Whisper

by Phoebe Kitanidis

  “Well, I’m glad you got home okay. I was worried about you.” She paused. “You never called me back.”

  I groaned. “I know, sorry about that.” I did feel bad for ignoring her texts. It was the first time I’d ever done that. But the truth was, all I’d felt at the prospect of talking to her was dread. And then I’d had the dream, argued with Dad, found Jamie at the door. “I just had all this stuff to deal with at home,” I said…and cringed.

  “I thought you were sick.” Her tone was accusing.

  “I was—am.” Crap; I was so sleepy I’d mixed up my excuses! “I was sick and busy,” I finished lamely. “It was really the worst of both worlds.”

  “God, I wish you’d just tell me the truth!”

  I froze. This wasn’t a Whisper. She was speaking out loud. Criticizing me. I had the sudden urge to hit End Call, press the button over and over till my fingers bled, escape her disapproval. But as in a nightmare, I was rooted to the spot.

  “It is so frustrating being friends with you sometimes,” she went on, her tone clipped, no-nonsense. “I know you keep people at a distance, whatever, that’s just your personality, but it’s getting harder and harder to connect to you at all.”

  Listening to her complain about me, I felt numb. Like I was floating above the conversation between our two telephones. She was frustrated with me. I was resentful of her. And I couldn’t think of a single way to fix it. It was just the way it was.

  “I care about you, Joy…but I don’t see how I could be your friend, let alone best friend, if you don’t start telling me what’s going on in your head.” She exhaled noisily. “Why don’t you talk to me, and let me help you?”

  “Because you don’t know me well enough to help me.” The words slipped out before I could stop them. They weren’t angry or baiting, like Icka. Just an honest observation on three years of lopsided friendship. Three years of her talking and me listening. Of her leading and me following. Of her wishing and me granting. She was sick of it? Well, I was sick of it too. And even if there were no solutions, it was a relief to say it out loud. I fumbled for the coffee-table lamp and found its metal snap. The living room lit up.

  “What are you talking about, I don’t know you well enough?” She sounded guarded, but curious too.

  “I mean, you’re right.” I was shocked by my own calm. “You’re right that I don’t let you in.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  “I guess I’m scared that if you knew the real me, you wouldn’t accept me.”

  “You don’t trust me?” She gave a hard laugh. “You don’t trust me. That’s hilarious.”

  “Parker, I’m sorry. It’s not your fault at all. But there’s just some things about me I don’t think you could ever…understand.”

  “Oh, really? Like what, like the fact that you have a little crush on Ben?”

  My stomach turned to ice.

  “It’s okay. Everyone knows, it’s so obvious. The way you look at him…” Dead silence on my end. “I just don’t want you to get hurt, Joy.” Her voice had turned gentle. “I’m sorry, but you’re not his type. He told me. He thinks you’re nice. He said you were the best friend type.”

  “What, and you just believe whatever he tells you?” I sputtered. Who would have thought it would sting so much to have Parker not be mad at me for Ben, not be the slightest bit jealous of me or threatened by me? She just thought my “little crush” was pathetic. A puppy growling and gnawing at a pants leg, harmless, even kind of funny.

  “Of course I believe him. He’s practically my boyfriend!” She seemed flustered. “No offense, but right now you sound like Icka.”

  “Well, it’s better than being your lapdog,” I shot back.

  “My what?”

  “I am not just the best friend type. I’m a person. I’m not a sidekick.” My voice had crept up to higher speeds and registers. I didn’t sound calm anymore.

  “No one ever said you were a sidekick.”

  “You don’t have to say it, Parker. It’s obvious how you all see me, as a follower. A little fan girl. Admit it. You don’t see anything special about me at all!”

  “Oh my god….” Parker sounded like she was dealing with a crazy person. “Where are you getting this from? I have never even suggested you’re not special.”

  “But it’s what you think!” The old unfair argument.

  “Great, so now you’re a mind reader?” She snorted. “First you claim I don’t even know you, and now you supposedly know what I’m thinking? That’s—that’s just crazy.”

  “Maybe it is.” I hugged my own shoulders with my cold hands. “Maybe I’m crazy. But can you honestly tell me you think of me as an equal?”

  Parker hesitated. Then, “I just can’t talk to you right now, Joy,” she said. “You’re acting like a freak.”

  Silence on the line. She was gone. It was over. Mom hadn’t called back in time to help me. She’d never called at all. I’d had to go it alone. Would Mom have advised me to be honest like that and risk losing the friendship? Almost certainly not. And yet I didn’t regret a word I’d said.

  I sat there blinking and gulping, holding the dead, useless phone in my shaking hands.

  Then I knew what I had to do.

  Still shaking a bit, I pulled on my boots, stumbled to the coat closet, zipped up my blue puffy jacket, stuffed wallet (with forty bucks, all I had outside my savings account), cell, and keys into its pockets.

  I ripped a page off the scented, pastel blue pad of note-paper Mom left by the phone. Dad, I scribbled. Thanks for talking to me—I feel MUCH BETTER! Sleeping over at Parker’s tonight. ? XOXO Joy. I slapped a giant ladybug fridge magnet over it and wondered if Dad would even notice I was gone.

  Denny’s was only half a mile away, if you didn’t mind braving dimly lit side streets where creepy child-abductor types could be lurking in any given laurel bush. I was out of breath by the time I pushed through the glass door. The frosted-hair, frosted-lipstick night-shift waitress greeted me with the stinkeye. “Will that be a table for one, miss?” she said, pointedly highlighting the syllable about my age. Here’s hoping this one can afford solid food.

  Jamie caught my eye from a corner table.

  “Thanks,” I said to stinkeye, “but I’m just meeting my friend,” and before she could say (or think) another word, I marched over to where Jamie sat with a glass of Sprite untouched, resting on a place mat covered in doodles. “It’s time for Plan B,” I announced.

  17

  Jamie offered to let me wait at the Denny’s table while he “picked up the car” (again, he was vague as to what that meant). But I was through with waiting.

  “No thanks,” I said. “I’m going with you.”

  The waitress hovered, hoping for a tip that wasn’t in nickels. I drew a ten-dollar bill from my wallet and set it by his glass. We needed good karma.

  In the near-empty parking lot, I found myself scanning each car as a possible target: a Civic, a Neon, a Mustang. The notion that we could soon speed off in one of them made my limbs buzz with a wild new energy. I’d never dared to break a school rule, and now, without blinking, I was going to commit a felony! But I’d reached a point where even jail sounded less awful than sitting on the couch biting my nails, wondering if Icka was okay. “So how does this go?” I rubbed my hands together in the cold, feeling giddy. “I mean, what’s your usual method, pick some old car with no club or alarm system, hotwire it…switch out the plates?”

  Jamie gave me a weird look. “Uh, someone’s been watching too much cable.” His voice was a bit overanimated, bouncy like Tigger from Winnie-the-Pooh. Was he picking up my excitement? He seemed to notice too and backed several feet away from me. “Look, I don’t want to cramp your style,” he said, breaking into a grin, “but my plan was just to borrow Ben’s car.”

  Oh.

  “It’s parked in front of my parents’ house and I have a spare key.” I just pray we get it back before he notices it’s gone.

  “Right,
of course.” I ducked my head and felt a blush come into my cheeks. I’d assumed he’d be willing to steal a car for me, and now he knew I was willing to steal one too. “Lead the way,” I muttered.

  “We’ll take Meridian.” He thumb-gestured left. “Fastest way to my parents’ place.”

  Even through my embarrassment, I couldn’t help but notice that twice in a row he didn’t call it “home.”

  Cars whooshed by on Meridian Avenue, kicking up streaks of dirty rainwater at us as we bounded up the blocks. Jamie’s legs were as long as mine, maybe longer, so for once I didn’t have to slow down my stride for the other person.

  Waiting at an intersection for the walking guy to replace the red hand, he turned to me and said, “So you were ready to commit grand theft auto back there.”

  “Oh, come on, I was kidding.”

  He fixed those golden brown eyes on me. “Then why were you feeling excited?”

  “Augh…that’s so not fair!”

  “I’m sorry.” He held up his hands. “If it freaks you out, I won’t say stuff like that. I’m not used to being able to talk about this.”

  “No, it’s actually okay.” I smiled, then bit my tongue, wishing I could explain that I was already used to Mom and Icka Hearing me, so his using extrasensory perception around me felt normal…in a weird way. Normal by not being normal.

  We pulled off Meridian and into a pocket neighborhood of skinny tract houses. Their two-story sameness depressed me. Strange how Ben’s million-dollar smile, his shiny car, his perfect hair had given me the idea his family was well off. Comfortable, at least. But the street he and Jamie lived on, Pomegranate Lane, could have used more streetlamps. Or a sidewalk. Only a sloping curb separated front yards—many smaller than my bedroom at home—from the potholed street. Several yellowing lawns were adorned with yard cars. Ben’s silver Land Rover, squeezed between a rusty old truck and a green Kia, stood out as the block’s pride.

  “Craigslist,” Jamie explained before I could ask, not that I ever would have dared go there. “He saved up three summers’ worth of lifeguard pay to buy this thing used.”

  I nodded. Made sense that Ben would never let his family’s lack of funds mess up his image. But I didn’t get why Jamie sounded so admiring. What was such a great achievement about buying a stupid car to impress people?

  Wish I could work as a lifeguard. Or as anything. Wish I had a Wall.

  Oh. For the first time it occurred to me: devastating as my new Hearing was, Icka and I were better off than Jamie.

  “That’s the house,” he added, pointing with his chin toward a ranch house with an empty driveway and most lights out.

  “Your folks aren’t home tonight?”

  I wish. “My dad’s always home,” he said. “That’s why we’re not going to get too close.” He fished a set of car keys from his pocket and double-clicked a button to spring the passenger-side door. So much for hotwiring.

  I hesitated. “It’s Saturday night, why isn’t Ben driving his detachable ego?”

  “Because he’s out with Gina. She picks him up in her Miata. Get in.”

  “Wait, Gina Belle?” The school president, my role model of unflappability? “Jesus, is there any girl at Lincoln he’s not hooking up with?”

  Jamie shrugged. “He’s got this weird mojo…it’s the Wall thing, women always fall for him. He can sneak a peek at what they’re feeling, but he closes off before it can get to him.”

  I shrugged like I’d never noticed, never fallen for it myself.

  Then again…had I really fallen for Ben? My crush on him was about a lot of things—some of them messed-up things, like being jealous of Parker or keeping my desires secret even from myself. But was it about Ben? I’d hardly known the real him anyway.

  “Come on.” Jamie was holding the car door open for me. No one had ever done that. “I want us out of my Dad’s Wave-range.”

  As we pulled out of the parking spot, I thought I saw a shadow move in the upstairs window, but I told myself to relax. Odds were I was just imagining things.

  I turned to Jamie. “Pearl Street,” I directed. “We’ll stop at my aunt’s house first.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  He surprised me by being a smooth, expert driver. Once on the street, he obeyed every traffic law, even slowing at a yellow light Mom would have run. Made sense when I thought about it logically: If you were breaking a big law, you had to be extra careful to obey the smaller ones so there was no reason to attract a cop’s attention.

  He merged onto the freeway. Now we were just an anonymous car doing the speed limit in the anonymous middle lane. I gazed in wonder at the red taillights all around us. “We made it,” I said. “We’re actually on the freeway. I can’t believe I’m really doing this.”

  “You know, I was pretty surprised you took my offer.” He kept his eyes on the road. “Figured if you ever decided to go through with it, you’d have ten rides lined up in seconds. Boom.”

  “Yeah, well.” I ran my finger along the glove compartment door. “I’ve sort of been reevaluating my friendships lately.”

  “Should we talk about something else?” he cut in. “I really can’t afford for you to get upset while we’re in this car together.”

  “It’s fine.” I sighed. “I’ve had a little time to get used to the idea that my friends all think I’m a pathetic, boring follower.”

  “A boring, average girl,” he recited, “with nothing special about her?”

  I’d almost forgotten that I described myself to him that way a couple of hours ago. I made a face. “It’s different when I say it. They’re supposed to be my best friends, right? Would a true friend think that? I mean, say that,” I added quickly.

  “Probably not. But it sounds like typical drama levels, for a popular clique. I’ve seen much worse.”

  I hated to admit it, but I knew what he meant. My friends hadn’t done anything awful like cut up my clothes or feed me weight-gaining bars, like the characters in Mean Girls. But it was confusing to think they were just “typical” friends instead of good or bad ones. What was I supposed to do with that? It was easier to hate people or love them, I decided, than to feel something mixed up and in-between.

  Jamie cut into my thoughts. “Well, at least you have your sister.”

  “Huh? What do you mean?”

  “I mean if you’d steal a car for her, that implies you’re pretty close, right?” He laughed.

  “Or that I’m insane.”

  “I wasn’t going to go there, but—”

  “We’re not friends, me and Icka,” I said. “I stopped being her friend a long time ago.”

  “What happened?”

  “What happened…” I shifted in my seat. No one had ever asked me before what happened between me and Icka. People just took it for granted that Icka was to blame for our estrangement. But Jamie wouldn’t have assumed that; he didn’t see me as a sweet, innocent angel. “It was me,” I admitted. “I was about eleven when everything came together for me.” I learned to use my Hearing to fit in. “I sort of figured out what other people wanted me to do. How to dress. How to act. How to talk, even.” Suddenly my voice was getting lower and faster, like I couldn’t get the words out fast enough. He didn’t interrupt, just kept driving, listening. “By middle school I was a pro at acting normal. And people just forgot that I’d been this shy, spacey, nervous little kid. I was popular. I started looking at my sister the way my friends saw her. I had to…” I swallowed. “I had to move on from her. And it took so long for her to get it. To give up. She just kept on trying to be close to me. She’d call my cell from home and ask if I’d be back in time to watch a movie with her. Once she knocked on my door with these giant oatmeal cookies and said she made one for each of us…I haven’t thought about that in years.”

  “Joy, stop feeling guilty. It’s not your fault Icka’s messed up.”

  “But I shut her out. I hated her…. Yesterday, I told her that the world would be a better place without
her in it.”

  He leaned left, glanced out his window, whistled under his breath, then turned back to me. “Ouch. But still, so what? Everyone gets mad at their siblings. Look at Ben and me. I punched him in the face, he pretends he doesn’t know me at school. At home we still look out for each other. Wow,” he said, “you really don’t like him.”

  I shrugged and pursed my lips.

  “He’s not the greatest, but he’s not Satan. And from what I can tell, you’re not a bad person either, Joy.”

  There it was again, the uncomfortable space in between. Between good and evil. The gloomy gray. For the first time I could really see why someone would want to embrace being truly bad—at least then you wouldn’t have to slog around in this confusing, icky middle ground.

  “What if she believed me, though?” I traced my fingers on the numbers of the clock radio: 9. 4. 1. “That the world would be a better place without her. What if she decided it was true?”

  “What if she did? Can’t be the first time that thought’s occurred to her. I guarantee it.”

  I stared at him. Was he implying…

  “You’re all shocked,” he said. “But you shouldn’t be. Come on, of course I think about it. The world would be a better place without some guy walking around who can mirror rage and hatred.”

  “But you can also mirror love and happiness….”

  He shrugged off love and happiness. “There isn’t as much of that stuff floating around. You saw me today. What scares me most is thinking I could become a shooter.”

  I felt a chill. “You would never let that happen. I know you wouldn’t.”

  “What if I couldn’t stop it?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know, but that’s just not who you are. You’re not a killer.”

  “You don’t know me that well yet.”

  “Maybe, but I’ve been Listening to—” I stopped. I almost told him I’d been Hearing his thoughts. “I mean, look how you’re helping me right now,” I covered. “My world’s better with you in it.”