Whisper to Me(62)

I’m going to look it up. I’m on my dad’s computer, by the way. I never said that. I’m in the study, surrounded by bugs, the tanks glowing. It’s kind of peaceful. The keyboard is old though and heavy and the keys make an annoyingly loud clicking sound. Then that sometimes gets the bugs going, and they click back at me. I don’t know which ones click—the beetles, maybe.

This room used to be where my mom would sew. I haven’t told you that either. She was a dressmaker—she had mannequins in here, measuring tapes, an old Singer sewing machine. Patterns and scissors; fabrics on rolls; it was like a treasure shop. Mostly she didn’t make stuff outright—women would bring her expensive dresses though, which they’d bought from Bergdorf Goodman in New York or whatever, and she would alter them so they fitted perfectly. Those women loved her for that: I could see it in their eyes, the joy when they saw themselves in the long mirror Mom had hung on the wall.

Dad kept it all for two years, after she died. The mannequins, everything. Then one day I came downstairs and it was all gone, and his bugs, which had been in the basement, were all along the walls. He also put in a safe, and bought a handgun—for protection, he said. After Mom died, he was obsessed with protection. With keeping us safe. Only I never felt very protected; I felt mostly the opposite, like his anger was the biggest threat. It was like living with a black bear.

Anyway.

I didn’t like his redecorating the room and filling it with insects and a gun, but I never said anything. It was like she was finally gone, even from the house. Like, before that, if the house had a mouth, the house would have said it missed her too, because it was still filled with objects that belonged to her, like memories in a mind. You know?

Anyway.

I did look it up. It’s not a stick, it’s a club. A golf club.

Okay, so we got the clubs and went around the course, but of course you were there, you know all this already. We laughed; we had fun. We chipped our balls up into a pirate ship, along the rigging, off a plank and into shark-infested waters. We tapped them up spiral slides and over ramps to clear rivers. We made clocks chime and windmills turn.

Shane tried desperately to hook up with Paris, and she gave weird answers to his questions until he gave up and just started acting normal instead, which was much less annoying. After a while he even tried to hit on Julie for a bit, but he dropped that pretty fast when it was obvious it was going nowhere.

You spoke to me. You spoke to me about the town you grew up in, twenty miles away, and how there was nothing to do there, no way to make money in the summer—just a general store and a gas station and a bunch of farmland that no one could earn a living from.

You spoke to me about how you wanted to go to college; the books you loved. Which were mostly the books I loved, and that was cool. I had noticed you, the very first time I saw you. But the more I spoke to you, the more I realized why I had noticed you. Does that make any sense?

“I’m on an old-texts kick,” you said. “Now that I’ve finished the Ovid. I’m on the Epic of Gilgamesh. It’s Babylonian, the oldest written work in—”

“It’s Sumerian, actually,” I said.

You rolled your eyes. “Geek,” you said.

“Hey,” I said. “You’re reading it. I’m just correcting your elementary errors. There are Babylonian versions, but the Sumerian came first.”

You made a face. “Speaking of which,” you said, “I don’t think the ball is supposed to go in the actual water. You aim for that painted ocean there; see the track up the octopus’s tentacle?” My ball had gone flying over the fence ringing the course, and presumably had landed on the beach below.

“Bite me,” I said.

“Don’t worry,” you said. “It’s a complex game.”

I stuck out my tongue at you.

We talked for hours, it felt like. The voice said nothing at all; the voice couldn’t get past the force field that was you.

It was nice.

I know, I know, that’s the lamest thing I could possibly say, but you have to understand, for me it was major. I mean, hanging with Paris was weird, and fun, but the voice was always there, somewhere—hanging on the edge of things like a dark bat—and it took a lot of energy, being with her, even when the voice was silent.

Being with you though … being with you was nice. And not just because the voice wasn’t there. I want you to know that.

As we walked back down the boardwalk, we passed another basketball stall—the racks of plush toys, the little hoops and child-sized balls. People think the whole thing is gamed, that the hoops are too small for the ball, or that the stallman bends them or something to make the angle impossible. But they don’t. It’s just hard.

Paris stopped. “Competition,” she said.

“What?” said Shane.

The stall was being run by a pimply kid in the same blue shirt that you wore to work, with a leather jacket over it two sizes too big. “You playing?” he said. “Five dollars, three shots.”

“Yes,” said Paris. She reached into her purse.

“We are?” you said.

“Yep,” said Paris. “All of us. Best shot wins … I don’t know. Pride, or something.”

“You get a toy,” said the kid behind the counter. He held out a ball to Paris.