Deadly Little Voices (5 page)

Turquoise, diamond-shaped, and brilliant, it took up half of my palm.

“I couldn’t believe it myself,” you continued. “I mean, it was just sitting there, sticking out from a pile of kelp. I almost didn’t see it, but something told me to take a closer look. That’s when I noticed what a beauty it was.”

“A beauty,” I echoed, hearing the question in my voice. You must’ve heard it too.

“So beautiful,” you said, closing my fingers around the piece, and then taking my hand in yours.

Did you notice how my lips parted? And how I took a step back? I couldn’t imagine you were truly saying what it sounded like you were saying. Because why would you ever say that?

“It reminded me of you,” you said, still holding my hand. I wondered if you could feel the sweat in my palm. “Can I ask you something?” you continued.

I nodded, wanting desperately to believe you—to believe the moment, to believe your sincerity. But I honestly didn’t know how.

Before you could utter another syllable, Carl ordered me to help Dee out in the storage room“It’s a real mess back there.”

When I turned to answer him, I felt your hand slip away. “Can it wait a second?” I looked back in your direction, but you were no longer there.

Your back toward me, you collected your books from the table, and then headed out the door without saying good-bye.

…

KIMMIE CALLS WHILE I’m at Knead, desperate to know where I am and why I went all psycho-and-demonic in sculpture class (her words, not mine). Part of me wants to hang up, but instead I agree to let her and Wes pick me up, which is exactly what they do. Less than twenty minutes later, they’re parked and waiting outside the studio.

Luckily, we don’t really talk much to one another in the car. Kimmie is too busy on her cell phone, telling her dad why he can’t expect her to change plans on a moment’s notice.

Kimmie’s parents separated recently, and Kimmie and her younger brother, Nate, have been spending some weekends at her dad’s new apartment in the city.

“Just because you want to play house with your fourteen-year-old girlfriend on the weekend of the twenty-first doesn’t mean that I have to rearrange my whole entire social schedule,” she tells him.

“The highlight of which involves eating curly fries, playing video games, and driving around aimlessly with me,” Wes snickers.

Kimmie moves the phone away from her ear as her dad speaks, enabling us to hear his garbled voice. He’s demanding that she give him more respect, and reminding her that his girlfriend, Tammy, is actually
nineteen
years old, not
fourteen
. “And very mature for her age,”

he adds.

Unfortunately, Kimmie’s not the only one whose parents are dealing with drama. Ever since my aunt’s most recent suicide attempt about six months ago, my mom hasn’t been herself.

She’s been beyond stressed out, clinically depressed, and ADD-like distracted, which is why she’s started seeing a therapist, and why she hasn’t been super involved in my life lately, despite how messed up it’s been. I think she just can’t handle it, and I’m pretty sure the feeling’s mutual.

By the time Kimmie clicks off her phone, we’re in front of my house with exactly one hour before either of my parents gets home. We go inside, and I head straight for the kitchen.

The red light on the answering machine practically blinks Ms. Beady’s name. I press the play button, and her voice squeaks out, begging for either or both of my parents to call her back
pronto
.

I delete it.

“Okay, are you
trying
to get yourself grounded?” Wes asks me.

“You’re right,” I say, keeping my voice low, though fairly certain Aunt Alexia is locked away in her room, out of earshot, as has become usual for her. “If my parents have to hear that I had some sort of psychotic episode in the middle of sculpture class, it’s better if they hear it while my mother’s straight-out-of-a-mental-facility-suicidal-and-possibly-schizophrenic sister is staying with us.”

“Point taken,” he says, keeping his voice low, too.

“Plus, it doesn’t even matter, because I’m pretty sure Ms. Beady left
two
messages earlier, not one,” I say, suddenly flashing back to the voice inside my head that told me there were two. Is it possible that it was referring to the two messages? Does that even make sense?

“So, there’s at least one other voice mail message out there just waiting to get played,”

Kimmie says, putting the pieces together.

“Hungry?” Wes asks. His arms are full of bags of Fritos and Starbursts. He’s managed to locate my dad’s stash of junk food (kept in the baskets over the kitchen cabinets) in less time than it takes most people to pick a wedgie.

We loot the stash, and I lead them down the hallway, almost forgetting the fact that Aunt Alexia’s nurse is there.

“Hi,” Loretta says, coming out of Alexia’s room. She closes the door softly behind her.

Nurse Loretta (a.k.a. Nurse Leatherface, according to Wes) is about sixty years old, but it looks as if she’s spent at least forty of those years in a tanning bed. Her skin is pure lines and leather. “Alexia’s just gone off to sleep,” she tells us, “so if you wouldn’t mind speaking in soft voices…”

“Will Frito-munching be too loud?” Wes asks, holding the bag out to her.

Instead of dignifying the question with a response, Loretta proceeds to the living room to wait for my parents. Meanwhile, Kimmie, Wes, and I head for my bedroom to talk.

“Okay, so I just have one question for you,” Kimmie says, flopping onto my bed. “What the hell was up today? Because you totally freaked me out. I was half expecting your eyes to roll up toward the ceiling and guttural phrases to come chanting out your mouth. You know…just like a couple months ago, also in sculpture class, I might add, when you flipped out and told me that I deserved to die.”

“Maybe you plus sculpture class equals a really bad idea,” Wes says.

I take a deep breath and tell them about the voice in my head—how it started whispering at me from the moment I touched my mound of clay.

“And you couldn’t just ignore it?” Kimmie asks.

“Nor could you simply stop touching your mound?” Wes grins.

“I actually started feeling better when I ditched the mound,” I tell him. “When I dropped it on the floor in Ms. Beady’s office.”

“Well, there’s your answer,” Kimmie says. “About putting an end to the voices, I mean.

You need to stop doing pottery.”

“Cold turkey?” Wes asks. “I mean, shouldn’t she try the patch first?”

“In the form of Play-Doh and really malleable gummy worms, maybe.” Kimmie giggles.

“I can’t stop doing pottery,” I tell them. “It’s a part of who I am.”

“Sort of like how you always insist on dressing like a Gap ad,” Wes says, giving my jeans and basic tee a once-over.

“Since when are you one to talk about style?” Kimmie says, coming to my defense. She raises an eyebrow at his sheepskin boots.

“Plus, it wouldn’t even matter,” I say, interrupting their banter. “Last night I wasn’t even doing pottery—just having a dream about it—when I heard voices as well.”

“That’s actually not so hard to believe,” Wes says, rifling through my night-table drawer.

He snags a sleep mask and slips it on. “I mean, that’s kind of what happens when you dream kinky stuff, too. Your body—God bless it—believes the dream. The next thing you know, you’re changing into a new pair of sweats.”

“
Ewwww
,” Kimmie says, covering her eyes as if that could blot out the less-than-lovely image that Wes has ever so kindly painted for us.

“So, then, if avoiding pottery won’t even solve the

there-are-crazy-voices-inside-my-head
issue, is there any way to
adapt
to the voices?” Wes asks, pulling off the sleep mask. “Sort of like how I adapt to my father being such a meddling and narrow-minded prick?”

“I don’t know.” I pop a lemon Starburst into my mouth. “I mean, today, in sculpture class, I completely zoned out. It was like I was someplace else entirely. Not exactly capable of voices-in-my-head adaptation.”

“Well, I
still
think taking a hiatus from pottery might be a good first step,” Kimmie says, pulling a copy of
TeenEdge
from her bag. “You could fake a sprained wrist. I’m sure we could make a legit-looking doctor’s note. Because, let’s face it, there’s way more to life than voice-activated premonitions and seizurelike fits, right?” She flips to an article titled “Pre-prom Planning Made Easy.”

“Maybe you could talk to your aunt,” Wes suggests.

“I’d like to,” I say, finally deciding to fill them in on what happened last night, when Aunt Alexia found me huddled on the floor of the linen closet.

“And we’re just hearing about this
now
?” Wes asks.

I shrug and look away, hoping that telling them was the right choice. The truth is that when I heard my aunt was coming to stay with us for a bit, I imagined things a whole lot differently—I thought that
she’d
be the one I’d talk to about this stuff, that we’d be able to help each other in extraordinary ways, and understand each other as no one else could.

“What’s this?” Wes asks, reaching further inside my drawer. He pulls out Aunt Alexia’s diary and runs his fingers over the cover, where it’s been torn and patched over.

“What does it look like?” I point at her name, written across the front.

“Yes, but what are
you
doing with it?”

“I found it,” I say, proceeding to explain that I came across the diary several months ago, while putting away holiday decorations in the attic. “It’s from when Aunt Alexia was a teen—when people started labeling her as crazy and when she started having brushes with psychometry.” At least, I think psychometry was to blame for a lot of her issues.

“And what was it doing in your attic?” Kimmie asks.

“There’s actually a bunch of my aunt’s stuff stored up there…ever since the first time she was admitted to a mental facility.”

“Talk about depressing,” Kimmie says, flashing me a picture from her magazine of a girl wearing a strapless dress made of duct tape. Whether she’s referring to the dress or my aunt’s journal, I have absolutely no idea.

“You know what’s really depressing?” I say, watching Wes read one of the entries near the end of the journal.

“Even more depressing than fantasies involving a pretty pink dress, sparkly gold shoes, and carbon-monoxide-induced sleep?” he asks. Then he begins to read:
“Dear Diary
,
I’ve never
felt more alone in my entire life. I feel like a victim of what’s going on in my head. Like my head
is independent of my body, tormenting me, punishing me, telling me things that I don’t
understand. I plug my ears up with cotton until they ache and bleed. I blast music, dance around
my room, stick my head between my knees when everything feels too dizzy. I also chant to myself:
I can’t hear you, I can’t hear you. You can’t hurt me. No one hurts me.
But nothing seems to
work. I need to try something else. I need to end this madness.”
Wes snaps the journal shut and shoves it back inside my drawer.

“Well, that was cheerful,” Kimmie says.

I swallow hard, thinking that, as crazy as that entry sounds, I can understand what my aunt was feeling. And that’s what terrifies me most. “The voices in my head have been hinting that I should kill myself, too,” I tell them.

“Hinting…because they practice the art of subtlety?” Wes asks.

“Okay, so we seriously need to figure out a way to stop this so-called superpower,”

Kimmie says, finally closing the cover of her magazine.

“Even if I
could
stop it, would that be the right answer, either? I mean, maybe the voices aren’t telling
me
to do it. Maybe there’s someone else involved here—someone who’s thinking about doing something drastic.”

“Give it a little time,” Wes says, “and with a few more voices crammed into your head, a couple nights spent reading morbid diary entries—not to mention Auntie Recluse in the next room over—you’ll be thinking about doing something drastic, too.”

I feed my funk with a three-stack of Starbursts, hoping that what’s been happening is indeed a symptom of psychometry, that there’s a logical explanation as to why the voices and the visions have been coming to me (if psychometry can even be considered somewhat logical).

Because I’m terrified of the alternative: voices plus hallucinations plus me equals crazy.

“Ever think that the voices might have something to do with your aunt?” Wes adds.

“Especially if they concern suicide?”

“Doubtful. The voices tell me how talentless I am, how ugly I look, and that I should basically be maggot feed. My aunt would never say those things.”

“And you’re sure you’re not just eavesdropping on the conversations that my dad has with me?” he asks.

“Very funny,” I say, joining Kimmie on the bed and noticing how suddenly sullen she looks—as if she had run out of spandex fabric just stitches away from finishing a dress.

“What were you dreaming about sculpting, anyway?” Wes asks.

“A figure skater,” I say, picturing the piece in my mind—the way the skater’s leg extends backward, and how her arms cross in front of the chest. “It’s something I’ve been working on, something I began just a few days ago in my basement studio—before I started dreaming about it, that is.”