The Silent Waters

  Then, my lips.

  I imagined her saying it to me, too. Good afternoon, Brooks Tyler.

  She took my hands in hers and walked backward, leading us into her bedroom. When we were inside, I kicked the door closed.

  For a while we were stupid and silly, simply staring and smiling. We kissed, too; that might’ve been my favorite part. Her finger danced across my shoulder blade and she studied my body, as if I were real. Her fingers moved down my arms, then down my sides, before traveling up my chest. She laid her palm against my chest, feeling my heartbeat.

  “For you,” I said.

  She blushed some more, and I kissed her cheeks some more, too. I took my finger, moving it across her collarbone, down her sides, back up her sides, and then moving my palm to her heartbeat.

  She bit her bottom lip and held up four fingers then pointed at me. For me.

  Her heartbeats were made for me, and mine for hers.

  “I like you.”

  She pointed to herself then held up two fingers. Me too.

  “Date me?” I asked.

  She stepped backward, almost shocked by my words. She shook her head.

  I stepped toward her. “Date me?” I asked again.

  She stepped backward again, shaking her head.

  “Stop saying no, please? It’s kind of a punch to my confidence.”

  She shrugged her shoulders and moved to her desk where she picked up a notebook and started writing.

  How?

  “How? How what? How do we date?”

  Yes.

  “Well, like anyone dates, I guess.”

  How do you date other people? How did you date your ex-girlfriends?

  “I don’t know, hung out with them a lot. Some liked to go shopping, to the movies, to…” My words trailed off. She frowned. The way I had dated in the past wasn’t the way I could date Maggie. “Oh. I get it, but I’m not trying to date them. I’m trying to date you. However that works, I want to do it. I want to be around you. I want to kiss you. I want to hold you. I want to see you smile. Plus”—I held up her journal—“dating is on your list.”

  She shook her head.

  “Maggie, I taped this book together piece by piece for over five hours. I think I know what’s in your journal.” I flipped through the pages and held it out toward her when I found it. “Number fifty-six: date Brooks Tyler Griffin, from The Book of Brooks.”

  A sly smile found her. I didn’t write that.

  I shrugged. “Listen, you don’t have to be embarrassed. I’m flattered. Even though I didn’t create the list, I’m here to make you follow it. Heck, if I’d known you were so madly infatuated with me, I would’ve started dating you years ago.”

  She cocked an eyebrow and slammed her hands on her hips, and I knew exactly what she was thinking.

  “Okay, to be fair, when we were eight and you planned our wedding, I was at the age where I hated girls. You can’t hold that against me.”

  She quietly chuckled and rolled her eyes. I loved that. I loved when she laughed, even though it was so quiet. It was the closest thing I had to her voice.

  “See that? We have this thing where I know what you’re thinking without you even talking. You’re my best friend, Maggie. If dating you means spending every night in this house with you, then I’d be the luckiest guy in the world.” I combed her hair behind her ear. “So I’m going to ask you one more time: will you be my girlfriend?”

  She shook her head, laughing, but then started nodding and shrugged. I could hear the words she didn’t speak so clearly. I mean, whatever, Brooks. I guess I’ll date you.

  Message fully received.

  We moved over to her bed, fell on it backward, and I pulled out my iPod for our first official couple song. “Fever Dreaming” by No Age. The song was loud and fast-paced, everything a dating song shouldn’t have been. I was going to switch it, but Maggie started tapping her fingers against the bed. Then her foot started tapping against the floor, and my fingers and feet followed her direction as the drums kicked in. Seconds later, we were standing, jumping up and down, rocking out to the music. My heart was racing as we stood so close to one another and jammed out to the song. When it was over, our breaths were heavy. Maggie reached for her marker and wrote on her board.

  Again?

  I played the song again, and again. We danced, and danced until our heart rates were high and our breaths were short.

  Our timing was so great that night.

  Our timing was finally right.

  Every day that passed with Maggie felt right.

  Every hand hold felt warm.

  Every kiss felt real.

  Every hug was perfect, except for when they weren’t.

  It wasn’t often that things weren’t perfect between Maggie and me, but if I was being honest, some days were tough.

  Dating Maggie was one of the best decisions I’d ever made, but that didn’t mean it was always easy. Even so, it was still always right. The more time I spent with her, the more I noticed the small things no one else noticed about her—like how the sound of running water made her flinch, or how when someone touched her when her back was turned, she’d jump out of her skin. Or how when more than two people were in a room, she melted into the corners, or how sometimes when we’d sit and watch movies, tears fell down her cheeks.

  “Why are you crying?” I asked.

  Her fingers grazed her eyes and she seemed surprised by the tears. Wiping them away, she gave me a tight smile and held her anchor necklace in her hand.

  Then, there were her panic attacks.

  In all my years of knowing Maggie, I’d never known about the panics.

  She kept them hidden, and to herself. The only reason I knew they existed was because some nights I’d sneak into her room for a sleepover. Sometimes she’d fall asleep, and she’d twist and turn so much I swore her nightmares were going to give her a heart attack. When I woke her, her eyes were wide, horrified, as if she didn’t know who I was when I touched her.

  She crawled into a ball and covered her ears as if she were hearing voices that didn’t exist. Her body was covered in sweat, her hands trembled, and her breaths were heavy. Sometimes her fingers wrapped around her throat and her breaths were short and erratic.

  Whenever I tried to dive deeper into her mind, she pushed me away. We’d have fights where I was the only one shouting. Fighting with someone who didn’t fight back was worse than fighting with someone who threw chairs. You felt hopeless, as if screaming at a stone wall. “Say something!” I begged. “React!” But she always stayed calm, which only pissed me off more.

  It drove me mad, trying to discover what was still eating at her all these years later.

  It drove me mad that I couldn’t fix her hurts.

  I’d dated quite a few girls before her, and it had always seemed easy. I figured if I had things to talk about with them, that meant we were a match. If we liked the same hobbies, we were supposed to be together. I never struggled with not knowing what to say in my past relationships; we always talked, sometimes for hours. When it came to silence, it always felt off. I was always searching for the next thing to say, the next conversation.

  It wasn’t that way with Maggie. She didn’t respond to words.

  During her most recent panic attack, I figured out how to help her. Before, when I screamed at her, demanding for her to let me into her head, it never worked. When I begged for understanding, she pushed further away.

  Music would help. Music could help. I knew it could. Music was the one thing that always helped me. As she sat on her bed crying, I shut off her bedroom light and turned on my iPod, playing “To Be Alone With You” by Sufjan Stevens.

  It didn’t help her the first time it played, or the second, but I sat quietly, waiting for her breathing to come back to normal.

  “You’re okay, Magnet,” I’d say every now and then, unsure if she could even hear me, but hoping she did.

  When she finally came around, the song was on its ele
venth loop.

  She wiped her eyes and went to grab a piece of paper, but I shook my head and patted a spot on the floor beside me.

  She didn’t have to offer me any words.

  Sometimes words were more empty than silence.

  She sat across from me with her legs crossed. I shut off my music. “Five minutes,” I whispered, holding my hands out to her. “Just five minutes.”

  She placed her hands in mine, and we sat completely still and quiet, staring into each other’s eyes for five minutes. The first minute we did it we couldn’t stop laughing. It felt a bit ridiculous. The second minute, we snickered some more. By minute three, Maggie started to cry. By four, we cried together, because nothing hurt more than seeing her eyes so sad. By the fifth minute, we smiled.

  She released a breath she’d been holding, and I let go of mine.

  It was freeing to feel so much with someone who felt it too. It was during those moments that I felt I learned the most about her. It was in those moments that she learned the most about me.

  I hadn’t known you could hear someone’s voice so clearly in the silent moments.

  Brooks never asked me about my panic attacks again, and I was happy about that. It was something I wasn’t ready to talk about yet, and Brooks understood. I knew, though, if there was a day I was ready, he’d be willing to listen, and that meant more to me than he’d ever know.

  Instead of filling our summer with serious topics, we filled it with kisses. When we weren’t kissing, we created our own to-do list for a future together. I liked the way he believed in me someday leaving the house.

  I liked the idea of me seeing the world with him by my side.

  “It’s gonna be great, Maggie. Plus, since I’m going to college one town over, I can come see you every afternoon after school is out. It’s gonna be easy,” Brooks often said. His hope in us made me more hopeful than ever.

  Then, we’d go back to kissing. Kissing, and kissing only.

  I wasn’t good at the good stuff.

  It wasn’t a surprise I wasn’t good at the good stuff, because I’d never had a boyfriend to practice any of the things people did when they were in relationships. Whenever Brooks came over and his hands started to wander, I tensed up—not because he touched me—I wanted him to—but because I wasn’t sure how I was supposed to touch him back.

  It was embarrassing. I hated it. I felt as if I’ve read enough books with enough sex references to be able to know how to touch my boyfriend, but it was far from the truth.

  “It’s fine, really.” Brooks smiled, standing up from one of our kissing sessions that always led to more kissing. “We don’t have to rush.”

  I didn’t feel rushed, though. I felt stupid. Where do I put my hands? Would that feel good to him? How do I know if he really likes it?

  “I better get downstairs for band practice.” He straightened out the crotch area of his jeans, which made me feel even worse. I was such an accidental tease. “I’ll see you downstairs, all right?”

  I nodded. He leaned in and kissed my forehead before hurrying away.

  The moment he was out of sight, I grabbed my pillow, placed it over my face, and silently screamed into it. My legs kicked back and forth in frustration. Ugh!

  When I heard quiet whimpering, I looked up from my pillow to see Cheryl walking down the hallway, holding her cheek. She hurried into her bedroom and slammed the door.

  I was there two seconds later, knocking.

  “Go away!” she shouted.

  I knocked once. No.

  I listened to her groan. “Please just go, Maggie. I know it’s you.”

  Turning the knob, I slowly opened her bedroom door to see her standing in front of her mirror, touching a slice under her eye that was dripping blood down her cheek.

  “Goddammit, Maggie! Don’t you know how to listen?”

  Walking closer, I made her face me and examined her cut. Tilting my head, I gave her a questioning stare.

  She grimaced. “Jordan thought since I had him drive me back from prom weeks ago, it meant we were back together. And seeing how I hated being alone, I went back to him. But it turned out, he didn’t fully forgive me, and as the weeks went on, he became more and more mean. So, when I told him I didn’t want to be with him anymore…he got a bit…upset.”

  My chest tightened.

  “Don’t freak out, okay?” she warned as she slowly turned her back to me and lifted up her t-shirt. My hands flew over my mouth as I stared at her red skin, where it looked like Jordan beat her.

  Cheryl…

  Snickering, she said, “If you think that’s bad, you should see him.”

  I frowned.

  She frowned, too.

  He had probably walked away without a hair out of place, leaving my sister with scars not only on her body, but also on her mind.

  I walked off and went to the bathroom to get a wet washcloth and a bandage. When I came back, I led her to her bed, pulled her desk chair over, and sat down. As I started cleaning her cut, her body trembled the whole time.

  “I’m not pressing charges, Maggie,” she asserted. “I know that’s probably something you’d want me to do, but I’m not. He’s over eighteen. He’d be charged as an adult, and I can’t ruin his life like that…”

  I kept cleaning her face, not reacting to her words at all.

  “I mean, it’s my fault. I shouldn’t have left with him on prom night. I sent confusing signals.”

  I tapped her leg once. No.

  She was blaming herself. I’d been there before, too. Sometimes my mind still put fault on me. I shouldn’t have been in those woods. Mama told me not to wander off. I put myself in a dangerous situation. It was my fault.

  But when I took a bath and slipped beneath the water, I cleared all of those thoughts.

  Sometimes our minds acted as a form of kryptonite, and we had a responsibility to our own self-worth to aggressively tell it to fuck off with its lies.

  I was not to blame.

  And neither was Cheryl.

  A tear fell down her cheek and she wiped it away. “What’s your deal, anyway? Why are you helping me? I trashed your room. I said some shitty things to you, and still you’re helping me. Why?”

  My shoulders rose and fell.

  She reached over, cringing from the pain in her back, and grabbed a pencil and paper. “Why, Maggie?”

  You’re my family.

  More tears fell from her eyes, and she didn’t even try to hide them. “I really am sorry, ya know, for what I did to your room, to you. I just…” She tossed her hands up in frustration. Her voice filled with deep shame and loud remorse. “I don’t know what I’m doing with my life.”

  I doubted most people did. Anyone who claimed to have their life figured out was a liar. Sometimes I wondered if there was anything to truly figure out, or if we were all walking around looking for a reason when no reason truly existed.

  “I want to tell Mom and Dad what he did,” she whispered, her eyes filled with sadness. “But I know they’ll just freak out. They are already pissed at me for all of the other shitty mistakes I’ve made. I’ve fucked up too much for them to really care.”

  I tapped her leg once more. No.

  “How do you know?”

  I held up the family piece of paper one more time. After that, she built up the courage to tell our parents. The moment they hugged her and told her none of it was her fault was the moment Cheryl released the breath she’d been holding for what seemed like years.

  “I miss him,” Cheryl said, plopping down on my bed a few weeks after her ‘official’ breakup with Jordan. The cut on her face was healing pretty well, but I knew the damage to her mind wouldn’t be healed as quickly. “I mean, I don’t miss him. I miss the idea of him. I miss the idea of someone being by my side. Today I sat and tried to think of the last time I’d been single and I couldn’t come up with an answer.”

  I grimaced, and she continued to speak. “What if I’m one of those girls who can’t be
alone? What if I’m supposed to always be with a guy? What the hell am I supposed to do with my time if there’s no guy for me to talk about? I don’t know if you noticed, but I’m not really the best at making friends with girls. No females ever come over to hang out with me, probably because I’ve stolen most of their boyfriends. What the heck am I supposed to do?”

  Standing from my desk chair, I moved over to my wall of books, searching for a certain read for my sister. Grabbing The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, I held it out to her.

  She knit her brow as a gloomy expression overtook her face. “What am I supposed to do with this?” I cocked an eyebrow, and she raised one back. “Maggie, I don’t read.” The combination of those four words created the saddest sentence I’d ever heard. I pushed the book out toward her again, and this time she took it warily. “Fine. I’ll try it, just because I’m so fucking bored, but I doubt I’ll like it.”

  It took her three days to finish the book, and when she did, she came back quoting it, her eyes wide with emotion I’d never seen from her. “You want to know my favorite line? ’Don’t let the bastards grind you down.’ God. So. Fucking. Good. Margaret Atwood is my spirit animal.” She held the book out toward me and narrowed her eyes. “You got any more like that?”

  I passed her a new book every three days. After a while, we started having Friday night girls’ nights where we ate Doritos, drank too much soda, and lay on my floor with our feet propped up on my bed frame. “Freakin’ A, Maggie. All this time I thought you were reading to escape the world, but now I know, you didn’t read to escape it; you read to discover it.”

  The best night by far was when Cheryl finished The Help by Kathryn Stockett. Throughout her read, she had tears that sometimes turned into laughter, and vice versa. “THOSE FUCKING BITCHES!” she’d holler every now and then. “No, really, THOSE FUCKING BITCHES!”

  One night as two a.m. rolled around, I was sleeping in my bed when Cheryl began poking me in the side to wake me. “Maggie,” she whispered. “Sis!” When my eyes opened, she was holding the novel to her chest and had the biggest smile on her face, the kind of smile kids have when they hear the sound of an ice cream truck coming down their road and they have just enough coins in their pockets for a Bombpop. “Maggie. I think I’m that thing. I think I’m it.”