Deadly Little Voices

by Laurie Faria Stolarz

  You need to stop doing pottery.”

  “Cold turkey?” Wes asks. “I mean, shouldn’t she try the patch first?”

  “In the form of Play-Doh and really malleable gummy worms, maybe.” Kimmie giggles.

  “I can’t stop doing pottery,” I tell them. “It’s a part of who I am.”

  “Sort of like how you always insist on dressing like a Gap ad,” Wes says, giving my jeans and basic tee a once-over.

  “Since when are you one to talk about style?” Kimmie says, coming to my defense. She raises an eyebrow at his sheepskin boots.

  “Plus, it wouldn’t even matter,” I say, interrupting their banter. “Last night I wasn’t even doing pottery—just having a dream about it—when I heard voices as well.”

  “That’s actually not so hard to believe,” Wes says, rifling through my night-table drawer.

  He snags a sleep mask and slips it on. “I mean, that’s kind of what happens when you dream kinky stuff, too. Your body—God bless it—believes the dream. The next thing you know, you’re changing into a new pair of sweats.”

  “Ewwww,” Kimmie says, covering her eyes as if that could blot out the less-than-lovely image that Wes has ever so kindly painted for us.

  “So, then, if avoiding pottery won’t even solve the

  there-are-crazy-voices-inside-my-head issue, is there any way to adapt to the voices?” Wes asks, pulling off the sleep mask. “Sort of like how I adapt to my father being such a meddling and narrow-minded prick?”

  “I don’t know.” I pop a lemon Starburst into my mouth. “I mean, today, in sculpture class, I completely zoned out. It was like I was someplace else entirely. Not exactly capable of voices-in-my-head adaptation.”

  “Well, I still think taking a hiatus from pottery might be a good first step,” Kimmie says, pulling a copy of TeenEdge from her bag. “You could fake a sprained wrist. I’m sure we could make a legit-looking doctor’s note. Because, let’s face it, there’s way more to life than voice-activated premonitions and seizurelike fits, right?” She flips to an article titled “Pre-prom Planning Made Easy.”

  “Maybe you could talk to your aunt,” Wes suggests.

  “I’d like to,” I say, finally deciding to fill them in on what happened last night, when Aunt Alexia found me huddled on the floor of the linen closet.

  “And we’re just hearing about this now?” Wes asks.

  I shrug and look away, hoping that telling them was the right choice. The truth is that when I heard my aunt was coming to stay with us for a bit, I imagined things a whole lot differently—I thought that she’d be the one I’d talk to about this stuff, that we’d be able to help each other in extraordinary ways, and understand each other as no one else could.

  “What’s this?” Wes asks, reaching further inside my drawer. He pulls out Aunt Alexia’s diary and runs his fingers over the cover, where it’s been torn and patched over.

  “What does it look like?” I point at her name, written across the front.

  “Yes, but what are you doing with it?”

  “I found it,” I say, proceeding to explain that I came across the diary several months ago, while putting away holiday decorations in the attic. “It’s from when Aunt Alexia was a teen—when people started labeling her as crazy and when she started having brushes with psychometry.” At least, I think psychometry was to blame for a lot of her issues.

  “And what was it doing in your attic?” Kimmie asks.

  “There’s actually a bunch of my aunt’s stuff stored up there…ever since the first time she was admitted to a mental facility.”

  “Talk about depressing,” Kimmie says, flashing me a picture from her magazine of a girl wearing a strapless dress made of duct tape. Whether she’s referring to the dress or my aunt’s journal, I have absolutely no idea.

  “You know what’s really depressing?” I say, watching Wes read one of the entries near the end of the journal.

  “Even more depressing than fantasies involving a pretty pink dress, sparkly gold shoes, and carbon-monoxide-induced sleep?” he asks. Then he begins to read: “Dear Diary, I’ve never felt more alone in my entire life. I feel like a victim of what’s going on in my head. Like my head is independent of my body, tormenting me, punishing me, telling me things that I don’t understand. I plug my ears up with cotton until they ache and bleed. I blast music, dance around my room, stick my head between my knees when everything feels too dizzy. I also chant to myself: I can’t hear you, I can’t hear you. You can’t hurt me. No one hurts me. But nothing seems to work. I need to try something else. I need to end this madness.” Wes snaps the journal shut and shoves it back inside my drawer.

  “Well, that was cheerful,” Kimmie says.

  I swallow hard, thinking that, as crazy as that entry sounds, I can understand what my aunt was feeling. And that’s what terrifies me most. “The voices in my head have been hinting that I should kill myself, too,” I tell them.

  “Hinting…because they practice the art of subtlety?” Wes asks.

  “Okay, so we seriously need to figure out a way to stop this so-called superpower,”

  Kimmie says, finally closing the cover of her magazine.

  “Even if I could stop it, would that be the right answer, either? I mean, maybe the voices aren’t telling me to do it. Maybe there’s someone else involved here—someone who’s thinking about doing something drastic.”

  “Give it a little time,” Wes says, “and with a few more voices crammed into your head, a couple nights spent reading morbid diary entries—not to mention Auntie Recluse in the next room over—you’ll be thinking about doing something drastic, too.”

  I feed my funk with a three-stack of Starbursts, hoping that what’s been happening is indeed a symptom of psychometry, that there’s a logical explanation as to why the voices and the visions have been coming to me (if psychometry can even be considered somewhat logical).

  Because I’m terrified of the alternative: voices plus hallucinations plus me equals crazy.

  “Ever think that the voices might have something to do with your aunt?” Wes adds.

  “Especially if they concern suicide?”

  “Doubtful. The voices tell me how talentless I am, how ugly I look, and that I should basically be maggot feed. My aunt would never say those things.”

  “And you’re sure you’re not just eavesdropping on the conversations that my dad has with me?” he asks.

  “Very funny,” I say, joining Kimmie on the bed and noticing how suddenly sullen she looks—as if she had run out of spandex fabric just stitches away from finishing a dress.

  “What were you dreaming about sculpting, anyway?” Wes asks.

  “A figure skater,” I say, picturing the piece in my mind—the way the skater’s leg extends backward, and how her arms cross in front of the chest. “It’s something I’ve been working on, something I began just a few days ago in my basement studio—before I started dreaming about it, that is.”

  “A female?” Kimmie asks.

  I nod, remembering the pair of ice skates in front of the girls’ locker room during my hallucination in sculpture class.

  “So, does this mean we should be on the lookout for suicidal skaters?” Wes asks, seemingly serious.

  I bite my lip, beyond confused. On one hand it feels really good to tell them stuff, but still, no matter how hard I try to explain what’s been going on, I can’t possibly expect them to understand what I can barely make sense of myself.

  “Perhaps here lies the root of your whacked-out dream,” Kimmie says, plucking my long-lost doll out from under my covers. Kimmie flips the doll’s dress up, revealing dirty rubber knees and a stray pen mark on the belly. “Since when do you sleep with dolls?”

  “Hey, don’t knock it till you try it,” Wes says with a wink. “I’ve got a life-size Princess Leia pillow that I’ve been known to cuddle on occasion…especially on those cold and lonely nights in front of the fire.”

  “Miss Dream Baby,” I s
ay, ignoring his chatter. “That’s what I named her when I was little.”

  “Miss Nightmare Baby might have been more appropriate,” he says.

  “She’d been missing for years,” I tell them. “But I found her in my room last night.”

  “Found her?” Kimmie’s barbell-pierced eyebrow rises. She peers around at my room.

  Aside from a couple of sweatshirts piled up on my dresser and a few pairs of shoes strewn about the floor, it’s actually pretty neat.

  “I think my aunt had the doll all this time,” I explain.

  “So, let me get this straight,” Wes says. “Your escaped mental patient of an aunt stole your baby doll when you were little, kept it for some twisted amount of time, and then snuck into your room last night and left it here for you?”

  “Okay, first of all, my aunt is hardly an escapee. She was legitimately released into my mother’s care. And, secondly, I found the doll by accident—by stepping on it in a pile of clothes and recognizing the familiar squeak.”

  Kimmie pushes the doll’s belly and it lets out a catlike cry. “As if things couldn’t get more creeptastic.”

  “Almost as creeptastic as that noise,” Wes says, nodding toward the wall that separates my room from Aunt Alexia’s, where we can suddenly hear a scratching sound, like fingernails against wooden panels.

  “Ignore it,” I say, wondering if Alexia might be trying to listen in on our conversation through the wall. “It comes and goes at various points of the day—ever since my aunt moved in.” Apparently she isn’t sleeping after all.

  “Well, if that isn’t enough to drive you nuts…” Wes says. “Who needs voices in their head and public displays of convulsions?”

  “I know,” I whisper, wondering what it would actually take for me to get to that tipping point—another month of voices? Another year? And where will Kimmie and Wes be then? Still by my side? Or tired of my drama? Or maybe even fearful of me? The way I’ve become fearful of my aunt?

  I grab Miss Dream Baby and hug her against my chest, thinking how it was only a couple of months ago that I visited my aunt in Detroit—when we talked a bit, and painted together, and when she showed me her art.

  So, what happened?

  Why is she like a stranger in my house?

  And why can’t I get over this anger? As stupid and irrational and embarrassing as it is to admit, part of me—my six-year-old self—can’t help feeling angry that she had my doll all this time.

  “What’s up with the X’s?” Wes nods toward the marks made over the doll’s ears.

  “I’m not sure, but I suspect that the answer might have something to do with hearing voices.”

  “Do you think she did it recently?” Kimmie runs her finger over the marks, trying to rub off some of the ink.

  “Like, maybe somehow she knew you were hearing voices, too?” Wes says, all but frothing at the mouth at his theory. “And this doll is part of some weird and twisted voodoo spell to make those voices go away? You know Van Gogh cut his ear off, right?”

  “For the record, it was just his earlobe,” I say.

  “And is there a point to this random piece of trivia?” Kimmie asks.

  “Are you kidding? There’s nothing random about it,” Wes says. “An artist, rumored to have suffered from major mental illness, cuts off his ear…”

  “Meaning you think Van Gogh was hearing voices, too?” I ask.

  “It’s possible,” he says, giving a happy tug to his earlobe.

  “Just curious, but were you dropped on your head at birth?” Kimmie asks him.

  “Anyway,” I say, getting us back on track, “it must’ve been pretty important to Aunt Alexia that I got the doll back. I mean, she hardly even comes out of the guest room.”

  “That you know of,” Wes says, correcting me. “Maybe she merely dropped it while stalking around in your room while you slept.”

  “But then why tuck me in with it?” I ask, noticing how the doll’s eyelids (the kind that open and close) are much droopier than I remember, and how it appears as if the lashes have all been plucked out. I glance in my dresser mirror, picturing the word BITCH scribbled over my reflection—when my ex-boyfriend Matt broke into my room several months ago and wrote it across the surface in bloodred lipstick. Is it a coincidence that the words DIE ALREADY, WILL

  YOU?! were scribbled across the locker-room mirror in my hallucination?

  “Well, I still think we need to figure out a way to stop all of this touch stuff.” Kimmie wraps her arm around my shoulder. “But don’t even think I’m going to let you sleep alone tonight.”

  “Planning a sleepover?” Wes perks up.

  “I’ll tell my mom we’re working on a research thing,” Kimmie tells me.

  “I, on the other hand, will need no excuse,” Wes says. “Dad will be as giddy as a zitless schoolgirl to hear about our threesome. What time shall I bring my pj’s? They’re Iron Man–themed, by the way, which is totally appropriate, when you think about it.” He winks.

  “You’re so mentally disturbed,” Kimmie tells him.

  “And speaking of…Camelia, what’s it going to take for you to get some mental help?”

  Wes asks. “No offense.”

  “None taken,” I say, pulling Ms. Beady’s sticky note from my pocket. “I need to call this doctor. Apparently, she works at Hayden and knows a thing or two about all things psychic.”

  “Hayden as in, where Adam goes to school?” Kimmie asks.

  “Nothing like multitasking,” Wes says. “A little psychic talk on the shrink’s couch, followed by pillow talk on Adam’s.”

  “And what do you think our favorite touch boy would have to say about all this?”

  Kimmie asks.

  “Do you really think Benny Boy needs to know about Camelia’s occupancy on Adam’s love couch?” Wes asks.

  “I was actually referring to Camelia’s recent bout of hearing-voices syndrome,” Kimmie says. “Don’t you think he ought to know about it?”

  “Wasn’t it you who said I should be mourning?” I ask her.

  “Okay, so I didn’t want to bring this up,” she says, “but since we’re sort of talking about him anyway—”

  “Rumor has it that Ben’s seeing someone else,” Wes blurts.

  “But it’s totally false,” Kimmie says, flicking a Starburst at his head. “I mean, let’s not

  forget that he could barely even lay a finger on Camelia without going into a touch-induced tizzy.”

  “Unless, of course, he only tizzies with Chameleon,” Wes ponders aloud.

  “We all know that isn’t true,” I say, thinking about Ben’s past with his girlfriend Julie—when he touched her on the cliff that day. “Do we know who he’s supposedly seeing?”

  “Not yet,” Wes says, “but I’ve got calls in to all my connections.”

  “Within the geek community,” Kimmie says, blowing him a kiss.

  “Of which you’re the current president.” He blows a kiss back at her. “Anyway, I should know within the hour.” He checks his cell phone for messages.

  I gaze down at my hands, feeling my heart tighten. It’s not that I don’t want Ben to be happy. It’s just that a part of me can’t help feeling jealous—the part that wants him to be happy only with me.

  “I’m just thinking it might be a good idea to keep the lines of communication open with Ben,” Kimmie says. “If not for your heart, then for the sake of your head.”

  “Not to mention your other body parts,” Wes jokes.

  “I just mean, considering everything that’s going on with you right now,” Kimmie continues, “it might not be the best time to stop all communication with Ben.”

  “No one’s stopping anything,” I tell her. “And it’s not that I don’t want Ben to know what’s been going on with me. It’s just that his power works a lot differently from mine. Don’t you think I should be focusing my attention on finding someone who knows exactly what I’m going through?”

  “Someone beside
s your ear-hating aunt, you mean?” Wes says, smooching Miss Dream Baby’s ear. “With all due respect, of course.”

  “Of course,” I say, looking down at the sticky note again, knowing full well how crazy my whole story sounds.

  And only half believing that I’m not going crazy, too.

  WHILE WES DRIVES KIMMIE home to get her stuff, I remain in my room, wondering if Aunt Alexia might be open to talking to me.

  I get up from the bed and place my ear against our shared wall, accidentally kicking one of my strewn shoes in the process; the wooden heel knocks into the wall.

  My heart tightens and I hold my breath, hoping she doesn’t think it was me knocking, trying to get her attention.

  A moment later, a clanking noise comes from her room. I huddle in closer, trying to hear something more. The scratching sound has returned. “Camelia?” a voice asks. I start and then turn to look, surprised to find my dad standing just behind me. “What are you doing?” he asks with a grin.

  My pulse racing, I look back at the wall. The scratching sound has stopped now, but I honestly have no words.

  He studies me for several moments, then asks if I’m hungry. “Your mother won’t be home for another hour,” he says, flashing me a bag from Taco Bell. The smell of chicken chalupas calls out to me.

  I follow Dad into the hall. He stops in front of the guest room door and knocks a couple of times. It takes a moment for Aunt Alexia to answer; her door creaks open with an eerie whine.

  Dressed in a loose cotton dress and a pair of leggings, she stares at me as Dad talks to her.

  “Care to join us for a little snack?” he asks her, holding the bag up. “I got enough for all of us.”

  She hesitates, as if considering the idea, but then shakes her head, still gazing at me.

  “Maybe some other time.”

  Dad nods and tells her that we’ll be in the kitchen if she changes her mind. I start to follow him, noticing that Aunt Alexia continues to watch me. She tries to be sneaky about it, closing the door most of the way, peeking out through the crack; plus she’s switched her room light off.

  But I can still see her there: a sliver of white that cuts through the darkness, sending shivers all over my skin.