if she didn’t give me those 10/10s and attentive comments. I don’t know if I would be studying English, I don’t know if I would have this Substack, if not for Amy. Lucas (different Lucas) thinks you can’t say that things would be worse or better if someone did or did not exist, but I am confident I would be worse off without Amy.
In my writing at school, I often feel compelled to wrap every essay up with a mindblowing connection to a greater societal issue. Ingenious, I know! I’d like to offer some reason for it all, some answer for why I’m writing about Amy Lucas now, why I’m thinking about her at this time in my life. But this isn’t school writing, man. This is my Substack and I can do what I want. Look, I just said man! Here is what we will try. Choose your own adventure. Whatever ending Amy thinks is best (when I get brave enough to send this to her), is the ending.
I feel uniquely alone this Summer. I just spent seven months of non-stop saturation in community, and now I’m back at home where most of my days are spent by myself. I’m not really “doing life” with anyone, as Nick likes to say. Maybe I’m yearning again to grab a hand. I’m thinking about that yearning, about that desire to be seen, to be looked at and taken as I am. It seems like a desire that’s pretty core to humanity, but I feel like it’s become muddled for me with all the stuff of being too much, how easily embarrassed I am and how much shame I carry. So I think about the first person that made me feel like my hand was being caught, my first true friend Amy. I miss my friends, but I haven’t responded to them in weeks. I feel alone on purpose. Maybe I am lonely and the last three months have been a bleak reminder of the reality that things fall apart. Maybe I am just thinking of something solid that doesn’t have room to break because I don’t see her anymore. Someone who loved me that I don’t have to worry about and that’s all it is. Bummer ending for number one.
I am a girl. This is so crazy to write down and is now making me reconsider if I will publish or not! But it is the truth. I am a girl. I’m transitioning in the fall, but this summer I’ve been going to doctors and coming out and coming to terms with my medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria. And I think when I think about womanhood and what that will mean for me (I mean, I can’t really know, it feels early to say that, but I digress) I think of women I look up to. And I think it was radically important that as a young girl socialized as a boy, one of the first people I truly admired was this incredibly intelligent woman who, despite her place in an overtly patriarchal world, advocated for equality. Amy became a pastor after she left the Church we grew up at, where women in leadership was and still is, and probably will always be, not permitted. I used to listen to her sermons on Apple Podcasts. I don’t know if Amy called herself a feminist or really talked about it to me when I was little, but she was feminist as hell. And I think it was extremely important in my development as a person that my primary model of personhood that I admired was a woman who did not submit to patriarchy. Maybe I liked feminism as a little boy because, as with pigs and Fantastic Mr. Fox and writing, Amy Lucas liked it. I want to thank her for that.
Maybe I am just grateful, maybe these memories are what they are, and I had to write them down. Amy just had twin boys, and the thought of that happening right now makes me tear up just as much as the thought of her when I was six. Her last name is different, she’s married to a man that is not my brother (who I actually met once and he was very nice) and I think and hope and pray that she is happy. She was so important in my childhood, and I just am grateful and miss her. Thanking her for her presence and realizing how much one person can shape you as a kid. She’s in Washington I think. She’s going to be such a good mom. If she reads this, thank you for being my friend when I was little. I am going to stop writing because I’m going to cry again, but I will keep writing generally because of her. Thank you.
note: this Substack was written throughout the month of August. it is not summer anymore. i’m at school now, and i am learning to let myself be seen again.
Mikey, your words are such a gift - I loved this