Whisper (14 page)

I never thought I’d feel relieved to see Jamie Williams on our porch. But seeing his stupid
ONLY USERS LOSE DRUGS
T-shirt through the peephole, I let out a leaky-balloon sigh.

Thank god, it wasn’t Parker! I wouldn’t have to deal with her just yet. Score one, me, finally.

Except…what the hell was Ben’s brother doing here? Bringing me more funeral flowers? Part of me still ached to know how he’d sensed my distress earlier—did he really
Hear
me? But as Ben had made clear, I wasn’t on the family-secret access list anyway. Anyway, Jamie was probably just here to ask me out, not clue me in. I sighed. Harsh as it sounded, the smart thing to do was shake him off. The way
he was going, just being seen with him at school would be social suicide, the fast track to turning into Icka 2.0.

Polite but firm, I repeated to myself as I undid the dead-bolt and slipped out sideways onto the porch.

Outside it was sprinkling still, and the air smelled like wet grass and pine needles. Jamie stood unsmiling under the porch light’s glow, the dark night all around him. His eyes seemed to bore into me. For the first time I noticed they weren’t green like his brother’s but cider gold. Before I could begin my brush-off, he said, “You know, I thought about this a lot. And I’m not okay with you thinking I’m a drug-crazed psycho.”

My heart beat faster. He hadn’t come to ask me out, but to set the record straight about this afternoon…maybe even tell me his secret! Was it possible—just possible—Icka and I weren’t alone after all?

“Hey.” Frowning, Jamie waved his hand over me. “You seem kinda distracted,” he said. “If it’s a bad time—”

“No, no, I’m fine.” I splashed on a smile. “So what were you going to say?”

But he tilted his head forward and peered at me with those piercing eyes as if to say, Are you
sure
you’re fine? Was I Captain Obvious, despite my smile, or—unreal thought—did he know I was an emotional mess because I was Whispering
straight into his mind
? What if he could Hear me longing to know his secret?

The idea of a stranger Hearing my innermost thoughts
was suddenly real enough to unnerve me. I backed up onto the welcome mat and shoved both hands into my sweatshirt pocket, jostling the two phones, which clattered together. The phones. Mom still hadn’t called with news about Icka. I hadn’t called Parker back.

“You look really worried,” Jamie said. “I should probably go.” He turned, then turned back. “Just tell me one thing. Is it…the thing you’re worried about…is it what you saw in there? I mean me? At Starbucks?” As he spoke of the fight, he seemed to slouch and went from meeting my eyes to watching two moths worship the lamp.
God, I hope she’s not scared of
me.

Scared? He thought I was worried he’d beat me up? Maybe Jamie
couldn’t
Hear what I was thinking. “Believe me,” I said. “It’s nothing to do with you.”

“Really.” He folded his arms across his chest. “Talking to a violent nutcase doesn’t freak you out at all?”

Why did he not seem to believe me? “No—I mean, you’re not a…Ben said it was just a bad trip,” I finished lamely.

“Yeah, well, Ben makes shit up.” He looked me in the eye. “He doesn’t want people knowing about…about my condition.”

“Condition?” The word threw me. “You mean, a medical problem?” Was there really some disease out there, like a liver defect or kidney sickness, that made people unable to stop punching their siblings?

“Not medical, exactly,” Jamie admitted. “It’s more like, I’m different.”

“Different how?”

“You know how.”

Drawn by an invisible magnet, I took a step closer to him. Tell me.

Please let it be true.
He bit his lower lip. “Like you.”

Now my heart was really pounding. He suspected me, as I suspected him. All my life I’d feared someone would notice I wasn’t as normal as I pretended to be. But I never thought it would be someone like him. His tone wasn’t accusing, it was inviting. Inviting me to open up. But why should I trust him? “Me?” I forced a laugh. “I’m, like, really average and boring. Sorry to disappoint you.”

Jamie rolled his eyes. “Come on, don’t give me that I’m-just-a-cheerleader act. I’ve been noticing you since school started.”

“Seriously, there’s nothing special about me.” Did he say noticing me, all year?

“I think you’re amazing,” he added, ignoring my protest. “The way you control it, without any Walls.”

Walls, that’s what Ben was trying to teach him about…by force. What were Walls meant to block out, Whispers? But acting normal meant stowing my curiosity. I wrinkled my forehead. “I have
no
clue what you’re talking about.”

“How the hell do you do that?” He shook his head as if I’d said something funny or impressive. “You lie easier than most people
breathe
.”

For a moment I just stared. I couldn’t possibly have heard right. He didn’t just call me a liar. Then I felt the searing ache of my throat tightening, closing up.

“Joy, wait.” He took a deep breath as if struggling to compose himself. “Just let me explain.”

I pushed my pouffy hair in front of my face, allowed my features to twist into pain. He’d called me a fake. A phony. The only person who’d ever called me out like that was Icka, but she was at least family. She knew we’d both had to learn to lie, to hide our secret. Jamie wasn’t family, wasn’t even a friend. He was a stranger humiliating me. And I was done sending him mixed signals. “Get the hell off my porch,” I heard myself say. The words were half lost in my lump of a throat.

“I swear, I didn’t mean to insult you.” His voice broke as I spun toward the door.
I wish I’d told her everything from the start….

Slam.

Inside I blew on my stiff fingers to warm them. The dimly lit hallway’s smell of Lemon Pledge felt sterile. Stuffy. And, as always in the silence, Mom’s grandfather clock took only about three ticks to drive me nuts. But at least no one in here was calling me a liar.

“Hon, who was that out there?” Dad called from the kitchen.

“No one,” I yelled back. “Just Girl Scouts!”

Crap, did that count as a lie? I cringed. So maybe I wasn’t a stickler for brutal honesty. But honesty was overrated.
Sure, I put on a happy face even when I wasn’t feeling great, pretended to be thrilled by so-so gifts, and giggled at jokes I didn’t find funny, all out of politeness, out of kindness…to make people happy. Why was that such a crime? Even Mom did it. At least I didn’t lie to make people miserable, like Icka. Or tell the
truth
to make people miserable, like someone else I could name.

And yet…I’d slammed a door on him. I, polite, kind Joy Stefani, slammed a door in someone’s face. It was beyond disappointing. I’d proved my pure niceness was an act, plus I’d done exactly what Icka would do. Worst of all, my short-lived fury didn’t even come from the same place as hers, the frustration of walking through a hostile world alone, day after day. Mine came from shame.

Hadn’t I spent all afternoon mourning the fact that no one outside my family understood me? And here this guy had—somehow—found me out. He saw through my carefully crafted shell. And I didn’t like it.

I wish I hadn’t screwed
that
up.

I almost jumped. So Jamie was still within Hearing range. I’d been cruel to him, but he hadn’t gone away. Why not?

I want to talk to her. I have to know if she’s like me.

Oh. I held my breath, waiting to feel wretched stomach pains because I failed to cater to someone’s Whisper. But nothing happened. No pain, no regret, just the hall clock loudly chiming eight o’clock. I could hide in the house and pretend all I wanted, but deep down, in that same place in my mind where I Heard Whispers instead of silence, I knew
the truth. Jamie and I had something major in common. As different as we seemed on paper, I
was
like him.

I took a deep breath and opened the door.

He was sitting on the porch swing, his face calm and contemplative. “You don’t have to say you’re sorry,” he said, waving away the formality. “Just sit here, okay?” He stood and offered me the seat. “Just listen.”

I sat in the splintery old wooden swing.

Jamie paced in front of me. “This is all so strange,” he said. “I mean, I came here wanting to tell you everything and then suddenly my curiosity got the best of me and I was trying to push you to tell me about
you
. Then I realized…I was feeling
your
curiosity.”

That stopped me. “You can feel my curiosity?”

“Oh, yeah. It’s practically knocking me over.” He was watching me closely. “You want to know about me? Well, now you know. That’s it. That’s my condition. I can feel…I
have
to feel…what other people are feeling.” He leaned back against the railing.

“Wow.” Now
I
had to stand and pace. So he did have the gift…or some kind of gift. But I didn’t quite get what he meant. “How…how do you do that?” I said. “You get some kind of message or signal about their feelings and that’s how you know what they are?” I had to tread carefully here. Not seem like I understood too easily how his ability worked.

But Jamie seemed surprised. “No,” he said, frowning. “I just feel it. The emotion goes through me like a wave.
That’s what we call them, in my family, Waves.”

“Waves?” I repeated dumbly. Were Waves totally different from Whispers? All this time I’d been thinking he was either a Hearer or normal. I’d never considered there could be a third category, a gift Mom hadn’t even known about. “So other people’s feelings are Waves to you.”

He nodded. “Sounds stupid, I guess. But it’s the best way my dad could come up with to explain it to a kid. Waves rise up out of other people, all the time. From here.” He touched his chest. “Happy Waves, sad, confused, lonely…of course, with a Wall you don’t have to feel most of those. They’ll just break and bounce off you.”

“Okay, you keep talking about Walls. What
is
a Wall?”

“It’s just a way of setting your mind, so you’re protected from Waves. Supposedly. All the men in our family can do it, except me.”

“Except you?”

He shrugged as if it didn’t bother him, but I wasn’t convinced. “I’m more like an open window than a Wall,” he said. “Other people’s Waves get inside me, whether I want them to or not. And if they’re strong enough, like yours were this afternoon…then all I can do is run.”

Suddenly I remembered how he hadn’t wanted to speak to me in front of the stoners because my presence made them mad. How he fled the classroom when Mr. Jensen spewed vitriol about politics…
he tried to leave whenever people got upset.

I was trembling, and not just from the cold. He’d done
it, just blurted out the truth about himself. I couldn’t do that, could I? I scanned the blue-black horizon as if for thunderbolts, but it was just a normal October night—even the rain had stopped. Mom’s crystal wind chime jingled in the breeze. Pieces of my mind were also jangling against one another, spinning wildly. Friends aren’t family, an old voice echoed. But the logical part of me knew my parents had only built up that “family secret” stuff to shield their daughters from social ostracism. Jamie wouldn’t think less of me or spread a rumor about me if I told him. The anti-freak police wouldn’t jump out from behind Mom’s azalea bush and arrest me. So what was stopping me?

I was lost in my very own logic trance when I saw Jamie at the railing looking away, staring out at the street.
I hope this isn’t the part where she points and laughs and runs to tell the story to all her friends.

God. I’d gotten so caught up in my own feelings, I’d forgotten about
his
. A mistake he himself was incapable of making. Impulsively, I reached out and grabbed Jamie’s hand. My palm was ice, but as his fingers closed gently over my hand it became the only part of me that felt warm.

“I don’t feel Waves like you,” I began. “But I’m not as avera—”

He interrupted. “Never? You don’t call them something else or…?”

“No.”

“But you believed me. No one but my family’s ever believed me before.” He squeezed my hand once more, then
let go. “I was wrong, I guess.”
I wish you
had
been like me.

“You weren’t entirely wrong about me, Jamie,” I said, then shook my head. “I just can’t tell you any more than that. I can’t. I can’t.”

“Breathe.”

I inhaled, studied the lines on my palm, exhaled. No doubt Jamie could feel the Waves of longing coming from me. The longing to open up, to be honest and real with someone, made me dizzy, like gazing into the void of an open airplane hatch. It wasn’t just that we both had gifts, it wasn’t just that no one had ever told me a secret of this magnitude. It was that I was desperate for someone to talk to. Someone who was there, unlike Mom. Who wouldn’t tear me down, unlike my “friends.” Who could believe me and take me seriously, unlike Dad.

“Can I tell you something,” I ventured, “that
isn’t
about being different?”

“Of course.”

“You kept saying I seemed worried and distracted earlier. Well, I was. I still am. I think this has been the worst day of my life.”

He nodded. “You were pretty broken up at the mall. What’s wrong?”

“Everything,” I said flatly. “But the one thing I’m most worried about is my sister.”

“You mean Icka?”

Despite the seriousness of the conversation, despite
everything, I had the urge to giggle. Even Jamie, the most out-to-lunch freshman at Lincoln, knew who my sister was; she was so wildly unpopular she was practically a celebrity.

“Yes, Icka,” I said. “She’s visiting Pendleton U this weekend. But something about it just feels so
weird
.”

“It was like that for me too,” Jamie said, nodding, “when I realized Ben wouldn’t be around next year. For the first time in my life, I’d be without him.”

“I don’t think it’s just that,” I said, frowning. I’d never even
thought
of that. “It’s more like…I keep thinking about her being…in trouble. And—this is going to sound really stupid, but—I had this dream. That Icka wanted to do something…something dangerous and crazy.” I sighed. “You probably think it all sounds stupid.”