Whisper (4 page)

I hobbled down the sidewalk after my friends, a white rage growing inside me with each step.

I wasn’t just angry at Icka—I was angry at myself. I could have prevented what had happened at breakfast, if only I’d bothered to think ahead.

It’s not like this was the first time she’d tried to sabotage my friendships. She’d never been okay with my having friends, period.

In second grade, I brought home my first BFF: plump, freckled, awkward Heather Mackey. Jessica had so far failed to bring home from school anything but perfect papers, bruises from having ice plant lobbed at her at recess, and the
mocking nickname Icka, which stuck like superglue. She treated poor Heather like a fire that needed to be stomped out. She stomped on Heather’s feelings, then her glasses (“accidentally”). Heather Mackey never came over again.

When I won “Sweetest Smile” in the fifth-grade year-book poll, she taunted me all summer, grinning like a baboon every time she saw me. “That’s what your smile looks like,” she informed me. “What’s wrong with you? You might as well get a tattoo that says, ‘Desperate to be liked.’” By then she herself had already given up on being liked. Two schools had expelled her that year for punching other students out of the blue—really, she confided, it was because they were “Whispering something jerky.”

But the worst was a couple years ago, when Mom talked Aunt Jane into coming over for Christmas dinner, and she told us some of the old family legends passed down through her mother’s mother.

I liked the one about Great-great-aunt Sadie, a spunky Old West gal. She’d used her Hearing to best every poker shark in the saloon, then gave all the money to charity.

Icka’s favorite was the story of Hope and Faith, Puritanera twins who’d supposedly opened up a psychic link one day when Faith was spinning wool and miraculously Heard her sister’s voice from miles away. Hope was drowning in the river, but Faith, Listening to her sister’s Whispers and even picking up mental pictures through Hope’s eyes, was able to find her and save her. According to the legend, Hope lived on to become our great-times-nine grandmother.
(Or maybe it was Faith. Changed every time we heard the story.)

“That Jane.” The stories made Mom shake her head and smile. “I can’t believe she remembers all those old family fairy tales.”

But Icka didn’t see it as just a fairy tale. She couldn’t get enough of the story. It stuck in her head: sisters bonded for life. This was right around the time I was starting to make more friends. People like Parker and Helena. Icka began the extremely annoying and creepy habit of calling me daily on my cell phone to ask, “Can you Hear me right now?”

“I hear your voice on the phone, if that’s what you mean…,” I’d say, getting suspicious and worried.

“Oh, that’s all?” You could just hear the disappointment in her voice. “Too bad. Because right now I’m lying across the railroad tracks.” Or sitting in a grocery cart at the top of a steep hill. Or wandering through the park alone at night.

This went on until the first time I ever slept over at Parker’s house. I was nervous. Parker was the most popular girl in my grade, and she liked
me
. We had a great time, though, and had finally drifted off to sleep around two
A.M
…. when my phone rang, waking Parker’s older sister and her hard-working immigrant mother, talk about embarrassing. It was Icka, of course, wanting to know if I could Hear her. She’d snuck out, walked to the mall in the dark, and climbed to the second floor of a construction site. I told her to go back home immediately, said I was calling
Mom and Dad. Suddenly she yelled and the phone went dead, and I screamed. (It turned out an eraser-sized hunk of plaster fell from the ceiling and hit her on the head.)

“I am so sorry about all this,” I said to the Lin family an hour later as the four of us sat around the kitchen table in our nightgowns, after 911 had dispatched police and an ambulance to her location and returned her, safe but concussed, to my parents. “I’m just really sorry…”

“Hey, don’t apologize.” Parker had put her hand on my shoulder. “It’s not your fault what your psycho sister does.”

She wasn’t saying that now.

No one spoke, in fact, as we trudged down Rainbow Street past stucco ramblers with green and shiny lawns, driveway after driveway curving back far from the sidewalk. No one even smiled. The sandal straps chafed my ankles and I felt guilty for holding up the group with my slowness. When Icka ran past us, every single one of my friends began wishing and praying I’d hurry up, and they kept at it until we reached the quad.

At which point the second bell rang and they all scrambled for their respective first-period classrooms, wishing I hadn’t made them late.

I watched them scatter, but I didn’t make a move toward Ms. Phelps’s language arts class. Even though it was my favorite class, there was something else I needed to do today.

I marched at turtle speed past E building, all the way down to the metal shop. Hardly any people were milling around that part of campus; there’s only a couple of reasons
to be down there. Two upperclassmen painting a mural paused to smirk at my outfit. Gingerly, walking pigeon-toed so I wouldn’t lose my balance, I traveled past the end of the concrete and onto the leafy, muddy ground.

It was like this: Deep down I knew Icka’s performance at breakfast had only been a warm-up. A month ago, when we’d planned the party, Mom had assured me she wouldn’t let Icka anywhere near it. Dad would offer to take her to the movies, and if she refused, then Mom would simply ground her to the upstairs—with the threat of taking away her art supplies if she so much as put one foot on the top step before every guest was gone. At the time, I’d been shocked that Mom—whose motto was “expect the best and people rise to your expectations”—was finally admitting she expected bad behavior from her older daughter. Now it was clear that Mom still needed to adjust her expectations down. Icka was determined to wreak havoc. She’d possibly done years worth of damage in
mere moments.
Whatever she was planning for tonight, I had to stop her…which meant I had to find her.

And I knew just where she’d be.

Unfortunately, the idea of going there made my breakfast bounce in my stomach. Lincoln was a friendly school, and I already felt welcome anywhere on campus, even on the quad, where freshmen were supposedly banned from sitting. But the path behind the metal shop wasn’t technically on school property. That was its sole appeal as far as I could see, and why it was legendary at Lincoln as a stoner
hangout. Dad said back in the eighties they called the Path’s denizens druggies, and in the seventies it was burnouts, but the idea was the same. Freaks and losers, people who couldn’t pass as normal, got pushed to the edge of campus life. You always wondered what would become of those people after high school…something I wondered about Icka too. Surely if you’d told Mom and Dad ten years ago their oldest would grow up to be a stoner/druggie/burnout and hang out at the Path, no doubt they’d have been disappointed. But the truth was sadder: Even
those
people wouldn’t hang out with Icka.

My sister spent her breaks and lunches—and too many class periods—about a hundred feet beyond the Path, on the other side of an old dry creek bed that was closer to the woods than to school. My heart pounded just thinking of venturing out there. Was I crazy? Looking for Icka was like driving toward a hurricane. But I couldn’t stand back and let her destroy my life until it sucked as much as hers. I had to try.

The stoners were congregated exactly where I knew they would be, clad in black leather and denim, smoking cloves and bidis and other weird cigarettes of a possibly less legal variety. I tried to walk quickly, but the damn shoes held me back.

“Hey, look!” A stoner girl pointed at me. “One of the trendies is defecting!” A burning joint crash-landed on the ground to vanish behind a black backpack, and a dozen
mocking eyes were suddenly fixed on me, like I was the freak.

“Wow, I didn’t know sheeple could venture so far from their quad pasture.”

“Maybe she has a message from our popular overlords?”

“Nah, she’s trolling for a homecoming date.”

“Hey, cutie, I’ll go if you promise to wear that dress.”

A chorus of snickers. And they say popular people are the mean ones? I smiled my Gina Belle smile, straightened my shoulders, and kept walking.

“She thinks she’s running for Miss Universe,” a leather-jacketed girl said. More laughter.

The tallest guy in the group I recognized as being in my government class. It took me a moment, because he cut class a lot. A lot a lot. He’d always struck me as shy and odd, but not mean. I had this bizarre urge to say hi to him and prove I wasn’t the snob they thought I was. But before I could I Heard him Whisper:
I hope she doesn’t talk to me in front of everyone here. I don’t want people to get mad.

So much for that.

The last thing I Heard before I crossed the dry creek bed—and the stoner pack moved out of my Hearing range—was from the girl who’d made the Miss Universe crack:
I wish people like her would stay away from here and leave us alone.

Youch. Who would have thought the denizens of the Path would be so harsh and excluding? Normally, Hearing
nasty Whispers like that could cast a shadow over my whole day—even week—but I couldn’t afford to nurse hurt feelings now. I had to keep going. Steeling myself for what was ahead.

Icka sat alone on the other side of the creek, sprawled on a boulder. Lit cigarette in one hand, matted white blond dreads sticking to her long, graceful neck. If not for the glint of metal in her lips and nose, the tattered men’s clothes, and clunky Docs, she could have been a mermaid. Even her raccoon-painted eyes looked otherworldly. A lot of people were intimidated by my sister, even if they didn’t like or respect her. Me, I wasn’t fooled; her pose looked posed. She was waiting for me, just like I’d waited for my friends at five thirty
A.M
. Still, it infuriated me that she could Hear me and predict my actions when I could rarely pick a Whisper off her.

My wig rustled in the breeze and red and orange leaves crunched under my platforms, but Icka didn’t lift her gaze till I was less than a foot away. Then her mouth curled into this smug little smirk that made me want to strangle her.

It also made me nervous. Had she Heard something from me, just now? I didn’t
want
to know what my desires sounded like at this moment.

“Hey, Icka,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm and even. “How’s your day been so f—”

“Get to the fucking point, if you have one.”

“Fine.” I folded my arms across the front of my hideous
dress. “You were evil to my friends this morning. You can’t do that again.”

“Oh, Joy.” Smug impatience changed to smug pity. “When you find out what those plastics have been Whispering about you, it’s really going to break you.”

Here we go again…she was so full of crap. “I don’t want to fight with you, okay? But Mom says my Hearing’s already done growing so—”

“Mommy says I’m all grown up,” she copied in a baby voice. “You planning to bring Mom with you to college so she can keep on telling you what to think? I hope you realize it’s not natural to be your mother’s clone at age fifteen. You’re supposed to hate the lying bitch…like I do.”

“Do not talk about Mom like that. Ever.” My heart was hammering. Poor Mom, who loved Icka so fiercely, who defended her still. Poor Mom! “You’re the liar.”

Icka jerked her head sideways and laughed, a high miserable sound of pain. “We’re all liars, Joy-Joy!” Just like that, her voice had gone shrill and jerky, dancing toward hysteria. “Have you, by any chance, noticed that our whole family
lies. All. The. Time!
”

I stared into her bloodshot eyes and felt a chill. “Icka, are you high again?” She’d tried just about every kind of drug—she even owned a fake ID claiming she was Allison Monroe, age twenty-two—but no matter what she did, her Hearing always came back.

“Seriously, we should change our name to the Liarsons.”
I couldn’t help but notice she’d dodged my question. “The only one who tells the truth about anything is Aunt Jane. You should ask
her
about your headaches.” She hiccoughed and it turned into a giggle.
Wish she’d go away so I could finish.

“Finish?” Aha! A Whisper. “So you could finish doing what?”

She shrugged.

I narrowed my eyes at her army bag loaded with science-fiction paperbacks. It appeared to be propped up right next to her boulder, but my eyes zeroed in on a 7Up bottle behind it. I bent down and swiped the bottle. Icka examined her fingernails in an exaggerated display of not giving a damn. There were no bubbles in the clear liquid. I took a tiny sip and spat it out on the dirt.

“That would be vodka,” Icka said unnecessarily.

“You’re drunk, Icka. Jesus. At
school
.”

“Oh, who gives a shit?” She grabbed for the bottle, but I held it over my head, miles out of her reach. “For god’s sake.” She actually sounded amused. “If you’re worried about my education, I know what’s in every teacher’s head better than they do. Dr. Kendricks, for example, spends half his time daydreaming that he’d made it as a real scientist, and the other half wishing he could bang Ms. Phelps.” I shook my head, not wanting to hear more. Not believing her. “Hey, I didn’t want to know this stuff either, believe me,” Icka said. “
Speaking
of Ms. Phelps, did you know she’s into—”

“Stop it. Now.” I held my hand up. Ms. Phelps was my
favorite teacher…as Icka well knew. “None of that is true,” I said forcefully. “It’s just like Mom said, when you think the worst of people, you Hear the worst. You read too much into everything.”

“You know the real reason Mom Hears no evil?” she said. “Because her Hearing’s just as crappy as her parenting. She can’t Hear a word below the surface. Must be kinda nice, being so clueless.”

“Mom is far from clueless.” I shook my head. “It’s just that there are too many Whispers in the world for anyone to pick up all—”

“Oh, good god, there you go quoting Mommy Dearest
again
.” She tipped her head skyward and broke into a hyena laugh. “You’re like her Mini Me. It’s creepy.”