Whisper (16 page)

“Maybe it is.” I hugged my own shoulders with my cold hands. “Maybe I’m crazy. But can you honestly tell me you think of me as an equal?”

Parker hesitated. Then, “I just can’t talk to you right now, Joy,” she said. “You’re acting like a freak.”

Silence on the line. She was gone. It was over. Mom hadn’t called back in time to help me. She’d never called at all. I’d had to go it alone. Would Mom have advised me to be honest like that and risk losing the friendship? Almost certainly not. And yet I didn’t regret a word I’d said.

I sat there blinking and gulping, holding the dead, useless phone in my shaking hands.

Then I knew what I had to do.

Still shaking a bit, I pulled on my boots, stumbled to the coat closet, zipped up my blue puffy jacket, stuffed wallet (with forty bucks, all I had outside my savings account), cell, and keys into its pockets.

I ripped a page off the scented, pastel blue pad of note-paper Mom left by the phone.
Dad,
I scribbled.
Thanks for talking to me—I feel MUCH BETTER! Sleeping over at Parker’s tonight
. ?
XOXO Joy.
I slapped a giant ladybug fridge magnet over it
and wondered if Dad would even notice I was gone.

Denny’s was only half a mile away, if you didn’t mind braving dimly lit side streets where creepy child-abductor types could be lurking in any given laurel bush. I was out of breath by the time I pushed through the glass door. The frosted-hair, frosted-lipstick night-shift waitress greeted me with the stinkeye. “Will that be a table for one,
miss
?” she said, pointedly highlighting the syllable about my age.
Here’s hoping this one can afford solid food.

Jamie caught my eye from a corner table.

“Thanks,” I said to stinkeye, “but I’m just meeting my friend,” and before she could say (or think) another word, I marched over to where Jamie sat with a glass of Sprite untouched, resting on a place mat covered in doodles. “It’s time for Plan B,” I announced.

Jamie offered to let me wait at the Denny’s table while he “picked up the car” (again, he was vague as to what
that
meant). But I was through with waiting.

“No thanks,” I said. “I’m going with you.”

The waitress hovered, hoping for a tip that wasn’t in nickels. I drew a ten-dollar bill from my wallet and set it by his glass. We needed good karma.

In the near-empty parking lot, I found myself scanning each car as a possible target: a Civic, a Neon, a Mustang. The notion that we could soon speed off in one of them made my limbs buzz with a wild new energy. I’d never dared to break a school rule, and now, without blinking,
I was going to commit a felony! But I’d reached a point where even jail sounded less awful than sitting on the couch biting my nails, wondering if Icka was okay. “So how does this go?” I rubbed my hands together in the cold, feeling giddy. “I mean, what’s your usual method, pick some old car with no club or alarm system, hotwire it…switch out the plates?”

Jamie gave me a weird look. “Uh, someone’s been watching too much cable.” His voice was a bit overanimated, bouncy like Tigger from
Winnie-the-Pooh
. Was he picking up
my
excitement? He seemed to notice too and backed several feet away from me. “Look, I don’t want to cramp your style,” he said, breaking into a grin, “but my plan was just to borrow
Ben’s
car.”

Oh.

“It’s parked in front of my parents’ house and I have a spare key.”
I just pray we get it back before he notices it’s gone.

“Right, of course.” I ducked my head and felt a blush come into my cheeks. I’d assumed he’d be willing to steal a car for me, and now he knew I was willing to steal one too. “Lead the way,” I muttered.

“We’ll take Meridian.” He thumb-gestured left. “Fastest way to my parents’ place.”

Even through my embarrassment, I couldn’t help but notice that twice in a row he didn’t call it “home.”

Cars whooshed by on Meridian Avenue, kicking up streaks of dirty rainwater at us as we bounded up the blocks. Jamie’s legs were as long as mine, maybe longer, so for once
I didn’t have to slow down my stride for the other person.

Waiting at an intersection for the walking guy to replace the red hand, he turned to me and said, “So you were ready to commit grand theft auto back there.”

“Oh, come on, I was kidding.”

He fixed those golden brown eyes on me. “Then why were you feeling excited?”

“Augh…that’s
so
not fair!”

“I’m sorry.” He held up his hands. “If it freaks you out, I won’t say stuff like that. I’m not used to being able to talk about this.”

“No, it’s actually okay.” I smiled, then bit my tongue, wishing I could explain that I was already used to Mom and Icka Hearing me, so his using extrasensory perception around me felt normal…in a weird way. Normal by not being normal.

We pulled off Meridian and into a pocket neighborhood of skinny tract houses. Their two-story sameness depressed me. Strange how Ben’s million-dollar smile, his shiny car, his perfect hair had given me the idea his family was well off. Comfortable, at least. But the street he and Jamie lived on, Pomegranate Lane, could have used more streetlamps. Or a sidewalk. Only a sloping curb separated front yards—many smaller than my bedroom at home—from the potholed street. Several yellowing lawns were adorned with yard cars. Ben’s silver Land Rover, squeezed between a rusty old truck and a green Kia, stood out as the block’s pride.

“Craigslist,” Jamie explained before I could ask, not that
I ever would have dared go there. “He saved up three summers’ worth of lifeguard pay to buy this thing used.”

I nodded. Made sense that Ben would never let his family’s lack of funds mess up his image. But I didn’t get why Jamie sounded so admiring. What was such a great achievement about buying a stupid car to impress people?

Wish I could work as a lifeguard. Or as anything. Wish I had a Wall.

Oh. For the first time it occurred to me: devastating as my new Hearing was, Icka and I were better off than Jamie.

“That’s the house,” he added, pointing with his chin toward a ranch house with an empty driveway and most lights out.

“Your folks aren’t home tonight?”

I wish.
“My dad’s always home,” he said. “That’s why we’re not going to get too close.” He fished a set of car keys from his pocket and double-clicked a button to spring the passenger-side door. So much for hotwiring.

I hesitated. “It’s Saturday night, why isn’t Ben driving his detachable ego?”

“Because he’s out with Gina. She picks him up in her Miata. Get in.”

“Wait, Gina
Belle?”
The school president, my role model of unflappability? “Jesus, is there any girl at Lincoln he’s not hooking up with?”

Jamie shrugged. “He’s got this weird mojo…it’s the Wall thing, women always fall for him. He can sneak a peek
at what they’re feeling, but he closes off before it can get to him.”

I shrugged like I’d never noticed, never fallen for it myself.

Then again…had I really fallen for Ben? My crush on him was about a lot of things—some of them messed-up things, like being jealous of Parker or keeping my desires secret even from myself. But was it about
Ben
? I’d hardly known the real him anyway.

“Come on.” Jamie was holding the car door open for me. No one had ever done that. “I want us out of my Dad’s Wave-range.”

As we pulled out of the parking spot, I thought I saw a shadow move in the upstairs window, but I told myself to relax. Odds were I was just imagining things.

I turned to Jamie. “Pearl Street,” I directed. “We’ll stop at my aunt’s house first.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

He surprised me by being a smooth, expert driver. Once on the street, he obeyed every traffic law, even slowing at a yellow light Mom would have run. Made sense when I thought about it logically: If you were breaking a big law, you had to be extra careful to obey the smaller ones so there was no reason to attract a cop’s attention.

He merged onto the freeway. Now we were just an anonymous car doing the speed limit in the anonymous middle lane. I gazed in wonder at the red taillights all around us. “We made it,” I said. “We’re actually on the freeway. I can’t
believe I’m really doing this.”

“You know, I was pretty surprised you took my offer.” He kept his eyes on the road. “Figured if you ever decided to go through with it, you’d have ten rides lined up in seconds. Boom.”

“Yeah, well.” I ran my finger along the glove compartment door. “I’ve sort of been reevaluating my friendships lately.”

“Should we talk about something else?” he cut in. “I really can’t afford for you to get upset while we’re in this car together.”

“It’s fine.” I sighed. “I’ve had a little time to get used to the idea that my friends all think I’m a pathetic, boring follower.”

“A boring, average girl,” he recited, “with nothing special about her?”

I’d almost forgotten that I described myself to him that way a couple of hours ago. I made a face. “It’s different when I say it. They’re supposed to be my best friends, right? Would a true friend think that? I mean, say that,” I added quickly.

“Probably not. But it sounds like typical drama levels, for a popular clique. I’ve seen much worse.”

I hated to admit it, but I knew what he meant. My friends hadn’t done anything awful like cut up my clothes or feed me weight-gaining bars, like the characters in
Mean Girls
. But it was confusing to think they were just “typical” friends instead of good or bad ones. What was I supposed to do with that? It was easier to hate people or love them, I
decided, than to feel something mixed up and in-between.

Jamie cut into my thoughts. “Well, at least you have your sister.”

“Huh? What do you mean?”

“I mean if you’d steal a car for her, that implies you’re pretty close, right?” He laughed.

“Or that I’m insane.”

“I wasn’t going to go there, but—”

“We’re not friends, me and Icka,” I said. “I stopped being her friend a long time ago.”

“What happened?”

“What happened…” I shifted in my seat. No one had ever asked me before what happened between me and Icka. People just took it for granted that Icka was to blame for our estrangement. But Jamie wouldn’t have assumed that; he didn’t see me as a sweet, innocent angel. “It was me,” I admitted. “I was about eleven when everything came together for me.” I learned to use my Hearing to fit in. “I sort of figured out what other people wanted me to do. How to dress. How to act. How to talk, even.” Suddenly my voice was getting lower and faster, like I couldn’t get the words out fast enough. He didn’t interrupt, just kept driving, listening. “By middle school I was a pro at acting normal. And people just forgot that I’d been this shy, spacey, nervous little kid. I was popular. I started looking at my sister the way my friends saw her. I had to…” I swallowed. “I had to move on from her. And it took so long for her to get it. To give up. She just kept on trying to be close to me.
She’d call my cell from home and ask if I’d be back in time to watch a movie with her. Once she knocked on my door with these giant oatmeal cookies and said she made one for each of us…I haven’t thought about that in years.”

“Joy, stop feeling guilty. It’s not your fault Icka’s messed up.”

“But I shut her out. I hated her…. Yesterday, I told her that the world would be a better place without her in it.”

He leaned left, glanced out his window, whistled under his breath, then turned back to me. “Ouch. But still, so what? Everyone gets mad at their siblings. Look at Ben and me. I punched him in the face, he pretends he doesn’t know me at school. At home we still look out for each other. Wow,” he said, “you
really
don’t like him.”

I shrugged and pursed my lips.

“He’s not the greatest, but he’s not Satan. And from what I can tell, you’re not a bad person either, Joy.”

There it was again, the uncomfortable space in between. Between good and evil. The gloomy gray. For the first time I could really see why someone would want to embrace being truly bad—at least then you wouldn’t have to slog around in this confusing, icky middle ground.

“What if she believed me, though?” I traced my fingers on the numbers of the clock radio: 9. 4. 1. “That the world would be a better place without her. What if she decided it was true?”

“What if she did? Can’t be the first time that thought’s occurred to her. I guarantee it.”

I stared at him. Was he implying…

“You’re all shocked,” he said. “But you shouldn’t be. Come on, of course I think about it. The world would be a better place without some guy walking around who can mirror rage and hatred.”

“But you can also mirror love and happiness….”

He shrugged off love and happiness. “There isn’t as much of that stuff floating around. You saw me today. What scares me most is thinking I could become a shooter.”

I felt a chill. “You would never let that happen. I know you wouldn’t.”

“What if I couldn’t stop it?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know, but that’s just not who you are. You’re not a killer.”

“You don’t know me that well yet.”

“Maybe, but I’ve been Listening to—” I stopped. I almost told him I’d been Hearing his thoughts. “I mean, look how you’re helping me right now,” I covered. “
My
world’s better with you in it.”

He smiled. “Hey, did you ever think that might be why I’m helping you?” he said. “So you’ll say stuff like that, and make me feel better. Like you make everyone feel better. I’m probably a lot more selfish than you think.”

I thought about all the times I’d called myself selfish lately. And how I thought I was being selfless when I gave people what they wanted, even though giving people what they wanted made me feel good in a way. But what Jamie was saying just mixed it all up, selfish and selfless. I wasn’t
even sure what the words meant anymore, or if it was possible to be one without the other.

A minute later, I spotted the exit for Aunt Jane’s. From memory I called out directions: right at the first light, left at the top of the hill. I pumped my fist and let out a breath of relief when my navigation skills actually led us to a sign reading
PEARL STREET LOFTS
. “That’s it! Now we just have to find parking.”

“Your aunt lives in a loft?” Jamie sounded impressed.

“It’s microscopic,” I said, trying to dispel any illusions of Aunt Jane being cool and glamorous. Her place was not like in the movies, where supposedly starving artists enjoyed a 360-degree view of some gorgeous city skyline. “It’s a five-hundred-square-foot studio, and it’s filthy. No furniture,” I added, then frowned. “Though she must have bought a futon recently if my mom slept on it last night.”

“Wait, your mom’s here too?” He quirked his eyebrows.
I wish I knew what else you’re holding back on.

“Aunt Jane needed some emotional support,” I explained. “She’s kind of a train wreck.”

“Great,” he muttered.
I hope I can handle that.

I hoped so too. Suddenly I had a flash of doubt, misgivings about this whole track-down-Icka enterprise. If Icka
had
ditched her college visit to see Aunt Jane, wouldn’t she have run smack into Mom? And how would Mom and Aunt Jane react to seeing Jamie, my new outlaw friend and
(unlicensed) chauffeur? Should I leave him downstairs? No, I wanted him with me. Him and his Waves.

It was too late for doubts. I had to just go with my gut.

“Grab that spot!” A Jeep started pulling out of a sizeable space right in front of the building, a stroke of luck. “Trust me, I know this neighborhood. We could waste ten minutes circling.”

Jamie parallel parked like a pro and we both climbed out.

Café Chanteuse, the funky coffee shop next door to Aunt Jane’s complex, was absolutely packed with people who looked like grown-up versions of the path’s denizens. I paused in front of the open door. The sign read:
OPEN TILL MIDNIGHT FRI-SAT
. On the corner stage, a purple-haired girl with a guitar was singing with her eyes closed. Sometimes the singers there have these soft, sweet voices you can barely catch over the espresso machine, but this one was belting out her tune so loud I felt the hairs rise on the back of my neck.