I Hope You're Listening

by Tom Ryan

  It is Sibby.

  We order cappuccinos and then grab a table in the corner, both of us making a bigger deal out of taking off our coats than we need to, avoiding one another’s eyes until we’re actually sitting and can’t avoid it any longer.

  I smile, awkward.

  “So how are you?” I ask.

  She nods slowly, affirmatively, before answering.

  “I’m good,” she says. “I’ll be in counselling for the rest of my life, but so far, the adjustment is okay.”

  “Did they—” I hesitate, worried about how to ask, but then I spit it out. “Did they hurt you at all?”

  She shakes her head and looks down at her hands, where they’re wrapped tightly around her mug of coffee. “No. Not in any way that you mean. They took away years of my life. My whole childhood. But they were kind to me. I know they loved me in their messed up way. And I loved them.” Her head lifts and her eyes meet mine again, almost challenging. “It’s complicated.”

  “I understand that,” I say. It’s only partly true. There’s no way I’ll ever fully understand how she feels.

  We fall into silence for a moment.

  “I feel bad for my real parents,” she says after a minute. “This is hard on me, but I think it’s even harder on them.”

  “How are things going?” I ask. “Being back with them, I mean.”

  She smiles, but there’s no joy in it.

  “It’s okay,” she says. “It’s weird. It’s been tough learning who we all are after all these years. My parents seem like they’re walking on eggshells all the time. Greta has been great. This can’t be easy for her, but she manages to act almost normal, unlike the rest of us. She jokes around. She actually talks about what happened—I mean, not just when there’s a therapist present. Sometimes it feels like she’s the only stable person under our roof.”

  “Greta’s a good girl,” I say. “I like her.”

  “She told me to tell you hello,” she says. “My parents wanted to come with me, but I convinced them that I needed to do this on my own.”

  I nod. “They’ll come around,” I say.

  “You’re probably right,” she says. “We’re all just figuring out how I’m supposed to fit back in after ten years.” She pauses, stares at me intently for a moment, as if she’s looking for some kind of answer in my face. “I’m not the person I was back then.”

  “You were a kid,” I say, stating the obvious, since I can’t think of anything else to say. “Now you’re almost an adult.”

  “It’s more than that though,” she says, leaning forward. “I can’t stop thinking about who I would be if this hadn’t happened. I would have been a totally different person, and I’ll never know what that person had in them.”

  My breath catches in my throat.

  The pain on her face drops away and she smiles at me with an expression of understanding. “I guess you’ve been thinking the same thing about yourself,” she says.

  I manage to nod.

  “I guess…” I say finally. “I guess it must work both ways. If I’d been taken instead of you or if it hadn’t happened at all, and we’d both come out of the woods that day, we wouldn’t be the people we are now. The only difference is…” I trail off, and she finishes my sentence for me.

  “We wouldn’t be wondering about it.” I nod, and she reaches across the table and takes my hands. “It doesn’t matter either way. We can’t move backward, so we just have to keep moving.”

  “Did you know who you were?” I blurt, finally making my way to the question I’ve been holding in for so long. “I mean, did you remember that you were Sibby Carmichael?”

  She pulls back into her seat and stares at the ceiling, considering. “I’ve known forever that something was wrong with me, that I was not the person they said I was.”

  “How could you forget in the first place?” I ask.

  She shakes her head, looks at me with a strained expression, as if she’s trying to figure out how to say something in a language she doesn’t understand. That neither of us understand.

  “It’s hard to explain,” she says finally. “I remembered who I was for a while, of course I did, but the Drummonds never called me Sibby or Sibyl. I was out for a long time. I don’t know how long. I must have been drugged. When I woke up, I was in a new bedroom in a new house, and there was a friendly looking couple sitting on the end of the bed smiling down at me, and a cheerful-looking man in a white doctor’s coat, with a stethoscope and a clipboard.

  “They told me I’d been sick, that I’d almost died. I wanted my parents, of course. I wanted my mother. My sister.”

  She glances across the table at me, a fleeting look, almost shy. My stomach drops, terrified of what she’ll say next.

  “I screamed at them, hysterical, asking what had happened to you.”

  I smile, about to shrug it off, when something goes off inside me like a lightbulb, and I feel myself get weak, only vaguely aware of reaching out to grab the edge of the table.

  “I’m sorry,” I manage to choke out. “I’m sorry I couldn’t stop them. I’m sorry I couldn’t keep it from happening to you.”

  She stares at me for a long time, and I worry that I’ve said the wrong thing, but when she speaks again, there are tears on the edge of her voice.

  “None of this is your fault,” she says. “You saved me.”

  She says it with such certainty that it brings me back up for air.

  “You going to be okay?” she asks.

  “Yeah,” I say. “Sorry. I’m fine.”

  “I heard about the other girl,” she says, releasing my hand. “They say that you saved her too. It sounds to me like you have nothing to be sorry about.”

  I nod. “Somehow the pieces all just fit together.”

  “Her father really put her through that for money?” she asks.

  “Looks that way,” I say. “Apparently, he thought Layla could just reappear, with some wild story of escaping from kidnappers, and then he could turn it into media gold. A book deal. TV interviews. The works.”

  “My parents have been getting lots of emails from Quinlee Ellacott,” she says. “She wants me to tell my story on her show.”

  “Of course she does,” I say, rolling my eyes.

  She laughs. “I turned her down, of course. My parents want to find me a lawyer to help me figure out the best way to tell my story, but I told them I trusted you with this.”

  Now that I’m sitting across from her, I can’t believe this is the same person I remember when I was little, the same bossy, confident, adventurous friend who wasn’t scared of anything. This girl couldn’t be more different if she tried, and then I realize that she’s not the same person. She’s totally different.

  She’s eighteen, and she couldn’t be more different from me. In itself, that wouldn’t be so weird, but she’s like nobody in my school. Nobody my age that I’ve ever met.

  I might be far enough away from this world to be completely unique, but even I have connections with the others—common ground, shared experiences. I’ve laughed with people in my class, rolled my eyes about teachers. I’ve gone to hockey games, usually against my better judgment, and ended up cheering for Redfields with everyone else.

  I think about the world that Sibby has inhabited for the past ten years. A quiet, insulated space, speaking to the same two people day in, day out. No school, not the way that we know school. No dances. No boyfriends or girlfriends. No phone. No TV. No computer.

  I’ve heard it said that everything good that happens to you wouldn’t have happened but for every bad thing that happened to you before it.

  But if that’s true, then doesn’t it stand to reason that the opposite is true as well? Wouldn’t another good thing have happened too? Another outcome skimming into more and more outcomes until infinite possibilities are scattered against the edge of time.

  “The girl who was with you,” says Sibby.

  “Sarah?”

  She nods, smiles. �
��Is she your…Are you guys together?”

  I can’t keep a grin from stretching across my face, and her smile widens in response. “Yeah,” I say. “We are. I want you to meet her. I mean really meet her.”

  “I’d love that,” she says.

  “Not to mention that Burke has been driving me crazy, wondering when he’s going to get a chance to see you again.”

  Sibby laughs. “I honestly can’t wait to see how Burke has turned out. It’s so great that you two are still good friends. I feel like I’ve missed out on so much.”

  “We’ll make up for lost time,” I assure her. “I’ll come back with them soon. Or maybe you even want to come to Redfields? We could hang out with Burke and Sarah.” I swallow, force myself to continue. “I know Brianna would really like to see you too.”

  “Would you make that happen?” she asks, and she looks so eager and anxious that it kind of breaks my heart.

  “I will,” I say. “I promise. Let’s get through today and then we’ll start taking things one step at a time.”

  The door jingles, and we both look up to see Jonathan Plank walking into the café, pulling his hat off and unzipping his jacket. He glances around and sees us, then smiles and lifts a hand.

  “That’s the guy?” Sibby asks.

  I nod as he begins to approach our table. “I’m glad you agreed to do this with me,” I say.

  “It’s our story,” she says. “We should tell it together.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  In 2017, I applied for the Lambda Literary Writer’s Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices and was accepted on the basis of three early chapters from this book. I owe everyone involved in the Lambda retreat a huge debt of gratitude, but in particular, I’d like to thank Malinda Lo and the entire young adult cohort for their careful, considerate, and imaginative readings of the work that ultimately became IHYL. Their creative energy stayed with me throughout the entire writing of this book, which I can honestly say would not be half of what it is without their contributions.

  A big thank-you to Eric Smith for his enthusiasm toward this project and for negotiating the deal, as well as everyone at P.S. Literary. Thanks so much to Wendy McClure for taking this book on and for her amazing editorial input. Thanks to the entire Albert Whitman team for their hard work, especially Lisa White, for her great promotional ideas, and Aphee Messer, who totally nailed yet another cover!

  Thank you to my friends in the writing and publishing world; there are too many names to mention, but you know who you are. This business can be tough, and it’s honestly such a joy and a relief to belong to a community of people who get it and who are always ready to celebrate and commiserate as necessary. Thank you to the booksellers, librarians, reviewers, and bloggers who do so much to push and promote my books. I am so grateful for the often-unseen work that you do—please know how much I appreciate it.

  To the readers who keep coming back, book after book, especially the queer teens who write to tell me that they’ve found themselves in my stories, thank you. In all honesty, there is no higher compliment.

  Thank you to my parents, family, and friends who have cheered me on every step of the way.

  Finally, my love and appreciation to Andrew, who is simply the best.

  TOM RYAN is the author of several acclaimed books for young readers, including Keep This to Yourself, the winner of the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Young Adult Crime Novel. His books have been selected for the Junior Library Guild, the ALA Rainbow List, and in 2017 he was a Lambda Literary Fellow. Tom, his husband, and their dog currently divide their time between Ottawa and Nova Scotia. Visit him online at www.tomryanauthor.com.