The Sound of Your Voice, Only Really Far Away

by Frances O'Roark Dowell

  “You know what I’d do if you were a guy—I mean, a grown-up guy?” Mr. Faber asked, and Kate shook her head no. “I’d say, ‘Let’s go out and play some hoops and then go grab a beer.’ I realize that’s a totally inappropriate response to a thirteen-year-old girl who’s feeling blue, though. Well, not the hoops part. Maybe instead of a beer, I could buy you a jelly doughnut?”

  Kate shrugged. “A cheese Danish might be nice.”

  “Your stomach up for it?”

  “I’m starting to feel a little better, I guess.”

  Her dad grinned from across the table. “I bet nobody’s on the court at the Y right now. We could have it all to ourselves.”

  “I don’t know, Dad. I mean, my stomach’s feeling better, but I don’t know if I want to play basketball.”

  “Okay, here’s another idea. We get our Danish to go, and we drive around town with the radio turned up all the way—any station you want—and then we go shoot some hoops.”

  “You really think that will help?” Kate asked, having her doubts. What if her dad wanted to listen to Bon Jovi on the radio? Or even worse, Rush?

  Her dad lifted his arms into the air, like a wild-eyed preacher on TV. “We’ll roll down the windows and sing loud as thunder! We’ll play air guitar like rock gods! It’ll be like we’re teenagers again, free from worries and woe!”

  Kate looked around nervously, but no one seemed to be paying attention. “Um, Dad? I’m still a teenager. In fact, I just started being a teenager a couple of months ago.”

  Mr. Faber nodded his head knowingly. “Yes, but you are full of worry and woe, are you not? And you’d like to be free from it, am I right?”

  What could Kate do but say yes? She was full of worry and woe, after all, not to mention that she had a heavy heart and a head full of broken dreams. My baby’s done gone, and now I’m sad and blue, she sang to herself. But that wasn’t even right, was it? It should be, I done gone and left my baby, and now I’m sad and blue.

  Really, Kate had no idea where this stuff came from.

  “Two words for you, Katie,” her dad said, and now he was grinning like a maniac as he pulled out his wallet and waved the waitress over to their table. “Free. Bird. ‘Free Bird.’ Do you know that song? Man, I love Lynyrd Skynyrd! I’ve got their greatest hits CD in my car.”

  Kate started to giggle. She’d never seen her dad like this before. “I like Lynyrd Skynyrd too. I could listen to some Lynyrd Skynyrd and drive around with you.”

  “And play some hoops?” Mr. Faber asked, sounding hopeful. “I think you’d feel better if you did.”

  “Okay, okay!” Kate said, still giggling. When the waitress came back to their table with her Danish, she wrapped it in a napkin and slid out of the booth to follow her dad through the restaurant’s din and out to the parking lot.

  “You’ll see,” Mr. Faber said, opening the passenger-side door for her. “You’re going to feel so much better after this.”

  “Maybe,” Kate said. “But maybe I’ll feel worse.”

  “Wait and see,” her dad said. “Wait and see.”

  Kate got into the car and started nibbling her Danish, and that definitely made her feel better. She guessed she might feel okay in a little while. She didn’t feel too terrible right now. Even though there was still sadness inside of her, she could feel something light, too. Maybe it was a bird that had just discovered it was free, she thought. Maybe it was a bird about to fly.

  the light you can hold in your hands

  On Saturday morning Marylin wakes to the sound of chattering, and when she opens her eyes, she sees a bird sitting on her window-sill chirping away, like it’s trying to tell her something. Wake up! Or Spring is here! Or This is the first Saturday of the rest of your life!

  Marylin likes the idea of a bird waking her up. Didn’t that happen in Snow White? Or maybe it was Cinderella. A little bluebird, or a flock of bluebirds, chirping cheerfully, flying around a bed with a garland of flowers. Something like that.

  “A flock of bluebirds chirping cheerfully,” Marylin says out loud as she kicks off the sheets. Maybe that could be her mantra, the phrase she repeats to herself over and over like a magic spell to ward off bad thoughts. She had one of her cheerleading nightmares again last night, the one where she was on top of the pyramid, balanced on Caitlin’s and Mazie’s backs, when suddenly the whole thing collapsed and she went flying into the stands. “Somebody catch me,” she called out in her dream, but everyone was too busy scrambling to get out of the way, even Kate, even Benjamin.

  A flock of bluebirds chirping cheerfully, she thinks as she stretches her arms over her legs and grabs her toes. And then she thinks, Kate would try to catch me. She’d never move out of the way.

  Benjamin? She’s not so sure. He’s been acting funny lately. He did ask her to the spring dance, but he doesn’t seem all that excited about it. Is it really possible he cares that she quit cheerleading? How could that be? She’s still the same person, after all. Her situation may have changed, but she hasn’t.

  Marylin pushes away the thought that maybe everything would be fine if she hadn’t tried to make Benjamin get the cheerleaders new uniforms. She can’t stand the thought that she might have ruined their relationship. She’d rather think that Benjamin thought it was cool dating a cheerleader, and now he’s less interested. So what if that seems unlikely? So what if Benjamin seems like the last person in the world to think that way?

  A flock of bluebirds chirping cheerfully. A flock of bluebirds chirping cheerfully.

  So. Anyway. What does she want to do today? If Marylin were still a cheerleader, she’d already be on the bus headed for the boys’ basketball game across town, but she’s a civilian now, and she can do whatever she wants all day long.

  It is, Marylin has to admit as she pulls on her bathrobe, a little depressing. No! Not depressing. She will not be depressed. However, she can admit that it feels sort of weird not to have her whole day laid out for her. She can admit that her closet seems empty since she donated her cheerleading uniform to Goodwill. But she refuses to think any thoughts that aren’t positive. She has a whole day to herself ! She’ll make a to-do list, she decides, filled with fun, fabulous activities.

  Number one on her list, she decides, will be dealing with her room, which suddenly strikes her as boring. She’ll call Rhetta, and together they can work on a room makeover. A post-cheerleading room makeover. Maybe Marylin can get her mom to drive them to Everything But Granny’s Panties, a consignment shop where they sell old stuff that you can fix up. Marylin would like a new desk; the one she has now is too small, and it doesn’t have any personality.

  Marylin decides that creating a room with personality is her number one priority today. Then she smiles and goes downstairs, happy that her life now has a purpose.

  Her mom is sitting at the table eating a bagel when Marylin walks into the kitchen. “I thought you weren’t doing carbs anymore,” Marylin says, opening the fridge. “Did you change your mind?”

  Her mom sighs. “No, not really. But what’s life without bagels?”

  “Boring,” Marylin agrees. She grabs some string cheese and an apple and sits down across from her mom. “Almost as boring as life without pizza.”

  “Life without pizza is not worth living,” Marylin’s mom says, checking her watch and sighing again. “Petey’s got a birthday party this afternoon, which naturally I forgot all about, and now I’ve got to go to Target and get something. I can’t wait for the birthday party years to be over. I feel like I spend half my time in Target buying presents for Petey’s classmates.”

  “I bet there’s something in Petey’s closet you can regift,” Marylin says, peeling the wrapper off her string cheese. “Didn’t he get two of the same Lego kits for Christmas? You said you were going to return one, but there wasn’t a gift receipt.”

  Her mom’s eyes light up. “Yes! That architecture kit—he got two Guggenheim Museums. Marylin, you’re a genius!”

  “We’re s
tarting a reuse, reduce, recycle campaign at school,” Marylin tells her mom. “Student Government is, I mean. Maybe we should make it ‘reuse, reduce, recycle, and regift.’ ”

  “You’re joking, but that’s a great idea.” Her mom pushes her chair away from the table and stands. “We’ve got so much stuff we never use. I mean, I have at least three blow dryers, and one of them’s practically new. Maybe that’s what I’ll give to Aunt Tish for her birthday.”

  “Just make sure there aren’t any hairs sticking out of it,” Marylin says. “It’s one thing to get a used blow dryer for your birthday; it’s another thing to get a hairy used blow dryer.”

  “Point taken,” her mom tells her. “Okay, I’m off to find the funny pages, which I’m going to recycle into wrapping paper.”

  Marylin takes a bite out of her apple and checks the clock. Eight thirty. The day stretches out in front of her. Except now that she’s decided that her room is her number one priority, things are starting to take shape in her mind. She needs to take inventory of her stuff, and she definitely needs to clean out her closet. Anything that doesn’t make her heart sing goes to Goodwill.

  Her mom’s phone rings from across the table, and Marylin reaches over to grab it. When she sees her dad’s number on the screen, she hits the talk button.

  “Hey, Dad, it’s me,” she says through a mouthful of apple. “Mom’s wrapping a present.”

  “Don’t tell me,” her dad says, laughing. “Petey’s got another birthday party.”

  “This afternoon,” Marylin confirms. “I think it’s at the Museum of Life and Science, so he’s probably thrilled.”

  “Well, tell your mom I’m going to be over that way around four. I’d be happy to pick him up, if that would help.”

  An idea comes to Marylin so suddenly she practically flips over her chair. “You know what would be a big help? If you could pick up Petey from the party, and then you guys could get some pizza and bring it home for dinner.”

  She squeezes her eyes shut. Please, please, please, she thinks. Her dad had dinner with them on Christmas Eve, and it was practically the best night of her life. Better than when she made the cheerleading squad, and almost as good as the day Benjamin came over and built snowmen with her and Petey. No, even better than that.

  “Marylin,” her dad says, his voice soft. “I don’t want you to—”

  But he doesn’t finish his sentence. All of a sudden there is a string of silence between Marylin and her dad. A garland of silence, she thinks, imagining a bluebird perched on her dad’s shoulder and another one hovering over her mom’s phone, each holding on to its end of the quiet.

  “Just because you and Mom aren’t married anymore doesn’t mean we’re not a family,” Marylin says after what seems like a million years. “You’re still our dad, Mom is still our mom. And it doesn’t even seem like you guys hate each other anymore.”

  “We don’t hate each other,” Mr. McIntosh agrees. “We never hated each other.” He pauses. “Okay, maybe we hated each other for five minutes.”

  “I think it will be better for my wedding day if you guys are friends,” Marylin insists.

  Her father laughs. “When did the invitations go out? I didn’t know you were getting married.”

  “Not now, but one day,” Marylin says, and she imagines walking down the aisle toward a taller, older-looking Benjamin Huddle, a flock of bluebirds carrying the train of her dress. “And I don’t want any broken-family drama.”

  Her dad laughs again. “Okay, I’ll tell you what. Let me talk to your mom and get her take on this.”

  Marylin finds her mom in her bedroom, taping up the Guggenheim Museum. “Can Dad come over to dinner tonight if he picks up Petey from the party?”

  Marylin’s mom looks surprised, then relieved. “If Dad picks up Petey, he can come over for dinner every Saturday night for the next month. I hate driving over to Life and Science from here on Saturday. It takes forever.”

  “Tell him that!” Marylin says, handing her mom the phone. “I’m going to go get dressed.”

  She closes her mom’s bedroom door behind her but stands in the hall for a moment, listening. Her mom’s voice is muffled, but it’s friendly, cheerful even.

  A flock of bluebirds chirping cheerfully, Marylin thinks, and then she wonders if she has anything orange to wear. It is one of Marylin’s gifts that she looks good in orange, especially if it’s a peachy-orange. Maybe when she and Rhetta go to Everything But Granny’s Panties, they can look for vintage clothes. Reuse, Reduce, Recycle, that’s Marylin’s new motto, after all.

  Can you recycle your family? she wonders as she walks down the hallway to her room. Can you recycle your life?

  She thinks maybe you can. She thinks maybe she’ll give it a try.

  Matthew Holler wakes up at 10:37 on Saturday morning and tries to go back to sleep, but he can’t. He’s too psyched. Today he’s getting together with Bob Stockfish and Jackson Hill in Bob’s garage, and if everything works out, it’s going to be the beginning of the most totally awesome band that ever was.

  Matthew grabs a T-shirt from the floor next to his bed, pulls it on, and then grabs his guitar. He plays first thing every day, partly because playing guitar is his favorite thing to do, and partly to remind himself what his priorities are. Number one: music. Number two: Well, he’s not quite sure about number two. He knows it ought to be school, but it’s not. He knows he’s supposed to be this great student—he’s supposedly gifted or something—but as soon as he walks into the building, it’s like his brain falls asleep. The only place he feels really alive at school is in the audio lab. If he could spend all day there, he’d definitely be a happy camper.

  Maybe he doesn’t have a second priority. Maybe music is it. Well, there are his friends, sure. There’s Kate. But Kate’s complicated. He knows she likes him, even though she tries to act like she doesn’t. And sometimes he feels like—well, he doesn’t know what he feels like. Like he wouldn’t mind hanging out with her all the time. Before she told him to back off, sometimes he went over to her house just because he wanted to be in the same part of the universe with her. But then she’d give him this look, this I’m really into you look, and Matthew wanted to be a million miles away. Like he was really mad at her or something. And then five minutes later, he wanted to hold her hand. It made him feel crazy.

  You’re an idiot, he tells himself. You sound like a no-brain romance novel. This is why he has music. Needs music. It gets him away from himself and all his stupid feelings. He doesn’t know anything; he just feels a lot of random feelings that push him here and there. Why even think about it? Why even try to figure it out?

  He starts working on a riff from the new Wilco song he heard last night on K-DUCK and immediately downloaded off of iTunes. It’s a noisy song, like a lot of Wilco’s stuff, and Matthew’s definitely into noise. Not just any kind of noise, though. What he likes are melodies that are covered up with cacophony, pretty songs you can hardly hear over the buzzing and the echoes and loud rushes of wind. But the melody has to be there. There’s got to be a song at the heart of all the noise. The noise has to be covering something up.

  It’s like the melody’s a secret, he thinks. And the noise keeps the secret safe.

  That’s when it occurs to him what his real priority needs to be: getting an electric guitar. Talk about noise, he thinks. Talk about a wall of sound.

  He leans back against his pillow, still strumming, imagining himself playing electric guitar in front of a huge stack of amplifiers. He imagines the rush of power surging through his arms, down through his hands and into the guitar before it crashes over the horde of screaming fans in front of him. Behind him, Jackson’s pounding the drums so that the whole thing’s practically tribal, and Bob’s screaming into the mic, the words all distorted and wild.

  Matthew shakes his head and smiles. How awesome would that be? He definitely needs his dad to give him a ride over to Slim’s Guitar World before lunch. What would a used Fender go for
? Like five hundred dollars? A thousand? Not that Matthew’s got that kind of dough, but maybe he can get a job mowing lawns or something. He could borrow the money from his parents and pay them back.

  Man, he wants to call Kate! Because she would totally get this, totally understand why he needs to go electric right this very minute. She started out on electric, which kills him. How cool is that? Really, he ought to be in a band with Kate, that’s what he ought to do. She writes awesome songs, for one thing. And she gets music, how it’s the most important thing.

  Matthew glances over at his desk, where his cell is sitting on a pile of junk. It’s been over a week since Kate asked him to leave her alone. That’s long enough, right? She’s definitely proven she doesn’t care anymore—she hasn’t stopped by the audio lab or written him any notes; she even skipped Creative Writing Club this week. So it should be okay to call, right?

  He starts to lean over to grab the phone, but stops himself. Better idea: He’ll wait a week and then call her and see if she wants to come to watch band practice. What’s Ms. Vickery always saying in Creative Writing Club? Show, don’t tell? Matthew will show Kate how cool being in a band is. He’ll show her how cool he is.

  He’ll show Kate how much she’s missing him, and then maybe she’ll come back.

  Petey McIntosh still has dreams of being a spy, but he thinks now he’d like to be the kind of spy who talks to people and gets their deep dark secrets out of them. An interrogator kind of spy. So now, in the car with his dad, a bag of party favors in his lap, he decides he’s going to get to the bottom of the story. Why exactly is his dad coming to dinner?

  “So how are you and Mom getting along these days?” Petey asks as they turn onto Roxboro Road. He tries to sound casual, like he’s making small talk at a party. “Seems like you’re communicating a little more than you used to.”

  His dad gives him a startled look. “Uh, you know, fine. I’ve always been—uh—very fond of your mom.”