It took me a moment to get it, and when I did, I felt my dinner churning around in my stomach. I started walking away, and the guy called after me, “Hey where you go? You stay. We make money.” But I never looked back, just headed toward the hotel, wondering if I’d finally been missed.
************
The car is fixed, and we are again flying down the road. Two days have passed since I wrote the first part of this letter, and I have had a lot of time to think. I still don’t know exactly where we are going, but then maybe that isn’t so bad after all. I think I’m finally getting the hang of how to survive these outings. I just fly down the Okie-Dokie highway-- that is what I have come to call this road, or any road for that matter. We stop to see a big hole in the earth, and I think, “okie-dokie, then,” and we pile back into the car until the next stop, where we will see who knows what? But no matter what it is-- a formidable reservoir, a vast junk yard, a dry riverbed, or whatever-- after seeing it, it’s “okie-dokie, then,” and onward, until one day you run across something that makes sense to you, maybe even something that you can attach yourself to and call your own. Am I making any sense? I think I am, but I’m not quite sure. You’ll have to tell me what you think in the fall, when I see you at school, assuming I ever make it back.
For now
XOXOXO
Darlene
SOUND TRAVELS
He was standing at the end of the pier, and I snuck up in the dark behind him. I was totally shameless. I had no problem tormenting somebody, and tormenting a friend can be especially fun.
When I was right behind him, I yelled out “Hey” and grabbed the back of his shirt. He teetered, his arms wobbling wildly to keep him from falling in the water.
He spun round to face me. I was laughing hard, holding my stomach.
“That’s not funny!” he screeched.
“Yeah, it is,” I said.
He glowered at me, as I sat at the end of the pier, dangling my legs over the water.
A moment later, he sat next to me. He never could stay mad of long.
Even in the dim light of the moon, I could see how different we had become. When we were little, people had mistaken us for brothers, or even for the same kid. Once his mother smacked me upside the head for something he did, and never did realize her mistake. But as we grew things changed. We were both tall and rail-thin, but his hair had remained blond while mine darkened to almost black. He had grown so quiet, so quiet and serious. You could never tell what was going on in his mind. Deep thoughts, deeps fears-- it was hard to say. Whatever, he didn’t seem to be capable of having fun anymore, so I never felt bad about tormenting him or having a good laugh at his expense.
“Your old man’s a con artist,” I said.
“Huh? What do you mean?”
“You never noticed?” I asked.
“Noticed what?”
“Every time he says let’s go up to the lake, let’s do some fishing-- every time there’s, like, all this work that has to be done up here. Like, uh, by the way, we really should finish the yard work before we go fishing. Or today: three hours to move a humongous pile of gravel. What’s that all about? Why does he need so much gravel?”
“He wants to put a patio behind the house,” he said.
“A patio? What?-- is that next week’s project?”
“It’s just chores”
“Chores?” I said. “Anything that involves a wheel barrow is more than a chore. Besides, if it was just chores, he’d say straight up that there are a few chores to be done. And he’d say that before we get into the car to come up here. That’s what makes it all a scam-- he sneaks it in at the last minute.”
“Well, whatever,” he said, starting to brood.
We sat there on the pier, neither of us saying anything. I listened to the half-hearted chirruping of crickets. There were no flies or mosquitoes. Most of the insects were probably dead, and those that weren’t sensed the coming chill of winter.
Then we both heard it, the faraway scream. It ran through the night silence the way a broken thread runs through a piece of fabric, fuzzy and desperate, trying to escape the harsh sameness of the other threads.
“What the hell was that?” he asked, gazing over the lake, over the water whose surface was inky black except for a ribbon of moonlight.
“Sounds like somebody saw a mouse,” I said.
“Sounds like more than that,” he countered.
There were a few pinpricks of light on the opposite shore, from summer homes hidden in the velvety darkness.
“People are still awake over there,” he said.
“It probably didn’t ever come from there,” I said. It was nearly half a mile across the lake, but out there at night sound travels. Sometimes, you could even hear the electronic bops and beeps of video games at the arcade attached to the nearest gas station, and that was over a mile away.
“It came from across the lake,” he said, certain.
“Okay, it came from there,” I said. Wherever it had come from, it didn’t seem to have anything to do with us.
“We should do something,” he said.
“Do what? It’s nothing.”
“People don’t scream for nothing. Didn’t you hear it? It sounded-- scared.”
“Yeah, probably from a field mouse-- it probably got into somebody’s house.”
“What if it’s more than that? What if somebody’s hurt. What if somebody’s hurting somebody else?”
“You think that’s what it is,” I said, curious that he was so grave. It didn’t have anything to do with us, so why worry?
“Yeah, maybe.”
“So call the cops,” I said, but he wasn’t listening.
He stood and pulled off his shirt.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“I’m going to check it out.”
“You’re nuts.”
“No, come on, we’ll swim across.”
“Uh-uh. No way.”
“It’s not that far. We did it before.”
“Not at night, we didn’t.”
“It’s no farther at night,” he said.
“What about water moccasins?”
“What about them?”
I looked up, studying him. For a second, I thought he might be kidding. But he wasn’t. He had stripped down to his shorts, and was waiting for me to do the same.
“Hey, I’m not going anywhere,” I said.
“Don’t you want to know what it’s all about?” he asked, looking down at me as though I were the crazy one.
“No, not really.”
“Fine. Stay,” he said curtly.
He turned away and dived off the pier. The splash he made shattered the hush of night. I heard him swimming away. He would never make it across, I was sure. The water must have been almost freezing. He would change his mind and come back. Just a single scream. It wasn’t worth such a long swim in the cold water in the black of night. Sure, he’d turn back. He would realize it had been nothing, just somebody who’d seen a mouse.
************
I sat on the pier and waited. I heard a splash in the water, and I thought it was him returning. But it must have been a fish, flapping its tail near the surface.
The night grew quiet again. Even the last few crickets stopped singing. All I heard was the soft sucking sound of the water lapping against the pier pilings.
A long time passed, the bright full moon shifted in the sky, but he didn’t return. I wished he’d come back, so I could make fun of him for going in the first place. He’d be freezing, pulling himself out of the water. He’d be tired and beaten. He end up telling me it had just been some woman, or little kid, who had been spooked by a mouse in the house or a raccoon in the garbage can. It would be a fine joke on him. I would have a good laugh, and he would brood over how stupid he’d been.
But he was not returning. I started to feel panicky. What if he drowned himself? He was a good swimmer, as good as me, but even good swimmers drown, especia
lly at night, in cold water.
I got up and paced the pier. I thought about swimming out into the lake, but how would I ever find him out there? I cursed him. What was I supposed to do? Should I keep on waiting? Should I go back to his parents’ cottage, wake them, tell them their moron son went for a midnight swim and never returned. And exactly how was I supposed to explain that to them?
Then I heard the faraway plashing of water. It must be him. I should have been relieved, but I was more mad than anything else. He shouldn’t have left. He should have stayed simply because I didn’t want to go.
He pulled himself up onto the pier. His hair, plastered to his head, looked very dark. He was shivering, the way I had known he would, but he didn’t seem beaten. I stood and watched him get dressed.
“Well?” I demanded.
“Well, what?” he asked.
“You didn’t make it across, did you?” I asked, though I knew darned well he must have; he hadn’t been out there threading water for so long.
“I did,” he said.
“And?”
“And what?”
“Did you find out what it was about?”
“Yeah.”
“Well?”
But he wouldn’t say anything.
“Well?” I said again.
He stared at me in the pale moonlight. “If you wanted to know, you should have come with,” he said coldly.
I couldn’t believe it. “You’re not going to tell me?”
But he was already turning away. He started walking up the pier, heading toward his parents’ place-- a small white cottage, with a large pile of gravel behind it.
“It was just a mouse, I bet,” I called after him.
But he didn’t say anything, didn’t even turn to look back.
After he was gone, I sat alone at the end of the pier. The night was silent again, somehow more silent than it had been before. The pinpricks of light across the lake were gone. Darkness blended into darkness, like a strange creature trying to devour itself.
I gazed out over the black water, thinking, wondering when my friend had become such a bastard.
TINY VOICES
I hear tiny voices. I’ve been hearing them since I was a little kid. They don’t buzz in my head twenty-four hours a day. They don’t tell me to do crazy things, either. They don’t tell me to whack the mailman over the head with a pickax and slit his throat and cut him into tiny pieces. Nothing like that at all. They seem to come to me at given moments and tell me things I need to know. For instance, once I wasn’t watching as I started to cross a street, and a panicky voice shrieked in my head, Watch out, stupid! I froze in place as I was about to step off the curb, and a newspaper delivery truck sped past, narrowly missing me. If it hadn’t been for that tiny voice, I would have ended up squashed under the truck tires.
Over the years I have discerned four distinct voices. The first, the one that saved me from the newspaper truck, I named Angel. I really thought she was my guardian angel, too, because she always seemed to speak to me whenever my well-being was at issue. The second voice I noticed I named Joker, because she would always tell me to do silly things, like little practical jokes to play on my parents and friends. Joker has been the voice that always cracked me up in school, making fun of the teacher or the other students, funny little remarks that nearly had me rolling around on the floor. Joker has been responsible for my getting sent down to the main office quite a few times. Then there is Grumpy, who seems to hate everybody and everything. Often I have the impression she resents being stuck in my head. She certainly has got into many arguments with the other voices, especially Joker, usually keeping me awake all night, forced to listen to the two insult each other, while Angel will try in vain to calm them down. The last voice, the one that really scares me, I call Lurker. It is the only male voice in my head. He doesn’t say much, but I always know he is there, listening. When he does speak, he tells me creepy things. I try not to listen to him, but I can’t help myself. Maybe this is why he has always scared me; I fear he may actually gain some control over me and force me to do things I don’t want to do.
So now I am sixteen years old and I have four people in my head. I have got so used to them, I probably wouldn’t be able to bear the silence if they were suddenly gone. Sometimes, I wonder if other people hear tiny voices, too. It is impossible to tell for sure. Who wants to admit that kind of thing?
************
Other than the voices in my head, I think I’m pretty normal. I have friends-- well, a few friends, anyhow. I attend school, a small country high school, and I get good grades. I am not altogether sure I deserve my grades; I do get help from four other people, after all. Angel is very good in English and History, while Joker seems to have a talent for Math and Algebra. Whenever I take test, they whisper answers in my head-- as though somebody else might actually hear them. It is all so sneaky, I usually feel guilty of cheating. Sometimes, I feel like confessing to my teachers, but what am I supposed to say? It isn’t me but tiny voices in my head that keep giving me all the answers?
My best friend in all the world is Jackie McCord. We have been BFF since first grade. I am her only friend. Though she is pretty and looks meek and mild, she always manages to get into fights. She has never got any good at fighting, though, and has the scars to prove it. They are not horrible scars, just a little nick on the chin and on her forehead there are a couple slightly larger ones, shaped like half-moons, which she covers with her brown bangs. I suppose she has other scars, too, on her back and other places covered by clothing, but none of the scars remind her that she is no good at fighting. So still, now and then, she gets into a fight she ends up losing.
I think her combative nature stems from her home life. She has a mother but no father. She never talks about her father, who has been absent forever. I once asked her about him, but she wouldn’t give me any answers. I thought for sure she was about to start a fight with me just because I asked. So I let it go; I didn’t want to be the next in a long line of girls who have kicked her ass.
Jackie is the only person in the world I told about the tiny voices in my head, but I don’t know if she believes me. I think she does, or maybe she wants to believe me. When you get down to it, Jackie, not me, seems much more like the type of person to hear voices in her head. I wonder if she does. It sure would explain all those fights over the years; the voices told her to start them. Yeah, sure-- it made perfect sense. So maybe she does really believe me-- only she doesn’t want to admit she hears voices, too.
Spring has come early this year, and at school every day after lunch, Jackie and I wander outside. We sit on the stairs at the side entrance of the school. We finish our drinks-- which we are not supposed to take out of the cafeteria because the lack of garbage containers outside leads to littering-- and look out across the school grounds. The grass is still a sickly shade of green, with big yellowish brown patches. In the distance, a traitor is chugging along slowly, kicking up dust. It is not the grandest scenery in the world, but a lot better than the view from the other side entrance, from where you can see cows lowing in the distance.
It is not easy being trapped in a school that is caught between cornfields and cows.
“We need to do something,” Jackie says. She says it abruptly, as though it’s an emergency. I guess the older you get, the more urgent it is to do something-- anything-- if you live in a place where there is nothing to do.
“Like what?” I ask.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she whines. “Think of something, will you?”
I thought a moment, and said, “I got nothing.”
“There has to be something.”
Yeah, sure, there are things to do. You can go to ice cream socials or while away hours at the roadside arcade just out of town. You can walk down the road a couple miles to the apple orchard, and just go wild…. But that isn’t what Jackie means. She means something that will let off the steam that builds up inside you until you can no longer bear the
pressure inside and you think your guts are about to split wide open as everything inside you spews out. That is what she means. It has to be something crazy and fulfilling, something that may hurt you and start trouble that never sees an end. If it isn’t dangerous in some way, why bother even doing it?
“I don’t know,” I say.
“You must have some idea,” she says.
“I got nothing.”
I can’t look at her. I can’t stand to see anybody look at me in certain ways, like when they expect something from me, especially something I can’t give.
“Then ask them,” she says.
I have to look at her now. Her eyes are large and desperate.
“Ask who?”
“You know who,” she says.
“No,” I say dully.
“Come on,” she moans. “I’m bored-- I am soooo bored!” She stands long enough to chuck her empty soda bottle out onto the lawn. When she sits, she edges closer to me, as though she is about to make some shocking confession. “Are they saying anything now? Can they give you some kind of idea?”
I can’t answer. I still find it hard to talk about the voices, speak of them out loud to another human.
I sigh. “They’ve been quiet.” This is a partial lie; although the voices are silent now, they were jabbering among themselves during lunch. Joker said something so funny I nearly choked on my corn bread.
“Well, can’t you just ask them? Can’t you get them to start talking?”
“I don’t know if that’s a good thing,” I say.
“Come on,” she coaxes.
“They wouldn’t come up good with anything, anyway. I may be a little crazy, but the voices in my head are pretty sensible.”
“That’s not what you told me before,” she says. Her eyes burn briefly. For a second I think she may take a swing at me. That is how fast she can lose control. I’m surprised she hasn’t taken somebody by surprise and won at least one fight. “That’s not what you told me at all. You said sometimes they tell you to do crazy things-- that’s what you said. The one you call Joker is always telling you things.”