The Sound of Your Voice, Only Really Far Away

by Frances O'Roark Dowell

  Kate hadn’t rolled her eyes since. She’d thought about trying to explain to her dad that she hadn’t given up sports for good, she was just dedicating this year to playing guitar. But she knew he wouldn’t like that, either. Kate’s guitar playing seemed to make her dad nervous, although he was acting a little more relaxed about it since she’d started playing acoustic. One afternoon last fall when she was still messing around on Flannery’s electric guitar, her dad had stood in the doorway to Kate’s bedroom and said, “That sounds nice, Kate, but are you sure that’s how you want to spend your time?”

  Kate had put down the guitar and stared at her dad. “What do you mean?”

  Mr. Faber had shrugged. “I don’t know, I guess I was just thinking about how we used to spend Saturday mornings playing pickup games over at the Y. You were turning into a good little point guard, Katie. I played guard in high school. I’ve got a lot more tricks I could teach you.”

  “It’s not like I’m never going to play basketball again, Dad. But right now I want to learn how to play the guitar.”

  “You could focus on music later,” her dad had insisted. “Like when you’re old and your knees are shot. You have your whole life to play punk rock music, but the opportunity to play basketball? It’s a ten-year window at best.”

  Kate suppressed her urge to giggle uncontrollably. Punk rock music? She’d been working out a riff from a Creedence Clearwater Revival tune. That was so pre–punk rock, it was practically ancient.

  “If it makes you feel any better, I don’t see playing the guitar as my path in life,” Kate had told her dad. “It’s just something I do for fun.”

  Mr. Faber had taken a deep breath. “Sports are fun, Katie. If you want to have fun, play sports.” Then he’d turned and walked down the hall.

  Kate had waited a minute before closing her bedroom door, and she’d waited for a few more minutes after that before picking up her guitar again. When her dad had knocked on her door five minutes before, she’d been happy, and now she felt terrible. Kate felt guilty that she’d stopped going to the Y to play basketball with him, but it had started feeling sort of weird. The guys she and her dad played with had begun acting differently around her, like she might break or cry uncontrollably if they fouled her.

  Kate stretched her arms toward her toes. It was funny how her mom seemed to get Kate’s love of music and her dad didn’t. Her dad was always going on about the importance of girls playing sports, but didn’t he see that it was important for girls to play music, too? And not just pretty, I’m-so-sad-about-my-bad-boyfriend music, but music about being angry or excited, music about feeling crazy or weird or wild.

  Now, sitting at the dinner table and listening to her dad talk about why man-to-man defenses were useless at the middle-school level of ball, Kate wondered if what she’d told her dad last fall was true. Had she really meant it when she’d said she didn’t see playing guitar as her path in life? Well, she supposed the question was, a path to what? Kate wasn’t thinking about becoming a famous rock-and-roll star or anything like that, though she could see putting out a CD on an independent label some day. But that wasn’t really a path; that was just something she daydreamed about on the bus to school.

  Here was the thing about guitar: When Kate played, she didn’t worry about whether or not she was fat (she sort of thought she was, although Lorna insisted that Kate was perfectly normal), or when she was going to get her first period (her mom had been fifteen—fifteen!), or if she should try to fit in more and be like other girls. She didn’t worry about grades. She didn’t even worry about whether or not Matthew Holler was her boyfriend or a boy who was a friend who sometimes kissed her behind the garage. When Kate played guitar, she didn’t worry about anything at all, except making the chords sound as clean or as soft or as fuzzy as she wanted them to sound.

  Playing basketball had been like that too, she realized as she took a bite of baked potato. Maybe sports and music weren’t so different. With basketball and guitar, you had to live precisely in the very moment you were living in. You had to train your mind not to wander off into the future or onto the topic of whether your zits were getting out of control.

  “I’m thinking about trying out for the school musical,” Kate said suddenly, surprising herself, and by the looks on their faces, the rest of her family too. “I think it’s important to try new things. And besides, I like music.”

  Mr. Faber nodded, looking pleased. “I think that’s great, Katie. Being in a musical is like being on a team, in a way. It’s about working together, cooperating.”

  “Oh, Mel.” Kate’s mother sighed. “Being in a musical is about singing and self-expression. Enough with the sports analogies, honey.”

  “Being in a musical is about hanging out with geeks,” Tracie offered through a mouthful of baked chicken. “The geekiest of the geeks. Computer nerds used to be the geekiest of the geeks, but now you never know if they might grow up to be billionaires. So now it’s the musical kids who wear the geek crown.”

  “Good,” Kate told her sister. “I like geeks.”

  “Enough,” Mr. Faber told his daughters. He turned to Kate. “I think it’s good you want to be involved. To be on a team.”

  Kate just nodded her head and gave her dad a big smile, like she thought he was absolutely right. Maybe he was. Kate didn’t know. All she knew was she was tired of her dad looking at her like he wasn’t quite sure who she was anymore.

  “So did you hear?” Lorna asked when Kate met her in the auditorium ten minutes before auditions started on Friday afternoon. “The musical is going to be Guys and Dolls. It’s about gangsters.”

  “Like The Sopranos?” Kate asked, sitting down. “Isn’t that sort of bloody for middle school?”

  “No, it’s about funny gangsters,” Lorna informed her. “Like from the 1930s or something. I don’t know anything about it besides that.” She turned to Kate. “Give me your honest opinion—should I try out for the lead? I’m not that great of a singer, but I think it would make my mom happy.”

  Kate scanned the crowd of auditioners. “Well, I see Phoebe Washington, who has a great voice, and Ginny Woo, also great. The entire middle-school chorus is here . . . and . . . whoa!”

  “Whoa what?” Lorna asked anxiously. “Somebody even better than Phoebe?”

  Kate shook her head. “Flannery’s here.”

  Flannery was sitting by herself in the back of the auditorium, and if Kate was seeing things clearly, she was knitting. What was Flannery doing at tryouts? And since when had she been a knitter? This was all too weird.

  “Is her hair still pink?” Lorna asked, straining to see where Flannery was sitting.

  “It’s red now,” Kate informed her. “She’s talking about doing purple next.”

  “Well, go find out what she’s doing here,” Lorna said, practically pushing Kate out of her seat. “I’m dying to know.”

  Lorna found Flannery fascinating. It was like Flannery did the things Lorna dreamed of doing but really didn’t want to do—like dye her hair purple. Lorna wasn’t really a purple-hair person, but she liked the idea of being a purple-hair person, and so she liked the idea of Flannery, even though when Kate offered to introduce her, Lorna had said no thanks. Flannery was a little too nervous-making, in Lorna’s opinion.

  Kate thought Lorna and Flannery would hit it off, but she didn’t try to force them together. The fact was, Flannery was pretty cranky. Kate was used to Flannery’s crankiness, but Lorna might take it the wrong way.

  Sure enough, Flannery’s expression was pure grouch when Kate reached her row. “I keep dropping stitches,” she complained, holding up a knitting needle for Kate to see. “It’s driving me crazy.”

  “I didn’t know you even knew how to knit,” Kate said, sitting down. “Are you just learning how?”

  Flannery nodded. “I’ve been reading all this DIY stuff online—you know, grow your own food, make your own clothes. Megan got me into it. I’m trying to make a sweater, but I royally
suck at it.”

  “My mom knits, if you need any advice,” Kate told her. “Mostly she knits socks and gives them away.”

  “I totally want to learn how to knit socks,” Flannery said, looping a strand of yarn around a needle. “I want to be able to make all my own clothes, underwear included.”

  “That’s cool,” Kate said. Onstage, some teachers had started to gather—Mr. Periello, the chorus director, and the drama teacher, Ms. South—and people had started to whisper, like things were about to get started. “So, are you trying out for the play?”

  “No, I’m here to conduct a scientific study,” Flannery replied. “What do you think?”

  Kate couldn’t tell whether Flannery was being sarcastic or not. Flannery was the sort of person who pretty much always sounded sarcastic or annoyed. “I think it would be hard to conduct a scientific experiment while you’re knitting.”

  Flannery raised her eyebrows. “You’d be surprised what you can do with a pair of knitting needles.”

  “Probably,” Kate said. “But really—are you auditioning or not?”

  “Of course I’m auditioning. Why else would I be here?”

  “To conduct a scientific experiment?”

  Flannery laughed. “I’m taking drama for my elective, and Ms. South is giving extra credit to everyone who auditions. I can act, but I can’t sing, so there’s no way I’ll actually get a part. But I’ll get extra credit.”

  It always surprised Kate that Flannery cared about her grades. Flannery seemed like the sort of person who wouldn’t care if she flunked out. But at the end of every quarter, when the honor roll was posted outside of the front office, Flannery’s name was always on it, no matter what color her hair was or how bad her attitude had been the last three months.

  “By the way, it’s still big news about the Matthew-Emily split,” Flannery said, squinting at her knitting like she’d lost something inside of it. “Emily’s telling everyone it’s your fault.”

  “That’s dumb,” Kate said, staring straight ahead. She didn’t know if this was something she wanted to discuss with Flannery. Flannery hung out with the same group of eighth graders as Matthew did, the ones with vaguely bad attitudes and lots of black T-shirts, so she’d know what was really going on. But sometimes Flannery was a little too honest for Kate’s comfort level. Sometimes Kate could live without Flannery’s opinion.

  “Yeah, that’s what Matthew says too,” Flannery said. “He says you guys are just friends. He broke up with Emily because he wanted to be free.”

  “He did?” Kate felt her stomach fill with butterflies, the bad kind, the kind with poison on their little proboscises. “He does? Want to be free, I mean?”

  “Sure,” Flannery replied, poking her right-hand needle into a left-hand needle loop. “Everybody was totally amazed when he got together with Emily in the first place. Although now he says she was never really his girlfriend. But if she wasn’t, then why did he have to break up with her?”

  “Yeah, that’s a good point,” Kate said, her voice sounding hollow. “Well, it looks like things are about to get started.” She stood up, amazed by how much she felt like a zombie, someone who had been dead for a while now but had miraculously retained the ability to walk and talk.

  “Hey, Kate,” Flannery said, and Kate turned around. She was surprised by Flannery’s sympathetic expression. “You know that the Matthew Hollers of the world always make better friends than boyfriends, right?”

  Kate nodded, though she wasn’t sure she knew that at all. “I need to go try out now,” she said in a flat voice.

  The walk back to the front row took Kate approximately five hundred years. Maybe it was because her legs had turned into rubber. Maybe it was because time had slowed down until every clock in the world barely budged. Maybe, she thought, it was because when you realize that you’re nothing, nobody, nada, just a silly girl who thought she might be someone somebody else could fall in love with, then it occurs to you that there’s no reason to get any place anytime soon.

  When she finally reached her seat, Lorna leaned over and said, “What’s wrong? Your face is totally white. You look like a ghost.”

  “I am a ghost,” Kate told her, and then Mr. Periello called her name, so she stood back up and walked to the stage, where she sang an old Joni Mitchell song her mom liked a lot called “Both Sides Now.” When she finished, everybody in the audience clapped and stomped their feet, and a few people whistled. Mr. Periello looked at her a long time before saying, “That was beautiful, Kate. I had no idea you could sing like that.”

  The funny thing was, Kate couldn’t really sing like that. Or at least she’d never sung like that before. But then again, she’d never had a broken heart before. Maybe that’s what had to happen to you before you could really sing, before your song was more than just a collection of notes and words that came out of your mouth.

  When Kate got back to her seat, Flannery was sitting in it. Kate sat down beside her and stared straight ahead. When Lorna leaned toward Kate to say something, Kate held up her hand and said, “I can’t talk right now.”

  Flannery worked a few stitches of her sweater, which was beginning to resemble a piece of Swiss cheese. Then she laid her knitting on her lap and, without looking directly at Kate, said, “If I had to guess, I would say he really does like you. The problem is, it doesn’t matter.”

  Kate nodded. She thought about kissing Matthew Holler behind her garage. She knew he’d really meant it, even if he didn’t act like it now. She wondered how a person could do that, feel one way and act another. Kate couldn’t. Her dad said she had no poker face, and it was true. If she was mad, she growled, and if she was happy, she laughed. Maybe she just didn’t have any interest in faking her life, or maybe she was just too stupid to figure out how to pretend like she didn’t care.

  Although, hadn’t she been pretending the last two weeks like she didn’t care?

  The kiss behind the garage. They’d been writing songs together at Matthew’s house, and when Kate said she had to go home, Matthew offered to walk her. A light snow had started falling when they were halfway to Kate’s house, and Matthew had launched into a loud rendition of “Let it Snow.”

  “That’s a Christmas carol,” Kate had admonished him. “You can’t sing Christmas carols in January!”

  “What does ‘Let it Snow’ have to do with Christmas?” Matthew had asked. “It’s totally about the weather. It’s a weather song, like ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ or ‘Blowin’ in the Wind.’ ”

  Kate had cracked up. “ ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ isn’t a weather song. It’s a protest song.”

  Matthew had slung his arm around Kate’s shoulder. “That’s what I like about you, Faber. I don’t know any other girl who would know that.”

  “Lots of girls know that,” Kate had insisted, although she was secretly proud that among all the girls she personally knew, she was the only one who had a clue to what “Blowin’ in the Wind” was about. “Girls are as into music as guys are. At least some girls. And not all guys are into music. My dad is a total music dork. His big claim to fame is that he saw Bon Jovi three times when he was in college. But you know what’s cool? My mom saw the Clash. Twice.”

  “Not to one-up you or anything, but my mom toured with the Clash.”

  Kate had stopped in her tracks. “No way!”

  “Well, maybe that’s an exaggeration. But she was friends with some sound guy’s girlfriend, and so when the Clash toured the Eastern Seaboard, my mom went with them for a few shows.”

  “Maybe my mom should invite your mom over for coffee,” Kate had said, immediately liking the idea of her family and Matthew’s getting tangled up, making it harder for Matthew to untangle himself from Kate. Of course, if their moms got to be friends, and the Hollers started to feel like family, then Kate and Matthew might start feeling like cousins, which wasn’t the vibe Kate was going for.

  I’m such an idiot for thinking like this, she had told herself, sticking
out her tongue to catch a snowflake. I mean, get a life.

  They’d reached Kate’s house by then. The sky had gotten dark, and there had been a layer of intensely pink clouds on the horizon. Kate had pointed at it and said, “I’m normally not a pink person, but I think that’s beautiful.”

  Matthew hadn’t said anything, and for a second Kate had felt really stupid, but she’d stopped feeling stupid when he’d grabbed her hand and pulled her to the side of the Fabers’ garage. Instead of feeling stupid, she’d felt jittery and light-headed, and when Matthew had pulled her toward him and dipped his face toward hers, she’d thought she might possibly faint.

  Matthew had brushed a strand of hair away from Kate’s face and said, “You are totally awesome. You are really, totally awesome.”

  And then he’d kissed her, and his lips had been so soft Kate could hardly stand it. She’d put her hand in his hair, the way she’d wanted to ever since she first saw him, tangling her fingers in his reddish-gold curls.

  She’d thought it meant something. She’d really thought it meant something, and so she’d tried not to care when he didn’t call the next day, and then on Tuesday back at school when he didn’t act like anything special had happened between them, she tried even harder not to care. And so maybe it wasn’t surprising that all her not caring (which was really caring more than anything in the world) had poured out in the song she’d just sung.

  She just couldn’t hold it in anymore.

  On Monday, the cast list was posted. Kate and Lorna were both in the chorus. Lorna was incensed. “You should have gotten the lead!” she told Kate at lunch. “You were awesome.”

  Kate had gotten at least ten phone calls over the weekend, some from people she hardly knew, telling her how awesome her singing had been. She’d felt weirdly famous for forty-eight hours.