Whisper (13 page)

Gross Businessman was still leering down his latte, Whispering his gross lust for teens.

“Oh my god, we thought you died or something.” Helena had worried the label off her empty San Pellegrino. “Parker’s here, waiting in line,” she added in a hushed tone, like she was trying not to tip off the paparazzi.

“Guess who
you
just missed seeing?” Bree tossed me a wicked grin. “Your boyyyy-friend!”

I shrugged and averted my eyes from the venti cup containing the milky sweet stuff my stomach had just rejected. Someone had moved my chair—for Princess Parker, I guess—and tossed my messenger bag on the floor. Its strap
was caught under Bree’s chair leg.

“No, seriously, it was him,” Bree went on, apparently tired of waiting for my reaction. “Emo boy just ran through here,
crying his eyes out.
” She puffed out her overly glossed bottom lip and trailed index fingers down her cheeks to show tears. Helena giggled. “All right, Joy, fess up now. Did you break up with Jamie and hurt his wittle feelings?”

At that, both of them cackled till they were out of breath, as if a person crying was the funniest joke in the world. As I gazed at their happy, reddening faces, I felt this weird sense that I was…alone. I’d always pictured “alone” as “not around people,” like Icka on her mermaid rock or Aunt Jane in her rain-forest cabin. But this version of aloneness, surrounded by people you used to think were friends, this was even worse.

“Good-bye,” I said. They just looked at me strangely, like I’d just spoken a line that wasn’t in our script. “I’m going home now,” I continued. “I just threw up.”

That
got a reaction. My so-called BFFs all gasped and shrank away.

Ew, I don’t want her to breathe on me with her sick germs.

I hope she stops acting psycho when she’s well again.

At their total lack of caring, I felt a strange satisfaction. A sense of letting go, like it was okay for me not to care about their feelings either.

Helena and Bree gazed at me with identical simpering faces of “concern.”

“Feel better!” they chorused.

Like you give a damn how I feel, I thought. Hypocrites. My hands shook, the blood thumping in my ears like a battle drum. Blood calling for blood. I bent down, grabbed my messenger bag with both hands, and yanked it, so hard that the strap trapped under Bree’s weight nearly tore off.

“Joy, what are you doing?” Bree was on her feet, glaring. I scooped up my bag, perversely pleased that I’d made her do just what I wanted her to without saying a word.

Helena cleared her throat. “Um…whoa?”
She can stop being rude anytime now.

Why the hell should I? I thought. Being super nice and polite sure hadn’t won me their respect. Maybe rudeness was underrated. I swung the bag across my shoulder and started hoofing it toward the exit, doing my best to ignore the Whisper storm behind me. Maybe storming out was underrated too.

“Joy!” Too late. Parker was waving madly from near the front of the coffee line. Her camel suede jacket looked rumpled, and her eyes looked tired, probably thanks to last night’s fake spider attack. But she was grinning as if seeing me was the best thing that happened to her all day. “Joy, come here.”

No way, I thought. She sounded like she was calling her puppy. And the pathetic truth was that on any other day I would have bounded over to her, wagging my tail. But for once this dog had a wish of her own: getting away from all these other people and their Whispers, pronto. So…why weren’t my legs moving? I glanced at the door, glanced
back at Parker. What was wrong with me? Why did it take so much damn effort for me to
not
grant her desire? Was I that well trained?

The Whispers in the room began buzzing thicker, a hot, heavy stew of sound pouring over me. From the red-haired supermodel type at the bar:
I would rather they’d just told me I was adopted.
From a preschool girl in pink overalls:
And I want ten more Bratz dolls, and a TV for my room….
From the sweet-faced lady knitting by the fireplace:
I hope he leaves that hussy not one red cent.

I must have had a pretty weird look on my face, because Parker slipped out of line and strode up to me. “Hey…you okay?” Her hawk eyes zeroed in on my rain-soaked hair nest. “Um, Joy? Do you need to borrow a hairbrush?”

Normally, her implying I looked sloppy would have crushed my confidence. Today it registered like a gnat sting after a thirty-foot cliff dive. “I just barfed up your favorite coffee drink,” I said, and prepared for her to pull back in disgust, like the others.

But she gasped, “Oh,
no
! That totally sucks, poor you.” Then she whipped out her iPhone. “I’m calling Waverly. She can give you a ride home. You shouldn’t have to take the bus when you’re sick.” Her hand reached out to squeeze my shoulder.
Hope Joy gets better soon.

A lump rose in my throat. Why did Parker have to be nice to me right then? If I was going to bounce out of here and quit being Joy the Fan Girl, then I needed the strength of my anger. My battle drum. Don’t you dare be nice to
me, Parker, I thought, trying to call its energy back to me. You don’t even think of me as an equal! I Heard you! (
There
it was:
ba-boom, ba-boom
.) Ben wouldn’t go for someone like me? Well, news flash, Ben thinks you’re fresh meat, he kissed me,
and
I know your mom used to be a maid!

What would happen if, like Icka, I just gave in to the urge to blurt out painful truths? Powerful truths, like poison inside me. I’d vomit them all over Parker, put the poison into
her
. Melt down her steady gaze. Throw her perfect posture off balance. Force her, for once, to feel like I felt.

“Forget it, don’t bother calling anyone,” I said. Parker stopped in mid dial and squinted at me. “I just…” I swallowed, tried again. “You…I…” And suddenly I knew I didn’t have it in me. I was no Icka, much as I right then wanted to be. I didn’t know how to attack. What to say and how. Where to start. I’d never fought with Parker. Not even about something small. How many times had Parker remarked it was amazing how we always seemed to think alike? How was I supposed to smash her reality, when I’d never even questioned her movie pick? “Just…you know…don’t worry about it, Park.” I hunched my shoulders. “My bus is coming in four minutes anyway.” Trained dog.

Parker hesitated, glanced back at the line, which was longer than ever. “Well, okay…” she said. “But you’ll call me as soon as you get home, right?”

“Sure,” I lied, and told myself she had no right to act like
some big boss and demand I check in with her. Because if I let myself see that she cared about me, it would only make walking away harder.

That was all pure bullshit about the bus. I had no clue of the TriMet schedule. Plus, no way was I planning to board some Whisper-filled public bus. But I had this feeling Parker wouldn’t have been down with letting her poor sick fan girl walk two miles in the drizzling cold. And that was all I wanted to do: go outside, where no one else was stupid enough to be, and slowly make my way home, where I could lock myself in my room and lie in bed, safe in a Whisper-free cocoon…for the rest of my life.

To escape the bustling mall, I cut through a foul, putrid-smelling Dumpster alley behind Whole Foods. Holding my nose was a small price to pay for not Hearing Whispers. On Meridian Avenue, cars zoomed by me as I trudged past strip mall after boring strip mall. Whenever I’d hear a car door open in one of the parking lots or spy someone about to dash out of a store, I’d speed up…till they were out of Hearing range. As I dashed across the street to avoid a lady with grocery bags, it occurred to me that I was using up a lot of extra energy, trying to get from point A to point B without Hearing a Whisper. But it would have been even more taxing to have to Listen.

Come to think of it, maybe that was why Mom’s side of our family—the Hearing side—didn’t seem to include a whole lot of success stories. Maybe Hearing
was
a curse.
Even Aunt Sadie, the famous poker player, had ended up hooked on barbiturates. And Blithe, the deaf-mute painter who’d Seen people’s “most secret longings,” had died in an insane asylum. Mom’s own mother, Granny Rowan, had worried her face into a mess of wrinkles early, doing whatever she Heard Grandpa Rowan wish for. When he died, back when I was in second grade, she only lasted six months before she went too. Her whole life was granting other people’s Whispers. Even her
Whispers
were about other people’s Whispers, as if her mind was all reruns, nothing original…. Wait.

It hit me like a sugar rush. I’d only Heard Granny with my weaker child’s Hearing.

What if there’d been more to her? A whole, complicated person, hidden behind those anxious gray eyes? Behind those ritual warnings:
I wish you’d be careful biking in the street.
I was just a kid. I saw wrinkles and bicycle anxiety. No one had told me there could be more to a person underneath. And now Granny was gone; I’d never know her.

I dragged one foot in front of the other until I finally hit greenbelt, and then houses.

Rainwater had soaked through my sneakers by the time I turned onto Rainbow Street. Upstairs, the round lock on my bedroom door made a satisfying click when I jabbed it with my finger, ten times harder than I needed to. I peeled off my sodden socks and stuffed the ice blocks that were my feet into magenta fun-fur slippers. Then I remembered the slippers were a Christmas present from Bree. I kicked them
off into the wastebasket and pulled on some mismatched socks and the silver boots I wore at the party. Then I went to draw my curtains shut.

Unfortunately, these were the white lace curtains Mom talked me into “choosing” when I was seven. The stupid things were so filmy that shutting them made practically no difference. In the twilight, from my bed, I could still make out the small shapes of the Marshall twins playing and splashing in the puddles in the backyard behind ours. Once I knew it was them, I could even make out some of their Whispers:
I want to play GI Joe.

I want to play hide and seek!

I want to kick him.

My phone rang. I lunged across my desk to grab it. Mom, please be Mom. But when I recognized Parker’s
“Eine Kleine Nachtmusik”
ring, I dropped it on the carpet like a hot lava rock.

Okay, so much for shutting out the world.

Then a lightbulb went off in my head. Leaving the phone where it was, I marched down the hall to Icka’s room.

As always, it was tomblike in there. Cool, dark, still. Reeking of moldering corpses. I sprawled across the organic hemp bedspread and stared up at the mocha brown fabric covering the window wall. Now I finally got it, the point of that fabric. In the silence I could hear my own breath, first loud and fast in my chest, then slower and calmer in my belly. I felt blood returning to my icy fingers and toes. I was seriously beginning to rethink the whole idea of aloneness,
real aloneness, being the worst thing in the world. There were much more painful experiences out there, especially for someone who could Hear. Icka had known that. For years now, she’d been trying to tell me how bad it was. By the end, she’d been screaming at the top of her lungs. Why hadn’t I listened?

Scarlett whined at the door. I opened it and she waddled past me, heading for the foot of Icka’s bed. “Scar, no, you can’t jump that high,” I said, reaching out for her. “I’ll pick you up, okay?” But she dodged me and shuffled onto a short stack of books, then up a slightly higher stack right in front of it, and finally onto a plastic milk crate in front of
that
before clearing the bed. Huh. Here I’d thought all that stuff was just mess, typical Icka mess. But apparently it was a dog staircase.

Scarlett’s cold nose nudged my hands, like she was starving for attention, which, come to think of it, she probably was. “You actually miss her, don’t you?” I patted the cinnamon-colored fur on Scar’s neck. “If you could think in words, you’d wish she was here.” I lay back in the semi-darkness, and the dog nestled her warm head in my lap. I closed my eyes.

A bright light went on. “Wish you’d finally wake the fuck up, Joy-Joy!” said a sarcastic voice.

Icka. Through bleary eyes I saw her standing over my bed—her bed—in clothes I’d never seen before, a pink tie-dyed peasant skirt and checked lumberjack flannel, gleefully mismatched. “I can’t wait to be free like Aunt Jane.” To
my groggy ears it felt like her voice was washing toward me from every direction, like surround sound in a theater. “I want to start fresh, be a whole new person like Aunt Jane said I could.” Her white face loomed over me, Granny Rowan’s solemn all-seeing eyes…and no mouth.
Just hope these guys can help me find oblivion.

Speechless, I looked down at her feet, avoiding the ruined face that so resembled mine. She was wearing the silver boots. They shone like the moon. But, no, wait,
I
was wearing those boots now. Or was I still—

I wish you’d wake up and find me. I don’t want it to end like this.
Her bony hand reached out for mine, but before we could touch she seemed to fall away. Gasping, I instinctively reached out to her from the bed, but all I connected with was cold, slimy seawater.

Then the bed was gone. Icka’s room was gone. I was far away, standing on top of Haystack Rock at Cannon Beach. Staring down at the stormy sea as her blond head vanished under its waves.

I shot off the bed. “What’s going on?” I yelled. “Icka, are you there?” Scarlett barked sternly, as if to say, “It’s bad enough she’s gone and left me, do you have to rub it in?” But I kept going, shouting at empty air. “Where are you, Icka? What’s going on? Can you hear me? What do you mean, oblivion?” The air wouldn’t answer.

Icka’s game, her stupid Hope and Faith game from years ago, hadn’t worked. I’d never Heard her once. Not when she injured herself at the construction site. Not when she lay across the tracks. So how could it be working now?

Where was she?

Was she in
real
trouble?

Back in my room, I picked up my phone with shaking hands. There were two fresh texts from Parker: where r u?? and r u ok??? I ignored them and hit speed dial one.

“You’ve reached Kelli Stefani—” I punched star star. “Mom,” I croaked. “Call me back, it’s about Icka! I think she might be…in trouble.” I winced. Saying Icka might be in trouble was like saying Kobe Bryant might have scored a few points in last night’s game. “She could be in danger,” I amended. Let Mom think I was jumping to conclusions, being a paranoid worrywart like Granny Rowan. I should have called right after I Heard her in the bathroom. How could I have been so selfish, so caught up in my own stupid problems that I never bothered to check if my sister was all right? I didn’t want to waste time waiting for Mom to call back. Aunt Jane’s number was stored in the kitchen cordless. I stuffed the cell into my sweatshirt’s gigantic middle pocket and ran downstairs.

Dad was sitting at the breakfast table, phone tucked between his ear and shoulder, the Lotus Garden menu spread over a place mat in front of him. “Just a moment,” he said to the order person, and turned to me with a smile. “What do you think, should we spring for sweet-and-sour tofu?”

Normally I would have been amazed and thrilled that he remembered my favorite dish, but now I was just twitching to get on that phone. I shrugged. “Sure, whatever.”

The second he hung up, I grabbed the receiver and hit pound six.

“Hey there, fellow suffering human,” said Aunt Jane’s somber voice.

“Hi, Aunt Jane, it’s—”

“If you’re stuck hearing this stupid message, it means I’m busy creating art or doing my Zen meditation. Or, maybe I’m just feeling a bit antisocial today.”

If Dad hadn’t been watching with concern from his chair, I would have pitched the phone at the wall. Instead, I waited for the beep. “Aunt Jane,
please
have Mom call me back ASAP. It’s Joy,” I added, and hung up. Then I stuffed the phone next to my cell phone in my sweatshirt pocket.

“Honey?” Dad raised his eyebrows.

“I’m fine,” I said reflexively. Ever since we grew past the Hear-by-touch phase, Dad had left all Hearing-related talks to the expert, Mom.

“You know.” Dad swept invisible crumbs off his knees, all overly casual. “Whatever it is,
I
might be able to help. I do give counsel for a living….”

I shook my head. “Thanks, but this isn’t lawyer-type stuff. It’s—” I almost said, “Family stuff,” then caught myself. “Girl stuff.”

“Oh.” He seemed to slump. “You mean your gift.”
I wish I knew the magic words to make it easier.
I squinted at him. Did Dad already know what was going on?
Wish she hadn’t Heard Mother and Father judging her, always demanding perfection—

“What?” I blurted out. “Oh my god, that’s so not it.” Dad blinked. “I don’t even care about the Grammy and Grandpa thing anymore.” He flinched. “I mean, that’s
your
big issue, not mine.”

“Okay, okay, you’ve made your point.”

“Sorry.” My fingers played with the braided place mat. “Does it, um, weird you out when I do that?”

“Maybe? A little?” Dad rubbed his jaw, then after a moment he sighed and smiled. “All right, yes, a lot.” I crushed my thumb into the hard braided material. Ouch. “But I guess if you girls can get used to Hearing Whispers,” he added, “the least I can do is get used to it too, right?”

“Dad…that’s the thing,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm. “I’m not sure if I
can
get used to Hearing this much. My power’s been changing, or maybe it’s growing, I don’t know. It’s all just so weird.”

Dad puckered his brow and leaned closer. “Weird how?”

I hesitated. Could I really do this, open up to Dad about Hearing stuff like I would have with Mom? But he was so clueless. Then again, he was here and she wasn’t. “I Heard Icka,” I blurted out.

His lips formed a horizontal line of doubt. “But how is that possible? We know for a fact that she’s in Portland, and even your mother can’t Hear past fifty feet or so.”

“All I know is, I Heard her.” I filled him in on what happened in the men’s room. And then of course I had to explain
why
I was in the Starbucks men’s room, that I was throwing up. And
why
I was throwing up—what I’d Heard.
(I left out all the stuff about Ben and Jamie—poor Dad was already looking overwhelmed.)

“Pumpkin, you’ve had a truly rough day,” he said. “But…Hearing your sister from another city?” He shook his head. “That’s outside the realm of plausibility.” Yep, saw that coming: lawyer speak. His face had taken on that same inflexible blankness it gets when he’s working. A logic trance, Mom called it. When Dad’s mind got stuck like this, she’d just smile and wink over at me. Whereas Icka wasn’t fazed at all; sometimes she’d even (in her blunt, bitchy tone) point out some little hole in his train of reasoning and instead of being mad, he’d be all impressed.

Maybe I could impress him into taking
me
seriously.

“What about the story of Faith and Hope?” I said, folding my arms across my chest. “Isn’t that historical precedent?”

“More like hearsay,” he said, smiling. “Honey, that’s just an old family legend. A bedtime story. I’m pretty sure one of your great-aunts made it up.”

“So what, you think I’m making it up too?” So much for being intellectual. I felt like a frustrated three-year-old. This whole conversation was a giant red illustration of why I never opened up to Dad.

“Of course I don’t think you’re
lying
.” Dad held his palm out, traffic-cop style. “However. You had one heck of a bad day. You threw up earlier. You’ve been getting headaches. Odds are, you’re coming down with something, sweetie.” He glanced down at the open menu as if it contained his case notes. “Remember that time you
thought you were floating over your bed?”

I rolled my eyes. Come on, that was in second grade. I had a 104-degree fever. This wasn’t the same. But how could I dispute his logic? “Dad. Forget probability and evidence and all that lawyer stuff for a second. What if I
didn’t
imagine it, and Icka’s in some kind of danger?”

“Now, that is two separate what-ifs,” he said, calmly. “Even if you did Hear her—big if—there’s absolutely no evidence to suggest she’s in danger. Mom saw her just this morning.”

“But that was hours ago!”

“True, and if anything had happened, we would have had a call from her freshman host, or the RAs in her dorm.”

“RAs?”

“Resident Advisers. Not to mention the Pendleton campus has a crime rate next to zero, not counting bike theft.”

I blinked. Dad was throwing so many facts at me it was hard to keep them all straight. Let alone argue.

“We both know Jessica has a tendency,” Dad went on, “to express herself in, shall we say, strong terms.” I had to nod. Couldn’t argue with that. “If she had a fight with her new friends, or got homesick, or maybe changed her mind about this being the perfect school…that would easily account for what you Heard.” Again, I couldn’t help but nod. He was making intelligent points. Points I hadn’t even thought of. Points that should have been, in theory, reassuring. So why wasn’t I
feeling
reassured?

“It’s just that she sounded so desperate,” I said, almost timidly. “She kept talking about getting rid of her Hearing. On purpose…and I didn’t even tell you the scariest part. Just now, I fell asleep upstairs and had this dream about her…what?” Dad grimaced slightly, and I knew I’d lost him at the word “dream.” “It felt really real!”

“Tell you what,” Dad said, rising. “I personally see no reason to worry. But if it’d make you feel better, why don’t you give Jessica a call in the dorms? Just to say hi.”

I stared at my father. Where had he been all these years? Me, call Icka to say hi? What made him think I even had a phone number for her? Was he really not aware his kid was the only teenage girl in America who spurned cell phones? And that, as she and I were no longer what you’d call close, she hadn’t bothered to fill me in on her weekend plans…much less supplied me with contact info? Not like the subject came up during my big You Are Kicked Out of My Life speech.

Would I call her if I could? The answer came in a heartbeat. It’d be worth me looking like a wishy-washy moron, worth every iota of awkwardness, to hear her bitchy voice on the line…and know she was safe.

But I didn’t have the phone number. All I had was a clueless dad who wouldn’t listen to anything
but
reason, and a mom who wouldn’t even call me back.

Before I could update Dad on his daughters’ lack of a sisterly relationship, the doorbell made me jump about a foot.

Ever serene, Dad glanced at his Rolex. “Golly, Lotus was fast tonight!”

I rolled my eyes inwardly. Dad’s bad sense of time was legendary in our family. It was seven fifty-one, not even ten minutes after he hung up with Lotus Garden. Unless the guy had
teleported
over here, it couldn’t possibly be him.

So who was it? I had a sneaking, sinking suspicion. Hint: I was known as her fan girl, and in the past hour she’d left me two voice mails and two urgent-sounding texts. If only Mom was home, I could have asked her to cover for me, say I was too sick to come to the door. But I’d never asked Dad to lie for me, and now wasn’t a good time to start: I didn’t want him to see me as someone who went around making things up.

I sighed. “I’ll get it.”

“Thanks, hon!” Dad flashed me a smile. From his posture as he stood, you could tell he thought our talk had gone swimmingly, that he’d solved all my problems using the awesome power of logic. “Cash is on the table out there,” he added.
I hope they remembered the wonton soup this time.

I trudged into the entryway. Well, I’d have to deal with Parker sooner or later…at least having something so much bigger to worry about put my issues with her into perspective, right? I leaned forward to press the top of my head against the cold metal door. Please god, please let it be the Lotus people….

From outside, a low, shy male voice Whispered,
Hope this is the right Stefani.