Whisper to Me (29 page)

So she sang the whole song, only she didn’t know most of the words, not that it stopped her.

Then we dropped them off, and Paris and Julie went up, Paris still shouting stuff, mostly impossible to make out now, and Julie was holding the trophy aloft that Paris had given her, and finally they went into the apartment building and you turned to me. And then I found out that sometimes your own feelings can thwart stuff for you; you don’t even need life to do it.

“Wow,” you said.

“Uh-huh,” I said. I must have sounded cold.

“What is it?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“Did I do something wrong?”

“Absolutely not.”

“But you’re pissed with me. Is it because I offered them a ride?”

“No.”

You sighed. “O … kay … So nothing is wrong?”

“No.”

But of course I was speaking in monosyllables and it was pretty obvious I was not happy, and in the end you just raised your hands and said, “Fine. Let’s just go home.”

That made it sound like our home was together, like we were a couple or something, which just made me feel even worse, thinking of you rushing to help Paris, of how stupid I had been, thinking that any of this had anything to do with me. I knew that was a thing boys did—get to the beautiful one through her plain friend.

I figured that was what you were doing.

I know better now. I know you were helping Paris because you liked me, and I liked Paris, and so automatically you liked Paris. At least I assume so; just as likely you just saw that she needed help and you didn’t even think about it. I’m the one who thinks about stuff too much, I’m aware of that.

Anyway, that’s why I was frosty to you in the pickup, okay?

Eventually you gave up on me and a little part inside me died, and you started the engine and drove back toward the house. After a while, watching the streetlights go past, I started to think maybe I had been an idiot. Maybe I had read something into nothing. I opened my mouth to say sorry—

—and we passed Dad’s car, a few blocks from the house, driving home.

****.

“Hit the gas,” I said. That was another opportunity wasted to spend time with you, to talk to you alone, because you sped up to beat him and we got home like two minutes before him so I didn’t even say good night to you, just ran into the house while you lay down in the pickup so he wouldn’t see you. And we made it. We got away with it.

So that’s why I’ve told you the story of the game, which you know anyway, what with being there and all.

One: because I was mean to you afterward and you didn’t deserve it and I’m sorry. Two: because you saw what happened at the game, with Paris and Julie, but you didn’t
understand
.

You see, you were on the phone at the pier when Julie was talking about never winning anything. You probably just thought it was Paris being crazy, as usual.

But you get it now, right? You get what I’m telling you about her?

You could call her crazy. If that was the way you saw the world. Or you could call her someone who would go to the trouble of having a trophy made, specially, and then crash a sporting event just to give it to her friend.

That’s the Paris I want the world to remember. That’s the Paris I want you to remember.

“Can you wash up?” said Dad. We had just finished eating—pizza from the restaurant for the third night in a row.

“Sure,” I said.

“I’ll be in the study.”

“Sure.” I was not varying my vocabulary much. I was thinking about you, and how even if you did like me, which I wasn’t at all sure about, but still, even if you
did
, I had messed it all up now.

He left his plate and went to the bug room. He was still pissed with me, even though he didn’t see me get back from the roller derby, luckily. I didn’t blame him, really. At least he hadn’t shouted for a while. Of course that didn’t necessarily mean anything. Dad’s anger, it surfaces unexpectedly, I’ve told you already. Like spray from a whale’s blowhole. Stillness …

then …

whoosh
.

So I was just waiting for him to blow over some tiny inconsequential thing. Like the dishes not being cleaned properly—so as a result I scrubbed them for ages before putting them in the rack to dry, trying to give him no excuses.

I stopped at the door to the study, on the way up to my room. Dad was hunched over the computer, typing. On the forum, I guessed. Dad was always on the forum, when he wasn’t actually feeding the bugs or breeding them or whatever he did with them.

On the forum he was BEETLEJUICE3. It was like a lame superhero identity. I mean, in real life, he was an ex-soldier with a failing restaurant and a sick daughter. But there on the forum he was a PRO-LEVEL BUGGER. He had seventeen hundred posts or something and two thousand comments. People would ask him questions, post comments with lots of animated emojis about how awesome he was—I’d seen him answering them lots of times. He was like a legend on that site.

No wonder he didn’t want to deal with real things. Like me.

“’Night, Dad,” I said.

He turned. “’Night.”

“Watcha doing?”

“Posting some pics of my new giant pills.”

“Pills?”

“Millis. They roll into balls. Like a pill bug, you know?” He went back to the screen, typing with one finger, slowly.

“Okay, well, see you tomorrow.”

He grunted and I went up the stairs. I lay on my bed, all my clothes still on. I stared at the ceiling for a long time. Then I grabbed my phone and texted Paris.

    U there? xxx

I waited for, like, half an hour, but she didn’t text back. I turned on the radio, and Katy Perry blasted out into the room.

“Turn that ******* **** down!”

That was Dad, shouting up from the study.

I sighed and turned it down. I got up onto my knees on the bed and looked out the window—but I couldn’t see you and Shane on your deck chairs, and there was no light spilling from your apartment.

My phone buzzed. I picked it up.

    Going out. Client. C U tmw?

I thought of Dad, banning me from seeing her. But he’d be at work from eleven in the morning …

    Yeah. Wld have to be daytime tho.

The answer popped right up.

    That’s cool. Maston Theater? Matinee of Toy Story.

    Toy Story? I replied.

    Hey don’t diss Pixar.

    OK. What time?

    1.

    OK. Night, Paris.

    Night, Cass.

I put the phone down. I lay down again and reached for the Haruki Murakami book on my nightstand.

“No,” said the voice.

“Oh hi,” I said. “Nice to hear from you. And thank you for waiting till after six p.m. to—”

“No reading.”

I thought of Dr. Lewis. I thought: I have nothing to lose here. “Or what?” I asked.

“Excuse me?”

“If I read my book, what are you going to do about it?”

The voice thought for a moment—this sounded different from when it went away. I can’t explain it. I mean, I could still
feel
it there. “I will make you cut off one of your toes.”

My toes curled. “How?”

“What?”

“How will you make me do that?”

“I will force you to.”

“No.”

Then the voice screamed at me. That was new. I mean, it was always saying horrible things. But the screaming was different. “
Don’t push me!
 ” it screamed.

“I’m not pushing you. I’m just saying no.”

“Go to the kitchen
this instant
. Tell your dad you’re getting a glass of water. Take a bread knife, and come back up here. Then cut off your pinky toe on your left foot. Do it right now.”

“Or what?”

“What do you mean, or what?”

“I mean, if I don’t cut off my toe, what are you going to do about it?”

The voice thought. “I’m going to kill your father. No more injuries. No more minor ****. You don’t cut off your toe, your dad dies. Okay?”

You can’t imagine how scared I was. My eyes were filling with tears. It was dark out; my room was gloomy with shadows. I flicked on my bedside lamp. But that only made it worse. Now my clothes hanging on the door handle, my posters, my shelves, cast weird shapes on the walls and floor.

“I won’t do it,” I said.

“Then you will wake up in the morning and your father will be dead.”

I said nothing.

“
He will die
. Do you understand?
I will kill him in his sleep
. I will smother him until he stops breathing and his body is cold and dead.”

I said nothing.

“Get the bread knife.
Now
.”

“No.”

“Last chance, Cass.”

“No.”

The voice sighed. “He dies, then,” it said.

And then it did go. I felt it withdraw from the room.

From my head.

The voice didn’t speak then, but my mind was unquiet. You get that word in old gothic novels, don’t you? Unquiet ghosts and so on.

That was my mind that night. My thoughts just raced around, like ghosts in a haunted house, unstoppable.

What if your dad dies because of you?

How selfish are you?

You really want to kill another parent?

Sometimes they were words, like that, and sometimes they were images. Scenes, flashing in and out of my consciousness.

Tiles.

Blood.

The house was mostly wood and I could hear it expanding or contracting or whatever houses do at night when they cool down. Outside, there was a strong wind coming from the ocean. I could
smell
it through the cracks of my windows, salty and holding the promise of distance and forgetting—a promise I wished it would make good on. I wished that wind would sweep into my head and rinse it clean, whistle through the cavities of my skull until there was nothing there but emptiness, and silence.

But the wind didn’t do that, and the voice was still in my head. “He’s going to die, he’s going to die, he’s going to die, he’s going to die like a dog on the ground, like your mother. It’s going to be your fault.”

The voice was
everywhere
. It was speaking, in my ears, as a voice, but it was merging with everything else too. The creaking and clicking and ticking of the house were all consonants, the wind outside was all vowels, and together the house and the wind were saying,

Your dad is going to die.

In the end I couldn’t stand it anymore, and I got some old headphones out of my nightstand—I had to dig under the piles of medication that I hadn’t been taking; archaeology. I plugged them into my radio and tuned it to a dead channel again, the way I used to block out the voice.

I filled my head with white noise.

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I must have fallen asleep at some point because when I opened my eyes there was sunlight flooding the room and the white noise was still blasting in my ears,

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I pulled off the headphones and vaulted off the bed. I ran out my door and just down the hallway to Dad’s.

I banged on it, hard.

No answer.

I hammered again on the door with my fist.

BANG, BANG, BANG.

Oh please oh please oh—

“Cass? What the hell?”

Relief snapped open and expanded inside me, like a parachute. “Dad?”

“Uh, yeah. It’s five thirty ********* a.m., Cass. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong, Dad. Nothing’s wrong.”

I heard him roll over in bed. “Then go back to ******* bed.”

But I didn’t. I bounced down the hall, elastic with happiness. I had challenged the voice and
I had won
. I had taken on step five for the second time, and I had come out victorious.

“You there?” I asked the voice.

No answer.

“Figures,” I said.

I didn’t know how I was going to wait till one o’clock for the
Toy Story
matinee with Paris. I was buzzing. I had 220 volts of electricity running through me, fizzing in my veins and nerves. I was
wired
. I went to my room and tried to read some of the Murakami—the voice said not one thing about it—but I couldn’t concentrate on the words.

A little later I heard Dad go downstairs and have his breakfast; then he left. He didn’t make me anything to eat, or call up, or anything. I went downstairs and tried to watch some TV for an hour or so, but I still couldn’t concentrate. I went back upstairs, still in my pajamas.

I pulled on my swimsuit and then faded jeans and a T-shirt with my old Converses and went outside. My phone went into my back pocket. I was going to walk to the beach, do some drawing, maybe swim in the ocean. If the voice wanted to say anything about it, well, what was it going to do? I grabbed my sketch pad and my pencil.