Whisper to Me

by Nick Lake

  “Life goes on” would be the simpler way to say this. But I don’t like those kinds of expressions; they’re so old that they’ve gotten worn and faded, and they don’t really convey what they’re supposed to mean anymore. And it doesn’t tell you anything. Life is always going on, for the living anyway.

  Instead, what happens is that things accrete, tiny things, tiny experiences, going to the bathroom, doing makeup, getting dressed, walking places, and they end up covering the shape of the dead person, filling it in, like little bricks, tiny, until the hole is almost filled up and you realize that you’re forgetting, and that makes you feel even worse.

  I didn’t want to feel bad anymore though.

  And so …

  Slowly …

  Surely …

  I just stopped myself from feeling stuff. From thinking about the killers, about justice, about revenge. I edited my memory. Deleted the part where I lifted her head, where I killed her.

  Well.

  I thought I had anyway.

  It turns out that all I did was push this stuff way inside, tamp it down, squash it, until just like old shrimps and stuff got slicked into oil, far underground, the pain got transmuted into something black and liquid, running through the crevices of my mind.

  The voice.

  Four things happened after my unfortunate hospitalization with anaphylaxis:

  1. Dad banned me from ever seeing Paris again.

  2. Dad banned me from eating any food outside the house.

  3. Dad tried to ban me from leaving the house at all, and I screamed so much he ended up backing down.

  4. I remembered, when I got home, why I had taken my eye off the ball in the first place, why I had eaten the candy bar.

  5. I knew why the voice had come. Because I had killed my mother and the voice was angry with me. Dr. Lewis was right. The voice was my mother. Or it was the part of me that hated myself, the part that I didn’t want to acknowledge. I was punishing myself.

  6. This insight did not help. The voice came back but hard.

  7. I know I said four things.

  8. Yeah, yeah.

  9. Whatever.

  10. It’s my list.

  5. FREEDOM. Challenge the power of the voice and establish dominance over it.

  Round two.

  It was weird.

  I knew now what my trauma was: I knew, I mean consciously knew, that I had killed my mother. That it was my fault that my mother was dead.

  But here’s the thing: you would think that would be terrible … only knowing that somehow made it easier, not harder. Because now that it was out in the open—I mean, the open inside my head, if that’s a thing—I could at least talk to myself about it.

  I could say to myself,

  “But, Cass, she would have died anyway.”

  I could say to myself,

  “But, Cass, you saw her eyes. She was gone. The doctors said there was nothing anyone could have done.”

  And I didn’t really believe it, but at least I could talk to myself about it.

  Not out loud of course. That would have been crazy.

  HAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

  So … mentally, I was doing a bit better. I hated being basically grounded and I wanted to see Paris, and wanted more than I could even admit to myself to see you … but in my head, in the echo chamber of my mind, I was improving.

  I realized, too, that I had been wrong—I mean, I had known there was something in Ovid, but I was looking for the wrong thing. I had been looking for Echo in the voice that I heard, when I should have been looking at myself. Ever since Mom died I had been Pygmalion’s statue—a girl who had been a solid object, an ivory girl—and now I had come to life, like Venus made Pygmalion’s statue come to life, and it was painful and amazing at the same time.

  Dr. Rezwari was pleased with my progress. I went to see her in her strange empty room, with its shelves of books, and she said I was responding very well to the drugs. This was funny because I was NOT TAKING ANY. But I was lucky: I think I looked so dopey from the anaphylaxis and being generally tired and emotional that I looked like someone who was taking powerful antipsychotics.

  “And do you ever hear the voice these days?” she asked.

  “No,” I lied.

  “That’s excellent,” said Dr. Rezwari. “Excellent.” Then she sent me home. Whether I heard the voice: that was the only thing she cared about. Not what might have caused it.

  The day after that I was in my room. Dad was outside, on a ladder leaning against the wall, painting the window frames. He liked to do it in summer, when it was sunny. But not too hot, because then the paint would dry too quickly and crack. He wasn’t painting my window, he was doing his one, the next one along.

  “Walk into the wall, *****,” said the voice.

  “Hello,” I said. “How nice to hear—”

  “Walk into the wall or your dad falls off the ladder.”

  Deep breath.

  “It’s two p.m. I’d really rather you spoke to me only after—”

  “He’ll break both his legs. Walk into the wall. Right now.”

  I don’t know why I did it. I really don’t. Maybe because the voice told me to eat the candy bar, and it really could have killed me? Anyway. I said,

  “No.”

  “What?” said the voice.

  “No. I won’t walk into the wall.”

  “Are you ****** serious? Both legs, Cass. You want to hurt him like you hurt your mother?”

  Rage filled me suddenly. I pictured it like redness rising up my eyes, flooding them. “Fuck you,” I said.

  “Last chance,” said the voice.

  Fear was fingers clasped tight on my body, shaking it. “No,” I said.

  I waited.

  The clock on the wall—Peter Rabbit, from when I was small—ticked and ticked, chopping up time into seconds.

  I could hear Dad whistling as he painted. The Beach Boys. “God Only Knows.” He and Mom had it at their wedding. I smiled a little. I listened for the sound of his ladder slipping, him falling, the scream when he hit the ground.

  Nothing.

  “Are you there?” I asked the voice.

  Silence.

  The voice was gone.

  AND SUPER UNSURPRISING CAPS-LOCK SPOILER ALERT: Dad did not fall off the ladder.

  DR. LEWIS: (eating a cookie) Of course, the voice didn’t threaten you.

  ME: Huh?

  DR. LEWIS: It threatened your father.

  ME: Yes.

  DR. LEWIS: The next test, I think, is to resist the voice when it is you it’s threatening.

  ME: I … I …

  DR. LEWIS: You’re still afraid of it, yes?

  ME: (silence)

  DR. LEWIS: You still believe it could hurt you.

  ME: I guess.

  DR. LEWIS: So what happened when your father didn’t fall off the ladder?

  ME: Maybe the voice decided not to do it.

  DR. LEWIS: No. It couldn’t do it. Because it’s part of you. It has no supernatural powers.

  ME: (thinking of the compasses, of the moment when Shane rolled over and scratched himself and I saw his junk, all wrinkly and gross) Hmm.

  DR. LEWIS: What I want you to do is, next time the voice threatens you, suggests some specific punishment … I want you to call it. Like in a poker game. Call it, and see if it can really do it. If it can’t, you start to get your life back.

  ME: You make it sound so easy.

  DR. LEWIS: Oh, no. No, it won’t be easy. But what is?

  It wasn’t all bad though.

  I didn’t see you apart from a couple of glimpses out of the window, and that sucked. And I didn’t hear much from Paris, and that sucked too.

  But then one day she texted me like five times.

  Hey hun come to the roller derby tonite it’s the final & Julie is skating. It’ll be fun! I promise.

  I know your dad’s working tonite b/c I asked in the restaurant. I pretended that I wanted a job as a server. HAHAHA
HAHAHA. Once I worked in a burger joint & I got fired b/c I kept eating the burgers and I accidentally kissed the short-order cook.

  Hello? OK it wasn’t an accident it was totally deliberate but he was hot.

  Hun? OK OK OK also I sprayed MEAT IS MURDER on the front window. I was confused, I was going through some stuff, OK?

  And, okay, that made me laugh. Then the last one dropped the joke:

  Roller derby. Tonite. Be there. I want you there. Please?

  I wanted to reply. I wanted so badly to reply. But there was my dad, and my work with the voice and … and I didn’t.

  But Paris wasn’t going to take no for an answer that easily, and maybe half an hour after my dad went out that evening, there was a ring at the door. I went to it thinking it would be Paris but it wasn’t, it was you.

  “Hey,” you said. You looked super awkward.

  “Hey,” I said.

  (I have just had a call from Spielberg saying he wants to option this conversation for a tentpole movie next year. I have said yes. Hope that’s okay.)

  “Um, Paris sent me,” you said. “Is your dad here?”

  “No.”

  “Oh good. Um …”

  “She sent you to take me to the roller derby, right?” I asked.

  “Yeah.” You shuffled a bit. You looked good. You were wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, and your hair looked like you’d slept on it but still … you looked good. Hot, actually. God, I am curling up inside writing this. “She’s totally amped up about it,” you said. “She really wants you there. I’m supposed to drive you in the pickup.”

  I looked over at the road, where your white Ford was parked under a streetlight. I sighed, but only inside, so you wouldn’t hear. “Well, I do love that pickup,” I said. “But my dad …”

  “Is out till late, right? He told me earlier.”

  “I’m supposed to be grounded.”

  “Why?” you asked. “What did you do?”

  “Nothing,” I said.

  “Mysterious,” you said.

  “Yeah.”

  Then one of our classic awkward silences.

  “Come on,” you said. “How can you resist a trip in that sweet ride of mine?” You gestured at the pickup.

  “It’s tough, I’ll give you that,” I said. “It’s the big Piers logo that really makes it.”

  You smiled. The world got a bit brighter. “Please?”

  I sighed. “Well if you say please … Fine. Let me get my Vans.”

  “Awesome,” you said, a bit too enthusiastically. Then you paused. “Um, I mean, for Paris …”

  I saw the embarrassment on your face, and inside I smiled. I grabbed my shoes and slipped them on and then you let me into the passenger seat of the F-150. It was still clean in there; I was kind of surprised. I figured, you know, seventeen-year-old boy in a pickup. I thought there would be McDonald’s bags and whatever. Eighteen-year-old? I’ve just realized I don’t know how old you are. But you’ve finished high school—so you have to be eighteen or nineteen, right?

  I digress.

  You drove us in your spookily clean pickup to what I thought was going to be some cool velodrome-type place but was actually a high school gym on the outer edge of town.

  “It’s a gym,” I said, as we parked the truck and got out.

  “Yeah.”

  “Disappointing.”

  “Hmm,” you said. “I was picturing an arena with, like, sloping sides.”

  “Me too. Same exact thing.”

  “Oh well,” you said. “It’s—”

  But I never knew what it was because …

  “CASS! CASS, YOU ******** ****! CASS, I ********* LOVE YOU, YOU SPECTACULAR ******* PERSON! ****.”

  Paris ran over. She had been standing in the shadows outside the gym, invisible, and I guessed we were late because there was no one else out there in the parking lot but light was coming from the windows of the gym. She picked me up and spun me around.

  “You came!” she said.

  “Evidently,” I said. But I couldn’t help smiling.

  “I knew you couldn’t resist him.”

  “Actually,” I said. “It was his sweet ride.”

  Paris looked over at the pickup, nodded sagely. “The iconography of the Piers has ever been potent. Once I hooked up with a guy just because he was wearing one of those mascot costumes. You know, the Piers dolphins?”

  “Ha-ha,” you said.

  “No,” said Paris. “That’s actually true.”

  “When he was in the costume?” I asked.

  “Well,” said Paris, “he took the head off.”

  “Wow,” you said.

  “Follow,” said Paris, gesturing to the gym. “The game is already afoot and we squander precious time.” She led the way through double doors and then down a corridor with lockers running down it. She was carrying a really big purse. Prada, I think? Black leather with a gold clasp thing.

  When we stepped into the hall the roar took me by surprise—the hall was flat, there was no sloping track, but there was a running track around the outside of the hall; it was big, I guess that was why it was chosen, and the bleachers were packed with people.

  The skaters were already racing around the running track, some of them in yellow and black, like wasps, the others in bright red.

  “Which is her team?” I asked.

  “Places first,” said Paris. She pushed past people, alternately charming and elbowing them, until we came to a good spot roughly in the middle, one bench back from the front. A rigged-up fence was between the audience and the skaters, those metal barriers that kind of slot together?

  You know this already. I keep forgetting.

  Anyway, so we sat down and started to watch the … match? Game? I don’t know. I would look it up, but I’m conscious of not wasting your time. Ironic, I know. There were lots of people in the center of the gym, inside the track the skaters were skating around. More skaters, in the same uniforms but not skating. Plus coaches, I think? And also people in black-and-white-checkered tops who I took to be referees.

  “See Julie?” said Paris. She pointed and, yes, I saw her. Yellow-and-black uniform, a helmet with a bright yellow stripe on it, her name emblazoned across her back: ONE THOUSAND MEGA JOULES. “They’re the Oakwood Miss-Spelling Bees,” she said. “Other team is the Wildwood Wild Kittens.”

  “She’s fast,” I said. Julie was behind a pack of the red skaters and closing on them quick.

  “She’s a jammer,” said Paris. “Well, right now, she’s a pivot, but—”

  “Excuse me, what?”

  “It means the jammer can designate her to take over as jammer, if she gets injured or whatever,” you said.

  I raised my eyebrows at you.

  “What? I read up on it.”

  “Suck-up.”

  “Scr—”

  “Children,” said Paris. “No bickering.”

  We watched some more of the play. I couldn’t really follow what was going on. After a minute or so they stopped skating and milled around, and then some of the players swapped with the ones waiting in the center space. It seemed like there were about fifteen girls on the team, but only about five of them were skating at any one time. Julie was one of the ones who stopped … playing? Competing? Skating? Anyway, she stopped. She looked around at the bleachers, finally saw us, and waved. We waved back.

  Meanwhile the skaters were skating.

  “Yeah!” you shouted at one point.

  “Um,” I said. “What happened?”

  “They scored.”

  “Really? How?”

  Paris turned to me. “You really don’t know anything?”

  “Uh, no.”

  “The jammer scores by lapping the pack,” you said. “The blockers from the opposing team try to stop them.”

  I looked at you blankly.

  “The one with the stars on her helmet has to pass the other ones,” said Paris. “Then she scores.”

  “Why didn’t you just say
that?” I asked you.

  You rolled your eyes.

  I watched them play. Now that I had a vague idea of the rules it was easier to understand and I was less bored. There was one more two-minute jam (see, I am all over this stuff now) where Julie sat out, and then she joined the team again. Almost straightaway the jammer shot past the pack and I jumped up and whooped. Okay, I got into it for a bit. I don’t like sports usually, but it was exciting.

  Paris and you stared at me.

  “What?” I said. “They scored. Right? Right?”

  “Yeah,” you said.

  “But you whooped,” said Paris. “You, whooping.”

  “What? I whoop.”

  “You’re not a whooper.”

  “Hey!” I said. “I can whoop.”

  “You don’t strike me as a natural whooper,” you said.

  “Stop saying whooper, both of you!” I said.

  “Maybe you could ask Julie if you could be a cheerleader,” said Paris. “You could follow the team around and—”

  “Shut up.”

  She smiled. It’s a picture I have pinned on the inside of my mind, to look at.

  Then the jammer seemed to lock skates with one of the blocker girls from the Wild Kittens, and went spinning on her back. The play stopped and she hobbled off, and various people talked to one another, and then Julie took off the helmet with the stripe on it and put on one with stars all over it instead.

  “Julie’s the jammer now,” you said.

  “Yeah, I got that, thanks,” I said.

  The previous jammer seemed to be okay. She sat on the ground cross-legged, rubbing her ankle, but didn’t appear to be badly injured. There was a scoreboard up on the wall of the gym, an electronic one. It said:

  BEES 42 KITTENS 50

  So I could see that the other team was winning. But as we watched, even in the first two-minute jam, it was clear that Julie was making a difference. She flew past the Kittens’ blockers a couple of times, and there was a big cheer when she did and Paris cheered too, so I joined in; I mean, I wasn’t going to be the first to whoop. Not after the last time.

  Soon after that it was 50–52 to the Kittens. Really close. There was like one more jam and then it all stopped for some reason; the skaters all went into the middle and huddled, the two teams standing far apart so as not to hear each other. Paris turned to me. “Seriously,” she said, under her breath. “Are you okay? With …” She gave a meaningful look, knowing that you were sitting there too.