The Sound of Your Voice, Only Really Far Away

by Frances O'Roark Dowell

  “Oh,” Kate said. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and picked her bag up. “Okay. I can do that.”

  “I know,” Marylin told her. “That’s why I asked.”

  The two girls sat on the front step and waited. Marylin kept expecting Kate to change her mind, to stand up and tell her to forget it, she was going home. But Kate just sat there, writing invisible words on the sidewalk with a twig.

  Ruby’s sister, Marta, was driving the white SUV that pulled up to the curb in front of Marylin’s house. Leave it to Ruby to have an older sister who seemed happy to drive her wherever she wanted to go, Marylin thought. No wonder she ruled the school.

  As Marylin pushed herself up from the stoop, one the SUV’s tinted windows slid down and Mazie’s face appeared. “Get in the car!” Mazie yelled. “The salon closes in forty-five minutes.”

  “I’m not going, remember?” Marylin called back in what she hoped was a cheerful, oh-I-guess-we-have-a-tiny-misunderstanding-but-that’s-okay tone. “I’m—I’m staying here with Kate. She’s spending the night.”

  “You are insane,” Mazie groaned. “Kate Faber is not coming with us, Marylin. That’s out of the question.”

  Marylin expected Kate to say something, but Kate just kept writing stuff nobody could see on the sidewalk. She didn’t even look up. Marylin was on her own.

  “I’m not going with you either,” Marylin said. She walked halfway down the front walk to the car. “I already have plans. I told you that.”

  Ruby Santiago’s face appeared at the window next to Mazie’s. “Then why are we even here, Marylin? You’re wasting our time.”

  “I told Mazie on the phone I couldn’t go,” Marylin explained, flashing her best middle-school cheerleader smile at Ruby in hopes it would make her think of brand-spanking-new cheerleading uniforms. “I can’t just abandon my neighbor to get a mani-pedi.”

  Ruby rolled her eyes. “Whatever,” she said, and disappeared back into the car. “Let’s go, Marta.”

  Marylin could feel Mazie’s glare from ten yards away.

  “Expect a text from me later!” Mazie yelled as the SUV pulled away from the curb. “This isn’t over, Marylin!”

  Marylin watched until they’d disappeared around the corner, then went back to the front porch. “You were a ton of help,” she said, sitting down next to Kate. She pulled the twig out of Kate’s hand and snapped in two. “Thanks a lot.”

  Kate shrugged. “It wasn’t my fight. But you handled it pretty well, even if you called me a neighbor instead of a friend. I thought that was sort of weird and possibly insulting.”

  “I was just trying to make a point,” Marylin insisted. “You’re not just anyone. You’re someone I grew up on the same street with.”

  “Uh-huh,” Kate said flatly. “Well, I’ll let it pass. I mean, like I said, you did pretty well for you.”

  “Wow, what a compliment,” Marylin said, throwing the pieces of Kate’s twig into the grass. She knew she ought to feel good about doing the right thing, but mostly what she felt was doomed. Nobody said no to Ruby and Mazie. Nobody.

  Uniforms, uniforms, uniforms, she chanted to herself. New uniforms would make everything okay. She turned to Kate, determined to keep things positive. “You don’t want to give each other mani-pedis, do you?”

  “Uh, I’m not sure that’s really my thing,” Kate said, but then she shrugged. “But sure, okay. Do you have any black polish?”

  Marylin rolled her eyes. “Sure. I have a whole closet filled with black nail polish. It’s just my style.”

  The two girls stood up. Kate brushed some pieces of grass off the back of her pants and said, “It could be your style. You could start a whole goth cheerleader thing.”

  Marylin just nodded and smiled, pushing Kate toward the front door. Everything was going to be okay. She’d get the squad new uniforms, and everyone was going to love her. She’d paint Kate’s fingernails a nice shade of raspberry and show her how awesome pink could be. All she had to do was keep smiling. All she had to do was keep pretending that everything in the world was fine.

  a modest proposal

  On Tuesday morning Kate had left her lunch sitting on the kitchen counter, and now here she was in the cafeteria, face-to-face with a tray of brown and olive-green food. It was supposedly meat loaf and string beans, but Kate was not convinced.

  “That should be illegal,” Lorna said through a mouth full of pasta salad she’d made herself the night before. In her left hand she held a crusty piece of artisan bread, also homemade. “I can’t believe the cafeteria is allowed to serve that kind of slop. I mean, look at it! All of the vitamins have been cooked right out of those beans. They’re not even beans. They’re bean remains. They could do a CSI episode on those beans.”

  “I’ve got to eat,” Kate said with a shrug, halfheartedly sticking her fork into the slab of so-called meat loaf. “I’ve got a pre-algebra test this afternoon. I need the energy.”

  Lorna sighed and passed Kate her Tupperware container of pasta. “Just eat this, okay? I can’t stand to watch you put that junk in your mouth. I can’t believe they can’t dish out some actual, fresh food. At my cousin’s school, they have this amazing salad bar in their cafeteria. It’s all stuff they grow in the school garden. How cool is that?”

  “Pretty cool,” Kate admitted. “We should do that here. There’s lots of open space out on the student commons.”

  Lorna slammed her fist on the table. “We should! We should enter that competition! The one that Student Government is doing.”

  “The What’s Your Big Idea competition?” Kate asked, and when Lorna nodded, she leaned back in her seat and thought about it. There was a lot about the idea of a school garden she liked. For one thing, a salad bar would be good for the school’s vegans and vegetarians, who were always complaining about not having enough lunch options. Quite frankly, Kate could do with fewer cafeteria protests, especially since the leader of the vegans had gotten her hands on a bullhorn. And a school garden would be good for the environment, lower the school’s carbon footprint and all that. She thought about Flannery and her do-it-yourself thing. She would totally be into a school garden.

  “Let’s do it,” Kate said, grinning at Lorna. “I think it’s a brilliant idea.”

  “We have to grow herbs, too,” Lorna said, pulling a notebook and a pen out of her backpack. She started making a list. “Basil and tarragon would be totally great.”

  “Maybe we could grow chickpeas and make hummus. And garlic. We could grow garlic.” Kate reached across the table and tore off a piece of Lorna’s bread. “We could grow wheat for bread.”

  Without looking up from her notes, Lorna said, “I think you’re starting to get carried away here, Kate, but I like your thinking.”

  “Me too,” Kate agreed. “I am a very profound thinker.”

  “Incredibly, super profound,” Lorna added, skewering a piece of rotini from the Tupperware container with her fork. “Most profound-from-on-high thinker.”

  Kate gnawed at the crust of her bread. “I wonder what the other ideas are going to be? Probably sports equipment for the gym and more computers for the library.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Ours is the best. All we’ve got to do is submit it. Which means all you’ve got to do is write up the proposal.”

  Kate’s mouth dropped open. “Me? Why me?”

  Lorna smiled and handed Kate another chunk of bread. “No such thing as a free lunch, babe.”

  That night Kate sat at the kitchen table and worked on the school garden proposal. It had to be five hundred words or less, which was the sort of writing challenge Kate liked. She thought she should focus mostly on the food angle, since most middle schoolers she knew were obsessed with eating. Not the way Lorna was—she read Bon Appétit and could talk with authority about different kinds of olive oil—but just about everybody she knew was concerned with where their next snack was coming from and what it would consist of. If Kate really wanted to win this contest, she’d w
rite a proposal for a new vending machine that dispensed only sour cream potato chips and kiwi-flavored bubble gum.

  But Kate liked the idea of a school garden. She wasn’t a gardener herself, but she could see how growing your own food was cool. Her mom usually had a few pots of cherry tomatoes growing on the patio, and it was always fun to take out a bowl and pick a bunch for a salad. It kind of made you feel like a farmer, or some kind of a hippie.

  Her dad walked into the kitchen, carrying a plate. “Did you try some of Mom’s raspberry pie?” he asked, putting his plate by the sink. “Amazing.”

  “You better rinse that plate off and put it in the dishwasher,” Kate warned him. “Mom’s going ballistic every time she sees a dirty dish in the sink or on the counter. She says she’s not our maid.”

  “She’s not,” Mr. Faber agreed. He reached over to turn on the faucet. “The problem is, she cares more than everyone else about the house being clean. I keep telling her she just needs to lower her standards.”

  Kate raised an eyebrow. “Yeah? And what does she say about that?”

  “Nothing I can repeat in mixed company,” Mr. Faber put his dish in the dishwasher, then sat across the table from Kate. “You working on homework?”

  Kate told him about the What’s Your Big Idea campaign and her and Lorna’s proposal for a school garden. “I don’t know if I should emphasize the importance of fresh food or tasty food.”

  “Go with taste, definitely,” Mr. Faber advised. “I doubt kids care that much about freshness. You could take a ‘tired of bland cafeteria food’ approach, make everyone think about how much better their food could be. Don’t worry about the vegetarians; you’ve got their vote already. Focus on the kids who have to eat cafeteria food every day. Would they rather eat some soggy broccoli or a great Caesar salad?”

  “Do you think kids even care that much about salad?” Kate suddenly felt worried that no one would vote for her proposal because hardly anyone her age actually liked vegetables. She suspected that even the vegans didn’t really like vegetables all that much; they just liked having something to argue about.

  “Probably not, but people like what’s new and different. You might also add a ‘stick it to the man’ element. Kids your age are starting to look for ways to rebel.”

  “Salad as rebellion,” Kate mused. “I like it. You should have gone into advertising.”

  “I thought about it,” Mr. Faber said. “I like messing around with language.”

  “Me too,” Kate said. “I don’t know why, I just do.”

  Kate’s dad pushed himself away from the table. “Well, let me know if you need any more help. In the meantime, I might just sneak an extra slice of raspberry pie. Do you think your mom would mind?”

  “I think if you put your dishes in the dishwasher, you can get away with murder around here,” Kate told him.

  After her dad left the kitchen, Kate stretched in her chair. She felt relieved all of a sudden, but she wasn’t sure why. Because her dad had given her some good ideas for her proposal? She didn’t think it was that. Maybe it was because they’d had a conversation where Kate didn’t feel guilty or angry by the end of it. They’d had a conversation that had ended on a funny note instead of Kate’s dad walking out of the room with a disappointed look on his face.

  Disappointed over soggy broccoli? Kate wrote in her notebook. Tired of depressed lima beans?

  She wrote as fast as she could, the ideas coming at her a mile a minute. It wasn’t even that she was so excited about the idea of a school garden. It was more that she was excited about messing around with language. About making words mean what she wanted them to say. There was a trick to it, Kate knew, and she also knew that sometimes she was magic.

  The next morning Kate couldn’t wait to see Marylin on the bus. She thought Marylin was the perfect audience for her proposal—someone who was smart, big on school spirit, and okay with lettuce.

  But before she got a chance to bring it up, Marylin was handing her a manila folder. “So I need you to tell me what you think about my proposal for the What’s Your Big Idea contest. Do you think it’s the sort of thing an average kid would vote for?”

  Kate opened the folder and read Marylin’s title: Why New Cheerleading Uniforms Affect Everyone!

  She turned to Marylin. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “I’m not kidding at all,” Marylin insisted. “Cheerleading uniforms matter. To everyone.” She began ticking off the reasons. “They’re important for school spirit. They’re important for school pride. Studies show that when the cheerleaders are exceptionally cute, the teams perform better.”

  “You’re making that up,” Kate said. “That’s totally bogus.”

  “I’m not making anything up,” Marylin argued. “I might be paraphrasing a little bit, but that’s different from making things up.”

  Kate handed back the folder. “This is so selfish! Nobody cares about your uniforms. And there’s nothing wrong with the uniforms you guys already have. They’re perfectly nice.”

  “ ‘Perfectly nice’ isn’t good enough. Perfectly nice won’t win us the district cheering championship, will it?”

  Kate stared at her. Even Marylin wasn’t this nuts, was she? “You’re doing this so Mazie won’t be mad at you, aren’t you? For not going with her to the mall Friday night?”

  Marylin flinched, and Kate knew she’d hit a nerve. “So what’s she doing? Writing mean stuff on the bathroom walls?”

  “She’s not doing anything,” Marylin said, examining her nails as though Mazie being mad at her wasn’t a big deal. “Well, she’s not talking to me, that’s true. And some of the other girls aren’t either, but that’s just how they are. They’ll get over it.”

  “Just as soon as you get them new uniforms, right?”

  Marylin didn’t say anything, but Kate could tell the answer was yes. She had two simultaneous, totally opposite feelings. She wanted to give Marylin a pat on the shoulder, like, There, there, everything will be all right, but she also wanted to punch her and yell, Get a grip! Earth to Marylin! These people are not your friends!

  “I don’t know, Marylin,” she said, trying to sound nice about it. “I mean, do you really want to hang out with people who treat you like that? And also, do you think it’s fair for someone who’s on Student Government to submit a proposal? Isn’t that, like, a conflict of interest or something?”

  Marylin shrugged. “There’s no rule that says I can’t. And Benjamin said it was fine.”

  “Oh, that’s right,” Kate said, and now she was totally unable to keep the sarcastic tone out of her voice. “I forgot your boyfriend is president. I guess you’ve got this one in the bag.”

  “Actually, he’s not all that crazy about my proposal,” Marylin said, sounding worried. “I called him last night to go over it with him, but he acted like he didn’t want to hear it. He probably just doesn’t want to seem like he’s playing favorites. Not that he actually has anything to do with which proposal wins. It’s a democratic process, right? One person, one vote.”

  “And you think people are going to vote for cheerleading uniforms?” Kate snorted.

  Marylin slipped the folder back into her back pouch. “I really do. You’d be surprised by how many students have true school spirit. Unlike some people I could name.”

  Kate took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. She hated the cheerleading side of Marylin. She hated how dumb it made her. Marylin could be goofy about a lot of things—that stupid flowered backpack she insisted on calling her back pouch, for example—but Kate liked Marylin’s goofiness. The cheerleading thing was something else entirely. Dumb. It was just dumb.

  They rode the rest of the trip in silence and didn’t even say good-bye when they got off the bus, which made Kate feel bad, but she couldn’t make herself be nice to someone whose big idea was getting more stuff for the kids who already had everything. How democratic was that?

  She headed for the audio lab as soon as she got in the school’s
front door. Matthew would appreciate her proposal, she bet. He’d get how cool a school garden was. Matthew Holler was totally DIY.

  “You are exactly who I wanted to see at this exact very minute,” Matthew said when Kate found him working on his World of Noise recording. She felt her face flush and the tips of her fingers start to tingle. Really, she wished he didn’t have this effect on her. It made everything between them so uneven.

  “What did you want to see me about?” Kate asked, trying to sound cool. “Do you have a bridge you want to sell me?”

  Wow, she thought, that sounded so un cool. She gave Matthew a lame smile. “Or something like that?”

  “Something like that.” Matthew grinned. “I have a project I want us to work on together. I want to enter that What’s Your Big Idea contest and get some new gear for the audio lab. There’s a new version of Pro Tools I’ve got to have, for one thing. And the soundstage needs a total upgrade.”

  “Uh, that’s sounds really great and everything . . . ,” Kate said.

  “But?”

  “But I’m kind of doing a proposal with Lorna,” Kate told him. “For a school garden. So we can have—well, fresh lettuce at lunch and stuff like that.”

  Matthew looked disappointed, but he nodded at Kate and said, “Yeah, that’s a totally cool idea too. I definitely get it. I’m just bummed because I thought this was something we could work on together. I thought we could go over to my house this afternoon, and you could maybe stay for dinner. My mom said it was cool, if you like spaghetti and garlic bread.”

  “I love spaghetti and garlic bread,” Kate said, meaning it. She also loved hanging out at Matthew’s house, and she thought his mom was really nice, even if she had a rule about no girls in Matthew’s room.

  Matthew sighed. “Yeah, well, another time, right? So let me see what you wrote about a school garden.”

  “That’s okay,” Kate said. “It’s not that interesting. I’m not even one hundred percent sure we’re going to do it.”